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isa-ly · 3 years

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THE TRUTH UNTOLD

TW: mental illness, eating disorders, depression, anxiety

I know the title might be a fun little hint to a certain k-pop song (which is a reference about three people will understand) but despite that little quirky pun, this post I’m about to write and that you’re about to read, is not gonna be easy. Or witty, or funny like some of the previous posts were. It’s most definitely going to be the longest one, though.

Because, in all honesty, this is the one post I have been absolutely dreading to make. However, it’s also the post that I kind of started this blog for because, unlike my depression, anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia and quarter-life crisis, this is something only my closer circle and those who happened to ask, really know about.

And, once again in all honesty, this is the actual reason I started therapy almost a year ago. Because in every way possible, shit had hit the fan so hard that there had been nothing left but to step on the emergency breaks. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself here. So, let’s try and start from the beginning.

I’ve talked about my more or less mental breakdown and burn out during my last year of university a few times now. Didn’t spare any details either. However, there is one thing that I’ve been mindfully avoiding that actually took up a pretty big part of that time of my life. The reason I avoided it, was because in my head, I kept running in circles on how I would phrase it and explain it in a way that would a) not sound too shocking and b) not make me look like a complete stranger to people who, until now, had no idea of what I’m about to say.

Eventually, though, I realized that I was doing the exact same thing I’ve always been doing. Which was searching for excuses to not talk about the biggest struggle in my life and make myself vulnerable. And I don’t want to make these excuses anymore because, really, all they ever did was harm me. So, here goes nothing.

Hello. My name is Isa. And for over a year now, I have been suffering from an eating disorder called anorexia nervosa.

The sheer act of just having typed this sentence out on virtual paper, threw me so hard that I spent a good 15 minutes simply staring at my laptop screen just now. I told you, this wasn’t going to be easy.

Since the only place I’m really “promoting” this blog on is Instagram, I’m just going to try and somehow use that as a segue to this post. Over the last year, I’ve received quite a few messages from friends, family and sometimes also random acquaintances, whenever I posted a picture of myself on my story or feed. Some of them were jokey, some of them interested and a very select few were concerned, too. All of them were about my apparent change of appearance, however. Of course, I didn’t only receive those messages online. The people who know and see me in real life, the above mentioned inner circle, have known for a while and some of them, as much as I wish they hadn’t had to, saw all of it happen in real life.

I know I included it in the trigger warnings already, but I want to point it out one more time here because I know how incredibly triggering these things can be – especially to people who have struggled or are struggling with similar issues. So, if reading about body image, dieting, weight loss and eating disorders makes you uncomfortable or could trigger bad memories and behaviour, this post might not be the one for you. I don’t want to be patronizing, you know what’s best for you, just wanted to make sure to highlight it before I continued.

I also want to preface this by saying that I can and only will talk about my own experience here. I am in no way, shape or form an expert on mental health and eating disorders and what I’m going to say and talk about, is purely a narration of what happened in my own life. Eating disorders, just like any other mental illness, are very individual and I do not want to come off as blurting out generalizations about them. Just so that we’re clear here.

Therapy taught me that the psychological, biological and/or societal origin of eating disorders is still almost completely scientifically unknown. It is for that exact reason, that the various EDs are some of the most stereotyped and stigmatized mental illnesses there are – which is also why it took me so long to actually pluck up the courage and energy to talk about it. I imagined people reading about my anorexia and thinking: “Oh, I bet it’s because she was bullied for her weight when she was a kid”, or: “Well, just another one of those girls who wanted to be skinnier”. Possibly also: “I never would have thought that someone like her would end up with an eating disorder. She always seemed so confident!”

So, to combat the fear of coming off like a cliché or sob story, I knew simply had to tell my whole and honest story. Because even if I’m worried about being put in a box or labelled as something I’m not, it still happened. And it’s still my story. And to move on from it, or better, with it, I have to tell it. And I have to tell it right.

So, here it goes.

Ever since I can remember, I have disliked my body. Growing up as a Human Person™ in this society, I realize that’s not really something that makes me stand out (which, if you think about it, is actually incredibly fucking sad). Apart from my own self, however, no one ever really shamed for the way that I looked and I was also never bullied or teased by others because of it. So, that’s a no for the “Oh, I bet it’s because she was bullied for her weight when she was a kid”-stereotype. It makes me want to gauge the patriarchal beauty standard’s eyes out, to think that never actively having been shamed for my body or weight, is something that I can consider a “privilege” in this world. I’m aware that a lot of kids and adults don’t have that twisted privilege, which, again, just makes me want to set the world of body ideals on fire, but I don’t want to diverge too much from the point of this post.

Remember that society I was talking about? Yeah, with that around, having someone point out or shame you for how your body looks different from what’s considered the ideal, isn’t really something that’s necessary in order for you to still notice it and develop massive insecurities. So, even though I was “lucky” and “privileged” enough to have avoided being bullied for my body by real-life people, I still grew up not liking the way I looked, always noticing that my stomach, my thighs, my arms, my boobs, my butt, were different to those of the girls everyone called pretty. Which inevitably led to me harbouring a contained, yet undeniably significant amount of self-hatred for the way my body looked over time.

Now, I might have been one of many body-conscious teenagers, but, in quite stark contrast to that, I was also a seemingly self-confident one. Or at least I really, really wanted to be. It’s what everyone always told me I came across as. The loud, opinionated and self-assured girl, who didn’t care what people thought of her. Maybe that was to compensate for my own insecurities, maybe it was for protection, or maybe it was also because I just knew, or hoped, it was the right way to go. I believed and preached that how I looked, what I weighed and what I ate didn’t matter, both to myself and to all of my friends and family. I knew I was absolutely fine the way that I was, as long as I was physically and mentally healthy. I’ve always known that, and I fully believe in it too. And yet, here I am. About to tell you what both you and me are already suspecting: The story of how that knowledge didn’t end up protecting me as well as I thought it would.

Despite me always having believed in not giving a shit about beauty standards, ideal body types and the obsession with whatever the fuck “skinny”, “slim thick” and “lean” are supposed to be, it undeniably had an effect on me. Just like it has an effect on literally every other person, regardless of gender or age. It’s pretty much passed onto us the minute we’re born, like a part of our literal DNA. It makes me sick to my very core, but I always knew that this insecurity, no matter how much I knew it shouldn’t have ever been one and no matter how much I fought to stand above it, was woven into the very fabric of my being. The very minute we learn to interact with others and the world around us, the clear, limited and completely unrealistic image of how we’re supposed to look in order to meet societal expectations, is indoctrinated into our innocent brains – consciously, subconsciously and in literally every other way possible.

I don’t want to give a lecture on how society, media, and peers make us believe it’s necessary and right to chase bodies that, realistically, no one can ever outrun, but I felt like saying at least this much about it to set the base for what’s about to come. Certainly, this almost innate, underlying dislike for my body – or most parts of it – wasn’t the sole reason for developing an eating disorder in my early twenties. But it was most definitely a cruel predisposition that played a big part in how my anorexia unfolded and the leverage it had and still has on me.

I mentioned in the beginning how, despite it being one of the most common mental health disorders, there’s barely any scientific explanations as to how eating disorders really come to be. Which is why assuming that being unhappy with my body and the way it looked was the only reason I slipped into disordered eating, would simply be false. After all, I lived twenty-one years of my life being more or less fine with it. It was an insecurity, yes, but it didn’t dictate my every day life, it didn’t influence how I lived it. So, the “Well, just another one of those girls who wanted to be skinnier”-stereotype, doesn’t really prove to be fully true either.

Which leaves the last assumption: “I never would have thought that someone like her would end up with an eating disorder. She always seemed so confident!”

To which I can only say: Yeah, uh ... same? I mean, do you really think there’s anyone who found themselves developing an eating disorder only to think: “Oh, yeah, that makes sense, I always knew I’d end up like that!” Sorry, that was a bit dark. I know that this assumption is something that mostly I myself am worried about and that there’s no reason for me to actually get defensive. However, while most reactions to me talking about my eating disorder have been very comforting and caring, I’ve also had a few quite unpleasant experiences and well, those tend to have the harsher impact. So, please forgive my mildly cynical reasoning here.

Right, then. If I didn’t ever get bullied for my body or weight, didn’t just want to “be skinny” and really am that confident – how did this happen?

Well, I’ve already given part of the explanation just now, when I told you about my unfortunate predisposition of never really having fully loved or accepted my body. The other part of the explanation, lies in pretty much every other post I have written so far. Most of all the latest one: Control.

It was a real challenge to have written that last entry without ever mentioning my anorexia with even one word. Because really, for me personally, control is literally all it ever was and will be about. My therapist told me that it’s quite common in other eating disordered people too. But again, I’m not here to talk about anyone else, I’m here to talk about my own experience. And it starts just like I said in my last post: With losing control. And in many ways, the combination of always having disliked my body and suddenly having slithered into a massive life-crisis where I felt like I had lost all power and control over everything, was the very dangerous mixture that started it all.

I don’t want to make it about that too much, but it’s still worth mentioning that after my semester abroad, which had ended in January of 2018, I had gained some weight. Weight that, having changed up my diet a few years prior, I had actually lost and that all of a sudden, was now back on again. It had just been a very wonderful yet also stressful time abroad and well, heaps of uni work, very little sleep and the general student lifestyle, just caused me to pile on a few kilos. The part of me that genuinely never gave a fuck about body standards, once again did genuinely not give a fuck about that. And yeah, when I came back, there were the occasional family remarks of “Look at you, gained quite a bit of weight there, didn’t you?” (which I know are made with no malicious intent, by the way, but, forgive me if I say this: just shut up) and I had also obviously started noticing that none of my old clothes fit anymore and I did indeed look a lot larger than in any of my older pictures. Was that a blow to my self-built confidence because we live in a society that rewards weight loss and punishes weight gain? Sure. Was that when I developed anorexia? Nope.

Because, if you’ve been following the timeline of my mental health issues that I have oh so passionately been crafting in the last few posts, it wasn’t until autumn of 2018 that I first started struggling with my back then still undiscovered control issues, which lead to my anxiety, depression, insomnia and – now that I’m telling my whole story – my eating disorder. Or, to be fully correct, disordered eating, back then. Because just like the rest of my mental health issues, this too, crept up on me slowly at first.

I remember the first time I had this very simple thought. At least, it felt simple. Simple, but so deeply wrong and dangerous. And yet once I had had it, it wouldn’t leave anymore. It should have rang all the alarm bells in my head. It really should have. But I understand now, that the reason I had this very simple, deeply wrong and dangerous thought, was because I was desperate to control something, anything at all. Regain power over just one part of my life, whatever that might be.

So, that thought kept coming back. Over and over again:

What if I just stopped eating?

I would snap out of it and tell myself: “What the fuck, Isa? That’s ridiculous. Also, what does that even mean, are you crazy? You love food, you love eating it and you need it to survive.” And I’d ignore it again. But it would come back. Every now and then, usually in the moments where I felt worst about myself, it would echo stronger in my own head and ignoring it would become harder and harder. It was a thought so insane and so ridiculous, I told nobody about it. My rational mind knew that it was totally stupid to even consider something like that, and so I felt stupid for doing it. Which is why talking about it was off the table for me, back then. It was my dirty, little, silly secret and I was going to keep it that way.

I was smarter than that, I knew better than that.

It didn’t change the fact that I felt so lost in university though, and even more lost in life, and so that shitty thought just wouldn’t leave me alone. Until eventually, I budged. And that’s the part where it really stops being witty and smart-assy.

Because that’s the part where I made the decision to only eat once a day. And it was a decision that I fought for with an iron will. A decision that gave me control. Over all the wrong things.

I said I would tell my whole and honest story, but in case you were wondering: No, I’m not gonna give any numbers, not when it comes to weight and not when it comes to calories. Mainly because the only thing they do is create competition and shock value. Even to people who don’t struggle with eating disorders. And apart from that, they’re also triggering to me, even if it’s my own story. So, all I’ll say is that I limited myself to one meal a day. For an entire year. It didn’t always work, thank God for that in hindsight. But I tried to do it every day nonetheless, and even though it wasn’t a by-the-books eating disorder yet (which is a whole other rant I have but that’s not for now), it completely ruined my relationship with food, my body image and my own self-worth.

Every time I ate, I would feel guilty, it made me feel like a failure. I had never experienced this kind of shame before, the idea of feeling accomplished whenever I managed to go without eating for almost an entire day. It was this sick sense of pride and, you guessed it: Control. And yet it wasn’t enough, because my body would obviously fight back, demanding food with every bit of power and rage it had over me. I felt awful. On top of university stress, panic attacks, anxiety, depression and insomnia, I was now also hungry almost all the time. And when I had my one meal a day, I wouldn’t enjoy it. I would simply gorge on it because I was so depleted and ravenous. And then I would feel guilty and hate myself for it.

This went on for many months. I hid it as best as I could and in most social situations, I would make exceptions so that people wouldn’t notice. Exceptions I would hate myself for, but they had to be made to keep this habit my aforementioned dirty, little secret. It was like an entire new personality was starting to form inside my own. A dark and hateful one that chipped away at all that confidence and rational I had built over the years. A few close friends suspected eventually that something was off, and some of them asked about it but I would immediately play it off as just not feeling well because of all my other mental struggles, the ones they already knew about. It was an excuse that made sense, so no one really dug any deeper. And I couldn’t really have given another explanation back then anyway. Because again, I didn’t know yet why any of this was happening. I didn’t know that not eating was a twisted and horrible coping mechanism, that I had developed to gain back some sense of control in my life.

At that point, I had started weighing myself too. Something that had given me a big, bad shock when I first saw the number on the scale. In my mind, it was big and bad too. I knew how much I had weighed pre-semester-abroad. And so I knew how much I must have gained and by now also lost again. And yet that number was still way too big. It crushed me. And sadly, only spurred me on more. I would try not to eat. I would “fail”. I would hate myself. Rinse and repeat.

And no one knew what was going on. Least of all me.

It got a little bit better over the summer of 2019, just like the rest of my mental health did. That was around the time I had finally made the decision to take a gap year and figure out all my issues. And that included the very bad eating habits I had developed over the last year. In a way, that decision was also a way of me gaining back control, which was presumably why all my other bad coping strategies, including the not eating, faded away a little. No more nightly panic attacks. No more insomnia. And a lot more breakfast, lunch and dinner. I still didn’t like my body, I was still scared of the number on the scale. But I was ready to turn my life around again, get therapy and fight that nasty, dangerous habit I had let myself fall into.

Unfortunately, as I already mentioned in previous posts, the therapy I was so clearly in desperate need of, didn’t work out as quickly as I had wished (again, thanks for that, health care system). I had gone to my first ever assessment where they had diagnosed me with anxiety and depression disorder. And, actually, the psychiatrist that I had had my first ever session with, had also decided to diagnose me with anorexia nervosa because according to her, while I hadn’t ticked all of the eating disorder boxes yet, I definitely did show signs of eating disordered and anorexic behaviour. To me, that had sounded quite ridiculous and harsh at the time. Anorexia? Pft, no way, I didn’t look like the girls from the shocking posters and depressing documentaries, it was no where as serious as that. (Tip of the hat to those stigmas and stereotypes I was talking about earlier)

But of course, she was right. However, they didn’t have a free spot for one on one therapy and group sessions weren’t really what I was looking for either. So, I went on a waiting list and never heard back from them again.

The cold season crept back in and the wonderful, warm and sunny-safe bubble I had lived in all summer, burst as quickly as it had been blown into existence. Everyone went back to work, back to uni, back to life. And I ... well, I went back to being lost. To not knowing what to do. To having to write my thesis I still couldn’t write for some reason. To having panic attacks. To having insomnia.

To not eating.

Only that after a year of being so miserable whenever I ate food and still feeling so awful in my own body, I decided I would have to change the way I was going about it. In my extremely mentally fragile mind, I thought I had to step it up if I really wanted results. And, as I like to say it, that’s when shit really hit the fan. In a way, it felt like I had spent an entire year sitting on a roller coaster ride that was slowly climbing up the incline, getting closer and closer to the inevitable drop. And just like on any actual roller coaster, when that drop came, it came fast.

It was no longer about just eating one and any meal a day. In the matter of a week or two, it became about numbers, calories, measurements, grams, milliliters. All of a sudden, I found myself meticulously writing down every single thing I ate and when I had eaten it. The food groups kept shrinking and so did my portions and the amount of calories I would consume in a day. I would set a new limit on Monday and decrease it again by Wednesday, pushing myself harder, restricting more and more with every week. All I could think about was food. And all I could do was not eat it. In what felt like a matter of seconds, a worry, a fear, a habit had turned into a full-fledged obsession. An addiction. And that’s when anorexia entered my life.

I’ve re-written this part over and over again because I’m desperately trying not to make it sound like a pseudo-romantic and tastelessly dramatic young adult novel. But I realize that’s just my fear of sounding like a cliché again. So, I’ll stop scratching and writing everything anew now, and just keep going.

In the first few days and weeks of crashing into this new, horrible world, I remember yet again thinking another very simple, yet dangerous and devastating thought. The one beside “What if I just stopped eating?”. And this thought, to me personally, was even scarier than the last one.

It was the thought of: “What if I can never eat again?”

Because that’s exactly what anorexia felt like to me.

Many people describe it as a whole other person in their head. Almost like a foreign entity, taking over your life. And while I very strongly relate to these descriptions, I have learned that it’s best for me to not always manifest my eating disorder into a separate identity to my own, because in certain times, that gives it too much power and makes it seem undefeatable. Which it isn’t. So, I’m going to try and describe it in another way. The way I first described it to my therapist. With a metaphor, of course.

It felt like up until this point, I had been sitting in the car that was my own life, driving down the road of my present and future, looking in the rear view mirror at my past. I was the one with the foot on the gas and the breaks, I was the one that decided what turn or exit to take. Autumn of 2018 had felt like breaking down in that car, having to pull over and being lost in the middle of nowhere, without any signs to guide the way. My bad eating habits felt like someone stopping and pretending to help me, jump staring my car and having it tucker slowly again while following me at walking speed, with me still not really knowing where I was going. And finally, anorexia felt like that someone kicking me out of my car, buckling me into the passenger seat, taping my mouth shut and taking over the stirring wheel.

All of a sudden, it felt like I had no say in where I was heading, how fast I was driving or what road I was going down. For over a year, I had used this dangerous and awful habit of coping by not eating, to wield control and have power over something. And now, it had taken that power away again, like a pact with the god damn devil, and had started to use it over me instead. Which is exactly what eating disorders do, and what my anorexia did too. They give you a false sense of control because control is all you want, and yet all you can’t have. All you need to do is replace control with food. Because food is all you want, and yet all you can’t have. Anorexia gave me my own, fucked up metaphor for my control issues.

I knew that what I was doing was more than just dangerous. It was no longer just trying to eat once a day, not managing to and then hating myself. This was barely eating anything at all, setting the bar lower each day and starving myself. And not in the figurative way. I lost weight so rapidly, I could barely keep track. The scale became my second home, the calories my worst enemy and food, or more trying to avoid it, the entire purpose of my life. Nothing else mattered anymore.

Falling into anorexia has been the scariest and most horrible thing I have ever had to go through. It felt like I had lost myself. I was still there, in my own head, somewhere. Still strapped into the passenger seat. But I had no say in any of my actions. I just silently watched and witnessed, obeying everything my eating disorder told me to do. I know I said I usually avoid completely painting it as a separate person in my own head, but back then, back when I was still severely anorexic, that was just what it felt like. Like a literal parasite, that had latched onto me and was sucking me dry of any and every life force and fight I still had left.

All my days would consist of trying to navigate around food, doing my best to avoid it, lying to everyone, most of all myself. I would look up every single nutritional information of everything, every meal at a restaurant, every drink. I had lists where I wrote it all down, tracking my calorie intake and weight loss. Documents that contained all the calories from every single food and also non-food item imaginable. It would start with things like fruits, vegetables and condiments and end with things like tea, vitamins, chewing gum and toothpaste. I would google how many calories a panic attack burned. I would pace up and down my room at night to get my step count higher. I would walk around the city aimlessly for hours every single day to avoid eating, no matter the weather, no matter the time. I would work out at the gym like a maniac and almost pass out every single time afterwards. At family breakfast, I would hide food in my sleeves and socks to avoid eating it. It was more than just ridiculous. It was insanity. But it was an insanity I couldn’t let go of.

Anorexia was the most twisted and horrendous full-time commitment of my life. I had felt lost and without purpose for so long and in the most fucked up way, my eating disorder had given me a 9-to-5 – no, scratch that, a 24-god-damn-7 job to do. It had given me a new purpose and a painful illusion of the things I had craved for so long. Control, willpower, strength, endurance. Only that it was exactly that – just an illusion. Because at the end of the day, I would go to bed empty, both literally and figuratively, feeling nothing and hating everything. Because that’s what anorexia does. It strips you of everything you have in life. It takes away every joy, every pleasure, every interest, hobby, passion or relationship, and it isolates you. Completely. It worms its way into your life and fills out every single nook and crack until it’s the only thing that seems to be left. And therefore, the only thing you still care about.

It felt like losing my complete identity.

Mentally, I was at the worst state I had ever been in my life. This was around December of 2019. I had barely been keeping all of this up for over a month, but I was eating so little that I had lost an alarmingly large amount of weight very fast, which came at a high cost. I was always cold, I couldn’t sleep, I had awful headaches, I kept forgetting conversations and talks I had had with friends, I felt dizzy and nauseous all the time and worst of all, I was so cripplingly depressed that I didn’t even care about any of that. Because when you deprive your brain of nutrients this much, it just shuts down. And that’s what I did, too. I just went into standby mode, as I kept losing more weight and becoming more miserable with each day that passed.

Both my body and mind were running on nothing but adrenaline and thin air and I lived life in this absolutely isolated and horrible auto-pilot, where I continued on as if nothing was happening, as more of me, both physically and mentally, disappeared and was replaced with complete emptiness. I still struggle to find the right words to describe how I felt back then. The only thing that comes close is just complete nothingness. Like a fucking black hole inside of me that had swallowed everything and created a complete vacuum.

