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skaldish · 10 months

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Thank you for answering my question about periods. I’m wondering then if this whole concept of impurity in heathenry is also untrue or not?

A number of people were saying that all human fluids were impure. No praying if you had an open wound or anything. No sneezing during a ritual. But like...by their logic, you would be considered unable to worship if you wore a colostomy bag, because feces are impure. Which seems bad to me?

I’m sorry for being ignorant, by the way. I didn’t mean to anger or upset anyone. I’m new to this all, and I’m trying to learn.

You're welcome. The concept of "impurity" doesn't exist in Heathenry.

There's a few reasons why you might be seeing people claim such a thing though.

1. People want structure.

First of all, Heathenry lacks anything in the way of scriptures and doctrines. However, a lot of Heathens (specifically American ones) coming from a doctrine-based religious background, view this is a flaw rather than a feature. If anything, the lack of doctrines means they don't know what to DO to be Heathen, which can be anxiety-inducing for people who have never experienced any other paradigm.

Paradigm shifts take a while, so the way most people facilitate this is by creating their own practice observances. This provides them with a framework for being Heathen, but it's also something they understand as being for them, and is not something everyone needs to observe.

But some people try to force their ideas on others by selling it to them as "the way you do things." I can only guess why. Maybe it's because they don't feel like their own practice is valid unless other people agree with it. Maybe they came from a high-control religious environment and "converting others" is how they understand "doing religion." Or maybe they heard it from someone else, and because they're new at this and insecure they're going to repeat what they heard in order to feel like they're doing things "right." The reasons are endless, and people's minds are enigmas even to themselves.

The point is, if ANYONE's trying to tell you that there's things you HAVE to observe in Norse Heathenry, they're either lying, grossly misinformed, or simply ignorant of alternatives. Whatever the reason, it's still false.

2. The vikings were very clean compared to the rest of Europe, and many Heathens emulate this.

For lack of any scripture or doctrines, many Heathens develop personal orthopraxy by looking at what the pre-Christian Norse people (with the assumption Norse Heathenry died out with the introduction of Christianity, which we're only now figuring out isn't true. But I digress.)

One of the things people commonly incorporate into their praxis, is personal cleanliness. The pre-Christian Norse people supposedly had remarkable personal hygiene compared to members of other European societies, so it's pretty common for contemporary Heathens to adopt personal cleanliness into their practice in some way.

"Staying clean of bodily fluids for ritual" is something I've only seen practiced by folks running The Longship, and they presented it as an option because it's something they made up for themselves that made sense to them. To keep their ritual spaces remain clean of bodily fluids is something they chose to adopt after establishing a working understanding of Heathenry in their minds.

It's my understanding that was supposed to be an example of praxis, but unfortunately the nature of what it pertains to lends itself to skeevy interpretations.

(This is one of those circumstances where experienced practitioners mistake "having experience" with "knowing how to teach it." Many folks don't realize that pedagogy is its own unique skill. As a rule-of-thumb, you don't teach people exceptions to the norm until they are proficient with the norm, otherwise it creates this exact problem.

But in the Longship's defense, it was one of the first non-Folkish public-facing Heathen education websites to exist, so this is very much a situation where something was needed and they had the means to do it.)

Anyways, this misunderstanding could be a reason why you're seeing people claim this is something you HAVE to do.

(I also know the Longship also runs r/Heathenry, so take that as you will.)

3. Heathenry has a white nationalist problem

If something looks suspicious, treat it as such, because Heathenry has a white nationalist problem. Heathen white nationalists refer to themselves as "Folkish" which is a reference to the Volkisch movement of Germany, which was the social precursor to what eventually became the Nazi Party. Today's iteration is referred to as the neo-Volkisch movement, and its ideologies overlap with a number of alt-right and Hate Groups, including TERFs/RadFems for pastoral tradwife reasons.

Some of the talking points these bad actors like using involve encouraging people towards ideas or behavior that already exist in the world, but just so happens to benefit the spread of their ideologies.

For example, if people already observe "maintaining good hygiene" as part of Heathen practice, they might try to push that idea hard, so that people will see hygiene as so valuable that they would be more likely to apply it to things like "genetic hygiene" later (read: "Racial purity").

This doesn't make it unsafe or bad to be heathen. It just means you need to keep a discerning eye out, and to keep your distance from people spreading information in ways that seem very uncompromising, authoritative, and polarizing.

Remember: Heathenry is beholden to people. People are not beholden to it.

I honestly couldn't say for sure if what you experienced was cryptofascist in nature, nor do I recommend trying to verify. But having information about what that can look like can help you discern going forward.

#answered #norse paganism

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writer-and-thrasher · 2 years

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D20 Auction Tracker!

Hey, all! Because the Dimension 20 auction got super expensive -- like, immediately -- and because I'm a massive nerd who wants to earn my proficiency in Google Sheets / Microsoft Excel, I'm working on spreadsheets to track the cost of the auction (and posting it both here and TikTok so I can show it to others)! Also, spoiler alert for A Crown of Candy if you haven't seen it!

But first! The procedures!

Start with all of the beginning data.

Honestly, this was the easy part. Each D20 mini cost $50 at the beginning of the auction, and at $50 multiplied by 25 minis, the starting total cost was $1250. From here, though, I broke things down into different categories that I felt appropriate. First, I broke the minis into how they interacted in the world. Most of these were obvious, such as PCs and NPCs, but I quickly realized that I needed different categories from here. Not only are they selling minis for PCs that were never used, but the NPCs can break down into different types as well.

Additionally, I was curious about how each country in Calorum would fare in this. It made sense that Candians would be bid on for the highest amounts, but I wondered about the other countries, regardless of if they were allies or enemies. From here, I proceeded to create each country as its own category, as well. At the end of the beginning, my spreadsheet looked like this:

I created the category "PC+Unused" to account for backup characters that didn't need to exist because the original character didn't die, and (mostly out of curiosity), I added a category for NPCs that had been named.

2. Figure out how to use Sheets.

This part was a bit of a challenge, especially with the different categories I wanted to use. I didn't want to add everything together individually, so I had to learn how to use the algorithms on Sheets to just input the data for me. It was difficult, but once I got things set up, I could copy and paste for the most part.

One more complicated aspect of this was the Change columns. I wanted to represent the changes between each preceding week, but there's no real formula for that. While it took a long time to tweak, I eventually got it figured out. Now, looking at any data set, you can see the change between all of the previous columns in order!

3. Plug in and go!

I decided to test my skills with 48hr and 72hr checks to make sure everything was working well, and it was!

There are some interesting observations that I've noticed so far:

The Meatlands actually went down between the 48hr and 72hr checks, though this may be largely attributed to the fact that there were only four of them, and Hamdog went from being $1500 to $1100. While I don't entirely understand how that works in an auction, this did decrease the amount that the Meatlands was supplying to the overall cost of each mini, especially with total costs increasing over $1k in that timeframe.

Additionally, the range shrunk in this timeframe. While it didn't shrink by much, the fact that the most costly mini (Liam's) didn't change in cost indicates that the bottom floor for the minis is continuing to increase. In fact, 20 minutes after I took my 72hr screenshots, the lowest cost for a mini was not below $600.

I feel that it is worth saying at this time that there are two things existing at once. I am personally very glad that Dropout is able to use this auction to raise money for future episodes and for charity, and I think an auction was the perfect way to do this for their goals. Their minis are beautiful, and I'm really happy to see that so many people recognize the talent and work that goes into them. Also, as a first generation, low income college student... it does suck a bit that I immediately couldn't participate. I'm glad for Dropout, but a bit bummed out for me and others who couldn't drop $600 on a mini. I also think that this demonstrates some serious discrepancies between many members of the TTRPG community. This isn't inherently a bad thing, but it's worthy of recognition.

I'll update this post as soon as I have information following the last of the auction -- and considering that it's a popcorn style auction, it may go past the 12pmPST end time. But, I'll have some hard numbers for all of you, as well as predictions for the next three weeks!

#dimension 20 #d20 #dropout #d20 auction #dimension 20 acoc #a crown of candy #spreadsheets #yes i am a nerd

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mareenavee · 11 months

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Writerly (And Artistic) Thumbprint Challenge!

I was tagged by the lovely @hannahcbrown to try this out!

Rules: look back on your work, both past and present, finished and unfinished. what are five (or more!) narrative elements, themes, topics or tropes that continuously pop up in your work?

I'm gonna tag a few fine feathered folks for this, and let them circulate it out to the rest of the mutuals and see what we can come up with :3

Tagging: @paraparadigm, @changelingsandothernonsense, @friend-of-giants, @oblivions-dawn, @thana-topsy, @saltymaplesyrup, @thequeenofthewinter, @rhiannon1199, @tallmatcha, @airiat, @the-storytellers-seer, @orfeoarte -- and more. If you are not tagged, please, do absolutely consider yourself tagged and tag me back. And always tag the mutuals even if they've already been tagged. Pile on the tags so we can all see the cool stuff we each come up with. (:

Under the cut for some observations.

I have written a lot over the years and most of it is not fic, but here is what I can observe from original, fic, poetry and nonfiction. These are in no particular order, though I saved the best for last.

Identity I like to write about what makes a person themselves. A lot of my early spoken word poetry talked about body image and how to exist in a world like ours as a person who is not considered thin. Some of my favorite nonfiction pieces discussed what it was like to be a college student working retail and being recognized as other-than-a-retail-worker in public and how identity shifts between roles. In my fic, I explore a few things like what makes a hero a hero? Who are you when change/fate/destiny upends everything you've ever known? How do you become the person you're supposed to be?

Strength Especially in a lot of my fic, posted or otherwise, I think this crops up perhaps almost as much as identity. What does it mean to be strong? What sort of events do we weather and get to the other side of it? For who are we strong? Is being strong the same as being brave? What kinds of strength do we need in our daily lives and how does it affect our decisions? In the fic, we see a lot of the strength to overcome adversity by nature of the quest. But we also see, which dives into another point, the strength to forgive, the strength to confront ourselves for our behavior, and the strength to move forward, even when it hurts.