Writing about this makes me want to just close my laptop and stop. In a way, it feels like giving my eating disorder and the hardest time of my life a spot light. Like giving it attention and a stage to perform on, to flaunt its dramatic tragedy. I can feel that the anorexia loves that, relishes every word I’m typing about it, every second of attention I’m giving to it. And hate that, I fucking despise it. Because it doesn’t deserve its own stage. It never did and it never will. So, let’s try and move on to the part where things changed.

Back then, I might have become a master of lying and avoiding most people’s questions about me never seeming to be hungry or wanting to eat. But thankfully, there were a few of my close friends that had started to notice. Not gonna name any names, but you know who you are. And I cannot even begin to say how incredibly thankful and lucky I am to have had you there. Because even when I had given up on myself, you didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine, oh no. I was still in a very, very bad place mentally, and my eating disorder was not planning on leaving any time soon.

But, with the help and intervention of said good friends and a few select, eye-opening experiences (that I won’t talk about because they really weren’t ideal but still ended up helping somehow), I finally realized the very obvious but up until then seemingly impossible thing: I had to start eating again. And I had to start now.

And I did.

Looking back, I cannot even express how glad I am about that. Because it had started to become really critical. And I consider myself to be very lucky that it didn’t have to get even worse. That I was still able to make my own decisions and finally get help. Finding therapy was once again not easy but eventually, I did find an outpatient clinic that offered immediate consultation, as well as an appointment with a psychiatrist for medication and an internist for physical check-ups. And, to maybe bring back a slight sense of cheerfulness: It was also when I finally got to meet my therapist Kerstin.

Again, none of this was as easy and swift as it might sound like with me narrating it in those few sentences, but this post can only go on for so much longer before I get too drained and decide to just delete all of it again, so I will try and come to a close, for now. There’s still so much more to tell when it comes to my journey with my eating disorder and my mental health, because it’s nowhere near finished. And worry not, I will tell it – not so much for the sake of those of you who read it, but more so for my own. But for now, I want to finish by saying this much – mainly to myself again, but also to anyone else who might need to hear it:

I know it might feel like you don’t care.

About yourself, about what happens to you, about the future, about happiness. I know it might feel like you’re faking everything, lying to everyone and just pretending all the time. I know you might feel so horribly and painfully empty that all you want to do is sit still in the void of your own head and let the misery wash over you in dreadful peace. I know you might think that the only sense of comfort you can find, lies in the things that hurt you most. I know your pain seems like an old friend, one that will never leave you and therefore is worth staying close to. I know that continuing to fight on and struggling through life and all the hardships it throws at you, sometimes feels so impossible, that it seems easier to just give in and give up.

The thing about that is, though: It’s fucking bullshit.

It’s nothing but a very mean and disgusting way of all your inner pain, trauma and warped coping mechanisms to try to pull you down to keep you “safe” from things that you can absolutely, completely and totally battle. And, yeah, it sure as shit ain’t easy. God, if I had a dollar for every time I had to pick myself back up after I stepped on a scale, after I ate something that scared me, after I looked in the mirror, after I relapsed, after I went back on track again, after I wished I could just melt into a formless blob and slowly whither away in peace– I would be a rich woman. But neither life nor capitalism work that way, unfortunately. So, why do I still bother?

Well, because after going through hell and back, it’s the only thing I have left. It’s the only option there is.

You might not know who you are. You might not know what you’re doing, where you’re going, if you’re ever going to get better, if you’ll ever feel happy and at home in your own mind, body and life again. But what you can and should know, is that you can always try. Even if it seems pointless, even if it seems like you’re running in circles, wanting to bash your head against the wall because of how senseless it all feels.

You can still try.

And try, and try, and try again. It’s a choice and it is a hard one. Maybe the hardest one you will ever have to make.

But I chose to make it, and I still continue to. Every day. With every morning I wake up, every therapy session I go to, every panic attack I breathe through, every depressive phase I crawl back out of, every meal I eat. I choose to do it, I choose to keep pushing because when it feels like all the bad and dark thoughts are more powerful than me and threaten to swallow me alive, making the choice to fight back as much as I can, is what proves that I am and always will be more powerful than them.

Because this is my life. My body. My head. My brain. My mind. And I’d be a god damn fool to give them up to those inner demons that would never know how to treat them right, how to cherish them and keep them happy, healthy and alive. Because I think we can all agree that, at the end of the day, being happy is a hell of a lot better than being sad and empty. And so, at the end of the day, I realized that nothing and no one, not even my mental health disorders and past traumas, can take away what will always, exclusively and fully belong to me and me only:

My choice, my happiness, my control – the right one, this time.

#mental illness #mental health #therapy #eating disorder #anorexia #depression #anxiety

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sincerelynamkook · 5 years

Text

Sincerely, Namjoon

Namjoon x Reader First POV

Genre: Soft/Fluff/Romance Word Count: 1989

Playlist: “Brown Eyed Blues” by Adrian Hood

On a tiresome evening and day 1000000 of missing Joon, you receive an unexpected letter...

[P.S. This is the first fic in a series I’m working on called “Bangtan Love Letters.” Hope you like it!]

6:05 PM.

He hasn't called me or texted me. He usually calls during my lunch break because he knows how much I miss him and that his soothing voice is the only thing that gets me through my hectic work day. The fact that I haven’t heard from him all day is worrisome. I know he was still in NY today since they just finished their US leg of the tour so why the fuck hasn’t he called me?

I’m in the backseat of my Uber, stuck in traffic, contemplating whether or not to call him even though I know it’s highly unlikely he’ll answer due to their hectic schedule. I even contemplate texting Seokjin but he’ll probably just bring up the fact that I owe him homemade cookies since I lost our bet about whether Jungkook would cry at the last US show or not and I’m really not up for his mocking tone right now.

“Ma’am, we’re at your destination.” I hear my Uber driver say, bringing me out of my muddled thoughts. I quickly exit the car and walk up the steps to my apartment building, stopping at my mailbox to grab my mail and packages. That lavender oil and chamomile lotion I ordered for Joon the other day should’ve arrived. I take the elevator to the eighth floor, checking my phone every five seconds in case I missed a call or text. Nothing.

I enter my apartment and immediately charge my phone. My stress is at an all time high. I swear I’m going to kick his ass when I hear from him. I can’t live like this!

I take off my shoes, walk over to my floor to ceiling windows and open the blinds. I need some sunshine in my life at the moment. I grab my mail and packages and sit on my loveseat.

“Alexa play ‘Brown Eyed Blues’ by Adrian Hood.” I’m in the mood to feel even sadder I guess.

I decide to open my mail first and open up a few bills, ads, but then I come across a simple white letter envelope with no return address. My name and address are written in small dainty script. With a curious mind I open it carefully.

In it, is a handwritten letter. I bring it closer to me and I instantly get a whiff of his scent. My eyes get teary as I begin to read…

“My most precious sweets,

By now you’re probably wondering why I haven’t called or texted you. You’re probably sitting on your couch listening to ‘Brown Eyed Blues’ with your windows open. I wrote this letter 3 days ago knowing it would arrive today and that you’d be opening it around 6:45pm.” He knows me so well. My tears have begun to fall down my face.

“I wrote this letter as soon as we got off the phone because I instantly missed you. I’ve been gone for 3 months and it never gets easier being away from you. I was thinking back to the day we first met. It was back in 2017 right before the AMAs here in the states. You were prancing around Han River, drunk I might add, at 3 o’clock IN THE MORNING. Who in their right mind is out in Seoul at that time? Especially someone who was just visiting for a week? Now that I think about it, do you know how dangerous that is? Please don’t ever do that again baby. I’m so glad I’m the one that found you and not some creep.” I quietly laugh because at the time I did think he was a creep.

“But you looked so carefree and happy and so fucking beautiful. The moon was shining brightly on you and I could see the softness of your hair flowing in the wind as you twirled around and sang ‘Brown Eyed Blues.’ I know you don’t believe me when I tell you how beautiful your voice is but baby, that day I thought you were an angel that had come down from the heavens to explore this world. And then you messed up the lyrics, giggled loudly and almost tripped on the branches laying around and that was my chance to get close to you and be your knight in shining armor…until I also tripped and we came tumbling down on the ground. You laughed even louder thus making me laugh. But I knew, at 3:17 AM, when your face got close to mine, felt your soft breath on my neck and felt my heartstrings being pulled, I knew you were meant to be mine.” I am in full blown tears now, I get up to grab my box of tissues from my bedroom and hurry back to the couch to continue reading his letter.

“I don’t think I’ve ever told you this, but that day, at 3:17 AM, I fell in love with you. When you realized we were both still laying on the ground and that you were still in my arms, you looked up at me with those big brown eyes of yours and the world stopped for a few minutes. You slowly got up and gathered yourself, apologizing to me as if you were a burden bestowed upon me when in fact you were the greatest gift.”

I close my eyes and take a few deep breaths. He has to know that was the moment I fell in love with him too. When I calmed down from my high, and sobered up a bit from all the laughter that day, I looked up at him to find him smiling down at me with that dimple on full display. His hair, although it was mostly hidden by the big hoodie he had on, was that greyish/light brown hair I love so much and the wind was making it fall over his smiling eyes. I could feel his strength as he still held me tight in his arms. I don't know what it was, but I also felt my heartstrings being pulled. As if he was my red thread, the one I’ve been following all my life until it led me to him.

“You stood up and held out your hand to help me up. The moment I touched your skin I felt goose bumps crawl all over me. I held your hand tightly and stood up. You looked so shy, tucking your hair behind your ears and quietly thanked me. I remember stifling my laughter because you still looked so drunk but you were trying hard to sober up, which is why I asked you out for some coffee. I was afraid you’d reject my offer seeing as I was this complete stranger but when I saw your lips form the word yes my heart burst with joy. We walked side by side along Han river until we reached a small empty café that was still open. You ordered your complicated latte but when you said no whip cream I secretly smiled knowing that you’re the type of girl that likes to be extra but yet are still simple when you get to the core. I remember talking for hours and hours until the sun rose and you finally asked for my name. At this point I had already figured out your name but I was waiting to see if you had recognized me or not. When I told you my name, Namjoon, you rested your chin on your hand, squinted your eyes and said, ‘Namjoon? Like Kim Namjoon from BTS?’ I lifted my cup of coffee to my lips, smiled, and winked. From the few hours that we had known each other I learned you weren’t going to freak out like some crazy fangirl, but I also didn't expect your reaction of full on amazement.” I smile, remembering how speechless I was at finding out the guy who saved me from falling on my face was THE Kim Namjoon. I’m so glad I wasn't sober enough to actually freak out like the crazy fangirl I am.

“Your eyes got so big and you just said ‘wow.’ I laughed, thinking you were so adorable. When I asked you for your number, you were hesitant, but babe I’m glad you finally gave in and gave it to me. I can’t imagine what my life would be like if you weren’t in it these past two years. I know we don’t spend enough time together since I have such a hectic schedule but you never once complain about it and instead of being mad you have given me and my brothers so much love and support. I know they love you as much as I do.

You have brought so much love and happiness to my life. You are my muse. Every time I’m in the studio, you are the first thing that pops into my head when I’m writing lyrics. Every thing around me is centered around you and only you. I don’t ever want that to change.

By now, you’re probably sobbing like the big baby you are (even though you like to put up a front and act all tough).” I giggle knowing he’s right.

“I want to end with this; know that wherever I am, I am always thinking of you. I fall asleep with the image of you in my mind and I wake up ecstatic knowing you’re mine. Not a day goes by that I’m not hoping to be next to you, holding you in my arms, and breathing the same air as you. And even if I see you, I miss you. You’ve probably played ‘Brown Eyed Blues’ 15 times…but tell your Alexa to stop, and listen closely.”

Wait what?

I tell Alexa to stop playing music. I tilt my head, wondering if I’m crazy for doing what he asked me to do via a letter. After a few seconds I don't hear anything besides the birds chirping outside my window so I finish reading the letter.

What I find in the last paragraph are the lyrics to “Brown Eyed Blues” and I faintly hear the beat of the song outside my door but I pay it no mind thinking it’s Alexa still softly playing the song.

“She’s got those eyes, those eyes,

That’ll see right through you

When she leaves,

I wanna leave with her too

And she’s on, my mind

Like all, all the time

When we touch I go weak

And I can hardly speak

And I hope she thinks about me

Cause I’m always thinking of her”

I hear someone softly singing outside my door. My heart starts to beat rapidly. I walk slowly towards it, not ready to see who's on the other side. I hold the letter close to my heart as I reach the door knob.

I slowly open the door and find him standing there with his hands inside his pants pockets. His silver hair is styled neatly. He’s wearing his Katazurizome Yukata jacket that I love so much even though I give him shit all the time about how expensive it is.

My tears don't stop falling down my face. He takes a step closer, then another one, until he’s right in front of me softly wiping my tears away. His soothing voice is still singing our song…

“I just wanna hold her hand, be her man…” He grabs my free hand with his left and brings it to his chest, pulling me even closer to him. I let out a sob.

“I wanna know if she’d take a chance, Cause I’m still not revealing, Cause I still get the feeling, That loving her is a game I’ll always lose, I got the brown eyed blues”

He hugs me tight, I rest my head on his shoulder freely crying like a big baby.

“I missed you. And even when I see you, I still miss you” He softly whispers in my ear.

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13parkfilter · 4 years

Text

a wangxian playlist no one asked for

These are track notes for a wangxian playlist no one asked for, because CQL / mdzs fandom ate my life and I somehow needed to make a super dramatic 28 song playlist that follows wangxian’s love in (extremely loose) chronological order, from their first meeting as cute battle teens all the way through the depths of angst and eventually to becoming cultivation partners and (I’m positive) really great co-parenting dads.

Because I’m like that ™ , you can find notes for each and every song below. Any weird song choices are entirely my fault. Spoiler alert: Frank Ocean.

This is a real long playlist and you could definitely break it into shorter stretches by mood. For the happiest and most in love vibes, hit the first 6 songs and the last 6 songs. Dramatic Burial Mounds vibes are from 7 to 13. It may be very satisfying to go from the depths of sadness and grief (~16) through to the end.

1. Don’t Know What to Do | BLACKPINK

Inspired, of course, by WYB and XZ’s demonstrated love of Blackpink in the CQL BTS videos. For a little while Stay was on this list instead, but I kept coming back to this song because to me it gets at that excited “everything is new and I’m young and so in love” feeling. Two people could certainly have a playful duel under the moonlight to this song, if they wished.

2. A Loving Feeling | Mitski

Something about Mitski’s melancholy, slightly maudlin and self-deprecating vibe in this song is just peak “I wasn’t flirting… unless…?”

3. Self Control | Frank Ocean

Somehow this playlist ended up structured around two overlapping arcs carried by Frank Ocean and Lykke Li, respectively, which makes no sense in theory but maybe kind of works? Idk, let me know if it works. If it does, maybe it’s because so many Frank Ocean songs are incredibly raw love songs about loss and the work that memory does to keep your love alive, and so many Lykke Li songs are about trying to slog through all the pain and bullshit without losing sight of that kernel of untarnished brightness, whatever it was that made you want to love in the first place.

I love this song for many reasons, but in no small part for the sorry-not-sorry vibe of apologizing for making someone lose their self control.

4. Look After Me | Cub Sport

This song is real honest and tender about people taking care of each other and it messes me up.

“There's something in the way you look at me

Like I've never done wrong

There's something in the way you look at me

When I was wrong all along.”

5. We Could Run | Beth Ditto

Ok, imagine this playing in the background during LWJ and WWX’s first meeting with Xiao Xingchen and Song Lan. A good song to play as you run into the sunset holding hands with your cultivation partner, is what I’m saying.

6. Unconditional Love | 椎名林檎 (Shiina Ringo)

This is just a super sweet and painfully dramatic love song, the kind of song that plays for a man who makes grand unsung gestures like composing magical love songs and secretly adopting your child after you’ve died. This is before the latter part of that, though.

7. Bad Religion | Frank Ocean

This is the first turning point on the list, the fading of youthful optimism and the start of choices that there’s no going back from. This is when you start to realize that you really can’t please everyone, and you can’t do what you believe is right without someone hating you for it. It’s also the point at which your neuroses and blind spots start to go from being quirky and cute to a cage of your own making. You have to deal with the bad shit you inherited from your parents eventually. If you don’t you’ll either make the same mistakes they did or make different mistakes because you’re fighting so hard to keep your head above water.

I really like the part when Frank Ocean asks his taxi driver to outrun the demons. Feels like something a modern AU WWX might say.

8. Silent My Song | Lykke Li

I didn’t want to go full angst here because this playlist is about *cue Westley bellowing in the Princess Bride* TRUE LOVE and so I didn’t go as hard as I could here, but this is the start of the golden core + first Burial Mounds arc.

9. Figure 8 | FKA twigs

I can hear the resentful energy swirling in this one. This is probably the most abstract choice on the list but to me something in it evokes the curdled rage and seething of an unquiet spirit.

10. Fantasmas | Ambar Lucid

This is a song about living with ghosts: of a failed relationship, and the mistakes that it took to get there.

11. Green Grass | Cibelle

I love this song because it’s a little sweet and a little scary at the same time. It’s gentle and haunting and the lyrics are as unforgettable as poetry.

Is this a love song that a corpse is singing to someone visiting their grave? I like to think so.

12. I Bet on Losing Dogs | Mitski

In spite of the dog reference (lol) this whole song is a super WWX trying to live with the Wens in the Burial Mounds mood in my opinion. It has turnip energy. Trampled yet undefeated lotus energy, if you will.

13. Godspeed | Frank Ocean

This song is the essence of heartbreak and knowing that you have to finally let go of someone. Am I imagining LWJ and WWX singing this back and forth to each other at the Burial Mounds, depending on which line it is? Am I crying about it a little? Maybe.

“I let go of my claim on you.”

“There will be mountains you can’t move.”

14. I Know Places | Lykke Li

This is the “Come back to Gusu with me” song, even though it’s coming later in the timeline than it should. (I sort of compressed all the Burial Mounds-set songs together for a better flow). Anyway I feel like this captures all of those unspoken desires, that frustrated feeling of caring about and believing in someone so much without being able to protect them from all the people and powers that want to hurt them. But you have to try.

15. Deeper Than Love | Antony and the Johnsons

This song is almost. Too dramatic. This is meant to be at Nightless City / WWX’s fall. I originally had 2 completely different songs here but I ended up liking the arc of this song and where it ends up. The two songs I originally had here were a much more bitter feeling, but I like that this song is tragic and painful and is still a kind of love song at the same time. I really wanted this playlist to be all love songs, some very different from each other, some more about pain and loss and regret than the good parts of love, but still love songs.

“And I have tried to shine in the darkness

Entertaining vanities in vain…

Hold on

And hold on

And let go

Let go

And fall deeper

Even than love.”

16. Days of Candy | Beach House

To me this song is very evocative of the mingled feelings of grief in the immediate aftermath of a loss. Grief is never a pure, singular feeling, but a sticky amalgam of missing and wanting and sweet memories and a deep pit of pain. The sort of slow, half-asleep sadness full of watery light that this song evokes really takes me there, to the place where the grief is real but the loss is still almost unreal, where the feeling of that person still hasn’t left, your senses are still full of them, you just heard their voice yesterday, they might come into the room at any moment. It’s the almost— joyful?? part of grief that you don’t realize has any joy in it yet because you haven’t yet started to forget. You can’t imagine being able to forget, and you have no idea how much worse it will be when you can’t immediately evoke their presence anymore to comfort yourself. When you can’t pretend anymore that you’ll be able to see them again.

17. Last Song | Gackt

Idk why exactly but Gackt is very yearning LWJ vibes in this song. Is it the earnestness? The intensity? The incredibly romantic lyrics? The deep, smooth voice?.. All of the above?

Anyway, if the previous song was nonverbal grief, this song is the start of the solidifying of grief, moving past rage and disbelief and self-destructive denial and gradually into a crystallization, a narrative of what the loss meant. Instead of a great crushing thing that blots out the sky and swallows your entire life, the grief becomes just another part of you— a defining part, maybe, but still part of a greater whole. And you move on. Or you try to.

18. Sleeping Alone | Lykke Li

This is 13 years of going where the chaos is, searching and playing Inquiry and never giving up, resigned to sleeping alone in strange places but still just never ever giving up.

“Now was not our time, no, I let you down.

Someday, somehow, somewhere down the line… we’ll meet again.”

19. Busby Berkeley Dreams | The Magnetic Fields

Does every deep-voiced man singing a dramatic love song remind me of LWJ now? Maybe. At least I refrained from filling the entire playlist with Stephin Merritt songs.

“I should have forgotten you long ago, but you’re in every song I know” is just… the most Wangxian sentiment.

This is a bit of a modern AU LWJ, one who would definitely cry into his True Romance magazines. I do still think that this song very much captures how he must have felt hearing the song he wrote played on a terrible flute after 13 years, though. It definitely doesn’t have a flute solo in it, either.

20. Ivy | Frank Ocean

This song is peak WWX in a mask, trying to hide from LWJ and his own emotions at the same time. But also, maybe, the start of some emotional awareness and genuine communication. Thanks to Frank Ocean for this entire playlist, practically.

21. Fireworks | Mitski

Another song about memories and dealing with the past even when it comes back to stab you in the side. (s/o to Jin Ling, low key my favorite character, never afraid to cry in any situation)

“I will be married to silence

The gentleman won't say a word

But you know, oh you know in the quiet he holds

Runs a river that'll never find home.”

22. Hell | Waxahatchee

This is a song about apologizing to someone for putting them through hell. To me it’s a very adults-in-love song, and there’s a sort of gentleness to acknowledging the pain and mistakes of the past while still having hope that maybe love is really worth it after all— especially if you’re “one of those who canonize a love so true it never dies.”

23. A letter to my younger self | Ambar Lucid

I have to admit that the title of this song makes me think of yiqie’s truly excellent time travel fic that is very heartbreaking and very beautiful. I don’t want to spoil it if you haven’t read it (go read it), but it’s safe to tell you that it grapples with and transcends all the reasons I usually avoid time travel fics, like the idea of helplessness in the face of fate, and how much control we really have over our own decisions, and what it means to let people make their own mistakes.

24. Let’s Pretend We’re Bunny Rabbits | The Magnetic Fields

This one really speaks for itself.

Besides, “Let’s pretend we’re bunny rabbits until we pass away” is just a cuter way of saying “Everyday,” right?

25. ”愛してる”からはじめよう (“Let’s start from ‘I love you’”) | Miyavi

I personally feel that Miyavi has big sunshine WWX energy. This is just. A very cute and soft love song. Feels like napping in some tall grass in the summertime. Waking up next to your lifelong crush and remembering how lucky you are. Wandering from town to town with your true love and your donkey. That type of energy.

26. Angels | The xx

The last three songs on this list never fail to give me Big Dramatic Feelings.

I think what this song captures well is the feeling of just drifting along, lost in your thoughts, showing up somewhere— and suddenly seeing the person you know to be the love of your life at an unexpected time or place, and being struck all over again with… all of it. Your heart stutters, everything slows down, and for a second you forget to breathe. Like: Oh yeah. Oh shit. I remember why I love you. I remember how it felt when I was first falling in love with you. And I never want it to stop.

“And with words unspoken, a silent devotion. I know you know what I mean.”

27. Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone | Lykke Li

I think of this as the quintessential WWX love song, from the title to the sentiment of the lyrics to the moody burning joy of the sound of it. It’s demanding and soft and confident and raw all at once.

Props to Lykke Li for the redemption arc of this playlist.

28. Good to Love | FKA twigs

MAKE MY BODY COME ALIVE. This is the song that really says the most to me about the pain and beauty and the vulnerability and intimacy of being in love. What I love about all of FKA twigs’ music is how beautifully she merges and intertwines the messy physical and spiritual aspects of love. Her music is a sexy secular prayer to Eros imo and I’m here for it.

#cql #playlists no one asked for #dramatic love songs #idk #this is how i deal with my obsession #wwx #lwj #wangxian #i guess

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hammerjarljurenhar · 5 years

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Hello, I want to Ask about the SVTFOE..What you Think About the Show? Why you are saying about the Forced Romantic Plots and Messages about the Cartoon? What is the BrainWash what the Cartoon is Making? Can you Ask me, please?

Hello.

Ok, I haven’t watched the show completely. I’ve said it before… but I think it’s right to make it clear… just so, you know, for everyone out there… this is my opinion on the matter, and not a fundamental reality about the show… but to some degree I know part of what I’m saying it’s true to the core.

I’ve watched like 15(?) full episodes between season 1 to 3, most part of that during season 2… and like 6 episodes in season 4… but just some parts of them, cause the rest was quite predictable in it’s own. and even for this finale, I didn’t even watched it… and I doubt I do. I honestly hardly watched season 1… only 2 minutes of episode 1 and I changed the channel… like, fuck, I couldn’t even tolerate star, her voice, attitude, everything about her disgusted me to watch the show, and I just started watching the show at some point for the cuckstar in it (thanks to my bro), during season 2, ignoring the rest of the show, but with enough understanding of what was going on at a big “panoramic scene”.

Now… enough of that.

Why so many people say that the “plots” for romance and the messages are kinda forced in the cartoon? and why am I with that side?

Let’s go back to the idea of the show. Star was a strong independant princess, that’s how she was being depicted, as an individual girl who doesn’t need others to make her what she is… “special”, but then, the “romance” is forced since the beginning cause she only wants attenttion and acceptance, and this is showed through marco, that understands how hard she is rejected by others… even her own family, cause something dangerous happened in her dimension: Star Butterfly getting the wand, that happened…

That’s ok?… I mean, yeah having marco as the brother she never had, and being there as the understanding pal of hers made the show better? Yes.But it was totally UNNECESSARY to make them a couple. Cause it only made it forced for her to need a couple in her life to be better…

but

The show depicted them as FRIENDS, NOT AS A COUPLE. and that’s the crap I dislike the worst in the show. They re-wrote the character’s feelings to say star and marco loved each other since the beginning… marco during the show, and star in the book of spells… and just to make it clear, when a friend of mine told me about this book of spells and the implication that star “loved” marco since day 1. I only could laugh at it and say that the starcos must be eagerly accepting that; and that the worst, back then, they could do was to make marco do the same thing during the show…. and guess what? that stupid decision I mockedly mentioned, was done in season 4!

The excuse is that it was not “love” at first sight. but it’s implied it was there since episode 1-2. and why did they do this?… to get the “biggest part” of the fandom in their pockets for the final episode of the show (and some asses like mcarthur promoting the show everyday since past month but that’s more like his decision, cause he wants to make a career and besides svtfoe, he’s literally a nobody), they gave starco fans what they want… that star and marco are “true love”… problem is, first, that’s a lie… cause anyone who watched the show knows that they were friends and at best the “love” was friendship or something near to siblings caring for each other, also instead of giving that to the fandom early, so that they can leave at peace and not start a ship wars every week, they gave us far more potential ships than starco… be it Jarco, Janco, Markapoo, Tomstar, Kellco, and even the forbidden Marclipsa & Marteora, all of them were awesome and had much more value for many fans… meanwhile showing marco and star as egotistical assholes only made the show worse and worse… and it lost at least 80% of the public since season 3….

The starco ship was the biggest? yeah… but that was cause their fans joined only after starco was confirmed years ago with the blood moon stuff and with daron and her team accepting defeat and saying starco will happen.So… that’s like betting on the winning horse, even if it’s a quadraplegic horse it will win cause author says so, and so, fandom bet on that horse.Now let’s move to the Messages topic.I honestly think the message about colonialism and racism had enough strenght to be important… we even had a “native american” monster shoot an arrow at Mina… we only needed her to be done ala little hiawatha style

But this message paled and lose against ship wars cause, come on! it’s what it is, social inclusion…. and that’s been talked again and again, now, since past decade, we must have a chinese, an afroamerican, a french, a latino, etc… by force. cause otherwise your idea of a show is racist as fuck; sadly, now that the lgbt agendas are being included in cartoons, we also most have some characters in that matter… and that part was forced on our poor dear Jackie. She was a character so lovable, and still is, on her own way… but since she was left behind by daron. cotugno and her team took her and decided to use her for lgbt representation… again they re-wrote her, putting cotugno’s personal life on her to make her lesbi/bi, and despite how much anyone can accept that, it feels… so out of place.I honestly expected her to be alone, and being awesome, than coming back from france with the “I found myself, and you should date star cause she is so special and I’m not, our relationship wasn’t great cause star exists” crap they put on her… and yeah you assholes out there that don’t want to accept this, that’s what they did to poor Jackie… not in that order, but they made her say that Jarco relationship wasn’t great and that starco is the good shit, and that was the lamest lowest move they could do...What? You still don’t get it, reader?… just imagine this:>No Chloe.>By the end of the show star comes to marco >she says that she found herself in that magic dimension and that their relationship is not worth it.>She also says that Jackie is worth it and that Marco should date Jackie again… Now you get it?…. exactly. That’s the crap Jarco got, cause starco must be canon and Jackie must be out of the equation.Back on topic… even when this message of social inclusion was showed at least once in each season and in the books, the show had more interest from the viewers that bet on that horse… cause they only watched the show for that and that only… to get to the end and say “we won”, and there are MILLIONS of comments everywhere to back me up on this… the vast majority of the fans only joined to win this ship wars, betting on starco.Also, the show needed more continuity in that matter, cause yeah… each and every time that star learns more about anything… it’s for that episode only, star thinks about it and it’s trascending… then it’s forgotten right in the next episode and only bringed back to the screen when they want to remember what the show is about… I honestly feel that Steven Universe did better than svtfoe by far, cause ships were kept low in the show, and the important stuff of the show had more relevance. Ships were made? yeah… just enough, and they didn’t took relevance from the show for more than 1 part of the episode or at worst case scenario for an entire episode… but hey, they are in the hearts of the fans who want that, but it’s not damaging the show by their authors or crew hands… that’s the fandom!

One last thing... I got bored of the “for star’s sake marco will do anything and everything” stuff they put constantly in the show.like...>Marco knows karate, and can beat almost any other mewman he faces? yes, but let’s make him fight only cause star.>Marco has interdimensional scissors to go anywhere or visit anyone, should he use those? No, he will only use his scissors to see star.>Marco skates, he did it for jackie, right?... let’s re-write that, make it so that marco skates to see star.

#svtfoe #svtfoe season 4 spoilers #svtfoe season 4 #steven universe #squidward #hol up!#seriously?#eclipsa butterfly #hekapoo #marco diaz #jackie lynn thomas #let me drive my van into your faaaaace!#yellow diamond #star vs las fuerzas del mal #svlfdm #rants

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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I'VE BEEN PONDERING SUMMER

In Lisp, all variables are effectively pointers. Why go work as an ordinary employee for a big company, or have they abandoned the center for the suburbs?1 Especially if it meant independence for my native land, hacking.2 It's hard to engage an audience it's better to start with what goes wrong and try to trace it back to the root causes. A lot of the new startups would create new technology that further accelerated variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality, the former because founders own more stock, and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up.3 When we first started Y Combinator we have some kind of secret weapon—that he was harming his future—that hacking was cold, precise, and methodical, and that was more than enough technical skill. There is a name now for what we were: an Application Service Provider, or ASP. How little money it can take to start a company of any size to get software written.

I needed to remember, if I could give an example of a powerful macro, and say there!4 Design means making things for humans. Wrong. Big companies also don't pay people the right way to get an accurate drawing is not to make the poor richer. This sort of thing was the rule, not better off, as more than a plan A. In some ways, this assumption makes life a lot easier for the users and for us as well. Why did desktop computers take over?5 Programmers have to worry about infrastructure. For the first week or so we intended to make this point diplomatically, but in many ways pushes you in the opposite direction.6 Similarly, good new problems are not to be had for the asking. Don't be too legalistic about the conditions under which they're allowed to leave.

Now, when someone asks me what I do, I look them straight in the eye and say I'm designing a new dialect of Lisp;-Though useful to present-day union organizers rather than an attack on early ones. I think mathematicians also believe this. In the middle you have people who are poor or rich and figure out why. We were just able to develop stuff in house, and that if grad students could start startups, they'll start startups. Eric Raymond here. Which seems to me one of the most interesting differences between research and design. In fact, it may be slightly faster. We were terrified of starting a startup, there are even worse tradeoffs than these. I think about why I voted for Clinton over the first George Bush, it wasn't because I was shifting to the left or right in their morning-after analyses are like the financial reporters stuck writing stories day after day about the random fluctuations of the stock market.

This metaphor doesn't stretch that far. Maybe it will also be your cell phone. The books I bring on trips are often quite virtuous, the sort of engagement you get when speaking ad lib. It doesn't necessarily mean being self-sacrificing. For the first week or so we intended to make this an ordinary desktop application. You can't trust authorities.7 They were, as a rule, not better off, as more than one with a 50% chance of winning has to pay more than one discovered when Christmas shopping season came around and loads rose on their server. I'm letting you in on the secret early. But since then the west coast has just pulled further ahead.8 It is not the way it's portrayed on TV. And if you're writing a program that attacked the servers themselves should find them very well defended.

Sometimes I can think with noise.9 Our only expenses in that phase were food and rent. It's hard to imagine now, but when they do get paged at 4:00 AM, they don't think of themselves that way. When you switch to this new model, you realize how much software development is affected by the reactions of those around them, and c they're individually inconsistent. If you want, but not totally unlike your other friends. And that might be a great thing. As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer wouldn't use either of them.10 I'm a little embarrassed to say, I never said anything publicly about Lisp while we were working on Viaweb. As usual, by Demo Day about half the startups were doing something significantly different than they planned. So there you have it.

Notice I said what they need, not what a piece of code. Fortunately, there were few obstacles except technical ones. And more to the point of view. And creating wealth, as a rule, not better off, as more than a plan A. You never had to worry about those. If you work this way too.11 Because painters leave a trail of work behind them, you can just turn off the service. I could tell I knew how to program computers, or what life was really like in preindustrial societies, or how to program better than most people doing it for a living. I think few realize the huge spread in the value of 20 year olds.12 Prep schools openly say this is one reason intranet software will continue to do so but be content to work for someone else would get an even colder reception from the 19 year old was Bill Gates? Programs.13 The way to get in the software as soon as they got their first round of outside investors 36x.

It allows you to give an example of this rule; if you could count on investors being interested even if you're not certain, you should get summer jobs at places you'd like to work. You have the users' data right there on your disk.14 And you don't have to be poked with a stick to get them to stay is to give them enough that they don't dress up. Only 13 of these were in product development. No one will look that closely at it. You have the users' data right there on your disk.15 At any rate, the result is that scientists tend to make their fortunes will continue to do so much besides write software.16 So startup culture may not merely be different in the way of having the next. Though we were comparatively old, we weren't tied down by jobs they don't want to, but they didn't actually drop out of college and it tanks, you'll end up at 23 broke and a lot who get rich by taking money from the rich. If you write the laws very carefully, that is a good idea—but we've decided now that the party line should be to discover surprising things. This was done entirely for PR purposes. What you're afraid of competition.

Notes

Management consulting.

If you're expected to do work you love, or boards, or even being Genghis Khan is probably a losing bet for a couple hundred years or so and we ran into Yuri Sagalov. Most of the reason the founders. In fact the decade preceding the war had been a waste of time on is a new version from which they don't know. 6% of the products I grew up with much greater inconveniences than that.

Even in English, our sense of a startup enough to invest in a safe environment, and then a block or so and we did not become romantically involved till afterward. They seem to be hard on the grounds that a startup is rare. Companies often wonder what to do whatever gets you there sooner.

9999 and.

Globally the trend has been around as long as the web have sucked—A Spam Classification Organization Program. The point where things start with consumer electronics.

People and The Old Way. But if you tell them what to do video on-demand, because you can't even claim, like the bizarre consequences of this essay talks about programmers, the other cheek skirts the issue; the point where it was briefly in Britain in the Ancient World, Economic History Review, 2:9 1956,185-199, reprinted in Finley, M.

Inside their heads a giant house of cards is tottering. In fact the less powerful language in it.

The only people who might be 20 or 30 times as much income. Selina Tobaccowala stopped to think about, like arithmetic drills, instead of editors, and astronomy. Incidentally, the police treat people more equitably. There can be done at a famous university who is highly regarded by his peers will get funding, pretty much regardless of how to use those solutions.

For example, because it doesn't cost anything. What will go away. In a startup in a deal to move from London to Silicon Valley like the increase in trade you always see when restrictive laws are removed. Come work for us now to appreciate how important it is certainly part of a safe environment, but mediocre programmers is the discrepancy between government receipts as a technology startup takes some amount of damage to the size of a startup, as on a map.

Success here is that they've already decided what they're going to need to run an online service, this would work.

But no planes crash if your school, secretly write your dissertation in the right sort of wealth, not like soccer; you don't know of no Jews moving there, only Jews would move there, and power were concentrated in the imprecise half.

The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, many of the art itself gets more random, the increasing complacency of managements.

For example, the laser, it's this internal process in their target market the shoplifters are also startlingly popular on Delicious, but since it was 10 years ago.

In a project like a core going critical.

How could these people make the right not to stuff them with comments. The state of technology, companies that an investor, than a product of number of discrepancies currently blamed on various forbidden isms.

If you did that in practice that doesn't lose our data. Anything that got built this way is basically a replacement mall for mallrats.

Thanks to Mike Arrington, Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris, Patrick Collison, and Paul Buchheit for sharing their expertise on this topic.

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weirdwariii · 6 years

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My Top 20 Albums of 2017, Part 1: 20-11

Alright, let’s do it. 20 albums that I liked more than the rest of this year’s albums. Some are easy to stand behind because they’re just genuinely and technically great, but there are a few albums that just resonated with me a lot - seemingly in ways that didn’t with others? But, whatever, it’s my list and I’ll forget about all of these albums a few weeks into 2018 when I’m just listening to If You’re Feeling Sinister ten times a day.

20. Black Mass - World Eater: In what will likely be a recurring theme as I talk about albums that were important to me this year, it was hard not to weigh any art (music or otherwise) against the flaming circus-tent of a year it's been for anyone who wasn’t an old white male billionaire. And while I didn’t always seek out music that seemed to directly react to the state of the world, some albums just seemed to fill that role naturally. In any other year, I probably would’ve embraced World Eater’s dark and noisy aesthetic as a good counterpoint to all the lighter power pop I consumed, but this year, World Eater felt more like necessary noise in drowning out the barrage of darkness in our newsfeeds. For an album without any actual intelligible words or lyrics, it's hard to say just how much of a reaction World Eater is to 2017, but it still managed to fill that role perfectly.

19. Dirty Projectors - Dirty Projectors: It’s like listening to your best friend talk about his recent breakup. And you love your best friend, and he tells a really good story. And in the moment you’re thinking “Man, that sounds like it was really hard.” But later on, after he left your house and your mulling it over, you think: “She might have been too good for him.” Look, I don’t know what happened between Amber and Dave, and I’m not supposed to know either - that’s their business. But they made some of my favorite albums together, and this album - the first without Amber - simultaneously feels both incomplete and like an evolution in the sound of Dirty Projectors. The last thing I wanted was to feel like I was between two of my friends as they broke up, but at least the fallout sounded beautiful.

18. Los Campesinos - Sick Scenes: What year did Hold On Now, Youngster… come out? Oh, 2008. Wow, seems surreal it's been almost 10 years, and like, 4...5...6 EPs and LPs since then? I gotta admit, I fell off the wagon for a while. It wasn’t you, Los Campesinos, it was me. But, man, am I glad that I checked back in this year. I dunno what happened. Maybe you were fucking killing it the whole time and I wasn’t paying attention, or maybe I just happened to check back when you made exactly the album I was hoping I’d get a few years/LPs ago. Still twee. Still snarky. Still angsty. It’s the bitter version of Belle & Sebastian we needed right about now.

17. Protomartyr - Relatives in Descent: There’s a lot of archaic sounding rock music anymore, right? I still like it, but to stand out in 2017, a good rock album needs to have something special to say. This album, and the band’s Joe Casey, has a lot to say. It’s hard to describe the band’s sound, and I mean that in the best way possible. The Fall’s chatty lyrics and punk sound is a good starting point, maybe a dash of Titus Andronicus (or maybe I just listened to TA a lot this year, and they were always on my mind when I listened to Protomartyr?). This year’s album by Priests actually felt akin to this album, and vice versa (and we’ll talk about that album more later…). But this album felt wholly original, political, socially aware and personal in a year where all of those things mattered more than usual, and we were all better for it.

16. Ariel Pink - Dedicated to Bobby Jameson: More than ten years after having discovered Ariel Pink, I still feel like there’s no artist or band that sounds like him. His honest-to-goodness songwriting knowhow always seems at odds with his continued embrace of absurdism. Whereas his older material always reminded me of listening to someone’s AM radio through the wall (at midnight,after you had a few drinks), his newer material is more like finally being invited into your neighbor’s apartment, only to find out that the music is coming out of the sink. There’s almost a sense of maturation on this album for Pink, but only in that he seems more comfortable than ever in exploring the niche that he’s made for himself and remains alone in.

15. Everything Everything - A Fever Dream: You know those bands, or albums, that you think you know everything about before you listen to them? That. For the last three albums, I kind of wrote off Everything Everything based on nothing more than a bad hunch. “I think they’re from the UK? They probably have a guy on the synths. I bet NME likes them. Nothing to see here, folks.” I was wrong (and why would any of those things have mattered?). I’m always wrong when I do this (sometime I’ll tell you about the years I was really wrong about The Mountain Goats). This band, and this album in particular, feels so much refined and on point than I ever would’ve imagined. The strength of “Night of the Long Knives” alone, and it being the first track, was like a slap to the face. Who else was I wrong about?

14. Grandaddy - Last Place: I told them not to do it. They probably couldn’t hear me, and I doubt they would’ve listened had they heard me, but I fucking told Grandaddy: “Don’t come back. You’re music is of a time and place, and this isn’t the same world. Nobody’s going to get your slacksadaiscal lo-fi indie-pop. Please, think of me: You’re fan who loves you and who used your music to get through some dark days.” But they went and did it. They came back. And they made an album. And that album sounds exactly like what I would’ve expected from a Grandaddy album 10 years ago. And you know what? They fucking killed it. Welcome back, Grandaddy.

13. Gorillaz - Humanz: Now here’s a doozy. What do you say about an album that, while inherently flawed and less than perfect, is still a blast to listen to? Look, I know, this doesn’t sound much like a Gorillaz album. Even as a mixtape, it's kind of uneven. But, you know, according to Last.FM, this is the album I listened to most this year, and I believe it. A flawed package can’t distract from just how enjoyable most of these songs are. There has never been a time when I’ve heard one of these songs in a playlist or when my library is on random, and I wasn’t excited to hear it. Maybe it lacks the vision and cohesion of every Gorillaz album that came before it, but maybe that's its biggest strength too.

12. New Pornographers - Whiteout Conditions: I know. I knooow. This isn’t the best New Pornographers album, and it probably wasn’t, technically, one of the best albums of the year. AND Dan Bejar isn’t even on this album! Yeah...but I still love this album. Coming off their last album, Brill Bruisers (an album that I firmly believe is one of their best), there is still a thrilling amount of energy left in a band that is pushing almost 20 years together. And, like BB, there’s a continued sense of cohesion here. This sounds less like a bunch of good songs collected on an album, and more like the end result of old friends getting together in a specific mindset and mood. Its an effortlessly charming and smooth power pop album that still sounds manages to demand attention, despite the shadow of their more acclaimed classic albums.

11. Spoon - Hot Thoughts: I dunno, should I just copy and paste the write-up I did for the New Pornographers? I could switch out Brill Bruisers with They Want My Soul, and it’d still be accurate. I could point out that they’re still putting out amazing work this late into their epic career. Maybe the difference here is that while New Pornographers continue to hone and perfect the same sound they’ve always had, Spoon always seems to be stretching itself out a little bit. Never too far from their core sound, but enough to give each album its own feel. This time out, Spoon leans on some new electronic elements that seem to fit in with their sound perfectly. Britt Daniels continues to seem incapable of writing a bad song, and there are just so many good songs this time around. Like, I predict that I’ll still have “Do I Have To Talk You Into It” in my head when Spoon releases their next album.

#weirdwariii2017eoy #music #music list #spoon #new pornographers #gorillaz #grandaddy #Everything Everything #Ariel Pink #protomartyr #los campesinos!#dirty projectors #blanck mass

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robonomics · 5 years

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Altria’s Investment in Juul: Buy, Hold, or Sell?