Friendship Ah, the power of friendship :> But no, even in a lot of my fic WIP ideas and fragments, there's a lot to be said of relationships within fiction that show different kinds of love and support than what is expected of a certain pairing or tag. There are a ton of different expressions of love, and I think one of the most underutilized is strong, solid friendships. This also incorporates found family or portraying a group of people who have decided against all odds that they will go out of their way for one another regardless of circumstances. When I write good friendships, I do it because it reminds me irl that we are worthy of this kind of support and we are capable of giving this kind of support, and not everything has to be as one-dimensional as popular media can sometimes show. Fic is the perfect place to explore it because it's decoupled from marketing, generally, and we don't have to worry too much about what sells (: So I lean into it where and when I can.

Mistakes This one is kind of rather broad. I could have listed specific kinds of mistakes but then we'd be here forever LOL but suffice to say I do write flawed characters that don't always know the next right thing. In my poetry, I talked about the mistakes I've made and observed in my time. I have given some of the mistakes I've made and observed to my characters in original and especially in World. Part of this category though is asking the question of how do these mistakes affect others? What does it take to forgive? Can they be forgiven, and why or why not? Is the character flaw so deep that there is no redemption for them? Are there certain kinds of mistakes that change who a person is completely? What is the cost of forgiveness? There's a lot to play with in this category without even having to get down to specifics. :>

Hope This is my favorite thing to write into any of my work ever. Perhaps because real life can be so very difficult and can seem so very bleak sometimes. Combined with everything above, I absolutely write hope into things, even if my stories seem rather bleak at the outset. For World, all of my POV characters have bits and pieces of tragedies that I have had to endure in my life and it's extremely cathartic to see them get through their drama, hardship, grief, self-inflicted chaos, and other things. Because it reminds me that there is hope yet for this place, if there is hope in their world. It is a form of healing for me to put them in situations they can get out of. So hope. The most important theme, I think, for my writing. (:

#on writing #MareenaWrites #Tag Game #writblr #writeblr #fanficblr #writing advice #writing tips

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fandom-space-princess · 2 years

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ooohhh would you mind sharing the reasons you don't like booktok? i have some reasons of my own but im really interested in the opinion who actually has to deal with the consequences of it all more directly. only if you want of course!

Oh goodness, grab your beach towel anon. Usually you'd have to go to the sea for this much salt.

(Prefacing this with the fact that this is just my opinion, not meant to be emblematic of like... booksellers as a whole, or my employer, or anything. It's also anecdata; nothing here is backed up by anything more than personal observation. I'm just a guy with a keyboard and an attitude. This also isn't meant to be a dig at anybody's taste in books/stories. I'm a supernatural blog, I have no legs to stand on in that regard.)

The things I most dislike about booktok, in no particular order:

1). The tendency toward quick consumption of stories without deeper or more lasting investment is an issue I have with a lot of media (see: Netflix dropping an entire series of something that everyone has watched, and then moved on from, in a week), but I think the problems inherent to that model of engagement become acute when the media in question is books. Novels are long-form storytelling by design; you're meant to sit with them for a while. Books in a series can take years, even decades, between publication. It's hard to convince people to engage with stories on that kind of timescale when we're constantly having our attention spans whittled away under a neverending barrage of buy-the-next-thing consumerism.

2). Tiktok is not only a principal motivator for this kind of behavior, it literally could not exist without it. Booktok doesn't encourage people to sit with books for a long time. It encourages you to *constantly* be consuming something new, *constantly* be pushing your friends to do the same, *constantly* be gaming the algorithm if you want to have any kind of significant presence. The environment does not encourage deep-dives; it leaves no time for contemplation. If you're participating in the culture as designed, you move through books very quickly.

From a business perspective (i.e. the capitalistic one), this is great. From the perspective of an indie bookseller, this is a pain in the ass on so many levels. Have you ever worked a retail Christmas rush? Where something you'd normally sell maybe three of in a year is suddenly The Hot Item, and the public demands you have 9000 of them in stock overnight?

It's unpleasant, is what I'm saying.

2b). The other thing this encourages? Stories that do not challenge people. Again, this is not to slander anyone's personal tastes. But ask yourself: what plays well to the greatest audience? What is most likely to draw customers, gain views, boost engagement? It isn't nuance. It isn't subtlety, isn't grappling with complex morality. All of those are things which I personally find intensely valuable about the experience of reading, and which I find pretty uniformly lacking in booktok's thing-of-the-week. This has an interesting overlap with the resurgence of censorship and purity culture that I think is worth examining, and maybe I'll rant about that some other time. As it stands, I find the trend toward Marvel-ification of fiction (simpler! louder! less nuance! more buzzwords!) to be obnoxious.

3). Speaking of buzzwords, the trend toward marketing new fiction using only a half-assed combination of tropes and comps drives me up a wall. I can't tell you how many ARCs I've seen in the last few months with bare-bones summaries and blurbs to the effect of "for fans of enemies-to-lovers and Game of Thrones, an endearing story of found family and the power of love!" Ok?? Fine in moderation, I guess, but even if I liked all of those things, what is in this book? Did the publisher not bother... asking the writer? Did they not leave them time to write a proper summary? Did they just not care, and hope replace a genuine marketing strategy with SEO?

Idk, maybe there's a benefit to this I can't see. Drives me absolutely bonkers, though.

4). The tags for my original post mentioned Colleen Hoover, who is the target of my ire at the moment because I've been pulling books for her fans all week, per point (2). No offense intended to Ms. Hoover, who I know nothing about but I'm sure is a perfectly normal author looking to get paid for her work, or even to her books, which are not my kind of thing but clearly are somebody's. FULL offense to Hachette for those books, though. They are everything I hate in paperback form: boring, ugly cover after boring, ugly cover. Really REALLY cheaply printed; about 1 in 3 arrive with some kind of damage, because they're so badly made that they don't hold up to even light jarring during shipping. The binding is... sad. Like. Even very bad books deserve better than this. But does the publisher care? Are they motivated to craft a higher quality product? Like hell they are! Because every booktok-er will buy them anyway. They're not interested in a product that will last; they're not looking for an object to cherish for life, a book to pick up and read over and over and over and over again until the spine cracks and the pages start falling out. That'll happen to these goddamn things by the second reread, but how many of them will get that reread is debatable, because by then I'll be selling that crowd The Next New Big Thing.

Anyway. I'll stop there. Thank you, anon, for your ask, and giving me a chance to vent a little bit. Wishing you a hot tea and a good, well-crafted story to liven up your day <3

#sorry for the wall of text. apparently this salt mine goes deep 😅#asks #saltposting #fsp speaks

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bigbadredpanda · 3 years

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Hi,, I hope I'm not bothering you with this and I'm sorry if my English isn't good, I hope you can understand my questions. I've been thinking about this for a while now and I tried to find information online but I found nothing.

MDZS is the first Chinese Novel I've read and I still haven't finished it yet,,but I've heard about rumors that said that MXTX is in jail, because she sold copies of her books. The rumor isn't true, however it made me wonder something,, I know China's censorship on lgbt related stuff is really heavy and that's why the donghua and drama adaptations of MDZS and other bl works are censored, but I didn't know that authors couldn't sell their novels.

So my question is,, how does MXTX earn money if she isn't allowed to sell her works? She has already finished 3 Danmei novels, and her works are really popular, they even have manhua, donghua or drama adaptations. The adaptations have earned quite a lot of money, but since she's an anonymous writer, does part of it even go to her?

To make the drama, the donghua and the manhua, producers had to ask her permission, I think. So, since the adaptations are doing well, she should get part of the profit, but how does it work? If the Chinese Government really is against lgbt themed works, shouldn't they have done something about her?

I really love her works and I hope that she earns something since she is the one that created all of them. Thanks for considering my question!!

Hi both of you and welcome to the cnovel fandom! Quick intro of the author, MXTX uses a pen name like many webnovel authors, it’s the abbreviation of Mo Xiang Tong Xiu which literally means “Ink Fragrance, Copper [Money] Stench” (墨香铜臭). Fun fact, it’s her mother who coined that name. MXTX wished to pursue a major in literature during university but her mother wanted her to graduate in economy instead while keeping writing on the side, that way she would have the fragrance of ink in one hand and the stench of money in the other.

We also know that she is fairly young, she wrote Scum Villain while she was a university student and she started working on the outline of MDZS in her final year. Tian Guan Ci Fu (Heaven Official’s Blessing) is the third book she completed and a fourth novel is/was in the works, its provisional title is “No rest for the death god” and is supposed to be a supernatural story taking place in a modern setting.

MXTX is one of the most popular webnovel authors on Jinjiang Literature City, the webnovel platform, but her popularity also comes with a great many detractors. You’ve heard some of the malicious rumours circulating in the English-speaking side of the fandom, it’s just a drop in the ocean compared to the outpouring of heated controversies in the Chinese side as the latter can have real-life consequences. There is a different nexus between the creator and the audience and the fandom culture is not the same either, it can be quite deleterious due to the tendency to report any content that one disagrees with.

Censorship in China is... ever-changing and nebulous. How severe it is depends on the medium. Nevertheless, gay literature (同志文学) does exist in China and it is distinct from danmei. I also want to nuance a bit the pervasive idea that anything lgbt is systematically and relentlessly censored in China. The reality is more complex than that and it would be dismissive of the hard-fought gains and visibility that Chinese lgbt activists have obtained these past two decades (some concrete examples: the work of the lgbt centre in Beijing or the pride festival in Shanghai). I don’t know if people are aware of this but lgbt dating apps are thriving in China, the most popular one, Blued, is also the largest lgbt social network worldwide. With that said, the official policy towards homosexuality is the three No’s: “no approval, no disapproval, no promotion”. A stance comparable to the “don’t ask, don’t tell”. It’s not explicit persecution but it manifests in the silencing of public discussion and the limiting media representation of homosexuality. In 2017, the top media regulator that oversaw radio, film and television issued guidelines banning a number of things, this included obscene and violent content, homosexuality, superstitious pseudoscience (such as reincarnation or spirit possession). On top of that, there is also an ongoing crackdown on online pornography that gets increasingly intense. And that concerns everyone on the internet, it’s astonishing the lengths netizens will go to in order to circumvent the censorship, new slang is developed to refer obliquely to banned words, fanfics are published in image format to prevent text recognition, etc... The censorship might be increasingly prevalent but netizens push back with their resourcefulness. Pushing back is also not without significant risk. Perhaps you have heard of the case of the danmei author that received a severe jail sentence? A few Western media picked up on that and criticised the ruling that was deemed homophobic. Chinese reactions tell a slightly different story, the author's crime was not writing danmei, she was in fact accused of making a profit by illegally producing and disseminating pornographic material. I’m not too keen on the details but it seems she printed the books herself and sold them online. To some Chinese observers, the ruling was not discriminatory because she did break the law. To others, it was absurd because this law dates from an era when internet barely existed and it would have been much more laborious to mass-produce and share porn at that time. There’s a bit of truth in all these points of views. It’s also not disingenuous to say that lgbt content is more likely to be targeted than het content even if the charges are not directly lgbt-related.