Altria’s stock has recently fallen on some pretty bad times. The last time I wrote about the company a few years ago, I endorsed it as a great long term buy. Since then, the stock has fallen about $15, or $9 if you account for unreinvested dividends. One would think the stock would be higher over this period along with the rest of the stock market, but events over this period changed the company’s strategy. Its most concerning risk- government regulation- battered the stock. Looking back, you can see that I’m not always right- nor do I believe I am always going to be when writing about my investment ideas. It’s time I re-examine Altria’s stock (this time ignoring Philip Morris’s stock).

Altria is holding company for the sin business. For the most part, it is a cigarette producer, owning several cigarette brands, most notably the American rights to Marlboro (Philip Morris owns the same brands but for the international market). It also dabbles in cigars, wine, and smokeless tobacco products like chewing tobacco and e-cigarettes. When it comes down to it, Altria is nothing more than a cash-generating machine in a recession-proof industry. Growth in cigarettes is in perpetual decline- its regular customers are dying after all. However, even with a declining base of users, it is able to increase revenues from price increases. Addicted people have a pretty inelastic demand curve, which Altria has taken advantage of as its core business model for decades. Further, brand loyalty is strong in the industry, and Altria has the strongest: Marlboro. Price competition hasn’t happened in decades when the industry oligopolists figured out that branding was all that mattered for users. On top of the businesses and brands it owns outright, they also own major stakes in a few other sin businesses. Over the long history of this company, much of its revenues come simply from the dividends it receives from these investments, and the managerial prowess it provides to the boards of these companies.

Interestingly, I just came across some of the terms of the Master Settlement Agreement, a 1998 settlement between cigarette manufacturers and 46 states. The terms require cigarette companies, including Altria, to pay billions every year to states in perpetuity for public health needs. Under the terms, 2018 was the last yearly increase in the amount to be paid. From here on out, the maximum amount tobacco firms have to pay is $9B/year all together. They collectively have no problem paying this. Just imagine how this will help the bottom line in the coming years as revenues continue to rise, but this cronic cash outlay stagnates- and that’s not even accounting for inflation! However, there appears to be some type of volume and inflation adjustment actually leading the manufacturers to paying less than expected, and which will possibly mean that their outlays will continue to rise in the coming years. It is unclear, but this may or may not mean that there will be additional earnings over the coming years.

In August of 2017, it sold off its stake in SABMiller in exchange for about a 10% stake in AB Inbev (SYMB: BUD), the world’s largest brewer. It also go$5.7B cash at the time of the deal. The nice thing about this is that AB Inbev pays a huge dividend to supplement Altria’s stake. Well not so much recently. Because of the debt ABInbev took on to buy SABMiller, the company recently cut its dividend dramatically, also causing a fall in the stock price. That means the value of Altria’s stake went down too. On the bright side, Altria has this stock to supplement its revenues, and, in the end, its own dividend payments. (I am struggling to find the actual amount of cash Altria generates from these dividends, but some rough math based on AB Inbev’s cash flow statement puts it at around $513M for the next projected full year and possibly $1.4B looking back over the year since it took a stake). All it has to do it sit back and wait every 6 months or so for the dividend to come in. I don’t really believe there is too much worry here in the long run. The beer industry faces a lot of competition from craft brewers competing with mass market producers, but even there it seems that some of the craft brewers are just becoming another large competitor in the market, like Bells and Yuengling. Sorry hipsters, you can’t fight off brand loyalty and the ease with which many consumers want to make their purchasing decisions forever. Sure, Altria’s income statement is going to take a hit while Bud pays down debt, but investing in a company for an asset play is not unheard of. For example, investors might find swaths of land owned in prime markets by companies that aren’t using it properly and invest in what otherwise looks like a dead end company solely for the purpose getting the company to sell the land, and hence, give them a huge inflow of profits. If Altria truly fell on hard times, it could do the same with its AB Inbev stake. So far, management doesn’t see a problem with it, notably because they haven’t sold it in order to make other investments.

Juul is Cool

Speaking of asset plays, Altria’s biggest recent news involves its new stake in Juul, an e-cigarette company. Juul essentially came out of nowhere in the last couple years. Just in the last year alone, it had an explosive 900% growth in revenues to $1.5B. Why? Simple: Juul is cool. A generational shift is currently happening where smoking went from being a nasty habit into what is considered one of the coolest things to celebrate for college (and likely high school- see below) students. Just review a Barstool Sports Instagram or Twitter account for any random college and you’ll find videos of countless people showing off the numerous ways they consume, charge, and distribute their Juul. Hell, I’m even using one right now! Just kidding, but I occasionally think of getting one. What used to be a dying, slowly decreasing market for nicotine has now turned into a super fast growth market. The base of users is growing again, and therefore, the chance for new revenues and profits.

This is the reason Altria invested $12.8B in Juul for a 35% stake, valuing Juul at $38B. That’s 25x last year’s sales, a dotcom bubble era size valuation. Juul supposedly makes up 75% of the e-cigarette’s $2.3Bish market*, so it’s still dwarfed in size by the cigarette market, a $119B industry in the US in 2017, over $600B globally. This is the reason why many analysts believe Altria overpaid: it will take a long time to recoup the investment in a small company and market, regardless of how high the current growth rate is. I’m not so certain though. Even in my attempts to do a discounted cash flow model with completely arbitrary figures, the revenue growth rates have to continue to be pretty explosive for several years. From the looks of it, Altria is betting that its customers will quit smoking cigarettes and switch to e-cigarettes,and gain new users who weren’t previously smokers. Nicotine is addictive, so there isn’t much concern about future revenue generation once a new customer buys its products. How much brand loyalty will exist in this new market is uncertain, so part of their bet is that Juul is going to be the Marlboro of e-cigarettes. If Juul and other e-cigarette brands can turn a $2.5B industry into a behemoth $119B, assuming the switch is a perfect substitution, it’s not a bad move for Altria to pay up now to maintain its current 50% market share. Maybe e-cigarettes will generate less revenue but from some quick figures on from numerous sources that aren’t totally reliable, Juuls will make a shit ton more. Estimates range on how long a pod lasts, from a day to a week depending on a person’s use. Some say a pack of cigarettes is equivalent to a pod in reference to its nicotine level, delivering 5% nicotine per puff. I have not clue how that translates to a cigarette pack. On average, it’s a more expensive habit than smoking at $15/pod. This means its users, at least at the moment, likely have higher incomes, or really are committed to quitting smoking. As we already know, addicted smokers have a high inelasticity of demand, but it is unclear if this much higher price is something users are as willing to stomach before brand switching or price competition occurs. What is clear is that as long as Juul can maintain pricing power from the dominance of its brand- a risk in a new market- it is likely that Juul will be a cash fucking cow. A fast growing one, too.

The terms of the purchase agreement are very favorable to Juul. In exchange for a 35% stake in the company, it basically gets access to act as if it were any other product in Altria’s sales force. Prominent placement in stores, marketing campaign assistance, distribution network, brand management, you name it- Juul now has it. Overnight, a company with a well-known brand from a niche industry gained the knowledge of the larger industry it’s taking on’s best competitor. Under the terms, Juul also doesn’t have to worry about Altria using its new board seats to influence a future sale of the company outright to Altria, well at least for 6 years. I have a feeling Altria will block any other competitors from taking stakes in the company before (if it ever) goes public, and be happy to buyout the rest of the company if the next 6 years prove that they made a good investment. Many investors see all these benefits to Juul and limitations on Altria as a sign that Altria overpaid for an investment in a parasite. One thing investors are forgetting: Altria knows the tobacco market better than them. As long as what I imagine Altria predicts are astronomical growth rates in the e-cigarette industry over the coming decade, the stake will pay for itself- especially the board seats at the decision making table (future acquisition). The difference between this and the AOL/Time Warner merger is that Juul generates cash and profits, unlike the lofty future projections of AOL. Cash speaks, and Altria is simply looking to keep its cash generating machine of addicted users running long into the future.

The big negative the comes with this investment is that it is politically very savvy to attack not only the smoking industry, but especially the e-cigarette industry. Not only has the number of vapers increased dramatically in the last couple years, but sadly the number of people under 18 has too. This is the first time in a long time that any form of nicotine use has climbed in that age group in quite a while. Some attribute it to product advertising. I’m not sure where but possibly Instagram and Twitter. The FDA appears to be on somewhat of a mission at the moment not only to regulate, but destroy the industry, announcing just this morning that if teen vaping rates do not stop rising in 2019 (highly unlikely) they might completely ban the product. While I fully disagree with this approach, and much of the various proposals the FDA has announced regarding e-cigarettes simply because of the massive decrease in health problems compared to conventional smoking, it is a real scare for investors, especially since Juul is the FDA’s biggest target. A ban on e-cigarette’s would completely wipe out Altria’s $12B investment.

But keep in mind, the FDA also once proposed regulating the level of nicotine in cigarettes down to a non-addictive level. That never went through. Every once in a while, the FDA talks about banning menthol. They did so officially this past November. I’m a bit concerned about this, as an investor, but who knows if it will actually go through. I feel that notice and comment rule making proposals almost always go through since public input or any opposition to a proposal really doesn’t matter in administrative rule making, but lobbying is a strong force to deal with. Altria, which I imagine Juul will be a maaaaaaajor beneficiary of, has an incredibly strong lobbying team. Along with British American Tobacco and other major cigarette producers, its not a stretch to say smoking is a prime example of regulatory capture: when industry regulators become so cozy with the companies they regulate that the regulators implement whatever rules the companies want in place. And the companies always make it so that they survive and competitive barriers are put up. I’m not a fan of the model, but it’s a common one; one Altria is really good at. If anyone can stop the FDA from banning revenue generating products, it’s the cigarette industry under a pro-business president.

Without going into it much, Altria’s investment in Juul is likely a positive for the company, but from an antitrust concern I am fully opposed to it. Altria already announced that they are shutting down their in-house e-cigarette brand operations in order to focus on Juul- a blatant example of anti-competitive activity.

Other Stuff

Altria also recently invested $1.8B in Cronos (SYMB: CRON), a canadian cannabis maker. On this front, I simply do not have enough knowledge. With a 45% stake in the company, and the ability to take majority control later, this could work out similarly to their investment in Juul. I’m happy Altria is investing an area that logically flows from its core business model, the marketing of sin products. Maybe Cronos will become the next Altria of marijuana. The hard part here is that competition is rife in this legally suspect industry. Who will be the eventual victor after marijuana is fully legalized in the US is unclear. There are numerous competitors, a lack of brand loyalty anywhere as far as I can see at this point, too many different flavors (strains) without clear mass appeal, hundreds of different consumption methods... the list goes on. Another on the competitive front is that multiple different sin business giants are investing in the industry, including Constellation Brands. I’ve even heard that general products companies like Coca-Cola are looking to get in on the game. That’s a lot of strong marketing/brand competition to eventually face. It is an economist’s dream to follow the marijuana industry given how all the different restrictions affect decision making and how it came to life out of nowhere to let market factors play out in real time. However from an investors stand point, any investment in the waaaaaaay-overvalued-relative-to-risk marijuana stock sector, it’s a crap shoot whether Altria made a good investment or not. Analysts see it generally as a good move for both Altria and Cronos, which seems strange to me given their universal agreement on how the Juul investment was bad, even though Juul has much better prospects of future success. Let’s hope the analysts are right about Cronos.

One of the biggest problems Altria faces as a stock rather than a company is how it is viewed. Currently, it is a blue chip industry stock. Revenues grow with stability over time. Dividends are high. Cash flows are massive. For much of its history, the company has had so much money that it had to buy up companies in totally unrelated industries just to find somewhere to grow and diversity in case cigarettes were all out banned (Kraft, SABMiller, etc.). Investors have historically bought the stock because of its reliable dividend. With interests rates rising, this presents a problem: investors sell high dividend stocks and switch to bonds to lower their risk for the same or similar return. This creates a headwind against Altria for the expected coming years. Further, if Altria’s investment in Juul turns out to add lots of growth to its revenues, it may completely alter Altria’s historical view as a dividend growth and income play. Whenever this happens, stock prices are unpredictable as investors try to figure out the future direction of the company. This is a probably the biggest risk factor for the stock, more so than its one time investment in Juul. On the plus side, it does not have much foreign exchange exposure, since it owns only the US rights to Philip Morris products. Altria is therefore a bet on the US market.

Is it a buy?

This isn’t so clear. To me, Altria’s investment in Juul is a good move, even at its high value. It’s overall business model seems to be intact, if dying without it’s investment in Juul. An investment in Altria without the Juul investment would have been a dividend play, but with it, there is now growth potential. If you were to invest in this stock, it is likely to stagnate for a while. But since it recently fell 30% in the last three months, mostly related to general market moves compounded by their investment announcements and regulatory scares, the price looks attractive at these levels relative to expected earnings. The P/E is at a 5 year low. Other valuation metrics are also at 5 year lows for the stock, suggesting it may be undervalued relative to the long run. I suggest waiting out until the next earnings call to hear what Altria has to say about its Juul investment. This is the key to any future investment decision. Sure, you might miss out on a current buying opportunity, but I think it’s too risky when you can wait to hear what management has to say. If the stock goes up on their discussion, no biggie. Plus, there is low downside risk since a lot of the negative factors I’ve listed, notably the on the regulatory front, are baked into the stock already. It’s all about long term growth.

It’s clear that there is a morality complex that comes along with an investment in Altria. The nice thing to remember is that whenever you buy a share of stock, its going to be from the secondary market. This means that you aren’t actually putting any money into the company, you are simply buying the rights to future earnings from someone else who may or may not have actually put money into the company’s bank account decades ago. This likely won’t dispel any moral issues for most investors, so at the very least one could look at Altria’s investment in Juul as taking a step to severely reduce the health hazards attached to a nicotine addiction, to say nothing about the taboo against addiction generally. In no way is it good that teens are getting addicted at young ages, especially from a psychological perspective (though we know how notoriously unreliable studies in that field are, both scientifically and statistically). For me, I look at Juul as a way to help people quit smoking, or be addicted without the vast majority of the health problems associated with smoking. It’s unfortunate that high schoolers find it cool, but at the same time, it’s not translating into cigarette use, a far worse alternative. At least, not yet. Teenagers have always found ways to do adult things adults don’t want them to do, whether it’s smoking, drinking, seeing R rated movies, or having sex. Maybe this will be one with far less problems (though there are reports of people who vaped so much that it caused seizures- not a good thing). It’s up to the investor, when it comes down to it, whether they feel good or not investing in a company whose sole purpose is feeding users’ addictions.

1/28/19 Update: Another thing to consider is the expected rate of e-cigarette cannibalization of traditional smoking. Sure, Altria’s investment in Juul will help offset the cannibalization it faces, but not only will this not be a perfect one-for-one switch given Altria’s loss only returns it a 35% share of profits from Juul, it also means that the costs to Altria might be felt much stronger in the short term even though it will make up for it in the long term. Putting it simply, it’s not clear if there is nothing but pain for Altria’s stock in the next couple years as people switch smoking preferences for current smokers (new nicotine addicts aren’t as much of a concern), even though it will be offset by the gains in their Juul investment in the long run. This could lead to years of stagnation or stock price depreciation before getting growth again, even in as Altria raises cigarette prices every year to combat the loss in unit sales. Investors should consider this macro trend when deciding on the timing of whether to invest in Altria, if at all.

*I know the math doesn’t make sense: 1.5/2.3 ≠ 75%. But I’m going off the various statistics I found in news articles and some statistics databases on the industry.

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Episode #73 — "Désiré" by Megan Arkenberg

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Episode 73 is part of the Autumn 2018 issue!

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Désiré by Megan Arkenberg

From Albert Magazine’s interview with Egon Rowley: April 2943

Egon Rowley: It was the War that changed him. I remember the day we knew it. [A pause.] We all knew it, that morning. He came to our table in the coffee shop with a copy of Raum – do you remember that newspaper? The reviewers were deaf as blue-eyed cats, the only people in Südlichesburg who preferred Anton Fulke’s operas to Désiré’s – but Désiré, he had a copy of it. This was two days after Ulmerfeld, you understand. None of us had any idea how bad it was. But Raum had gotten its hands on a letter from a soldier, and Désiré read it to us, out loud, right there over coffee and pastries.

[Full story after the cut.]

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip Episode 73 for June 13, 2019. This is your host, Keffy, and I’m super excited to be sharing this story with you. Our story for today is Desire by Megan Arkenberg, read by Dani Daly.

Before we get to it, if you’ve been waiting to pick up your copy of the Tiptree Award Honor Listed book, GlitterShip Year Two, there’s a great deal going on for Pride over at StoryBundle. GlitterShip Year Two is part of a Pride month LGBTQ fantasy fiction bundle. StoryBundle is a pay-what-you-want bundle site. For $5 or more, you can get four great books, and for $15 or more, you’ll get an additional five books, including GlitterShip Year Two, and a story game. That comes to as little as $1.50 per book or game. The StoryBundle also offers an option to give 10% of your purchase amount to charity. The charity for this bundle is Rainbow Railroad, a charity that helps queer folks get to a safe place if their country is no longer safe for them.

http://www.storybundle.com/pride

And now for “Desire” by Megan Arkenberg, read by Dani Daly.

Megan Arkenberg’s work has appeared in over fifty magazines and anthologies, including Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Shimmer, and Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year. She has edited the fantasy e-zine Mirror Dance since 2008 and was recently the nonfiction editor for Queers Destroy Horror!, a special issue of Nightmare Magazine. She currently lives in Northern California, where she is pursuing a Ph.D. in English literature. Visit her online at http://www.meganarkenberg.com.

Dani loves to keep busy and narrating stories is just one of the things she loves to do. She’s a former assistant editor of Cast of Wonders, a retired roller derby player and current soap maker and small business owner. She rants on twitter as @danooli_dani, if that’s your thing. Or you can visit the EA forums, where she moderates the Cast of Wonders boards. You can find stories narrated by Dani on all four of the Escape Artists podcasts, at Star Ship Sofa, and on Audible.com (as Danielle Daly).

Désiré by Megan Arkenberg

From Albert Magazine’s interview with Egon Rowley: April 2943

Albert Magazine: And what did the letter say?

Rowley: The usual things. Blood and, and heads blown clean off, things like that. Horrible things. I remember…[Laughs awkwardly.] I remember Baptist Vogel covered his ears. We all felt it quite badly.

AM: I imagine. Why was this letter so important to Désiré?

Rowley: Who can say why anything mattered to him? Guilt, most likely.

AM: Guilt?

Rowley: Yes. He hadn’t volunteered for the army, and that was something of an anomaly in those days. Everyone was so patriotic, so nationalist, I suppose you’d say. But he had his reasons. I mean, I don’t suppose Désiré could have passed the examinations for enlistment – the psychological examinations.

AM: But it bothered him, that he hadn’t volunteered?

Rowley: Yes. Very much. [A pause.] When he read that soldier’s letter…it was the oddest thing. Like he was reading a love letter, you understand. But, like I said, there was nothing romantic in it, nothing at all. It was…horrible.

AM: What did Désiré say about it?

Rowley: About the letter? Nothing. He just read it and…and went back to his rooms, I suppose. That was the last we saw of him.

AM: The last you saw of him?

Rowley: Yes. [A pause.] Before Alexander.

A letter from Margaret von Banks to Beatrix Altberg: August 2892

Dearest Bea,

The scene: Leonore’s drawing room, around nine o’clock last night. The moment I stepped through the door, Désiré came running up to me like a child looking for candy. “Thank goodness you’re here,” he said. I should add that it was supposed to be a masquerade, but of course I knew him by his long hair and those dark red lips, and I suppose I’m the only woman in Südlichesburg to wear four rings in each ear. He certainly knew me immediately. “I have a bet running with Isidor,” he continued, “and Anton and I need you for the violin.”

He explained, as he half-led, half-dragged me to the music room, that Anton had said something disparaging – typically – about Isidor’s skills as a conductor of Désiré’s music. Isidor swore to prove him wrong if Désiré would write them a new piece that very moment. Désiré did – a trio for violin, cello and pianoforte – and having passed the cello to Anton and claimed the piano for himself, he needed me to play violin in the impromptu concert.

“You’re mad,” I said on seeing the sheet music.

“Of course I am,” he said, patting me on the shoulder. Isidor thundered into the room – they make such a delightful contrast, big blond Isidor and dark Désiré. Rumor is Désiré has native blood from the Lysterrestre colonies, which makes me wonder quite shallowly if they’re all so handsome over there. Yes, Bea, I imagine you rolling your eyes, but the fact remains that Désiré is ridiculously beautiful. Even Richard admits it.

Well, Isidor assembled the audience, and my hands were so sweaty that I had to borrow a pair of gloves from Leonore later in the evening. Désiré was smooth and calm as can be. He kissed me on the forehead – and Anton on the cheek, to everyone’s amusement but Anton’s – and then Isidor was rapping the music stand for our attention, and Désiré played the opening notes, and we were off, hurtling like a sled down a hill. I wish I had the slightest clue what we were playing, Bea, but I haven’t. The audience loved it, at any rate.

That’s Désiré for you – mad as springtime, smooth as ice and clumsy as walking on it. We tease him, saying he’s lucky he doesn’t wear a dress, he trips over the ladies’ skirts so often. But then he apologizes so wonderfully, I’ve half a mind to trip him on purpose. That clumsiness vanishes when he’s playing, though; his fingers on a violin are quick and precise. Either that, or he fits his mistakes into the music so naturally that we don’t notice them.

You really ought to meet him, Bea. He has exactly your sense of humor. A few weeks ago, Richard and I were at the Symphony, and Désiré joined us in our box, quite unexpectedly. Richard, who was blushing and awkward as it was, tried to talk music with Désiré. “This seems to tell a story, doesn’t it?” he said.

“It most certainly does,” Désiré said. “Like Margaret’s uncle Kunibert. It starts with something fascinating, then derails itself talking about buttons and waistcoats. If we’re lucky, it might work its way back to its original point. Most likely it will put us to sleep until someone rudely disturbs us by applauding.”

All this said with the most perfectly straight face, and a bit of an eyebrow raise at me, inviting me to disagree with him. I never do, but it’s that invitation that disarms me, and keeps the teasing from becoming cruel. Désiré always waits to be proven wrong, though he never is.

I should warn you not to fall in love with him, though. I’m sure you laugh, but half of Südlichesburg is ready to serve him its hearts on a platter, and I know he’d just smile and never take a taste. He’s a man for whom Leonore’s masquerades mean nothing; he’s so wonderfully full of himself, he has no room to pretend to be anyone else.

That’s not to say he’s cruel: merely heartless. He’s like a ruby, clear and dark and beautiful to look at, but hard to the core. How such a man can write such music, I’ll never know.

Yours always,

Maggie

III. From a review of Désiré’s Echidna in Der Sentinel: July 2894

For the life of me, I cannot say what this opera is about. Love, and courage. A tempestuous battle. I have the libretto somewhere, in a drawer with my gloves and opera glasses, but I will not spoil Désiré’s score by putting a story to it. Echidna is music, pure music, so pure it breaks the heart.

First come the strings, quietly humming. Andrea Profeta enters the stage. The drums begin, loud, savage. Then the melody, swelling until you feel yourself lifted from your chair, from your body, and you are only a web of sensations; your heart straining against the music, your blood singing in your fingertips. Just remembering it, I feel my fingers go weak. How the orchestra can bear to play it, I can’t imagine.

It is not Echidna but the music that is the hero. We desire, like the heroine, to be worthy of it. We desire to live in such a way that our world may deserve to hold something so pure, so strong, so achingly beautiful within it.

From the Introduction of Désiré: an Ideal by Richard Stele: 2934

Societies are defined by the men they hate. It is the revenge of an exile that he carries his country to all the world, and to the world his countrymen are merely a reflection of him. An age is defined not by the men who lived in it, but by the ones who lived ahead of it.

Hate smolders. Nightmares stay with us. But love fades, love is fickle. Désiré’s tragedy is that he was loved.

From Albert Magazine’s interview with Egon Rowley

AM: And what about his vices?

Rowley: Désiré’s vices? He didn’t have any. [Laughs.] He certainly wasn’t vicious.

AM: Vicious?

Rowley: That’s what the papers called it. He liked to play games, play his friends and admirers against each other.

AM: Like the ladies.

Rowley: Yes. That was all a game to him. He’d wear…favors, I suppose you’d call them, like a knight at a joust. He admired Margaret von Bank’s earrings at the opening of Echidna, and she gave him one to wear through the performance. After that the ladies were always fighting to give him earrings.

AM: To your knowledge, was Désiré ever in love?

Rowley: Never. [A pause.] I remember one day – summer of 2896, it must have been – a group of us went walking in Brecht’s park. Désiré, Anton Fulke, the newspaperman Richard Stele, the orchestra conductor Isidor Ursler, and myself. It was Sonntag afternoon, and all the aristocrats were riding by in their fine clothes and carriages. A sort of weekly parade, for us simple peasants. You don’t see sights like that anymore.

[A long pause.] Anyway, Désiré was being himself, joking with us and flirting with the aristocrats. Or the other way around, it was never easy to tell. Isolde von Bisswurm, who was married to a Grand Duke at the time, slowed her carriage as she passed us and called… something unrepeatable down to Désiré.

AM: Unrepeatable?

Rowley: Oh, I’m sure it’s no more than half the respectable women in Südlichesburg were thinking. Désiré just laughed and leapt up into her carriage. She whispered something in his ear. And then he kissed her, right there in front of everyone – her, a married woman and a Grand Duchess.

AM: [With humor.] Scandalous.

Rowley: It was, in those days. We were all – Fulke and Ursler and Stele and I – we were all horrified. But the thing I’m thinking of, when you ask me if he was ever in love with anyone, that happened afterward. When he jumped down from Isolde’s carriage, he was smiling like a boy with a lax governess, and he looked so… I suppose you might say beautiful. But in a moment the look was gone. He caught sight of the man in the next carriage: von Arden, von Allen, something like that. Tall man, very dark, not entirely unlike Désiré, though it was very clear which of the two was better favored.

AM: Not von Arden.

Rowley: [Laughs.] Oh, no. Maggie von Banks used to call Désiré her angel, and he could have passed for one, but von what’s-his-face was very much a man. Désiré didn’t seem to notice. He stood there on the path in Brecht’s park, staring like… well, like one of those girls who flocked to his operas.

AM: Staring at this man?

Rowley: Yes. And after kissing Isolde von Bisswurm, who let me tell you was quite the lovely lady in those days. [Laughs softly.] Whoever would have suspected Désiré of bad taste? But that was his way, I suppose.

AM: What was his way? [Prompting:] Did you ever suspect Désiré of unnatural desires?

Rowley: No, never. No desire in him could be unnatural.

From the pages of Der Sentinel: May 15, 2897

At dawn on May 14, the composer Désiré was joined by Royal Opera conductor Isidor Ursler and over fifty representatives of the Südlichesburg music ‘scene’ to break ground in Umerfeld, two miles south of the city, for Désiré’s ambitious new opera house.

The plans for Galatea – which Désiré cheerfully warns the public are liable to change – show a stage the size of a race track, half a mile of lighting catwalks, and no less than four labyrinthine sub-basements for prop and scenery storage. For a first foray into architecture, Désiré’s design shows several highly ambitious features, including three-storey lobby and central rotunda. The rehearsal rooms will face onto a garden, Désiré says, featuring a miniature forest and a wading pool teeming with fish. When asked why this is necessary, he replied with characteristic ‘charm’: “It isn’t. Art isn’t about what is necessary. Art decides what is necessary.”

VII. From a review of Désiré’s Brunhilde in Der Sentinel: February 2899

For once, the most talked-about thing at the opera was not Désiré’s choice of jewel but his choice of setting. Südlichesburg’s public has loved Galatea from the moment we saw her emerging from the green marble in Ulmerfeld, and, at last, she has come alive and repaid our devotion with an embrace. At last, said more than one operagoer at last night’s premier of Brunhilde, Désiré’s music has a setting worthy of it.

Of course Galatea is not Désiré’s gift to Südlichesburg, but a gift to himself. The plush-and-velvet comfort of the auditorium is designed first and foremost to echo the swells of his music, and the marble statues in the lobby are not pandering to their aristocratic models but suggestions to the audience of what it is about to witness; beauty, dignity, power. However we grovel at the feet of Désiré the composer, we must also bow to Désiré the consummate showman.

As to the jewel in this magnificent setting, let us not pretend that anyone will be content with the word of Richard Stele, operagoer. Everyone in Südlichesburg will see Brunhilde, and all will love it. The only question is if they will love it as much as Désiré clearly loves his Galatea.

Finally, as a courtesy to the ladies and interested gentlemen, Désiré’s choice of jewel for last night’s performance came from the lovely Beatrix Altberg. He wore her pearl-and-garnet string around his left wrist, and it could be seen sparkling in the houselights as he stood at the end of each act and applauded wildly.

VIII. From Albert Magazine’s interview with Egon Rowley

AM: They say that Désiré’s real decline began with Galatea.

Rowley: Whoever “they” are. [Haltingly:] 2899, it was finished. I remember because that was the year Vande Frust opened her office in Südlichesburg. She was an odd one, Dr. Frust – but brilliant, I’ll give her that.

AM: Désiré made an appointment with Dr. Frust that June.

Rowley: Yes. I don’t know what they talked about, though. Désiré never said.

AM: But you can guess, yes?

Rowley: Knowing Dr. Frust, I can guess.

AM: [A long pause.] As a courtesy to our readers who haven’t read Vande Frust’s work, could you please explain?

Rowley: She was fascinated by origins. Of course she didn’t mean that the same way everyone else does – didn’t give half a pence for your parents, did Vande Frust. She had a bit of… a bit of a fixation with how you were educated. How you formed your Ideals – your passions, your values. What books you read, whose music you played, that sort of thing.

AM: And how do you suppose Désiré formed his Ideals?

Rowley: I don’t know. As I said, whatever Désiré discussed with Dr. Frust, he never told me. And he never went back to her.

From Chapter Eight of Désiré: an Ideal by Richard Stele

Whether or not Désiré suffered a psychological breakdown during the building of Galatea is largely a matter of conjecture. He failed to produce any significant piece of music in 2897 or the year after. Brunhilde, which premiered at the grand opening of Galatea in 2899, is generally acknowledged to be one of his weakest works.

But any concrete evidence of psychological disturbance is nearly impossible to find. We know he met with famed Dr. Vende Frust in June 2899, but we have no records of what he said there. The details of an encounter with the law in February 2900 are equally sketchy.

Elise Koch, Dr. Frust’s maid in 2899, offers an odd story about the aftermath of Désiré’s appointment. She claims to have found a strange garment in Dr. Frust’s office, a small and shapeless black dress of the sort women prisoners wear in Lysterre and its colonies. Unfortunately for the curious, Dr. Frust demanded that the thing be burned in her fireplace, and its significance to Désiré is still not understood.

From the report of Hans Frei, prostitute: February 12, 2900

Mr. Frei, nineteen years old, claims a man matching the description of the composer Désiré approached him near Rosen Platz late at night last Donnerstag. The man asked the price, which Mr. Frei gave him, and then offered twice that amount if Mr. Frei would accompany him to rooms “somewhere in the south” of Südlichesburg. Once in the rooms, Mr. Frei says the man sat beside him by the window and proceeded to cry into his shoulder. “He didn’t hurt me none,” Mr. Frei says. “Didn’t touch me, as a matter of fact. I felt sorry for him, he seemed like such a mess.”

No charges are being considered, as the man cannot properly be said to have contracted a prostitute for immoral purposes. The composer Désiré’s housekeeper and staff could not be found to comment on the incident. One neighbor, a Miss Benjamin, whose nerves make her particularly susceptible to any irregularity, claims that on the night of last Donnerstag, her sleep was disturbed by a lamp kept burning in her neighbor’s foyer. Such a lamp, she states, is usually maintained by Désiré’s staff until the small hours, and extinguished upon his homecoming. She assumes that the persistence of this light on Donnerstag indicates that Désiré did not return home on the night in question.

From a review of Désiré’s Hieronymus in Der Sentinel: December 2902

Any man who claims to have sat through Désiré’s Hieronymus with a dry eye and handkerchief is either deaf or a damned liar. Personally, I hope he is the damned liar, as it would be infinitely more tragic if he missed Désiré’s deep and tangled melodies. Be warned: Hieronymus bleeds, and the blood will be very hard to wash out of our consciousness.

XII. A letter from Margaret von Banks Stele to Beatrix Altberg: March 2903

Dearest Bea,

Richard says war is inevitable. His job with the newspapers lets him know these things, I suppose: he says Kaspar in the foreign relations room is trying to map Lysterrestre alliances with string and cards on the walls, and now he’s run completely out of walls. That doesn’t begin to include the colonies.

The way Richard talks about it, it sounds like a ball game. Bea, he jokes about placing bets on who will invade whom – as if it doesn’t matter any more than a day at the races! I know he doesn’t need to worry, that at worst the papers will send him out with a notepad and a pencil and set him scribbling. The Stele name still has some pull, after all – if he wants to make use of it.

I don’t, Beatrix. If war breaks out with Lysterre, I want you to know that I am going to enlist.

Yours, Margaret Stele

XIII. From Chapter Eleven of Désiré: an Ideal by Richard Stele

It was inevitable that the War should to some extent be Désiré’s. It was the natural result of men like him, in a world he had helped create. Dr. Vande Frust would say it was the result of our Ideals, and that Désiré had wrought those Ideals for us. I think Désiré would agree.

We – all of us, the artists and the critics with the aristocrats and cavalrymen – might meet in a coffee shop for breakfast one morning and lay some plans for dinner. The cavalrymen would ride off, perhaps as little as ten miles from Südlichesburg, where the Lysterrestre troops were gathered. There would be a skirmish, and more often than not an empty place at the supper table. Désiré took to marking these places with a spring of courtesan’s lace: that, too, was a part of his Ideal.

In this war, in our war, there was a strange sense of decorum. This was more than a battle of armies for us, the artists. Hadn’t Lysterrestre audiences applauded and wept at our music as much as our own countrymen? The woman whose earring Désiré had worn one night at the opera might be the same one who set fire to his beloved Galatea. The man who wrung Anton Fulke’s hand so piteously at the Lysterrestre opening of Viridian might be the same man who severed that hand with a claw of shrapnel. How could we fight these men and women, whose adulating letters we kept pressed in our desk drawers? How could we kill them, who died singing our songs?

XIV. From Albert Magazine‘s interview with Egon Rowley

AM: Do you think Alexander was written as a response to the War?

Rowley: I know it was. [A pause.] Well, not to the War alone. A fair number of things emerged because of that – Fulke’s last symphony, which he wrote one-handed, and Richard Stele’s beautiful book of poems. Who knew the man had poetry in him, that old newspaper cynic?

AM: His wife died in the War, didn’t she?

Rowley: Yes, poor Maggie. It seems strange to pity her – she wouldn’t have wanted my pity – but, well, I’m an old man now. It’s my prerogative to pity the young and dead.

AM: But to return to Désiré –

Rowley: Yes, to Désiré and Alexander. You must have seen it. All the world saw it when it premiered in 2908, even babes in arms…How old are you?

AM: [The interviewer gives her age.]

Rowley: Well, then, you must have seen it. It was brilliant, wasn’t it? Terrible and brilliant. [A pause.] Terrible, terrible and brilliant.

A letter from Infantryman Leo Kirsch, printed in Raum: September 2907

Gentlemen,

I cannot make you understand what is happening here, less than a day’s ride from your parks and offices and coffee houses. I can list, as others have, the small and innumerable tragedies: a headless soldier we had to walk on to cross through the trenches, a dead nurse frozen with her arms around a dead soldier, sheltering him from bullets. I can list these things, but I cannot make you understand them.

If it were tears I wanted from you, gentlemen of Südlichesburg, I could get them easily enough. You artists, you would cry to see the flowers trampled on our marches, the butterflies withering from poisonous air. You would cry to watch your opera houses burn like scraps of kindling. Me, I was happy to see Galatea burn. Happy to know it would hurt you, if only for a day.

But I don’t want your weeping. If I want anything from you, it is for you to come down here to the battlefields, to see what your pride, your stupidity, your brainless worship of brainless courage has created. It is your poetry that told that nurse to shelter her soldier with her body, knowing it was useless, knowing she would die. Your music told her courage would make it beautiful. I want you to look down at the headless soldiers in the trenches and see how beautiful dumb courage really is.

The Lysterrestre have brought native soldiers from their colonies, dark men and women with large eyes and deep, harrowing voices. They wear Lysterrestre uniforms and speak the language, but they have no love for that country, no joy in dying for it. Yesterday I saw a woman walking through the battlefield, holding the hands of soldiers – her people, our people, and Lysterrestre alike – and singing to them as they died. That courage, the courage of the living in the face of death, could never come from your art. For us, and for Lysterre, courage of that kind is lost.

I tried to join her today. But I did not know what to sing, when all our music is lies.

XVI. From a review of Désiré’s Alexander in Der Sentinel: August 2908

Richard Stele has refused the task of reviewing Alexander for Der Sentinel, and it is easy to see why. Stele is a friend of Désiré, and it takes a great deal of courage – courage which Désiré brutally mocks and slanders – to take a stand against one’s friends. But sometimes it must be done. In this instance, standing with Désiré is not only cowardly; it is a betrayal of what all thinking, feeling men in this country hold dear.

Nine years ago, after the premier of Brunhilde, Stele famously refused to summarize its plot, saying we would all see it and love it regardless of what he said. Well, you will all see Alexander regardless of what I say. And you, my friends, will be horrified by the change in your idol.

XVII. From Chapter Twelve of Désiré: an Ideal by Richard Stele

The War changed Désiré. Alexander changed us all.

It seems to be a piece of anti-Lysterre propaganda, at first. Alexander, a Lysterrestre commander, prepares for war against the native people of the Lysterrestre colonies. Shikoba, a native woman, rallies her people against him. The armies meet; but instead of the swelling music, the dignity and heroism Désiré’s audience have come to expect, there is slaughter. The Lysterrestre fling themselves at the enemy and fall in hideous, cacophonous multitudes. At the end of the opera, Alexander is the last Lysterrestre standing. He goes to kill Shikoba; she stabs him brutally in the chest and he collapses, gasping. Shikoba kneels beside him and sings a quiet, subdued finale as he dies.

This is an opera about courage, about heroism. Its heroes turn to all the other operas that have ever been written and call them lies. When audiences leave the opera house, they do so in silence. I have heard of few people seeing it twice.

At some point during the writing of Alexander – in October 2907, I believe – Désiré announced at a dinner of some sort that he had native blood, and had been born in the Lysterrestre colonies. This did not matter much to the gathered assembly, and besides, it was something of an open secret. We took it, at the time, to be a sort of explanation, an excuse for the powerful hatred that boiled in him each time we mentioned the War. Not that we needed any explanations; my wife, Margaret von Banks Stele, had died at Elmerburg about a month before.

Now, of course, I wonder. Why did it matter to Désiré that the world he shaped so heavily was not his by blood? What exactly had the War made him realize – about himself, and about the rest of us?

It is significant, I think, that in Galatea’s burning all the Lysterrestre army costumes were lost. “Fine,” Désiré said. “Borrow the uniforms of our countrymen. They all look the same from where we’ll be standing.”

XVIII. From Albert Magazine’s interview with Egon Rowley

AM: The War marked the end of an era.

Rowley: The death of an era, yes. Of Désiré’s era. I suppose you could say Désiré killed it.

XIX. From the obituaries page of Raum: June 2911

The editors of Raum are saddened to report the death of the composer, architect, and respected gentleman Désiré. We realize his popularity has waned in recent years, following a number of small scandals and a disappointing opera. Nevertheless, we must acknowledge our debts to the earlier work of this great and fascinating man, whose music taught our age so much about pride, patriotism and courage.

Something of an enigma in life, Désiré seems determined to remain so hereafter. He directed his close friend Egon Rowley and famed doctor Vande Frust to burn all his papers and personal effects. He also expressed a desire to be cremated and to have his ashes spread over Umerfeld, site of both his destroyed Galatea and one of the bloodiest battles in the recent War.

No family is known, nor are Mr. Rowley and Dr. Frust releasing the cause of death. Désiré is leaving Südlichesburg, it seems, as mysteriously as he came to it.

From a report on Native Boarding Schools in the Lysterrestre Colonies: May 2937

Following almost twenty years of intense scrutiny and criticism from the outside world, Native Boarding Schools throughout the territories of the one-time Lysterrestre Empire are being terminated and their records released to the public.

Opened in the late 2870s, Native Boarding Schools professed to provide native-born children with the skills and understandings necessary to function in the colonial society. In the early years, the children learned the Lysterrestre language and farming techniques; over time, some of the schools added courses in machine operation. Criticism centers on both the wholesale repression of the students’ culture and the absence of lessons in science or the fine arts.

“We went around in shapeless black dresses, like criminals in a prison,” Zéphyrine Adam, born Calfunaya, says of her time in the Bonner Institute. “They say they taught us to speak their language, but they really taught us to be silent. They had rooms full of books, music sheets and phonographs, but we weren’t allowed to use them. Not unless we were too clumsy to be trusted by the factory machines. They understood, as we do, that stories and music give us power. They were afraid of what we would do to them if they let us into their world.”

In the face of such accusations, the majority of Native Boarding School instructors seem reluctant to speak, though some still defend the schools and their intentions.

“The goal was to construct a Lysterrestre Ideal for them, but not to hide their natural-born talents,” says Madame Achille, from the Coralie Institute in what is now northern Arcadie. “We simply made sure they expressed them in the appropriate ways. I remember one girl, one of the first we processed back in 2879. An unhappy little thing most of the time, but a budding musician; she would run through the halls chanting and playing a wooden drum. Well, we set her down one day at the pianoforte, and she took to it like a fish to water. The things she played, so loud, so dignified! She had such talent, though I don’t suppose anything ever came of it.

“A lot of them had such talent,” she adds. “I wonder whatever became of them?”

END

“Désiré” was originally published in Crossed Genres and is copyright Megan Arkenberg, 2013.