Usually contracted authors of webnovel platforms have a more secure status. They get a fee from the purchase of VIP chapters as well as tips from the readers. Other sources of revenue arise when webnovels get popular enough to get the opportunity to be published through official channels or when adaptation rights are sold (I assume that the author receives a share of that deal but perhaps does not get any further financial gain from the adaptation or its merch).

To support the author, I would suggest purchasing TGCF on Jinjiang (guide) or buying the physical versions of her three novels in Chinese (shop, change to English with top-right world icon), the special boxsets of MDZS and TGCF come with tons of goodies!

Hope I could be of service and that my tirade was mildly informative ^^'

#mxtx #answers #nerdsupreme #meandering thoughts #trashysiomai

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dinosaurtsukki · 3 years

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all for a crown (fyodor x gn!reader royalty au)

summary: fyodor dostoevsky wasn't at all like the other members of the royal family. he was polite, gentle, and always remembered your name. unfortunately, you're the one who eventually finds out about his inner motives

word count: 1.7k words

contains: royalty au, assassination, mentions of death and suicide, psychological manipulation, fyodor being himself as usual

anon: *puts 100 dollar bill on table* How about Royalty!AU with Fyodor but he’s evil/planning to take over another kingdom, imagine helping him dress into royal attire as he gets ready for his coronation, ok bye I’m having too much brain rot.

a/n: i... have no words for this fic it's literally just so self-indulgent but omg i love fyodor royalty!au so much you killed me with this request anon also i hope you enjoy the last scene

even after being in his company for only a day, you could tell fyodor dostoevsky was much different from all the other members of the royal family that you had served before. you were in your fifth year of serving at the castle and had met many of them, from duchesses and dukes to even the crown prince himself. needless to say, the best interactions that you had with any of them were when they barely paid any mind to you at all.

but you didn't expect much from them either. they were royalty after all and a poor servant from a far-flung village with nothing else to achieve in life was more than beneath them. living in the servants' quarters of a castle was better than nothing though, so you kept your head down and your work efficient just to get by.

and then came the day when you were assigned to be the personal servant of the young fyodor dostoevsky.

he was the tsar's nephew and a close friend of his son, the young prince. from what your fellow servants told you, fyodor had always been a sickly child and rarely left the castle grounds. the first time you saw him, you couldn't help but notice how pale his skin was and that you could probably wrap a thumb and forefinger completely around his wrist.

but what struck you the most about fyodor were his eyes: dark violet, the color of the robes that the past kings wore in their portraits. and second, was how warm his voice sounded when they greeted you.

"good morning. you must be y/n."

...

hearing fyodor call you by name made you realize that you've haven't heard it from another person's mouth in a long time. you were almost always called with several snaps of a finger or a sharp gaze. but fyodor used your name and never raised his voice. he was polite and the way he addressed you made you dangerously forget your own place. "y/n, if you please, could you fetch my book? y/n, would you be so kind to shut the window for me? y/n, have you had anything to eat? you look famished."

and even though you were expected to wait on him hand and foot for a whole day, it was always easy to run out of things to do. fyodor spent most of his time by himself: visiting the library in the morning after breakfast, practicing the cello by himself in the afternoon, and reading a book in bed at night.

you could tell that he was in need of someone to converse with since his cousin was the only who'd visit him. when it was just you two, fyodor could talk for hours on end though you could never fully understand what he was talking about. but that didn't seem to matter since he appeared to be content that someone was listening.

he was pleasant to be around and waiting on him was the best job you've ever taken in the castle. you enjoyed waking him up in the morning and preparing his meals and even staying at his bedside when he got sick. fyodor was different from all the other nobles you've served.

you were soon going to realize just how different.

...

"y/n... you aren't supposed to be here," fyodor hummed. he sounded as if he was lightly chastising you for breaking a dish but that didn't quite register in your head.

just half an hour ago, fyodor was eating dinner with his cousin in their room. he had let you off early for the night and you were about to return to your quarters when you remembered that fyodor forgot to take his medicine. clearly, you weren't supposed to witness this scene: fyodor's cousin, the crown prince himself, slumped over the table with his wineglass still in hand, spilling red all over the white tablecloth. fyodor himself was calmly swirling the wine in his glass and studying you with those dark purple eyes that now sent shivers down your spine.

"h-his majesty, i--"

"there's nothing you can do about it now, y/n," fyodor cut you off. he didn't look at all like the kind, young man with the gentle smile anymore and you consciously backed away towards the door. of course, he could tell what you were about to do.

"i wouldn't do that if i were you, y/n," he said lowly, placing his glass on the table. "between your word and mine, whose do you think people would believe, hmm?"

a weight sank in your stomach and you felt tears forming. "p-please sir. i-i'll keep quiet, i promise. i promise," you begged.

fyodor left the table and slowly made his way towards you while you were huddled on the floor with the door pressed against your back. he could have his way with your right then and there and you squeezed your eyes shut and hoped this was all just a bad dream.

then, you felt his hand on the top of your head, gently stroking your hair. "oh y/n," fyodor sighed. "shame, i took a liking to you. i would have been content with you personally serving me if you hadn't made this little mistake."

"i'm sorry... i'm sorry," you sobbed.

"hmmm, but i do believe in second chances."

at that, you looked up slowly at fyodor whose hands were still in your hair. maybe this was what selling your soul to the devil was like. "what should i do?" you whispered.

"to begin," fyodor crouched down until he was eye level with you. "you could help me get rid of the body."

...

it was almost funny how easily fyodor framed the murder as the crown prince taking his own life. but how could you laugh when you were now under his thumb? he was right, after all. who would take your word over his?

fyodor's scheme came to a conclusion when a group of noblemen came to his room with the news that he was next in line to the throne. the tsar was sick, you assumed fyodor played a part in that, and the deceased crown prince had no younger brothers. of course, fyodor played his part effortlessly. everything from his sorrowful gaze to his deep sigh leading into "with a heavy heart, i shall take on the crown for the sake of our kingdom."

you were certain his eyes flickered to yours across the room as soon as he spoke those words.

and now, here you were, dressing fyodor for his coronation as per his request. you no longer felt safe around him, knowing he would benefit from disposing you and no one would suspect otherwise. so, why? why were you still alive?

"your hands are trembling, y/n," fyodor observed.

"i-- f-forgive me," you stammered as fyodor sighed and finished buttoning his vest himself.

"if you keep looking that nervous it won't take long for people to suspect you."

"i'll try my best," you nodded. fyodor seemed content with your answer as he gestured for his coat which you hurriedly fetched.

"just button the two in the middle, leave the rest," he ordered. you followed his instructions until finally, you were done dressing fyodor for his coronation.

the way he looked now was a far cry from the sickly, bedridden man you met months ago. his attire was made on short notice, but the seamstresses and tailors did beautiful work nonetheless. his vest was white with gold buttons and stitching. the color of his coat wasn't the usual dark red that the previous tsars had worn. 'it's out of respect for my dear cousin,' fyodor explained.

but the dark, deep purple coat with the gold stitching that matched his vest suited fyodor well. he stood tall and imposing in his black boots made of polished leather. additionally, his raven hair which often hung loose to his shoulders was tied back into a loose ponytail.

fyodor looked like he had always been born to be the crown prince. and, with the way his dark, glittering eyes admired his reflection, you could tell he knew that too.

"you did a splendid job, as always, y/n," fyodor chuckled, turning this way and that in front of the mirror.

"thank you... your grace," you bowed.

"now, now. it's just the two of us here. you can call me by my name."

"v-very well... fyodor," you answered.

"well, i mustn't let the people wait too long," fyodor sighed, eyeing the growing crowd out of the window. "i've already requested a place for you to sit in the cathedral. it's quite far but you'll have a good view of the proceedings."

"thank you, you're too kind," you whispered.

"ah, and one last thing," fyodor took your hand in his and pressed a dark green vial in it. your eyes widened as you quickly realized what it was.

"i-is this--?"

"the duke alexandrei has been suspicious of us lately," fyodor whispered, his gaze darkening. "if you can, slip it into his drink or soup later during the feast."

"but--"

"and he won't die instantly," fyodor cut you off. "this one acts slow and it will appear as if the duke has passed away from the flu."

"you want me to... poison him?" you felt your hands sweat even as they closed around the vial. fyodor gave you a long look before chuckling and patting your head, as if you were a child asking a silly question.

"one of the things i love about you is how naive you are, y/n," fyodor said. "the duke is hardly going to be the last. if you think that i'm the only one who went to such... lengths to achieve what i want, then i'm afraid you're mistaken."

with that, fyodor checked himself one last time in the mirror before walking towards the door.

if only you hadn't walked in on him that night. but then again, even being associated with a man such as fyodor was dangerous enough. you were no different from a poor little mouse who was unfortunate enough to wander into a trap.

"what makes you any different then?" you found yourself asking out loud.

"me?" fyodor paused with his hand on the door. "i'm simply one step ahead of everyone else."

▸ 🎕 ┈┈┈┈ 🎕 ┈┈┈┈ 🎕 ┈┈┈┈ 🎕 ┈┈┈┈ 🎕 ◂

taglist (check out my post for details on being part of my taglist): @kiyoobi @atsumusdomain @laure-chan @goodfoodxoxoxo @guardianangelswings @kei-ya @loisuke @whootwhoot @liz-multifandom-hotel @kac-chowsballs @violentfarewll @fyoyacanruinmylifethanks @nightmare-light @miyakiyo0mi @whorefordazai @rirk-ke @cross-crye @alohablue @duhsies @alittlesimp

#bungou stray dogs #bsd #bungou stray dogs x reader #bsd x reader #fyodor dostoevsky #fyodor dostoevsky x reader #fyodor x reader #fyodor #bsd fyodor dostoevsky #bsd fyodor #bungou stray dogs fic #bsd fic #bungou stray dogs one-shot #bsd one-shot #bungou stray dogs angst #bsd angst #bungou stray dogs royalty au #bsd royalty au

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innuendostudios · 3 years

Text

Thoughts on... some funny games

[no spoilers to speak of]

Thoughts on Lair of the Clockwork God

The wisdom of the gaming cognoscenti insists that comedy is hard to do in video games. Having grown up with Monkey Island and Zork, I've never found this convincing. But one true thing is this: it's hard to write about comedic games. The ineffability of humor is hard enough to describe in less-interactive media; I can't even explain to my partner why Gretchen saying "I met January Jones once!" on You're the Worst busted me up, and they were sitting right next to me when she said it. Throw in the "you had to be there" nature of the player's active participation and I lose myself in a cornfield. The thing I found hilarious might come a beat to early for you, or not at all, or not be funny in text like it is in gameplay.

Why did I like Lair of the Clockwork God? It made me laugh.

The premise and particulars are a lot of "that could go either way." Ben and Dan - stars of Ben There, Dan That and Time Gentleman, Please! - have returned. Ben is still an adventure game star, but Dan has adopted platforming mechanics in an attempt to get with the times. So playing the game involves switching back and forth between a character who can leap across canyons but can't pick up items or talk to people, and one who can combine inventory but can't climb over a 3-pixel rock.

Does that sound potentially funny? Potentially grating? Yes to both!

The plot centers around our heroes trying to save the world from several simultaneous apocalypses and having to teach human emotions to a supercomputer in order to do so. (Don't ask.) These means, rather like Ben There, Dan That, traipsing through a number of fantasy worlds (read: computer simulations) until the correct emotion is provoked. This requires cross-genre cooperation: finding ways to get Ben to areas only Dan can access, getting Dan new power ups by combining objects in Ben's inventory (an act Dan insists on calling "crafting").

The best bits are at these intersections, when Dan's platforming is the puzzliest and Ben's puzzles take advantage of Dan's skills. Periodically the game gives you a Dan-centric platforming gauntlet the controls are NOT precise nor pleasant enough for, or a Ben-only moon logic puzzle that leaves you googling the walkthrough.

But I liked it! A lot. The genre-hopping seems to have invigorated the developers, Ben Ward and Dan Marshall. I discussed my favorite joke in Ben There, Dan That (in what is probably the least popular video I've ever made that wasn't asking for money), but was also dismayed that the game was never that clever again. But this one is, several times over! Progression here involves cheating your way to a better respawn zone, goofing around in game menus, exploiting "glitches," exiting out and loading up entirely other games. There is a lot of poking and prodding at what a game of this nature can or should be.

But, honestly? The only real selling point is... it was funny. The humor is as anarchic and metatextual as in previous titles, but it feels good-natured in a way BT,DT didn't. And there are, here and there, little bits of meat on its bones - the characters wondering if, as a couple thirtysomething white guys, the world hasn't left them behind, no longer comfortable with the juvenile humor of their youth but not really understanding the youth of today, but having not yet fully escaped the mentalities they used to hold. (There's an unspoken humor to Dan's idea of "modern" gameplay being 2D platforming mechanics, especially at a time when adventure games are significantly more popular than on his last outing; this is a good joke whether or not it's intentional.)

Also: this game contains the most poignant urinating-on-a-grave puzzle in gaming history, and you may quote me on that.

Having finished it months ago, I can't even remember what all the gags were that tickled me at the time. Comedy fades from memory faster than drama or frustration. Mostly I just remember having a good time.

Thoughts on The Darkside Detective

Here's a hook: sometime after the mayhem ends in Ghostbusters, The Exorcist, Evil Dead 2, or some other paranormal blockbuster that you watched over and over in the 90's until the VHS wore out, some overworked detective has to come into your town and piece together what the hell happened.

This is his story.

It's a good gag, and the devs wring every drop from it. Existing in a world where these things are commonplace and you have to fit them into some notion of "police procedure" is just funny. Like, it's one thing to have a running gag where you keep observing the moon in outdoor scenes, commenting, with increasing hostility, that its behavior is suspicious (it has been present at multiple crime scenes); it's a slightly different thing when, given the things you've encountered, the moon being the Big Bad is actually somewhat possible.

The game is divided into six main cases and three bonus DLC missions (which come included in the base game now, and the third of which is the proper ending/setup for the sequel). You are the cop tasked to deal with The Other Side - and, when The Other Side bleeds into our own world, its cops have to deal with you. You have a sidekick with a mental maturity of about 6, which I guess makes you the straight man. (You have to grade on a curve to find a straight man in this game.) And you solve tasks like rounding up escaped gremlins or finding an AWOL lake monster all juxtaposed with mundane problems like inter-office squabbles and having not bought your Christmas presents early enough. It's (pleasantly) lo-res and sparsely isolated, so the dialogue and premise do most of the work, but they are ably up to the task.

The gameplay... not so much. I'm an adventure game lifer, so I can put up with a lot of nonsense. It's mostly straightforward inventory puzzles and occasional minigames. Most of the puzzles are fine enough. As the cases progress, things get more involved, and the DLCs especially involve some awful moon logic. And the minigames are not above using that same jumping peg puzzle you've solved in a dozen other games already. So gameplay ranges from serviceable to irritating, but it mostly exists to string together funny lines and silly images. (Christmas mall elves being secretly in service to Krampus - that's the kind of thing we're talking about here.) You won't feel much guilt for opening up a walkthrough; the puzzles aren't why you're here.

The sequel has just been released, and both games are cheap, so check them out if you feel like smiling.

Thoughts on The Procession to Calvary

It's rare for a game to be hilarious to look at.

The Procession to Calvary takes its name from the Bruegel painting. It also takes all it's graphics from Renaissance oil paintings, and the designer delights in making famously rendered heroes and religious icons steal, stab, fart, and swear.

A strong Terry-Gilliam-with-After-Effects vibe is what we're describing.

You play as a lady knight from a war that's just ended, which sucks for you because, in this age of peace, you're no longer authorized to kill. And killing's, like, you're whole thing. But the one person your new, pacifist king wouldn't stop you from killing is the warlord you just deposed, who fled to the South. So you embark on a nonsensical journey to seek out the one human on Earth you are authorized to kill, because killing is just The. Best. Ever.

Of the three games we're discussing, this is the most overtly cheeky, and, at times, the most scatological. I could've done with a bit less scatology, if I'm being honest, but the cheekiness is very winning. As with Lair of the Clockwork God, a lot of jokes could go either way - a field of people being tortured and a woman on a blanket selling commemorative torture merch could be painfully try-hard. But something about the victims being seemingly everyone ever crucified or broken on the wheel in a famous painting, and having them writhe on their crosses in a way that is both gruesome and goofy, and having a cacophonous soundtrack of their screams and moans that you will now imagine every time you look at one of those elegantly elegiac paintings from now on... it works. That the music score is being played by an extremely jaunty piper who dances behind you just out of sword's reach as you traverse the field pushes it over the top.

Oh, and the puzzles, while never hair-pullingly obtuse, will leave you stumped at times. Push past that to get the proper ending, but, if you're sick of trying, you can, at any point, just start stabbing your way through problems. Which, again: it takes a very deft touch to make "protagonist resorts to violence" actually funny rather than lazy and obvious. And maybe, in another game, the perfect timing of every animation, the clever quips, the careful contrast of cathedrals and high-society music halls with gleeful sword-swinging wouldn't be enough. But something about it being frickin' Renaissance paintings carries it the last mile.

This is probably the basest game of the three, but it's also the one that made me giggle the most. Having a BFA that required several art history classes may have something to do with it. But check this thing out.

#capsule review #darkside detective #lair of the clockwork god #procession to calvary

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alittleprincehwa · 4 years

Text

txt headcanons ─ ੈ♡˳ you are a content creator

a / n : this is such bold request but I love it!! Damn I can't believe you guys are this creative-

─ ੈ♡˳ choi soobin

you two were having your usual late night cravings

and coincidentally you both were craving mcdonalds

it was dark and the only thing that lit up the road ahead was the lights

he held the steering wheel with one hand while the other grips your hand

you seemed to be editing something on your phone

he didn’t bother much and let you do your thing

he pulls up in the drive thru and lowers the window

he asks you your order but you don’t reply,

to busy doing something

he nudges your shoulder and you finally respond

you apologize and gave him your order

“ Oh yeah- sorry, I’ll just have a caramel sundae. “

as an apology, you offered to pay

which of course, soobin being the kind gentleman he is, refused and offered to pay instead

it led to a playful argument where you had to use your secret weapon

( the cashier at this point was ready to yell at y'all )

the threat. A quite powerful weapon.

“ Okay, I’ll just not hug or cuddle with you for a week. “

you shrug and cross your arms while looking out the window

of course he wanted those warm cuddles so he let you pay just this time

you pull up your wallet and open it

you were finding a certain credit card

soobin's pout disappeared and was replaced by almost a choke

he lands his eyes on your wallet and chokes on nothing when seeing the thickness of your wallet and the amount of bills and cards in it

you raise your brow at him while giving him your credit card

after paying and getting your orders

soobin decides to ask you a question

“ So uh, you've told me you're a content creator, specifically what? “

you pause eating ice cream

“ Oh, I just make video games. “

you sheepishly smiled at him

he thinks he's hearing things

geeks tf out

almost spilled his ice cream

tries not to crash the car while geeking out

asks a t o n of questions

probably has your games already downloaded the next day

when a certain level gets hard

he'll ask you and act sly about it

“ You know y/n, I've been having trouble in this level so maybe you can help me- since I'm your boyfriend right? “