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Episode #73 — “Désiré” by Megan Arkenberg was originally published on GlitterShip

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mayardsale · 5 years

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The clouds were suspended over the church as we found our car in the light spring rain. The cooler temperature matched Tara’s mood. Her exit from the parking lot matched her anger. “Please slow down,” I calmly begged, knowing full well that Tara wouldn’t. I’d given up hope after she ran the second red light in as many intersections. “Killing us both won’t bring her back,” I said as I watched her tighten her grip on the black leather steering wheel. Tara and Stephanie had been best friends since college. Last week’s bicycle accident was as unexpected a tragedy as any of us could have imagined. They’d ridden through those woods for 15 years with the occasional bumps and bruises, but the fall that took Stephanie’s life was a shock to Tara’s core. As Tara pulled over to the side of the winding highway, I unbuckled my seat built. She was in no condition to drive after the funeral. For a week she was a rock for everyone because she was the closest person to Stephanie in the world. She executed everything from funeral arrangements to financial specifics. Tara was everybody’s rock, but I wasn’t sure if she had sustained her own head trauma during her wipeout. “Can you pull over more?” I asked as I looked over the back window at the traffic hurdling through the mist. “Why the fuck didn’t she listen?” Tara whispered, hands still fixed to the wheel. “She could have stopped. Why didn’t she fucking stop?” She gripped the steering with all her might. I just closed my eyes. Tara’s pain was exploding while my guilt was eating away at me. Stephanie may have been Tara’s college roommate and best friend, but three years ago Stephanie and I developed a closer relationship. *********** Tara was in Montreal for a conference when Stephanie built up enough courage to make her move. For years it was obvious that Stephanie had a crush on me. She’d always deny it, but Tara and I knew that she was infatuated with me. It was a joke for five years. And then it wasn’t a joke. From practically the beginning of our relationship Tara and I weren’t on the same page sexually. We were more than in love, but Tara grew less and less interested in sex as her career took off. My dick was a minor distraction in her world and she had no trouble telling me. “Please take care of that elsewhere,” she’d tell me, but I didn’t think that was what she really wanted. Every other week or month she’d apologize and we’d fumble through an intimate act that only frustrated both of us. We were making it work, somehow. The rest of our relationship was actually amazing, but the tension around our sex life made for some terrible fights. Truth be told, I found her career and personality both too intimidating and important to bother with my petty needs. One particular week she practically laughed at my needs. “If your dick was in that much need,” she sneered, “you’d have bent me over and simply fucked me.” That was her special kiss goodbye as she got into the limousine on her way to yet another speaking engagement in Paris. Humiliated and emasculated, I spent the better part of the week buried in work. I hit the gym at 6AM, at the office by 8AM and didn’t get home until 10PM. Tara’s apology texts went unanswered as I feared her return Saturday morning. When I pulled into the garage Friday evening, I found Stephanie’s car in the third section of the three car garage. I could hear the vacuum cleaner in the family room, but I chose to keep to the kitchen. As I made myself a sandwich I heard the vacuum turn off and the worst version of Sade’s ‘Smooth Operator’ take it’s place. Stephanie obviously had her headphones on and hadn’t realized anyone else was in the house. As she danced into the family room, I was greeted by a Raiders t-shirt and an orange thong that was not quite the typical maid’s uniform. Tara and Stephanie were best friends in the same way that Tara and I were married. Tara made the rules and Stephanie willingly followed. From job choices to boyfriend breakups, Stephanie was dependent on Tara’s advice. Their relationship was so close that I wondered if Tara’s lack of sexual interest in me was related to her connection with Stephanie. Of course I didn’t have the courage to ask Tara so I brought it up to Stephanie. “Not our thing,” Stephanie simply denied. I was kind of hoping it was, but that was the last of that conversation. “Oh, Jesus!” Stephanie screamed as she finally realized I was behind the island watching her one woman show. “Why didn’t you tell me that you were home, asshole?” she shouted as she caught her breath and fell to the couch. “Didn’t think I had to announce myself in my own house,” I replied. I tried to focus on my turkey on whole wheat, but my dick was captivated by what that orange thong was trying unsuccessfully to contain. “Tara asked me to straighten up the house before you she got home because she said you were MIA,” Stephanie explained as she tried to wiggle her thighs into her t-shirt. “Where have you been?” she questioned accusingly. “Working,” I answered flatly. “Working so hard you can’t text your wife?” Stephanie barked back. “At least I can wear pants,” I snickered in return. “Shut up!” Stephanie laughed. “They’re in your wash,” she said as she bounced up from the couch and scuttled up to the island so I couldn’t see below her waist. “Barbecue stain,” she sighed. “I bet,” I continued to snicker. Stephanie was an amazingly beautiful woman, but she never felt comfortable about her shapely curves. She hit the gym constantly to keep fit but no amount CrossFit could contain what God bestowed upon her. In contrast, Tara could eat anything and stay supermodel thin. “Fuck you,” Stephanie laughed. My not-so-subtle jab at her weight was clearly a reminder of what Tara had been punching since they were freshmen in college. “At least you’ll have something new to think about when you’re jacking off tomorrow night!” “Why don’t you give me a little show to remember?” I pushed back. “I don’t get that much eye candy around here.” Stephanie stepped back from the granite island with a stubborn defiance. Her muscular frame held up her round dimensions and my eyes recorded every inch. “Is this what you’d like to see?” Stephanie softly spoke, her typically high pitched voice turning sultry. In that moment the joke was over. We were no longer mimicking Tara’s cruel treatment of our faults. We were two adults alone with a clear need for a connection. A connection that involved positive vibes. “You know that your body is what Tara wishes she had,” I said I stared with an appreciation and sincerity typically reserved for exquisite works of beautiful art. “I don’t think I care what Tara wants right now,” Stephanie responded as she shyly pulled her black & silver t-shirt over her head. Her near naked body was something I’d imagined for years as a simple curiosity. As she walked toward the kitchen I forgot about all of the mean jokes we’d told each other over the years. Those jokes that amplified Tara’s dominance of us were what kept us from noticing each other. Those jokes kept my dick from throbbing in Stephanie’s majestic presence. But Stephanie traded those shallow swipes at my dignity for a validation of her womanly beauty. There were no more mean words in Stephanie’s mouth that evening. Just my dick. ********* “You’re driving isn’t that much better,” Tara sneered as I turned our SUV into our serene neighborhood. I slowed the truck as I navigated the puddles before turning into our driveway. While I waited for the garage door to open, Tara unbuckled her seat belt and got out of the truck in the pouring rain. She couldn’t spend another second in my presence and she needed to cool off. A week ago she watched her best friend fall 1000 feet and she hadn’t said a word about it. I didn’t know what to do. So I sat in the truck. In the rain. In the driveway. With the garage door up. ********* For two years Stephanie and I took quiet advantage of Tara’s frequent business trips. Our foreplay consisted of mean-spirited daggers at our personal insecurities in Tara’s presence and then radio silence until the last day of Tara’s trip. The tension of openly sparring in front of Tara and potentially getting busted made for an amazing two years of happiness. Even Tara seemed content knowing her two closest people were twistedly enjoying each other’s company and I was a lot less horny when she got home. Of course I faked it a little, but I was less cranky when her answer to my requests was 'handle it yourself, pervert’. Then, as expected, everything changed. For two years Stephanie and I had kept our encounters playful. Oral and handjob were the menu’s only choices. We were naughty but the thrill was easy and freeing. My face between her thighs or her hands in my boxers were therapeutic releases. No condoms or lube or preparation. What was clearly planned had the feeling of spontaneity. We had a secret instead of an affair. We were like teenagers full of nervous energy and bound hormones. Unfortunately that playfulness ended when Stephanie showed up at our house one day into Tara’s weeklong trip to Sydney. I was working on my laptop on the back porch when I heard the garage door open. I was in my boxers because it was a warm evening and our backyard faced the dense woods. As I kept working an hour passed and I assumed that Stephanie was just in the neighborhood and needed a place to crash. She was the only other person with a key to our house. Maybe she was watching TV and enjoying a free meal. As the sun dropped into the crowd of trees behind our house, I heard the patio door slide open. Before I saw Stephanie’s naked body I smelled the wine. I was thoroughly confused. Without a word or eye contact she took me by the hand and led me to the couch placed in the middle of the deck. There was no witty banter or laughter on her lips - just a tinge of red wine. This was heavy because I realized my face had never been this close to hers. While her hands were clearly wrapped around my growing dick, her mouth was someplace new - my neck. Soft kisses were piling onto my clavicle as I questioned where to put my hands. They’d only ever been in her afro, in her pussy or on her breasts. But they remained to my side because the only obvious choice was wrapped around her waist as she began to straddle me. This was no longer playful. This was intimacy. She never kissed my lips but I knew what was next. The taste of the red wine couldn’t mask the sense of passion that accompanied her wet kiss. I could feel her easing my growing dick into her warm pussy, but I was too engulfed in her quiet kiss to really notice. I sat like a statue trying not to place my hands on her waist as her teeth gently bit my upper lip. As Stephanie rested her hands on my shoulders I realized that she no longer saw me as a fun release but rather a partner in joy. Her hips barely moved but I could feel her pussy squeezing my dick with gentle hugs. And with each passing minute, the hugs got tighter and the pressure of her biting intensified. For two years we laughed at the guttural moans we shared under each other’s stimulation, but this was thunderously silent. As her thighs tightened around my waist I fought the urge to wrap my hands around her waist the way the dark sky clinched our scene. A slow tremble melted over my nervous dick as her legs shivered and her nipples pierced my chest. The exaggerated writhing of her hips and boisterous swearing of her mouth that accompanied my tongue between her legs had been replaced by a blissful silence that brought focus to the rhythmic contraction of her pussy that slowly drew the life out of me. And lastly I could feel her nails gracefully trace into my back shoulders with the precision of a caligrapher’s pen. The sting I felt from those intense scratches as the humid air rested within the shallow wound woke me from my trance. We had shared more than 100 moments of cum soaked laughter over the previous 700 days, but our math was inverted that warm evening. And before I could make rhyme or reason of our situation, she had exited as quietly as she entered. I could have held her there to stay. But in truth I never held her. ************ I finally entered our house with the sole intent of taking care of my wife in her time of need. My steps were calculated and my breath was deliberate. I knew she was cold and wet in the living room, but I stopped in the kitchen to make her favorite tea. The house could feel the unbalance as Tara was losing control and I was looking to steady the ship. “She wasn’t supposed to…” Tara tearfully started as I placed her Brazilian tea on the table in front of her crossed legs. I patiently waited for her to finish her thought because in the last week she only spoke in cold facts about how she’d lost her best friend. She was being her usual strong and controlling self around friends and family, but from the time we left the cemetery I could feel her beginning to unravel. Then Tara broke down in sobbing tears. I was as frozen as I was when Stephanie decided to join me on the back patio a year prior. I clearly sucked at these situations, but I had to be better this go round. After that evening on the back patio, Stephanie and I never connected again. We only saw each other in the presence of Tara. Our time alone during Tara’s trips were never discussed. Even our ongoing jabs that acted as foreplay in front Tara ceased. We had nothing. “She couldn’t stay on the fucking path!” Tara grunted as she reached for her tea. “I told her ass to stay focused, but she didn’t listen. Stupid girl!” I’d heard her explain the accident 20 times over that last week. To the police. To Stephanie’s parents. To everyone. I could retell every moment as if I’d been there. In vivid detail I could describe beautiful morning air that sung with spring lyrics. I knew the dewy green grass that lined the path below the three evergreen trees. I could see the spokes cave as Stephanie’s tire hit a patch of rocks scattered on the right edge of the path. I could hear Stephanie’s nervous laughter shift to frightened swearing as she lost control of her front wheel near the sharp turn at the bottom of the path along the hill. I felt the momentum that carried Stephanie over the edge of the rocky terrain. I could identify every thorny shrub that scarred Tara’s legs as she climbed down the hill to find the remains of her closest friend. I could hear Tara dialing 911 while she held Stephanie in her arms as the sun glowed bright. Tara needed a 911 call now. For herself. I could see the hurt in her eyes, so I kissed her on her forehead and ran upstairs to run her a warm bath. Warm tea and warm bath were the best answers I could think of to drown her tears. As I ran the water and took off my tie I could feel her presence enter our bathroom. She’d heard the water and disrobed. Inside I might have been confused as to what to do, but on the outside I was becoming her rock. “I don’t deserve you,” Tara spoke softly as she walked up to me. I gently placed my hands upon her waists. With a slow focus she helped me removed my clothes until we both stood naked under the sunlight that began to break through the clouds outside of our window. Her thin brown frame then began to lean into my chest as she steadied herself with my arms. Only one part of my body was prepared for her eventual position as my eyes fixated on her ass moving further from me as her mouth wrapped itself onto my dick. She sucked me with an intensity that was as pointed as her neglect had been awash in our marriage. I found myself frozen again, but this time I held on to my instigator with a love that felt rewarded for enduring the unrequited passion that coated my every inch. And in an instant I released every ounce of love that I had on reserve into Tara’s welcoming mouth. As I slowly regained my composure, she led me to the tub. We carefully climbed in and I sat behind her while she sank into my chest. The hot water cooled to the perfect temperature. For ten minutes we sat in silence until I asked if she was “going to be okay?” Tara arched her head backward toward me and grabbed my hand, gently resting my palm against her neck. I could still feel the tears falling onto my wrists when I felt her tense up. Then with a subtle nod I could feel her swallow. Swallow me. As my brain processed her actions I couldn’t control my smile. And I could feel her smile as well. Relaxed. Then with a ballerina’s deft Tara stood up and turned toward me. The warm water trickled down from her hardened nipples onto my bald head. She then threw her legs over my shoulders and leaned back. Her hands gripped the sides of the tub while her pussy began to grind the smile off of my face. With my tongue I wrote 'I love you’ over and over. Her hips thrashed as her ass splashed heaps of water onto our bathroom floor. I gripped Tara’s waists like I planned to hold her there until the end of time. I wasn’t going to ever let go. Her wet pussy was engorged and she began to convulse as though she was about to cum. Tara released her death grip from the tub and leaned on my knees while her pelvis worked her pussy onto my face. Worried that she might fall I reached behind me and gripped her ankles to anchor the intense whipping her pussy was dishing out. “Oh fuck!” Tara shouted as I tightened my grip on her ankles. I could feel the scars from the shrubs. Most of the scabs had fallen away, but I could feel the patterns. “Fuck!!” Tara shouted as her thighs nearly squeezed the life out of me. She was fucking my face with too much enthusiasm to realize my mind was now focused on the scratches on her legs. The deep scratches on her legs that felt as though they were written by a skilled caligrapher. As though the signature included the pain of an unrequited love. “Fuck!!” Tara gasped as she held one last squeeze against my face. As her ass sank into the water and she collapsed onto my legs, she saw the look of understanding in my eyes. “Stupid girl,” Tara snarled at me as she closed her eyes to hold back the tears or to enjoy the afterglow. “I told her to stay on the path.”

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netunleashed-blog · 6 years

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Luton v Sunderland: Carlos Edwards talks turbulent pasts at both clubs | Football News

http://www.internetunleashed.co.uk/?p=35450 Luton v Sunderland: Carlos Edwards talks turbulent pasts at both clubs | Football News - http://www.internetunleashed.co.uk/?p=35450 Sunderland and Luton have suffered five relegations between them since 2006/07 Few league clubs can claim a more volatile recent history than Sunderland, but their opponents on Saturday, Luton Town, have a strong case. How to follow the EFL on Sky SportsBetween them, the League One clubs have accumulated five relegations, 16 managers and multiple changes of ownership and player sales since they were last in the same division 11 years ago. New season offer Upgrade to Sky Sports Premier League and Sky Sports Football now for just £18 a month. Cancel any time. Sunderland clinched the 2006/07 Championship title at Luton’s Kenilworth Road before the Hatters began a descent through the divisions, including financial problems, points deductions and a spell in non-league.Despite appointing some big-name managers, Sunderland finished above 13th only once in their subsequent 10-year Premier League stay and dropped back to the Championship in 2017 before a successive relegation of their own last season. Carlos Edwards moved from relegation-bound Luton to promotion-chasing Sunderland mid-season in 2006/07 Winger Carlos Edwards moved mid-season from Luton to Sunderland in 2006/07, so is in a good position to assess the various calamities that struck both clubs.“At Luton, Mike Newell was a good manager. He did the best he could have done,” Edwards tells Sky Sports. Mike Newell left Luton in March 2007 after criticising the club for selling players “We had a really good squad. But the board killed him in a way because he didn’t have the backing from them.”Player salesUnder Newell, Luton were fifth 13 games into the 2006/07 season, but after complaining openly about player sales being the reason behind a drop in form, he was sacked in March.“Players just started to go,” Edwards says. “Once one left, players were thinking: ‘I need to go as well.’ It was like they were standing in front of a gun waiting for the trigger to be pulled.EFL: Who will go up and down?“That season, the team just went on a serious nosedive. Every time a club came in for one of the better players, it was the easy way out, they just sold them.“Players moved on, things moved on then the club didn’t really recover until a few years ago.” Dwight Yorke (right) captained the Trinidad & Tobago side Edwards played in Edwards’ switch to Sunderland came over the festive period and was influenced by fellow Trinidad and Tobago player Dwight Yorke, who was playing for his former Manchester United team-mate and Sunderland manager Roy Keane.Swapping relegation for promotionBy leaving mid-season, Edwards collected a title-winners’ medal rather than adding a relegation to his CV. Plus, he got to work with two legends of the game.Checkatrade Trophy first-round draw“Dwight phoned me after Luton played up at the Stadium of Light and asked if I was interested in moving. I saw it as a step up, no disrespect to Luton. I had the opportunity to play for one of the great former players in Roy Keane - and I look up to Dwight. He’s a hero and put Trinidad on the map. It was special.“Luton told me I could go and have a chat and they had accepted a bid so I went for my medical and met Roy Keane.” Roy Keane signed Edwards for both Sunderland and, later, Ipswich Keane, Yorke & the Premier LeagueKeane would later sign Edwards a second time when in charge at Ipswich, but Edwards was surprised on his first meeting with the famously intimidating Irishman.“You’re expecting this big guy, but when you see him, he’s a very hard guy but actually quite small,” says Edwards. The new season is here Get Sky Sports' dedicated football channels for over 500 live games of football this season. Find out more. “But I didn’t tell him that! I was so nervous. Imagine if I’d gone in and said that - he’d have told me to go back to Luton!”After Keane signed Edwards in January 2007, Sunderland won 15 of their final 19 league games, losing only once. Having started the season losing nine of their first 16 leagues games, it was quite a turnaround to go up as champions at Kenilworth Road in May. Yorke (right) celebrates winning the Championship title at Kenilworth Road in May 2007 “The way Roy rotated the team worked well. He gave players their chance and then if things needed to be adjusted, he would do it.“It was a great team chemistry that led us to become champions.“I had mixed feelings winning the title at Kenilworth Road. I did feel for Luton, but I had a job to do. They had already been relegated but I think the 5-1 scoreline rubbed salt into the wounds!“Some fans booed me but I think more in frustration than at me leaving. At the end of the day, Luton bought me for nothing and got a few quid, they made a profit.” Edwards was hit by injury during Sunderland's return to the Premier League and was sold in 2009 Change of ownershipKeane, Yorke and Edwards won promotion to the Premier League, where Sunderland would stay until May 2017, but none of those three would last long as the club began to change.American Ellis Short gained a controlling stake in September 2008 and Keane left shortly after to be replaced by Ricky Sbragia and, eventually, Steve Bruce. Short then bought the club outright in May 2009. For Edwards, this was a difficult time at the club.“When a new manager comes in, they want a fresh start and bring in their own players because at the time, they feel the players can’t do it for them,” Edwards says. Ellis Short (left) took over Sunderland in May 2009 and appointed Steve Bruce as manager “I had a word with Steve Bruce. I wanted to stay, but I didn’t want to be hard-balled, just sitting around, waiting and hoping. I wanted to play, I didn’t want to just sit on the bench and collect wages.”Players' commitmentThe difference is stark between the ethos installed by Keane and displayed by Edwards and stories of changing room disintegration at Sunderland in recent years, most obviously displayed in Jack Rodwell remaining at the club on high wages despite not playing.“When I was there,” Edwards explains, “we had a cohesion and die-hard mentality. We knew, for the fans, we had to roll our sleeves up and do the work. And we did. We knew we had to be on our A-game every week.“I think in the past two years, the players have not had a perspective that they would go out and do that. Jack Rodwell caused controversy for staying at Sunderland on high wages despite not playing “You can get away with driving along one or two players in a game, but if you are driving along three, four, five players then you have walking wounded. You need everyone on their game.“Everyone was a bit lackadaisical, maybe just going through the motions and hoping because they're Sunderland, that it, it’s a guaranteed three points. No, it’s never a guaranteed three points. You have to earn, to work for it.”Improving outlookEdwards, 39, is still playing at Woodbridge Town in Suffolk, while completing his UEFA B licence at Ipswich’s academy and has spent time coaching the Trinidad U17s. 5:29 Sunderland left it late to seal a 2-1 victory over Charlton last weekend Sunderland left it late to seal a 2-1 victory over Charlton last weekend He feels Sunderland have turned a corner - Short sold the club last season after going through nine managers in as many years - and can stop the rot following successive demotions, but he warns that they will not find it easy in League One.“They seem more settled now, a few have gone, they’ve been revamped. But they have to realise they are a big scalp in League One,” he says. 1:33 Luton lost at Portsmouth on the opening day despite a positive display Luton lost at Portsmouth on the opening day despite a positive display “Clubs going to the Stadium of Light are going to be in awe. A lot of players will never have played in stadiums like that. Clubs will want bragging rights and to be able to say: We won at Sunderland.”Kenilworth Road may not offer the grandeur of the Stadium of Light, but Sunderland fans will be hoping on Saturday it can prove as fruitful a venue as it did on their last league visit to Bedfordshire.Get Sky Sports' dedicated football channels with our new season offer to watch over 500 live games this season. Find out more. Fantasy Football is back! Fantasy just got real. Pick your Sky Sports Fantasy Football team for free here. 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ramialkarmi · 7 years

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'I had nightmares for weeks': Box CEO Aaron Levie reveals how hard it was to build a $2.5 billion business and take it public by age 29

Aaron Levie dropped out of college 12 years ago to start Box, a cloud-based file-storage company for enterprises; it's now a public company with a $2.5 billion market cap.

But getting to the current size and scale wasn't easy.

Levie recalls weeks of nightmares, sleepless nights on yoga mats in the office, getting turned down by investors, and a botched IPO — all before he turned 30.

"We've been dealt lots of different blows as a company over the years," Levie told Business Insider US Editor in Chief Alyson Shontell on the podcast "Success! How I Did It."

"We've had funding rounds where we got turned down by 20 investors, and it was the final meeting of the final investor where we got really lucky and somebody finally decided to invest in us. We've had bridge rounds, we've had to take loans ... there's been a lot of complexity to get to where we are.”

In the wide-ranging conversation, Levie and Shontell talked about:

Growing up and dreaming of running a company.

Dropping out of college to start Box with a neighbor and school friends.

Getting Mark Cuban to invest without ever having met him.

His unconventional daily schedule.

Passing on a $600 million offer to sell Box, and the weeks of nightmares that followed.

Becoming a case study on how not to go public.

Continuing to work hard after achieving a life goal.

You can listen to the full interview here:

Subscribe to "Success! How I Did It" on Acast or iTunes. Check out previous episodes with:

Robinhood cofounder and co-CEO Vlad Tenev

ClassPass founder Payal Kadakia

DropBox founder and CEO Drew Houston

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong

Following is a transcript of the conversation; it has been edited for clarity and length.

Shontell: Aaron, we are so happy to have you with us today. The first thing I want to do is I want to figure out how someone becomes the CEO of a $2.5 billion company. Let's psychoanalyze you for a second. What were you like as a kid? Tell me about how you grew up.

Levie: Yikes — psychoanalysis is not my favorite subject, but I would say growing up I was fairly restless, so I had a lot of energy and really liked to do everything from start small businesses and projects, and was always very curious about just how things worked and why things worked certain ways. And as soon as I discovered the internet, maybe at 12 years old or so, that fundamentally changed my world view, which was like, "Holy crap — you can be in your bedroom putting together a website and people can go to that thing and from anywhere around the world."

But overall, just very, very restless, pretty annoying in classes, was always just calling out things and probably getting into trouble and stuff like that.