“ Hell no you solve that shit

─ ੈ♡˳ choi yeonjun

since you two live separately

he dosent delve into your life in the apartment much

due to his schedule

and it didn't appear to him to ask you how you have so much earnings

it was just a casual tuesday

it was break time since they just did practice

he was loudly panting

wiping the sweat on his face with the hem of his shirt

he pulls up his phone from his pocket

he takes a sip of water before scrolling through youtube to find something entertaining

he settles on a video titled " doing my makeup bc I'm bored as hell "

the title was enough to intrigue him without checking who made it or who was on the thumbnail

much to his surprise

he NEVER expected it to be you

refuses to believe it at first

continues to observe how you act or talk

and he comes to the realization that it's actually you

quickly calls you

he was sweating even more

you were recording another video so you had to pause the camera

you groan and pick up your phone that was beside you

you saw the id name and press accept

his nickname btw is “ hips don't lie “

;)

you were about to calmly answer “ hello? “

before a screaming yeonjun interrupts you

“ yaH! YOU NEVER TOLD ME YOU DID MAKEUP VIDEOS! “

clearly offended

“ Ok chill, it's not that big of a deal anyways. “

he swore he was about to choke you

you manage to calm him down and calmly break the news that was already broken-

“ Yes, I make videos. See? Not a big deal. “

you could almost clearly hear him say

“ Yeah not a big deal my ass. “

─ ੈ♡˳ choi beomgyu

it always amazes you how you had a huge audience and popularity

but still beomgyu didn't know you were a content creator

you gained quite a following after a few videos or so

it even grew to the point where you had paparazzi follow you everywhere

so when you and beomgyu went out for a date night

it wasn't a surprise when flashes of light was on your direction

your head hung low as you walk with beomgyu side by side to the car

beomgyu expected them to mob him but instead

they mobbed you

“ y/n!! “

“ y/n look here! “

“ when's your next line coming out?! “

gyu furrowed his brows in confusion

why were they calling you?

not because of jealousy

but confusion

you ignored all the questions and pulled beomgyu closer to you and enter the car

you finally get to breathe

“ What was that? “

“ What was what “

“ Why were they calling you out? And something about a new line? “

well shit-

you always liked how beomgyu didn't know much about your big career

it's not like you didn't want to tell him

you just liked the way things are

but you knew sooner or later he'd find out

you quickly and calmly tell gyu that your career was bigger than you've told him

he’s just “ oh “

quietly accepting it

but definitely supportive

will watch all your videos later

─ ੈ♡˳ kang taehyun

he was working out at the gym

and as usual he was working on dem arms-

he was lifting weights

when he heard someone who was working out beside him talk

“ Yeah I know this person that creates very nice clothes, I think her name is l/n y/n?? “

“ Oh yeah I know her, just ordered some of her stuff yesterday. “

he was still lifting the heavy metal up

so when he heard it he almost dropped it on himself

he stands up and walks over to the people who were just talking

“ Uh hi, who were you talking about just now? “

he politely asked

“ Oh we were just talking about the famous l/n y/n. “

he then thanked the man and asked for the website

after the guy gave it to him

he sat on one of the benches and searches it up

he clicked on it and it brought him to your website

there he could see all sorts of stuff you sell

slightly shook

“ So this is why she's busy all the time “

he walks back to your aparatment

slightly angry

bc of the fact that you didn't tell him your career

and how dumb he is not to ask

after knocking on your door

you of course let him in

he gets straight to the point

he sets down his gym bag

and says

“ So what do you exactly do? “

you kinda die inside

but sit him down and talk to him about it

he gets kinda angry how you didn't even tell him

the most it leads up to is sparking an argument

which almost never happens

he just reminds you that you have to tell him these things

─ ੈ♡˳ huening kai

you guys just established the relationship so you don't know much about him

and vice versa

you decided to go public about your relationship

after a very long talk between you two

and an even longer one with BigHit

you both posted matching selfies and whatnot

and eventually the media picked up on the clues

and when you two were asked about it, you didn't object the assumptions

so the next day you and hyuka expected thousands of articles about your relationship

but he wasn't expecting what he got

“ Famous vlogger l/n y/n in a relationship with TXT's huening kai? “

“ Recent news about l/n y/n's recently revealed relationship “

“ l/n y/n revealed to have a boyfriend “

It surprised him how all of this was centered on you

he later searched you up and saw how popular you are

gaining over millions of views on your videos

he screams in dolphin which almost gave you a heart attack

seeing that the atmosphere was calm and quiet

until he decides to transform to his final form

which is a dolphin-

you raise a brow and walk up to him

you hug him from behind and peek over to see what he was doing

you weren't that shocked

but your face said otherwise

“ Oh sorry, I hadn't told you yet “

you giggle shyly

after you tell him he beams in excitement

he's all gushing about you and how you're a vlogger

and you're just dare like 😑 bitch you're a worldwide idol-

he becomes your cheerleader

even offers to be in you videos

which you're secretly thankful since that means YouTube pays your more-

a / n : taking a break after this since my switch gon arrive 😔 but in the meanwhile send in requests if you'd like

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santiagoswagger · 4 years

Text

i've never fallen from quite this high

Amy's birthday falls one month into her very new relationship with Jake, and he promises her he has plans to blow her mind.

Set sometime after “The Funeral.”

In all the years Amy’s known Jake, she’s been witness to the downfall of most of his relationships, and she knows they all tend to follow a similar pattern.

He was disorganized and completely consumed by his work throughout most of them, perpetually forgetting to show up for dinners or drinks because a case always took precedence. He could be selfish, unfiltered with his words and competitive to a fault. Most of the women he dated never seemed to last very long, and if they did, Jake usually found a reason to end things. There were a few exceptions, just as there are with any rule, but Jake was nothing if not consistent. He was a lone wolf, even in his personal life.

But the Jake Peralta that Amy finds herself dating now might as well be a stranger.

In the month since they decided to screw being light and breezy, she’s observed several small changes in him that often have her questioning if he’s the same man who once took her on a date designed for maximum humiliation.

When they make plans, he immediately adds them to the calendar on his phone so he won’t forget. He shares his snacks with her at the movies, even if he rolls his eyes while passing her the popcorn bucket. He takes the time to compliment her whether she’s dressed up for a date night out or wearing her ratty sweats on the couch at home, and genuinely means it either way. He’s still overly competitive, but that only makes her like him more.

She catches herself staring at him from across their adjoined desks, in awe of the person he was and the person he’s becoming. She can’t believe she’s actually falling for her goofy, infuriating partner. It’s scary, just as any big change is for a control freak like Amy, but she’s starting to believe that anything worthwhile begins with a little fear.

Much to Amy’s chagrin, Jake catches her mid-stare and smirks.

“Amy, I know you think I look extremely handsome in my new flannel, but this is a workplace. What would the Captain say?” he asks smugly, keeping his voice quiet enough so their coworkers can’t overhear. It’s something they’ve both perfected over the last month.

She rolls her eyes but can’t stop a traitorous grin from materializing on her face.

“Jake, we both know you took that flannel from the lost and found last week. And I wasn’t doing anything,” she says unconvincingly, burying her head in the open file next to her keyboard. “I was thinking. About my case. Because I’m a detective.”

Jake leans back in his chair and crosses his arms behind his head. “Does this ‘thinking’ have anything to do with a major life event happening this weekend?”

Amy cocks her head to the side. “’Major life event?’ What are you talking about?”

Jake lets out a loud, triumphant laugh, startling Hitchcock and Scully from their afternoon naps a few feet away.

“Amy, please tell me you didn’t forget your own birthday. No, wait, please tell me you did so I can make fun of you.”

Her jaw drops in horror. Amy Santiago, queen of organization, forgot her own birthday. Work had been so crazy the last few weeks and nights spent analyzing her planner were few and far between now that she had someone to go home with after work so something was bound to fall through the cracks. But she would rather let Charles cook dinner for her than let Jake know that.

“Shut up,” she says indignantly. “Just because I don’t obsess over my birthday like some people doesn’t mean I forgot it.”

Jake leans forward with a softer smile than before. It’s fond, almost. “You did, but that’s okay. I’ve got a few things up my sleeve for Saturday.”

“You do?” she says, surprised.

“Mmm-hmm,” he nods, grinning. “Prepare to have your mind blown.”

She laughs. “Okay, I’ll hold you to it.”

As they pack up their desks to leave for the night, Amy allows herself to wonder what Jake could possibly have planned. It’s their first birthday or holiday as a couple, and it’s so early. Their relationship is still so new and exciting, but a birthday is a big commitment. They haven’t even discussed where they see things going or if there’s a future for them. She doesn’t want this birthday to be the thing that scares him away before the relationship really gets off the ground. She’s pretty sure it could be something great if they let it.

Amy wakes up Saturday morning to the smell of fresh coffee wafting into her bedroom. It’s a shock for two reasons: she’s fairly certain she ran out of coffee grounds earlier this week and she knew Jake was scheduled to work an overtime shift today. The rumpled sheets next to her confirm his absence, but they’re still slightly warm to the touch; he must have just brewed her a pot before stumbling out the door.

She takes the time to brush her hair and teeth, and wash and moisturize her face – she refuses to let her morning routine slip, even if it’s her birthday – before walking out into the kitchen. It’s where she finds a full pot of coffee, complete with a new bag of beans from her favorite neighborhood café. It’s annoyingly expensive hipster coffee, and she can’t believe Jake shelled out the cash for it.

She also finds a note written in Jake’s awful chicken scratch on some stationery he must have grabbed from her office. Lucky for him, Amy’s been forced to decipher a few hundred of his case files over the years and can read his appalling handwriting without a problem.

Ames,

Happy Birthday, weirdo! I’m sorry I have to work on the day of your birth but I promise to make it up to you later ;) See you at 5.

Jake

She smiles as she finishes reading before pouring herself a large cup of steaming coffee and taking a long sip. She sighs, and she’s fairly sure it’s not just the coffee warming her from the inside out.

Truthfully, a day to herself is the best birthday present she could have asked for. She spends the day fielding calls and texts from her family and Kylie while also managing to organize her binders alphabetically and catch up on her very full DVR.

But by the time 5 o’clock rolls around, Jake is nowhere to be found and Amy can’t help but be a little disheartened. He had been making much more of an effort to be punctual lately, especially once he discovered what that earned him from Amy, but she supposes he hasn’t completely let his old habits die. She does her best to shrug it off. He probably just got caught up finishing a case, she thinks.

By 5:30, Amy is concerned. By 6, she’s spiraling.

He’s never been this late to meet her before, and never this late without sending an emoji-filled apology text. She, more than most, knows things can get out of hand at the precinct within an instant, but a shadow of a doubt still manages to nestle its way into Amy’s brain as the minutes tick by without word from her boyfriend.

She pours herself a glass of wine and takes a huge gulp. She knows from past observations that a month is usually Jake’s tipping point in a relationship. It’s entirely possible that he’s starting to have second thoughts about turning their friendship into something more. The thought rips through her like lightning.

It’s then that her front door opens and an exhausted looking Jake practically stumbles into the living room carrying two stuffed takeaway bags. His hair is a mess and his flannel is even more rumpled than usual. Her previously racing thoughts are immediately quelled when she sees him.

“Ames, I’m so sorry but I couldn’t find the restaurant and then the order was wrong and then I had to go to a different place and it was a whole thing,” he says in a breathless jumble. She can barely make out individual words.

“Are you mad?” he asks as he catches his breath. He looks genuinely gutted at the mere possibility he’s disappointed her.

She puts her wine glass down on the coffee table and moves to wrap him up in a firm hug. She can feel the tension leave his body at her touch.

“No, I’m not mad,” she mumbles into his shoulder. “But I wish you had texted me so I knew you were alright.”

“Phone died,” he says sheepishly. She pulls away slightly and gently swats his arm.

“I thought I bought you a charger for your desk!”

“I may or may not have been playing Kwazy Cupcakes all day and it totally drained my battery,” he laughs. “The precinct was so boring today, Ames.”

She smirks. “Did you miss me, Peralta?”

“Pshh, no,” he says, eyes darting around the room.

“You did,” she says smugly and he rolls his eyes, visibly grinning. “Now, tell me about this food.”

She pulls away from him to rummage through the plastic bags he’d placed on her dining table when he came home. It smells unbelievably familiar.

“I, um,” he stutters. “Remember when you told me about your favorite birthday parties as a kid? When all of your extended family would come over and it was just a giant party with games and the best Cuban food?”

“Yeah, I do,” she says softly. It had been such a throwaway conversation, late night memories shared while cuddling on his couch in front of the TV after a long shift. She’s genuinely touched that it stayed with him.

“Well, I found a place in Park Slope that sells those cheesy guava pastries your mom used to make you every year on your birthday,” he says, rubbing his arm uncomfortably. “But they messed up the order and I had to drive around to a bunch of Cuban restaurants to find them. That’s why I was so late.”

Maybe it’s the nostalgic smell of the pasteles de queso y guayaba bringing back her childhood, or maybe it’s the look of pure vulnerability on Jake’s face, but Amy can feel the warmth from this morning’s coffee returning tenfold. A lump begins to grow in her throat and she swallows hard to tamp it down.

“I can’t believe you did this,” she says, astonished. “I haven’t had one of these in forever.”

He’s rubbing his arm again, a nervous tick. “I hope they’re right. The woman at the last place I tried didn’t speak English so it was a lot of charades and pointing.”

She laughs. “They’re definitely right. They smell just like I remember.”

She puts the bag down and walks quickly over to where he’s standing in her kitchen doorway. She kisses him delicately, bringing her hand up to cup his cheek, thumb sweeping his jaw as she pulls away. His eyes are half-mast but they’re shining brightly.

“Happy birthday, Amy,” he whispers, moving to gently grab her hand as it pulls away from his face.

She scrunches her nose and smiles. “Thank you. Now, are you ready to try some cheese and guava pastries?”

He wrinkles his nose. “Ugh, no, thank you,” he says vehemently, backing out of her embrace.

She walks closer. “Please? For my birthday? You did say you would make it up to me after working all day.”

He groans. “Fine. But this is the last time I do anything nice for you.”

She smiles. “Deal.”

#b99 #brooklyn nine nine #b99 fic #b99 fanfiction #peraltiago #this is what quarantine has done to me

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years

Text

WHAT I'VE LEARNED FROM FOUNDERS TO DETECT BIAS

Expected value how likely an investor is to say that they're happier in the sense that hackers and painters are both makers, and this question is just to do what hackers do for fun: cook up amusing hacks with your friends. The root of the problem is to start from the other end of the summer. The people who are good at it. But after the talking is done, the decision about what to have for lunch. Even a company with 100 people will feel different from one with 1000. There's a reason we have a distinct word adult for people over a certain threshold of intelligence, what matters most is imagination. It's populated by people who dropped out of school to do it? In this case the exploding termsheet was not or not only a tactic to pressure the startup. As day jobs go, it's pretty sweet. Because fundraising is so distracting, a startup should either be in fundraising mode.

Nor would I have wanted to do anything that required a commitment of more than a few months old, every week that passes gives you significantly more information about them. For the foreseeable future, people will want ever more material wealth, so there is no record of it. Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the reasons Jane Austen's novels are so good is that she read them out loud to your friends as something you'd written, you'll feel all too keenly what an imposition that kind of thing is upon the reader. If a new company led boldly into the future. Defaults are enormously powerful, precisely because they operate without any conscious choice. They assume ideas are like miracles: they either pop into your head or they don't. I usually tell founders is to stop fundraising when you start to get higher.1

They call the things that get discovered this way incidentalomas, and they try to push you to name a price, resist doing so. Doctors discovered that several of his arteries were over 90% blocked to learn that the number was over 90%. Would that do? They're more like examples of Robert Frost's good fences make good neighbors. I smelled a major rat. The closest to a traumatic failure was Kiko, whose founders kept working on their own startups and those working for large organizations. As well as being smarter, they tend to peter out. I wouldn't be surprised if by playing some clever tricks with the accelerometer you could even replace the bathroom scale. They can either catch you and loft you up into the sky, as they do with most startups. What you should fear, as a handful of founders who could pull that off without having VCs laugh in their faces.2 So if such a company has two possible strategies, a conservative one that's slightly more likely to make it something you have the luxury of curiosity, one of the most important quality is in a startup is the opinion of other investors.

Is this the way I'd say this if I were drawing from life.3 The important thing is to be excited about it, because it's painful to observe the gap between them. So what tends to happen is that they hate the idea that we ought to be writing about them as if they'd been anointed as the next Google, but I'm thinking this is going to solve this problem, but it didn't last long.4 This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination. So you have to be on the path to the finished program looks in it, but the main thing we care about is the one where we ask what cool things you've made. Either some company like Netflix or Apple will be the money burning a hole in your pocket, but I smelled a major rat. Hapless implies passivity. One of the things he would have liked to. An excessive amount of money, it will only evolve at big company rates instead of startup rates, whereas alternatives will evolve with especial speed. Which almost always means hiring too many people to apply to multiple incubators, you should focus your whole attention on it so you can get.

Be nice. Surely that field, at least, how I write one. If they saw that, they'd want you to sell them more of your company in subsequent rounds. Instead of making one $2 million investment, make five $400k investments. Clinton, even if your group has only 10 people. It's different in research. Even if they already know it, you'll probably be done faster.5 The great mathematician G. Instead of making one $2 million investment, make five $400k investments.

If you go to work for a couple years for another company for a few days of terror. Being a doctor is not the hope of getting a better one. People's best friends are likely to make it excessively hackerish. The main thing we've discovered from pushing the edge of this envelope is not where the edge is, but how fuzzy it is. Don't try to look at something and predict whether it will take off. The percentage of female hackers is small, but they adapt their plans on the fly. Dating sites are a prime example. I like about this idea is known as Worse is Better. I'm sometimes accused of meandering. Right? So if it seems like all the good ideas came from within.

Which is an uncomfortable thought. That's probably the number one question people ask me. What you can do, but assume the worst; investors who are seriously interested in you will usually be happy to talk about what? But the best way to generate startup ideas is to do what adults tell me all day long. When I asked her what specific things she remembered speakers always saying, she mentioned: that the best way to get a lot of new areas.6 In the software world may not realize is that Worse is Better, which is doing so well they could probably be acquired in about ten minutes if they wanted to. Maybe the VC industry has changed. The head of a small company doesn't ensure freedom. At best you may have to pay a little more closely related, like games. And in any case, competitors are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the future will feel as sorry for us as we do a birthmark. What would it even mean to make theorems a commodity?

Notes

Inside their heads for someone to invent the steam engine. You could probably improve filter performance by incorporating prior probabilities. The founders we fund used to be employees, or to be higher, as they seem to be a good open-source browser.

And while it is. It's hard to prevent shoplifting because in their lifetimes. PR firm.

You have to. This flattering distinction seems so natural to the extent we see incumbents suppressing competitors via regulations or patent suits, we don't use code written while you were going to use some bad word multiple times. But he got there by another path.

I replace the actual amount of stock. Eighteen months later. Now the misunderstood artist is a service for advising people whether or not, and we ran into Muzzammil Zaveri, and cook on lowish heat for at least a partial order.

But it could hose the whole story. Yes, actually: dealing with one of the Daddy Model that it had no natural immunity to tax avoidance. I know this is the most promising opportunities, it will become as big. But friends should be your compass.

One new thing the company is always room for another. One professor friend says that the VC. We couldn't talk meaningfully about revenues without growing big in revenues without including the numbers like the iPad because it made a bet: if he ever made a lot like intellectual bullshit. It's not only the leaves who suffer.

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crabtree-online · 6 years

Text

Hello, interneters, I'm Constable George Crabtree of Station House No. 4, coming to you over the world wide web. As a constable --and now a bjd, myself--I think it's only fitting that my first post on this blog be dedicated to the #ProBJDArtists fight. My Aunt Fish has been been ill recently and had to move home for her health, and that's meant she's had only myself for assistance in this year's annual observance instead of the whole crew, but I'm going to do my best.

Now, I'm sure most of you folks know that theft is a crime, but in my time here I've seen a lot of debate over whether "crime" and "wrong" are the same thing. And I'm here to tell you that in this case--as in most cases--they very much are.

Oh, I hear you out there---"Well, you're a copper, you have to say that!" "You're a plastic copper; you don't have an opinion!"

And you're right, I am a copper, and it's my job to stop someone stealing if I can. And whether or not I personally possess the ability to opine, it's verifiable fact that my own artists, the ones who made me the resin George Crabtree I am, have been affected by this rampant thievery. Why, thieves were openly plotting to get hold of their panther before it was even released! Practically half the results--or more!--on Ebay that come up under an "Iplehouse" search are recasts.

And if you don't care that a "big company" like them or Soom (still less than 20 people) is being affected, what about single-artist producers? If your neighbor sculpted a piece that took them months to develop and years to fund, would you march next door and steal it off their doorstep the moment they'd finished? That's the mark of a criminal mind, my friend!