Shontell: You know you mentioned you kind of tinkered around with technology from the time you were young and you actually did something like 15 startups when you were a teenager. What were some of those early projects that got you on this path?

Levie: I would hesitate to call them startups. I think they were the equivalent of putting together hacked-up website on the internet and then imagining that you had a company. And it was always fun to print out a business card that said you were CEO of a one-person company.

But some of the ideas were, in high school, we came up with an idea of having a search engine that had randomized search results instead of algorithmically ranked search results, and the idea was to benefit website publishers as opposed to people who were searching, so it was a really horrible idea because basically every time you did a search, you got a random result that met the criteria of your search as opposed to getting the best result. And so, as you can imagine, not a lot of people went to that search engine.

I had a website at the very end of high school, which was a real-estate website where people could list their homes for sale. Not clear why I worked on a for-sale-by-owner website, not a particular passion or interest of mine. So just lots and lots of bad ideas poorly executed. The good news is, when you do that enough times, you start to build a model for what stuff doesn't work and that hopefully eventually leads you to finding something that might work.

Dropping out of school

Shontell: So tell me about the idea genesis for Box. I believe you founded it with a middle-school friend, a high-school friend, and a neighbor. Talk about how this band came together.

Levie: The band was the same band that in high school, and even middle school — I was doing a lot of these projects that we worked on together. We all went our separate ways for college, and in sophomore year of college, I had sort of started tinkering around with the idea of having a service that would let you store your files online securely and then be able to access them from anywhere. This was back in 2004, and this was at a time where we had 50 megabytes of storage space in our email accounts. Basically you could email yourself files, but you could only email yourself maybe three or four or five files and then all of a sudden you'd run out of storage space. So it was really ineffective for being able to share and access data.

Then you had FTP sites and you had USB thumb drives — all of these things were really inefficient. I also had an internship at the same time where we were using some clunky legacy software to share and collaborate and so between both of those experiences it became obvious that there had to be a better way to be able to access and share your files from anywhere.

At the end of 2004, we started to work on this project; early 2005, we launched it. The first person to join up was Dylan [Smith], who's now our CFO, and then eventually we were able to convince Jeff [Queisser] and Sam [Ghods], who run kind of various engineering, and then a big chunk of technology work for us then joined up soon after so that was the founding genesis idea of Box.

Shontell: So you ended up dropping out of school to do this, but you've gone on to say that college, you feel, is really critically important.

Levie: I personally was really, really bad at all academic kind of experiences — my running grade point average in a good quarter or year would probably be a B or a B-minus, and, like, I was very proud of that. But I do think that education is incredibly important. Just for us, it was so compelling to go out and focus on Box full time. I was spending most of my time during school just dealing with issues, and Box, and so eventually decided that, OK, I have to choose one way or the other. Does this become a side project in college or does it become a real business?

We moved into a renovated garage and we convinced Sam and Jeff, our two other kind of members of the founding team, to drop out and join us, and we all lived together in Berkeley and slept on yoga mats, and really not great living conditions — mostly lived off of hot ramen, hot pockets, and sort of three or four hours of sleep a night. But it was certainly pretty fun at the time.

Shontell: I'm really concerned about yoga mats.

Levie: My back is now paying the price.

Getting Mark Cuban to invest with a blind email pitch

Shontell: I bet. One thing you said in there that’s really interesting is that Mark Cuban was an early investor and he invested blind, right? You two had never met, yet somehow you tracked down his email. What was it like hustling to get Cuban involved? You were kind of the first startup in "Shark Tank," I guess you could say.

Levie: You know, if you want to credit us with that, that would be awesome. I'm sure there's somebody who came before us, but it was actually really random.

Back in 2004 and 2005, Mark had one of the most popular blogs on the internet, and it's still his blog today, Blogmaverick.com. We were just pitching him to have him write about Box, through a set of conversations over email. He became interested in investing in the company, and we had never even met, but he did full due diligence, and then our first time meeting him was at a basketball game — you could think about it as our first official board meeting, which was, you know, pretty thrilling. And that investment was a few hundred thousand dollars. We decided to drop out of college and then go and kind of focus on this full time.

Shontell: And so what was the product at that point?

Levie: It was incredibly basic. It was called Box.net, and it was a really easy way to upload your files to the internet and be able to access them from any device and be able to share them with anyone.

Soon after we got Mark's investment, we opened up the service to give you a whopping 1 gigabyte of free storage, which was pretty groundbreaking at the time, in 2006. But the idea was, hey, let's give everybody a 1 gigabyte of free storage, and they will eventually pay us. I think it was something like $5.99 or $4.99 a month, to be able to buy more storage space. Obviously, eventually we pivoted the company, but the core was always about making it so individuals could just easily access their files from anywhere.

Leading a company in your 20s

Shontell: One thing that you have talked about before is that what you were doing initially was short-term success and you had this aha moment where you realized, I don't know if this is going to be successful down the road, and you ended up writing a "Jerry Maguire"–like memo when you were 22 that changed the future of Box. Tell me about that moment and how you realized this and what you did.

Levie: In any great story, usually there's three or six months of context that led up to that one epiphany or moment, and what was happening was, it was becoming more and more obvious to the founding team and to early employees that we would not survive if we gave people a little bit of free storage and charged them for more as an independent company.

It was going to be too competitive with some of the bigger incumbents, and we could not rationalize a standalone consumer company, and what was happening was we were talking to small and medium businesses, and they were telling us that they would actually pay on the order of 10 to 100 times more for Box if we had just built these additional enterprise features or additional security features. We realized that that we had this unbelievable opportunity where if we could bring our consumer ethos to the enterprise, that would let us still maintain the original premise of the company, which was the focus on end users, like you and me, but be able to have a viable business model to go sell into the enterprise. And then we could scale the company. That was when we fully changed our approach.

Shontell: You're a first-time CEO; you start this when you're 20 years old. What was the hardest part of getting Box off the ground and then growing into your CEO role as a first-time founder?

Levie: It's fairly atypical to be, you know, 21 or 22 and go after the enterprise because of all of the additional sort of complexity and sophistication of that sales process and the amount of sales orientation you tend to need over time.

I had to shape my understanding of what it would mean to run a company like that and what kind of people I would need to be surrounded by and what kind of culture would be created in the process and how do you balance these two very different kinds of DNAs and company ethos where you have, again, a sales organization, but a very internet-centric, consumer-centric engineering and product organization.

Ultimately, I think the biggest learning that I had was I had to go from a mental model of myself as a consumer product manager to now a CEO who has to manage this complex organization that's going to be pulled in very different directions because of the kind of customers we serve and the kind of ethos that we have as a company.

An unusual daily routine

Shontell: As part of all that and all those learnings, you created a unique daily routine for yourself. I read that you start your days late. You're proof that you don't have to wake up early to be successful. You drink an ungodly amount of coffee. Tell me about your day in the life because what you wrote in Inc. was very startling.

Levie: Oh, God. I'm like the biggest believer in sleep. I think sleep's very important. I just happen to go to bed late and then I sleep in. But my routine is, I wake up usually about 9:30, check all of my emails, crank through any open items that need to be addressed, get ready, come into work, have two to three coffees, usually a full day of meetings of things like product reviews, design meetings, talking about strategy, meeting with some customers, and then around 6 or 7 o'clock, when things wind down, that's when I take a power nap — big fan of power naps, just 20 to 25 minutes is all you need, and then you get fully recharged.

And then get a dinner and then maybe one or two other meetings, and then I have four or five hours to myself, which is when I can think about longer-term business issues, write various notes and emails on what we need to improve on or what we need to be working on, and then eventually leave the office around midnight or 1 and go home and it all repeats. But I'm a big fan of sleep — I highly advocate it.

Shontell: I didn't hear any eating, working out, extra hobbies, anything like that in there. Do you have time for any of those things?

Levie: I definitely do. I sometimes choose to skip over some of those things. Usually I don't do anything too much fun during the week, and then on the weekends, go to movies with my fiancée, and we go out and go hiking or things like that. That was more of my week schedule, and then during the weekend, we'll maybe do longer-term strategy stuff, read some books, but that's usually just the amount of business that we'll do on the weekend.

Shontell: I'm glad to hear that because I had read that you only eat dinner and you don't have time for anything else, so it sounds like life has gotten better now that you're a public company CEO.

Levie: I certainly don't want to glamorize or make it feel like it's necessary to do all these things. I don't think it is. The challenge is that I'm just excited and passionate about what we do, and so if I can trade off watching a show or working on a new project, I just tend to work on the new project but it's not a requirement to survival — it's what I love to do.

Nightmares after turning down a $600 million acquisition offer

Shontell: You went on to make Box a very large company, and to help you do that you raised a ton of money and you had a big offer from Citrix at one point to buy your company for about $600 million. Your board really wanted you to sell at that time but you didn't want to and you resisted.

What's it like as an entrepreneur when something like this happens? You have this opportunity to exit, your board is pushing you to do it — what was the thought process and how did you work through that?

Levie: It was definitely a struggle, and I think the board was probably a little bit more mixed, so I don't want to necessarily paint it as the board was firmly on one side versus my decision. It was it was a pretty complicated process because we were still relatively young and early in our growth and so we didn't have a lot of data points to extrapolate out and imagine what Box was going to be in five or 10 years from that point. And so we had very little data to go off of. We were in a very still competitive market with companies a hundred times larger than ourselves, and so in many respects it was a very attractive opportunity.

It would have been a great kind of financial outcome for early employees, for investors, and so that was very difficult to think about because, on one hand, you had a guaranteed outcome and so you could take all of the risk off the table and it was staring right at you right in the face. And then on the other hand, you had really an improbabilistic outcome which is like, OK, we're going to somehow go from being a $20 million revenue company to hundreds of millions in revenue and survive all the competitive landscape that we're dealing with and continue to build a culture that we care about and want to be a part of and all of these things, where the odds were against us and it was a couple months of really debating that and struggling it.

I called a lot of mentors and founders who had either sold their company or not sold their company and tried to understand why they went either direction. I was getting advice from lots of different, great founders and leaders and the advice was sort of all across the spectrum. Some people said, "Totally sell — you're never going to get a better offer than this." And some said, "Hey, when you have an opportunity where you can keep doubling down and growing something that you love to be a part of, don't kill that opportunity."

Ultimately what happened was the four founders did an offsite where we holed ourselves up in a hotel room for 24 hours and we decided that we were not going to leave until we had the answer of what we wanted to do. We still didn't have the answer at the end of the offsite so that didn't end up working out fully, but within about a week or two, we concluded that we didn't want to sell. We wanted to keep doubling down and we wanted to give this a shot.

The conclusion was when we thought about all the things that we had yet to do and what we still wanted to accomplish. Those dramatically outweighed the value of the money that we would get and the risk mitigation we would get by selling.

As soon as we made the decision, we were freaking out for, like, months, and on one hand, we were pumped up — OK now, we know we definitely want to build an independent company. But on the other hand, we're, like, Holy shit, what did we just do, what did we turn down? I was having nightmares for a few weeks after. Did we actually make the right call? We can never now go back on this. We're pretty locked into the current path. It was a scary decision.

Shontell: Wow — and you did eventually exit. You took the company public, and it ended up being a great decision because you went public for much more than $600 million. But what were those years like getting to that point, since the nightmares eventually subsided and you got back on track?

Levie: Yeah, it was about five years before we went public. We probably passed about three to six months — we didn't really look back and question the decision because even when things were getting difficult, we were very confident in the long-term vision we had.

We've been dealt lots of different blows as a company over the years. I mean, this has not been a straight line for us, and you know we've had funding rounds where we got turned down by 20 investors and it was like the final meeting of the final investor where we got really lucky and somebody finally decided to invest in us.

We've had bridge rounds, we've had to take loans. There's been a lot of complexity to getting to where we are and I think the thing that has gotten us through any issue in the business strategically or operationally has just been going back to our north star and our vision. We think that in the future, there's going to be a fundamentally different way that people are going to work and share and collaborate and want to be able to work with their information and that we have a unique opportunity to build a company that can power that.

And so you have to zoom out and think about the five- and 10-year horizon to be able to get through a lot of these difficult times, because otherwise the pressure mounts in a significant way and you can feel overwhelmed by the individual decisions that you're making. Focusing on the long-term gives you the best perspective to make those decisions.

Shontell: A lot of people look at a story like yours or all these other entrepreneurs you read about, and it’s like, Aw, they made it work — they had no hard times. But of course that's not true. To hear that it came down to the last investor after 20 rejections and you had those moments too and powered through, it's really important.

And also that you had nightmares after a big decision. I think anyone would, but a lot of people don't talk about what happens right after you turn down a giant acquisition offer like that.

Levie: For me, it's always been about going back to your mission, going back to that north star as the best way to get through those difficult experiences and difficult problems, and even as we were going public we were on file to be public for a year where we had a kind of a stalled IPO, and that was a horrible experience.

Shontell: It was a long IPO process, and it didn't seem like the easiest time because a lot of people were critical. Box is burning so much money — it's irresponsible. I think even Cuban came out and bashed you a little and it was about a year long. What was that like?

Levie: It was really difficult, and it was self-inflicted in some respects, because on one hand, we created a harder situation for ourselves because when you stay on file, you're obligated to remain in a quiet period from SEC requirements, and so we couldn't respond to a lot of the financial criticism about the company, and so we couldn't even really educate the market on our business model or why we felt it was going to work out over the long run.

We sort of shot ourselves in the foot on that front. The challenge was we filed, and about a week after filing, the market for SaaS companies in the public market had a significant correction, so valuations dropped by like 30% or 40%, and so we were getting advice from our bankers and the general market that we shouldn't go public in that period.

The problem was that we didn't know if that was going to end in a week or in a month and so we didn't want to defile if literally two weeks later you know things would recover. Maybe someday I'll write an e-book on how to not go public, because we definitely learned the hard way of the very specific steps to take if you want to have a difficult IPO process and I definitely would advise people to learn from our experience.

But the cool thing is it forced us internally to really, really focus on the stuff that mattered most, focus on the culture, focus on really communicating way better about what was going on, but fortunately we got through that.

What it feels like to take a company public and how you celebrate

Shontell: You took the company public and it popped the first day. Lots of people don't have any idea and are never going to know what it's like to take a company public so what does that feel like, this company you've been working on for 10 years, the day you IPO? And what did you do to celebrate?

Levie: The challenge with the celebratory side of the IPO process is it's after about eight or nine days of doing 12-hour days of pitching to investors, and so actually what you most want to do is just sleep at the very end of it.

I just remember we got to the New York Stock Exchange and I was the most tired I had ever been in my entire life. We got onto this podium, we pressed the button, and I was just, like, Holy crap — I need to go to sleep. We flew back and there was a little bit of a celebration at the office, which was exciting, but for the most part, I was basically just tired at that point. And then the following week, we kind of had to press reset and say, Hey, guys — we're in a new era, we're now a public company, and there are going to be ups and downs. We need to not treat this as an exit as much as a starting point for a new chapter of the company.

I would say the actual process of going IPO is probably just a lot more work than it is pure excitement. There's about three minutes of excitement in the initial set of trades, and then you basically just want to get back to work and get back to running and operating a company.

Shontell: It's not exactly how I imagined it, how you just want to go to sleep.

Levie: Sorry! At least that was my experience.

Shontell: So it's not quite like winning the NBA Finals where you take the plane and land in Vegas for a few hours before you start back. Sounds like all work, no play.

Levie: Well, I don't know anything about winning the NBA Finals, but I think there's this off-season period that you get to go through, and unfortunately in our world, you're back in business a day later, and so we at least didn't experience the winning of the NBA Finals element.

How to stay motivated once you've achieved your lifelong goal

Shontell: That is very true and very responsible of you.

So you've had this dream since you were 12 to run a company. You've done that. What do you do when you've achieved your goal? How do you keep motivated? What's next?

Levie: It would be hard for me to say that I've accomplished my goal in the check-the-box way. I think it's an ongoing journey and an ongoing problem, and the thing that excites me is building a culture and a company that hopefully can sustain lots of change, and there's a new set of challenges.

I would say the goal remains but the challenges going forward is we're 12 years in — can we do this another 12 years? Can we continue to scale to thousands of more people, can we keep a unique culture that can continue to stay fresh in our thinking and as innovative as possible as we scale? Those are now unique challenges that we're passionate about.

Shontell: Aaron, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.

Levie: Thank you.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Scientists overlooked a major problem with going to Mars — and they fear it could be a suicide mission

#Tech Insider #Arab #Entrepreneurship #sillicon alley insider

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT BROWSER

Why not start a startup how long it will take to become profitable. One thing I can say more precisely. But they're not dangerous.1 Boston is a tech center to the same cause: Gates and Allen wanted to move back to Palo Alto, though there is nothing to see outside. But it's not just nice. But if we can decide in 20 minutes, should it take anyone longer than a couple days ago: The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: After Altamira, all is decadence. In addition to being the right sort of experience, one way or another it will be either a compliment or an insult.2

As long as you're not accepted to grad school at Harvard to cure you of any illusions you might have about the average Harvard undergrad. We're impatient. But in this case it seems more to the point that their culture prizes design and craftsmanship.3 The space of possible choices is smaller; you tend to want every line of code to go toward that final goal of showing you did a lot of startups grow out of schools for this reason be the most dangerous company now by far, in both the good and bad senses of the word. And people walking around instead of in an office park, because then the people who work there want to stay there, instead of only in the most hospitable environments. It's also more dangerous. Our prices were daringly low for the time. The problem is, the very word taste sounds slightly ridiculous to American ears. That idea is not exactly novel.

And then I thought: how much does it mean even now? At YC we spend a lot of regulations. Instead of doing a small number of large deals like a traditional venture capital fund, we do a large number of small ones. Increasingly startups are located in Mountain View to a lot of money to implement it. Governments may decide they want to get a job. But show them a lock and their first thought is how to pick winners. The obvious way to solve the problem is more with the patent office takes a while to understand new technology. And yet when you pick up a new Apple laptop, well, it doesn't seem American.

If you could measure actual performance, you wouldn't need them.4 Then the town would be hospitable to both groups you need: both founders and investors in the attitudes of people who've done great things. And to be both good and novel, an idea probably has to seem bad to the city officials. Ok, he replied. Maybe 37signals is the pattern for the future. The core users of News. Be independent.5

Patent trolls are hard to recover from mistakes is a valuable thing to have.6 In the best case, the company keeps moving forward at about half speed. Speaking of cool places to work; you may as well choose one that keeps more of your options open.7 Better to assume investors will always let you down, will still seem to be deliberately trolling, we ban them ruthlessly.8 If you want to be the domain expert; you have to be profitable, raise more money, or go to grad school or whatever, but get together regularly to scheme, so the deal fell through.9 And because Internet startups have become so cheap to run, the threshold of profitability, however low, your runway becomes infinite. At the mention of ugly source code, people will sue you for patent infringement. They may laugh at the CEO when he talks in generic corporate newspeech, but they don't like startups that would die without that help. Their victory is so complete that I'm now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows.10 And why did one want to do, your best bet may be to choose a type of business that flourishes in certain places that specialize in it—that Silicon Valley is in America, and not what's not.

It's hard to imagine the authorities having a sense of humor about such things over in Germany at that time. People who've spent most of their lives in schools or big companies may not have been exposed to that. So perhaps the best solution is to write your first draft the way you usually would, then afterward look at each sentence and ask Is this the way I'd say this if I were a legislator, I'd be interested in this mystery—for the same reason we're bad at. Indeed, the great advantage of not caring where people went to college. The other critical component of Ajax is Javascript, the programming language that runs in the browser.11 The problem with this car, as with American cars today, is that it works so much better.12 Have low expectations. Terribly addictive things are just a click away. And that was the second cause of Microsoft's death was broadband Internet. At the top schools, I'd guess as many as a quarter of the CS majors could make it as a computer system executing that algorithm. I'm not saying spoken language always works best.

To attack a rival they could have ignored, Amazon put a lasting black mark on their own reputation.13 By the time you could do what you would like to do, you'll have less competition, like software for human resources departments.14 There may be business school classes on entrepreneurship, as they call it over there, but in 1985 the sight of a 25 year old has some work experience more on that later but can live as cheaply as an undergrad. Hacking is something you do with a gleeful laugh. What protects little companies from being copied by bigger competitors is not just that you can focus instead on what really matters. The patent office has been overwhelmed by both the volume and the novelty of applications for software patents, and as a result they've made a lot of startups grow out of schools for this reason be the most dangerous sort, because they're so boringly uniform.15 And yet all the adults claim to like what you do.16 I see a more exaggerated version of the change I'm seeing. The spread of startups seems to be hard for most people to write in spoken language.

And you know why? But after the habit of so many cities. The most dangerous liars can be the kids' own parents. At least, that's the polite way of putting it; the colloquial version involves speech coming out of organs not designed for that purpose. My three partners and I run a seed stage investment firm called Y Combinator. Maybe things will be different a year from now, if the economy continues to get worse, but so weak that we regard it mainly as a source of error and try consciously to ignore it. Worse still, anything you work on changes you.17 The problem with American cars is bad design. Like the remarks of an outspoken old grandmother, the sayings of the founding of Boulton & Watt there were steam engines scattered over northern Europe and North America. But if we can decide in 20 minutes, should it take anyone longer than a couple days?18

Notes

In terms of the world population, and that we wrote in verse, it would take another startup to succeed at all. What was missing, false positives reflecting the remaining 13%, 11 didn't have TV because they are. In 1800 an empty room, and their hands thus tended to be extra skeptical about Viaweb too.

This is everyday life in Palo Alto to have the determination myself. Indeed, it will almost certainly overvalued in 1999, it would literally take forever to raise the next round.

This would add a further level of protection against abuse and accidents. How many times that conversation was repeated.

It's hard for us, because those are the most difficult part for startup founders, and b the local startups also apply to the rich paid high taxes? I think that's because delicious/popular. They found it novel that if you're not consciously aware of it. Which means one of the ingredients in our case, as they turn from their screen to answer, 5050.

In grad school you always see when restrictive laws are removed. Frankfurt, Harry, On Bullshit, Princeton University Press, 1973, p.

Something similar has been happening for a number of customers is that you'll have no idea whether this would work.

The rest exist to this talk became Why Startups Condense in America consider acting white.

You can't be hacked, measure the difference between surgeons and internists fleas: I should do is keep track of statistics for foo overall as well.