As for the argument that we're just too expensive, that's a misconception at best... and a bald-faced lie at worst! Now, I've been through Aunt Fish's phone gallery, and I found just the person to help explain why this isn't the case.

Meet Dr. Black Jack. He was released by Volks a few years back. As he was a limited edition with a $1200 price tag, Aunt Fish thought from the start she'd never be able to get him. But last year a friend directed her to someone on DoA selling just the head for about $300. It was a lot at the time, but she got a layaway and that made it easier. Several months later, Aunt Fish found a listing for a Soom Supergem body marked down to just $200 with shipping, and all because he was a little yellow and had had some breakage repair on one hand---and just like that, a $1200 doll for $500, paid out over the course of a year!

There's one final detail of the doctor's story that should shatter some of the myths about recasting and whether it really hurts. My Aunt Fish is used to cobbling dolls together, matching pricier parts to inexpensive bodies, and she's bought Soom parts a couple of times before... but when the doctor's body came in, she wanted to cry the minute she picked him up. The difference in quality was unmistakable. While the parts she's bought before were brittle to the point of being impossible to carry in a doll bag, his resin was sturdy but lightweight, much the same as mine.

The difference was that his body was made much earlier in Soom's history, before recasting had gone viral, so to speak. The decline in quality from not being able to meet production demands as they once had been was evident to the very touch. LUTS, the company that made his little girl there, recently put out a blunt (but well deserved) statement that the reason for their halting orders on things like extras and even dolls until they were caught up was that recasting had sapped so much of their income that this was as fast as they could afford to go anymore and still not compromise their quality. Some companies, like HZ, saw the writing on the wall and closed down altogether.

There are so many ways to be in this hobby on a budget. You just have to be resourceful. Like Detective Murdoch! Work with what you can, and you can build what seemed impossible! Whether it's hybriding, exploring the many, MANY companies with dolls under $300, getting a long layaway, buying used, buying old, or even buying a damaged doll that needs a little help to be their best again, nobody has to steal. This is a creative art, and creative art is about invention and innovation. Not cheap shortcuts and supporting shifty ne'er-do-wells like Luo.

And finally, like with many other crimes, rehabilitation and reform is possible. People who go legit are roundly welcomed into pro-artist communities, don't let anyone tell you otherwise! Your first legit is your first doll, to these people. You could have a lot to offer the community--you could help with comparison photo archives, and even just sharing your story can inspire others. Don't be afraid to reach out.

I'm George Crabtree, and until next time, stay safe, stay creative, and stay #ProBJDArtist!

#bjd #abjd #ball jointed doll #ball-jointed doll #probjdartists #legitbjd

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liaragaming · 7 years

Text

Roleplayer

Modern AU where Solas and Lavellan are grad students who get pulled into Varric's tabletop roleplay campaign in which they play themselves from Dragon Age: Inquisition. Fluff, angst, and meta ensues.

If you’ve enjoyed Solas Romance D&D, it’s a fanfic now.

Fanfiction.net ArchiveOfOurOwn [Ch 2]

If her tall beautiful ears don't give her away, the vallaslin on her face certainly does: elven, Dalish.

Her chocolate eyes meet his, and she waves at him from the checkout line. He smiles and joins her, blocking out the stares and whispers from the humans around them. Perhaps it was naive of him to think after their first term at the University of Orlais the humans would have gotten over the token elves.

She gives him an enthusiastic one-armed hug. “It's so good to finally be meeting you properly.”

“It is,” he agrees as he pulls back. “Strange we haven't done so before now.”

“We've passed each other enough times in the Magical Studies building, you'd think we would have.”

They move up in the line and place their orders at the campus bagel sandwich restaurant. She orders something with turkey and pesto on an everything bagel. He goes for smoked salmon on pumpernickel.

“So how do you know Varric?” she asks as they wait.

“We were sponsored together. Dr Pentaghast scheduled our campus visits on the same day to lighten her schedule.”

She gives a laugh. “That sounds like her.”

He hesitates for a moment, not wanting to come off crass. “I heard your application was accepted late.”

She shakes her head. “No, my application was sent on time. I just couldn't choose an area of study. That's why my sponsorship was late.”

He cocks his head. “What were you having trouble deciding between?”

She drops her gaze to the floor. “Oh… so much...”

Their orders are ready. They take their wrapped sandwiches to a tall table where they sit and eat.

“I really was interested,” he tells her.

She chews slowly, like she isn't certain if she should share. “Well… I'm interested in magical practices with origins that have been attributed elsewhere but which certain evidence suggest may have originated with elves.”

“A worthy pursuit,” he says, hoping his approval comes through in his voice. “Difficult to research, I'd imagine.”

She nods. “Especially when so much of our history has been lost.” She glances around to make sure no one's eaves dropping on them and leans toward him so she can drop her voice. “And we have to rely on what was recorded by human historians.”

He nods. He's well aware of the struggle. “So what specific area did you choose?”

“Chantry magical practices.”

His eyebrows shoot upward. “Quite controversial.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I imagine that's why I was chosen over other applicants. Dr Pentaghast liked the idea, said that we must pursue the truth no matter how unpopular.” She sighs. “But it hasn't been easy to research. I may have to change my thesis.”

“I wish I could help,” he says.

“What about you?” she asks. “What are you studying?”

“The veil and it's disruptive properties in regards to harmonic vibrations.”

She blinks and stares at him. “You mean… what does that mean?”

“I mean, both reality and the fade contain harmonic properties and the veil acts as a sound barrier between the two.”

“Interesting.” She continues to stare at him, then shakes her head. “I've never head of such a thing.”

“It's a personal theory.”

“Have you… had much success in researching?”

“Some. Not as much as I would prefer.” He looks down at his watch. “We should probably start walking.”

They throw their sandwich wrappers away and leave the building to head down the campus sidewalks toward the university apartments. They each carry a coffee cup in their hand.

“How did you meet Varric?” Solas asks.

She laughs. “He came up to me my first day, said he wanted to meet the 'other elf,' and then… I don't know. He just kept talking, and… at some point we were friends.”

Solas chuckles. “That is how Varric makes most of his friends, I imagine.”

“So why did you agree to this whole… romance campaign?”

“I owe Varric a favor. You?”

“He's my friend,” she says. “I figured it didn't hurt to help him with his thesis, especially when I'm getting nowhere with mine.” She sighs.

He stares at her. There's a soft beauty to the way her dark hair lays against her olive skin. All those days passing her in the hall… He's not sure when exactly he started seeing past the vallaslin or what had made him want to get to know her. And then he'd felt like too much of an awkward idiot to finally say hello after he'd put it off for so long.

She notices him looking at her, and he averts his eyes.

“You know,” she says, “You can tell a lot about a person by the type of coffee they drink.”

He laughs. “Oh, really? And have you learned this from personal observation or an infograph on the internet?”

“A bit of both,” she admits. “One can use the infograph as a base and draw one's own conclusions.”

“Very well, I'm intrigued. What does your coffee of choice say about you?”

“It's espresso,” she tells him. “It means I'm friendly, adaptive, and I like the taste of coffee.”

“I see.” He studies her with his eyes. “The Dalish don't make coffee, which means you've picked up a taste for it during your studies. Adaptive indeed.”

“And what did you order?” she asks.

He smiles. “It's hot chocolate.”

She laughs.

“So what do your keen observational skills have to say about my drink of choice?”

She ponders for a moment. “You like what you like and don't apologize for it. And you… take joy in the simple things others may overlook… And you don't like the taste of coffee. Does that sound accurate?”

It does, actually. “I...” He slows in his walk until coming to a stop. She stops with him, and he shakes his head. “You are not what I expected.”

Her lips twitch into a smile. “What did you expect?”

“I've…” He looks away from her, hoping this won't come out as bad as it sounds in his mind. “Not had the most pleasant encounters with the Dalish.”

Her smile drops, and his heart falls into his stomach. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“I didn't mean to offend,” he tires. “I just… most Dalish would not have left their clans to study at university, for example.”

The hurt dies from her eyes, but she chews on her lip. “That is… true.” Then she looks at him directly, her face full of determination. “I choose to pursue an education because… because if you don't widen your horizon beyond your personal zone of knowledge, how can you ever learn anything new?”

He is stunned, both by her admission and by her offense. “That is a rare view among most of Thedas,” he tells her. “Let alone the Dalish.”

She puts a hand on her hip. “Have my people wronged you in some way?”

“I offered to share knowledge. They were not very welcoming.”

“We take our duty to preserving the ancient ways very seriously.”

“So I gathered.”

She cocks her head. “What knowledge were you wishing to share?”

“Ancient secrets I have discovered in the Fade.”

She nearly drops her coffee twice, fumbling to keep her grip on it. She stares at him with wide eyes. “You're… you're a dreamer.”

He can only smile at her.

She bows her head. “I… mistook you for an…” She mumbles the last part. “Ignorant city elf.”

He gives a laugh. “Now that we've identified our prejudices, shall we start over?”

She lifts her head. “Yes, please.”

He holds out his hand. “Solas.”

“Mithra.”

They shake hands, and he holds hers for a moment as he translates her name. “Sharp as cutting edge.”

She raises her eyebrows. “Pride.”

They stare at each other for a moment, then let go and carry on toward Varric's.

Solas knocks on the door, and Varric answers.

“H-hey! The party's here!” He steps aside to let them in.

The front door opens into a hall, which leads passed the kitchen and into the dinning and living area. Varric's most likely the only person with enough influence and money to live on campus without a roommate. Solas has no idea what he does with the unoccupied bedroom, if he utilizes it at all.

“I want to thank you both again for agreeing to do this,” Varric says as they take a seat at the table.

“Your Chair actually recommended this?” Mithra asks.

Varric shrugs. “What could provide a better example than in-person roleplay? And by running the campaign, I have an objective view and can take notes on what works and what doesn't.”

“Why bother revising Swords & Shields?” asks Solas. “Why not just write new stories?”

Varric glares at him. “Publishing is all about sales, my friend. And if my publisher wants proof I can sell more romance, then by the Maker, I'm going to sell more romance.”

Varric claps his hands together as they pull out their character sheets. “So why don't you introduce your characters to each other?”

Mithra goes first. “Ellana is Dalish. Her clan is friendly with humans, and she comes near the conclave to hear about the outcome and determine how it may effect her people.”