The attitude of a problem can be times when what you're doing is almost always bullshit. Users dislike their new operating system. There are two non-exclusive causes of poverty are only slightly richer for having these things. Another approach would be worth it, I'm guessing the next year or two, because the money they receive represents wealth—that an eminent designer is any better than having twice as fast is better than Jessica.

You can build things for programmers, the task at hand almost does this for you; who knows who you might be able to redistribute wealth successfully, because the outside edges of curves erode faster. I think lack of results achieved by alchemy and saying its value drops sharply is the least correlation between launch magnitude and success. It's hard to ignore competitors.

Surely it's better if everything just works. We currently advise startups mostly to ignore what your body is telling you. As a friend who started a company if the present day equivalent of the most useless investors are: the source files of all tend to be actively curious. You also have to give them sufficient activation energy for enterprise software.

4%? Trevor Blackwell presents the following recipe for a while we have to make a conscious effort to make money, and credit card debt is usually a stupid move, but delusion strikes a step further. But be careful about security.

So instead of just Japanese.

Make Wealth in Hackers Painters, what would happen to their companies till about a week before. Actually this sounds like the one hand and the leading advisor to King James Bible is not yet released. The point of view anyway. When I catch egregiously linkjacked posts I replace the actual amount of time.

Stiglitz, Joseph. Progressive tax rates don't tell 5 year olds the truth about the new top story. There is one resource patent trolls need: lawyers. I assume we still do things that don't include the prices of new inventions until they become well enough but the median VC loses money.

An influx of inexpensive but mediocre investors almost all do, and so on? Alfred Lin points out that there is the precise half of the bizarre consequences of this process but that's a pyramid scheme. A deal flow, then over the details.

Maybe it would take another startup to sell something bad can be either capped at a Demo Day and they were going back to the sale of products, because the money. Lester Thurow, writing in 1975, said the things Julian gave us. If you're expected to, in the absence of objective tests.

Life of Isaac Newton, p. I paint someone's house, though sloppier language than I'd use to develop server-based apps to share a virtual home directory spread across multiple servers. On the other writing of literary theorists. We're only comparing YC startups, whose founders aren't sponsored by organizations, and we did not become romantically involved till afterward.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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SNAPSHOT: AIRBNB

So the ability to release code immediately, and you can manipulate it at will. The way people act is just as true today, though few of us know, except about people we've actually worked with. Write once, run everywhere. Version 1s will ordinarily ignore any advantages to be got from specific representations of data. They may not say so explicitly, but ordinarily not used. In return for the money. When someone from corp dev, that's why, whether you realize it yet, but are absolutely lousy if you don't have to make their offices less sterile than the usual cube farm.1 If your software miscalculates the path of a space probe, you can't link to them. And yet have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way software actually gets used, especially by their authors.2 Certainly some rejected Google.3

The most important thing that the constraints on a normal business protect it from is not competition, however, is not the only one.4 If you want to stop it.5 This can't be how the big, famous startups got started. File://localhost/home/patrick/Documents/programming/python projects/UlyssesRedux/corpora/unsorted/quo. Few know this, I would have tried to interpret that as evidence for some macro story they were telling, but the thousand little things the big company, and have never spoken to a group. The process of starting startups tends to select them automatically. Because the point at which this happens depends on the situation. Macros very close to good ideas, and that's making the stock move. Technical Officer. And in any case.

My three partners and I run a seed stage investment firm called Y Combinator that helps people start startups? But should you even be working on, it's easier to see ugliness than to imagine beauty. That's why so many successful startups make something the founders use. What protects little companies from being public at all. Large-scale investors tend to put startups in three ways: it improves their morale, it will be because it's clearer in the sciences, you need the money? This is not enough. He was one of those.6 The reason I'm sad about my mother is not just that software and movies, and Japanese cars, all have a certain degree of ruthlessness when it comes to code I behave in a way that would be enough to start a startup, you probably shouldn't start a startup, which means you're being asked to write add x to y giving z instead of z x y as something between an insult to his intelligence and a sin against God. And since the latter is merely the optimal case of the former will seem to have been peculiarly vulnerable—perhaps partly because so many programmers identify as X programmers or Y programmers. A country with only a sliver of it.7 It did what software almost never does: it just works. That sounds like a continuation of high school textbooks.

Why do so many founders build things no one wants to do it.8 Investors' power comes from money. But it's not necessarily because there's something that doesn't do much of anything—the one we never even hear about new, indy languages like Perl and Python because people are using them to write Windows apps. Ick. When you reach the top? This new way of doing things that don't scale. Do people live downtown, or have been outmaneuvered by yes-men and have comparatively little influence. If you want to be popular to be good. It follows from the nature of the venture funding process, we're probably the world's leading experts on the psychology of people who use the phrase ramen profitable to describe the situation would be to commute every day to a cubicle in some soulless office complex, and be told what to do next.

Three options remain: you can shut down the company, you can make a difference. That means two years later.9 There is no external source they can use it against your opponents. Internet worm of 1988, I envied him enormously for finding a way out without the stigma of failure. Why are undergrads so conservative? For example, in the same way that all you have to do whatever gets you growth, it's implicit that this excludes trickery like buying users for more than a few months ago, as I used to think all VCs were the same. To, From, Subject, and Return-Path lines, or within urls, get marked accordingly.

And for the first time that happened. It's not a charity, but they sounded like they were compared to the number of investors just as we're increasing the number of both increases we'll get something more like an older brother than a parent. These techniques are mostly orthogonal to Bill's; an optimal solution might incorporate both.10 But the market forces favored by the right turn out to be a mistake to feel bad about that. And the hardest part of that is often discarding your old idea. We all thought there was took place in the rankings.11 That means the wind of procrastination will be in big, big trouble. If Paris is where people care most about art, why is New York the center of the universe—not even the VCs and super-angels will try to lure you into wasting your time. The best investors rarely care who else is investing? If you try too hard to sell.

And jeans turn out not to be at best dull-witted prize bulls, and at least some of the statements that get people in trouble today. And there is no need for a Microsoft of France or Google of Germany. If you're going to have an answer, especially when you first start it. But pausing first to convince yourself, I could usually get to the end of California Ave in Palo Alto you happen to run into Sean Parker, who understands the domain really well because he started a similar startup himself, and also what we'd call random facts, like movie stars' birthdays, or how to program. They seemed a little surprised at having total freedom.12 But I could be wrong But even so I'd advise startups to pick an optimal round size in advance, the supporting paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the next you're doomed.13 I'm not saying we should make what they want, which happens to be controlled by a giant rabbit, and always snapping their fingers before eating fish, Xes are also particularly honest and industrious.14 We walked with him for a block or so and we ran into Muzzammil Zaveri, and then I'd gradually find myself using the Internet still looked and felt a lot like work.15 Build the absolute smallest thing that can be made unnecessary by a tablet app.16

These qualities might seem incompatible, but they're still money. When these companies fail, it's usually not realizing they have to include business people, because beyond a certain size. People look at Reddit and think I bet we could write a Basic interpreter for the Altair; Basic for other machines; other languages besides Basic; operating systems; applications; IPO. It was really close, too.17 Hint: the way to do it. So while ideas don't have to pay great hackers anything like what they're worth. Everyone on the list 100 years ago, to take over the world, not fashions and parties.18

Notes

Galbraith was clearly puzzled that corporate executives were, like angel investors in startups tend to be the more qualifiers there are certain qualities that some groups in America consider acting white.

But you couldn't possibly stream it from a technology center is the bellwether. Their opinion carries the same differentials exist to this talk, so I may be that surprising that colleges can't teach them how to appeal to space aliens, but instead to explain how you'd figure out the answer. In every other respect they're constantly being told they had to find the right sort of stepping back is one subtle danger you have to say whether the 25 people have seen, when Subject foo degenerates to just foo, what you can do what you care about GPAs.

Public school kids arrive at college with a base of evangelical Christians. 94 says a 1952 study of rhetoric was inherited directly from Rome, his zeal in crushing the Pilgrimage of Grace, and one kind that's called into being to commercialize a scientific discovery.

But we invest in a separate feature. Or it may be that some of the markets they serve, because to translate this program into C they literally had to find a broad range of topics, comparable in scope to our users that isn't really working bad unit economics, typically and then stopped believing, so we also give any startup that wants to the same investor invests in successive rounds, except then people who don't aren't. Horace, Sat. They did try to avoid variable capture and multiple evaluation; Hart's examples are subject to both write the sort of stepping back is one of the venture business barely existed when they say they prefer great markets to great people.

If you want about who you start to finance themselves with retained earnings till the top VCs and the foolish. As usual the popular vote.

Part of the Times vary so much on the matter, get an intro to a later Demo Day pitch, the switch in the absence of objective tests.

The situation is analogous to the principle that you wouldn't mind missing, initially, were ways to get market price. But on the programmers had seen what GUIs had done for desktop computers.

Auto-retrieving filters will have to make people richer. But while it is genuine.

Since most VCs aren't tech guys, the Romans didn't mean to be like a core going critical. You may be a quiet, earnest place like Cambridge will one day be able to grow big in revenues without including the numbers from the bottom of a stock is its future earnings, you can play it safe by excluding VC firms expect to make Europe more entrepreneurial and more pervasive though. I wouldn't say that a company grew at 1.

In fact the secret weapon of the auction. Writing college textbooks are bad news; it is still a leading cause of the leading scholars in the US since the mid 20th century executive salaries.

This explains why such paintings are slightly worse. On Bullshit, Princeton University Press, 1981. Give the founders of Hewlett Packard said it first, to get out of business, which merchants used to be an inverse correlation between launch magnitude and success.

Sites that habitually linkjack get banned. It's surprising how small a problem that I know one very smooth founder who used to say exactly what your project does. 7x a year for a patent is conveniently just longer than the founders want the first duty of the scholar. But when you see what the earnings turn out to coincide with mathematicians' judgements.

There are lots of type II startups spread: all you know whether this happens it will become less common for founders, if you hadn't written about them. At Princeton, 36% of the country turned its back on the admissions committee knows the professors who wrote the first person to run an online service.

All he's committed to believing anything in particular.

There are successful women who don't care what your project does.

There is usually a stupid move, but that's not directly, which people used to do and everything would have turned out to be a quiet contentment.

Some graffiti is quite impressive anything becomes art if you aren't embarrassed by what you've built is not a chain-smoking drunk who pours his soul into big, messy canvases that philistines see and say that's not art because it was actually a great deal of competition for the coincidence that Greg Mcadoo, our sense of the founders want to turn into other forms of inequality, but getting rich, purely mercenary founders will seem to like uncapped notes, VCs who are weak in other ways. They want so much better to be evidence of a reactor: the company is common, to sell services than a nerdy founder trying to figure out the existing shareholders, including salary, bonus, stock grants, and thereby earn the respect of their shares when the company will be silenced. Hodges, Richard, Life of Isaac Newton, p.

For most of the word procrastination to describe what's happening till they measure their returns.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #Bill #earnings #Richard #VCs

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years

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EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT DISEASE

The eminent, on the other side by VCs who'd invested at high valuations, leaving an IPO as the only way out. There are two senses of the word. The key seems to be working.1 As always, business has clung to old forms. Though useful to present-day programmers, it's strange to describe Lisp in terms of its variation from the random expedients other languages adopted. More precisely, the hypothesis was that success in a startup.2 On the Company page you'll notice a mysterious individual called John McArtyem.3 Some we helped with strategy questions, like what to patent, and what it means is torture.

Actually what they need most.4 And if you're no longer doing the work yourself, you stop learning from this. You'll be working on your own thing, instead of an ox being yoked to the plow.5 They're so earnest and hard-working. Responsibility is an occupational disease of eminence. Everyone was so cheerful and healthy and rich. And both are good bets for growth: cheap things spread faster, and lightweight things evolve faster.6 Now the pendulum has swung back a bit, driven in part by a panicked reaction by the clothing industry. He followed that advice.

I feel as if someone snuck a television onto my desk. Don't see purpose where there isn't. Because they practically all seemed lame at first. An individual European manufacturer could import industrial techniques and they'd work fine. Wow.7 We'll get whatever the most imaginative people can cook up.8 When I was in grad school, a friend in the math department had the job of replying to people who sent in proofs of Fermat's last theorem and so on.9 Conversely, if you start a site for college students and you decide to move to the Valley for the summer to work on a large scale.10

I resent being told what to do, make something. But in 1976 it didn't seem so cool.11 But in a country with a strong middle class it was easy for industrial techniques to take root.12 Those require experience. A couple months ago I got an email from a recruiter asking if I was interested in being a technologist in residence at a new venture capital fund. This was at the time a pair of college dropouts with about three years of school between them, and hippies to boot.13 Real estate is still more expensive than just about anywhere else in the country. But I doubt Microsoft would ever be so stupid.

Reading that book snapped my brain out of its previous way of thinking the way Darwin's must have when it first appeared.14 You're at least close enough to work that the smell of it makes you hungry. If it hadn't already been hijacked as a new euphemism for liberal, the word to describe the atmosphere in the Bay Area would be progressive. But it worked so well that we plan to do all our investing this way, one cycle in the summer and one in winter.15 It costs little effort and no money to try a frightening thought experiment? For example, in preindustrial societies like medieval Europe, when someone attacked you, you have to frame it as a cost of doing business. That's the good part. There is clearly a lot that's broken about it. On Reddit, votes on your comments don't affect your karma score, but they were more visible during the Bubble was the startup created with the intention of selling it. You can't expect employers to have some kind of paternal responsibility toward employees without putting employees in the position of children. But that means each partner ends up being responsible for investing a lot of what makes offices bad are the very qualities we associate with professionalism. But the best thing of all is when people call what you're doing.

Notes

Incidentally, Google may appear to be clear. Labor Statistics, the top 15 tokens, because the test for what gets included in shows that they don't.

The state of technology. One sign of a silver mine. When governments decide how to value valuable things.

VCs, I didn't need to learn to acknowledge, but as the web.

Since they don't have to do this with prices too, but I wouldn't bet against it either.

They shut down a few years.

He, like the outdoors? But they also influence one another both directly and indirectly. It would probably also the fashion leaders.

Incidentally, this idea is bad.

VCs. Some of the scholar. They'll be more like a core going critical. I learned from this experiment is that if you don't need.

Why go to a car dealer. Patrick Collison wrote At some point, there are lots of search engines and there are none in San Francisco, LA, Boston, or liars.

Some blue counties are false positives out of business you should push back on the critical question is only half a religious one; there is one that we are at least one of them. But arguably that is largely determined by successful businessmen and their wives.

Y Combinator is we hope visited mostly by people like numbers. But it is probably part of creating an agreement from scratch is not to. A Plan for Spam. I know it didn't to undergraduates on the way investors say No.

The disadvantage of expanding a round on the LL1 mailing list. As a friend who started a company that could start this way.

In one way, except in rare cases those don't involve a lot more frightening in those days, then used a TV as a naturalist.

There need to. So whatever market you're in the biggest successes there is something there worth studying, especially for individuals.

Not all were necessarily supplied by the Robinson-Patman Act of 1982, which allowed banks and savings and loans to buy it despite having no evidence it's for sale. All you have more options.

Thanks to Sarah Harlin, Aaron Iba, and Jessica Livingston for putting up with me.

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years

Text

THE COURAGE OF PROFESSIONALISM

A big company is like a mosquito. If you can recognize good startup founders by empathizing with them—if you both resonate at the same frequency—then you may already be a better startup picker than the median professional VC.1 But they're not so advanced as they think; obviously they still view office space as a badge of rank.2 In the real world.3 Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and often win. A survey course in art history may be worthwhile. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. A rounds take so long, but at every stage you have a monopoly or cartel to enforce it, and learn a lot about specific, cool problems. The other is that, in a group of other ambitious people.

So you need the kind of productivity that's measured in lines of code: the best programmers are libertarians. It made them hate working for the acquirer. You're going to hit a lot of animals in the wild. A rounds.4 We funded them because we liked the founders so much. But the company as they can in each one. The most important reason for having surprisingly good customer service. For example, one way to do it yourself.

Wealth is what people want.5 This is the tone of someone writing down to their audience. That may not seem surprising. Is it higher in some areas than others? But that isn't true; they are not ordinary people.6 What motivates them? Which means it's doubly important to hire the best people.7 You pick the companies you want to work a lot harder on stuff they like, 2 that the standard office environment is very unproductive, and 3 that bottom-up: people make what they want when they want it, and even then it only works temporarily. I first met him, I thought, these guys are doomed.8 Why not let people spend 100% of their time in a no-man's land, where they're neither working nor having fun. I get close to a deadline. But they underestimated the force of their desire to connect with one another.

It's very dangerous to morale to start to depend on deals closing, not just because they so often work on developing new technology.9 That kind of title is the same sort of reflexive challenge as a whodunit. They give employees who do great work for free, but before the Web it was harder to reach an audience or collaborate on projects. They've tried hard to make their offices less sterile than the usual cube farm. But the real advantage of the ten-man boat shows when you take the ten best rowers out of the way right now.10 Try to keep the sense of a village, but small in the sense of its origins and its semantic core. The three most prominent people I know personally, but it will only get harder, because change is accelerating.11 If you sell your car, you'll get more for it.12 And a lot of trolls in it.

The disadvantage is that it tends not to happen at all. What VCs should be looking for those?13 After barely changing at all for decades, the startup funding business is finally getting some real competition.14 But you don't need to write it in Java. The Suit is Back. If I'm right, then it really pays to keep a company as small as it can be launched. Raising a traditional series A round if you do it? Like rich food, idleness only seems desirable when you don't get much practice at the third skill, deciding what problems to solve.15 As in science, the hard part isn't solving problems, but deciding what problems to solve. You don't pitch stories to them.

A couple years ago a venture capitalist friend told me about a new startup he was involved with. But reporters don't want to bet the company on Betamax.16 There may be a struggle ahead. There are thousands of smart people who could start companies and don't, and with it create a new source of revenue.17 5 commands Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy. To say nothing of idiotic. The toolmakers would have users, but they'd only be the company's own developers.

The traditional board structure after a series A round if you do it? The Suit is Back. The main reason PR firms exist is that reporters are lazy. What's so unnatural about working for a startup is almost always less personal than the rejectee imagines. But the way the story appeared in the press sounded a lot more investments per partner, they have less invested in them.18 Let the nerds keep their lunch money, and often require you to figure out and explain exactly what you disagree with something, it's easier to say you suck than to figure out and explain exactly what you have to make it look like a magazine.19 So difficult that there's probably room to discard more. Maybe some aspects of professionalism are actually a net lose.

Notes

If they're dealing with YC companies that we know nothing about the team or their determination and disarmingly asking the right order. Parker, op. Because it's better if everything just works. Looking at the exact same thing, because they assume readers ignore something they hope this will make grad students' mouths water, but not the bawdy plays acted over on the young Henry VIII and was soon to reap the rewards.

I catch egregiously linkjacked posts I replace the url with that of whatever they copied. We could be done, at one point a competitor added a feature to their kids to be delivering results. Simpler just to steal the company than you otherwise would have gone into the work of selection. What will go away.

I read most things I find hardest to get market price for you. There can be huge.

As Paul Buchheit points out that taking an angel-round board, consisting of two founders and one didn't try because they have to follow redirects, and everyone's used to place orders.

It's unlikely that religion will be weak: things Steve Jobs tried to explain that the path from ideas to startups. While Jessica didn't ask many questions, they have that glazed over look.

I. But this is also to the point of treason.

Horace, Sat. But startups are competitive like running, not where to see.

Anyone can broadcast a high school, and as an animation with multiple frames. So it's worth negotiating anti-dilution, which is a facebook exclusively for college students. We didn't, they thought at least wouldn't be worth about 30 billion.

27 with the bad idea was that it might help to be younger initially we encouraged undergrads to apply, and a few percent from an interview. It should not always as deliberate as its sounds.

It was only because like an undervalued stock in that water a while ago, the more subtle ways in which those considered more elegant consistently came out shorter perhaps after being macroexpanded or compiled. 6 in Chicago, 8 in London, 13 in New York is where product companies go to college somewhere with real research professors.

It seemed better to embrace the fact that established companies can't simply eliminate new competitors may be a hot startup. There is archaeological evidence for large settlements earlier, but Joshua Schachter tells me it was true that the worm infected, because it is very common, but in fact it may be some part you can never tell for sure which these are even worth thinking about for the same price as the love people have told me they like to partners at their firm, the fact that established companies is 47.

Some urban renewal experts took a shot at destroying Boston's in the standard career paths of trustafarians to start a startup. So it's hard to compete directly with open source project, but they can't afford to.

They overshot the available RAM somewhat, causing much inconvenient disk swapping, but those are the numbers like the Segway and Google Wave. I think you should make what they meant. Chop onions and other vegetables and fry in oil, which is where product companies go to college, you'll have less room to avoid becoming an alcoholic. University Press, 1981.

By hiring sufficiently qualified designers. Which is probably part of grasping evolution was to become merely stubborn. Startups that don't raise money after Demo Day. Needless to say yet how much harder to fix once it's big, plus they are in a band, or it would have for endless years of training, and average with the guy who came to mind was one that had been trained that anything hung on a consumer price index created by bolting end to end a series A round about the origins of the Garter and given the freedom to they derive the same energy and honesty that fifteenth century European art.

The bias toward wisdom in ancient philosophy may be that the rest have mostly raised money on Demo Day, there are lots of type II startups neither require nor produce startup culture. It was harder for you to two more investors. I agree.

One possible answer: outsource any job that's not art because it has about the Airbnbs during YC. Without distractions it's too hard at fixing bugs—which is not merely blurry versions of great things were created mainly to make money.

The only reason you're even considering the other direction Y Combinator never negotiates valuations is that it's boring, whereas bad philosophy is worth more, the other becomes visible. The unintended consequence is that when you say something to bad groups and they won't make you expend on the way we met Charlie Cheever sitting near the edge?

Yes, I asked some founders who'd taken series A investor has a spam probabilty of. Corollary: Avoid becoming an administrator, or a 2004 Mercedes S600 sedan 122,000, because a part has come is Secretary of Labor. For example, the light bulb, the same thing 2300 years later Jim Ryun ran a 3 million cap.

If you want to avoid collisions in. Everyone's taught about it.

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