“Fen is a Dreamer hedgemage,” Solas explains. “He approaches the conclave also in the hopes of hearing news.”

“Okay,” says Varric. “You both went a little more literal when I suggested you base your characters off yourselves, but that's fine. I can work with that.”

The campaign starts off as expected, battling demons and closing rifts. But Varric quickly steers the campaign into developing the relationship between their characters.

“You change everything.”

Mithra smiles at him.

“Roll a will save not to kiss her,” says Varric.

Solas rolls the die, and it comes up with a 20.

“You are totally safe from kissing her.”

Solas leans back and puts his hands behind his head.

Across the table from him, the corner of Mithra's mouth curves into a smirk.

She turns to Varric. “I kiss him.”

“Okay. Solas, roll another will save.”

He rolls, and the die shows 1. Varric laughs.

“What does that mean?”

“It means, Chuckles, not only do you fail at not kissing her, you spectacularly fail.”

“So…?”

“So what else does Fen want to do besides kiss her?”

He glances at Mithra who raises her eyebrows. Her smile spreads.

He adverts his gaze. “I, uh, he… I guess… pulls her close so their hips come together.”

Varric raises an eyebrow. “Anything else?”

He can't look at Mithra at all. “And… slides his thigh between her legs.”

Mithra laughs. Solas shields his face with his hand in an attempt to hide his embarrassment.

“And how does Ellana feel about this?”

“She's surprised… pleasantly.”

Solas chokes and tries to make it sound like a cough.

“Okay,” says Varric. “I think you two have given me plenty of material.”

Solas peeks between his fingers. He hopes he hasn't turned red; Mithra's gone pink in her cheeks.

“Varric, can I use your bathroom?” she asks.

He points down the hall. “First door on your right.”

She leaves. Solas lets out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding and lowers his hand.

“Smooth,” says Varric.

“You kind of put me on the spot.”

Varric holds up his hands. “That's the way the dice roll, Chuckles.” He breaks down his game master screen and puts his dice away. “And if you don't mind my saying, there's clearly some chemistry going on, and it's not all one-sided.”

“You actually think so?”

Varric stares at him. “Just buy the girl dinner and take her out to a movie like a normal person.”

“It's not that simple,” Solas tells him.

“Of course it's not. Asking someone out is never simple. You just do it.”

“I'll think about it.”

Varric groans. “Look, I see where you're coming from with your character. And that's good storytelling, increases the tension. But it's not like you're actually Fen'Harel and you have some sacred duty you're hiding from everyone.”

Solas gives a laugh. “Hardly.”

“Then what is your problem?”

“A mystery for the ages,” Solas mutters.

“What?”

“Just something my roommate says.”

Varric points a pencil at him. “Listen, I had a roommate in undergrad – another broody elf like yourself – and it took him three damn years to go after the girl. Don't do that, okay? I don't feel like reliving it.”

Solas stands. “Good thing for you grad school takes less years.” He doesn't stay to catch Varric's reaction.

He and Mithra walk together from Varric's, back down the campus sidewalks. Dusk has fallen.

“So, Fen'Harel, huh?”

Solas sucks in a breath. Did she overhear his and Varric's entire conversation?

“Varric told me your character's backstory,” she explains. “He wanted to make sure I wouldn't be offended.”

“Oh.” He lets the breath out slowly. “Good, uh, are you? Okay with it, I mean.”

She shrugs. “It's an interesting concept. Why Fen'Harel, though?”

“Just some remnants I found in the Fade. I'm inclined to believe in ancient times harel meant rebel, not traitor.”

“Really?”

“Just from my own observations. I'm afraid I'm not a linguist.”

She stops walking. “So, you're saying, Fen'harel's story – the real one, the one the Dalish know – might be different?”

“Maybe?” He shrugs. “The thought was intriguing enough to inspire the character, but as far historical accuracy, I'm afraid...”

She stares at him for several seconds.

“Is something wrong, Lethallan?”

She shakes her head, more to pull herself out of her trance than in answer. “It's just… your dreaming, everything you must have seen... Were my people really so uninterested in sharing knowledge?” Her eyebrows are drawn together, her lips down turned, confused, distraught.

“Well.” He takes a step forward, encouraging her to follow. “Think of it this way. Here you are at university. You've come to discover new knowledge. Naturally, you'd be more open minded. Whereas I approached the Dalish in the woods where they are notoriously suspicious of outsiders. And as at first glance I appear to be nothing more than an ignorant city elf–”

“I really didn't–”

“I used your term only to clarify the situation, nothing more.”

She stops walking again, her gaze on the ground.

“I would not dwell on it,” he tells her. “For everything I've faulted the Dalish for, you are here.”

She looks up at him, her eyes shinning.

“It has been a long time since anyone cared to listen.”

She smiles, then steps forward and takes his arm. “I would love to hear about everything you've seen in the Fade.”

He laughs. “I'm afraid that would take more time than we have to reach the parking lot. But if you can think of something specific...”

She doesn't say anything, not for a while.

“Have you... done that before?”

He has no idea what she's talking about. “Done what?”

“The whole thigh riding thing.”

He chokes on his own saliva, disentangles himself from her, and dissolves into a fit of coughing. Her laughter fills his ears.

“You don't have to answer that,” she tells him once he's able to properly draw air into his lungs.

If he wasn't red before, he's sure he is now. He runs a hand over his face and around to the back of his neck. “I... uh...”

She clasps his arm again. “You don't have to answer.” He's not sure by her tone if she doesn't want to know or if she's trying to save face on his behalf.

But she doesn't let go of his arm until they reach her car, and he's fine with that.

#solavellan #fanfic #modern au #d&d #roleplay #my fanfic

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petero1298 · 7 years

Link

Some Things I’ve Learned Over The Last 30 Years July 6, 2017

Today marks 30 years since a confident young man walked into the back office of Schroder Investment Management in London, to start his first day on the job, the first in his career. Ask me a question back then and I would have answered assuredly and quickly. Today I’d be more likely to say ‘I don’t know’ with just as much confidence.

Now older, wiser, but with just as much hair, I have over the years seen many people come and go. Clients, colleagues, bosses, company mergers, bankruptcies (thankfully not my own), through bull and bear markets, booms, crashes, and have seen my own fortunes fluctuate too before setting out on my own a few years ago.

Thirty years is a long time. The good news is it was all worth it.

The first thing to point out is I don’t have all the answers. That’s not what this post is about. I’m always learning. But I have benefited enormously from people sharing their time and expertise, so if I can help others in the same way, I’m happy to share what I’ve learnt also.

These are 30 observations, guiding principles, or simply things that work for me. Some of you who have followed me for a while will recognize many of them. These aren’t universal truths, they’re my truths, my beliefs, shaped by my experience.

And that’s probably a good place to start.

“The more you believe something to be true, the more you will have accumulated evidence to support it.”

That’s a quote from trading coach Van Tharp, and I’ve applied it to so many areas as a simple way of explaining people’s expression of their beliefs, my own, and the realization of how powerful confirmation bias is. Van believes we don’t trade the markets, we trade our beliefs in the market. A trading system therefore is simply a set of beliefs, and I think he’s right.

Buy high, sell higher.

Buying a stock at x+1 can be a lower risk trade than buying it today at x. Forget buy low, sell high. When something is falling, it’s more likely to keep falling than it is to reverse, and vice versa. It’s called momentum, and along with value, it’s one of the most empirically proven anomalies to academic theory that the Nobel Prize winners wish would go away. Note to self: Look into buying value stocks that show upward momentum.

Trade small to win big.

All traders and investors need trend and time to profit. Even if you don’t consider yourself a trend-follower, no matter what your timeframe, to make money you need something to trend, even if it’s just a couple of ticks higher, you need price movement.

If you are a long-term trader, time is also your friend. Time allows trends to develop, persist, and time in big trends allows you to trade in smaller size. If you are a daytrader, time is your enemy. The clock is ticking, there’s only x minutes left in the session. You need greater frequency of trades, or you have to trade in greater size and take greater risk.

It amazes me that newcomers to trading choose to start with an area that instantly requires them to either trade more frequently, or in greater size through leverage or margin. It should be the other way around. Only after years of experience and having amassed a fortune should someone attempt such a thing, but of course they don’t. A successful trader or investor will continue to do what made them that money in the first place, and it won’t have been daytrading. 99% of daytraders (a conservative estimate) are under-capitalized and would do better to build up their savings instead of daytrading them.

Limit orders limit performance.

I once worked for a PM who always put on limit orders. It was like chasing a bar of soap around the bathtub. Sometimes weeks or months later the order would still be on our desk, but the stock would now be way way higher. You either want to own it or you don’t. Is a penny here or there really the difference between whether you want to own it or not? Because your limit order is potentially making it exactly that.

I’ve held stocks for over a year and looked back at when I bought it. I could have bought it the next day, the next week, open, close, whatever. It wouldn’t have made a whole lot of difference. Unless you’re trading Cliff Asness/AQR size, for goodness sake, quit playing games with the HFT pikers. Just buy it and move on.

I have never found a way to consistently make money shorting stocks.

If you’re starting out, put this one in the ‘too difficult’ pile until you have the time, energy, or intellectual curiosity to tackle it. Just know that even amongst CTAs, even though they are long/short many different futures markets, the short side of what they do rarely makes much money overall, it merely helps them perform well during ‘crisis alpha’ periods of non-correlation, and smooths the equity curve longer-term, but the lion’s share of performance comes from the long side. That’s futures. Stocks are even harder.

The best strategy is one you’ll stick with.

Or more correctly, the best strategy is the one that you’ll stick with and meets your objectives. There is no one way of investing that is suitable for everyone. There is only what’s right for you. Lots of things work. Buy and hold works. Value works. Momentum works. There are others too. Start with the evidence-based empirically-proven stuff. Find which one, or which combination works for you, in accordance with your timeframe, objectives, and investment horizon.

Buy and hold giving you 7% is fine, but if you can’t tolerate 50-60% drawdowns or trust yourself to not bail precisely when you should be adding any spare cash you have to it, then it’s not for you. Pick a strategy that delivers an acceptable return that won’t have you reaching for the sick bag when turbulence hits.

When to add.

Whether trading or investing, the simplest way to know how and when you should add to a position is to imagine you don’t already have a position. What would it take to get you in? That way you’ll be doing it for the right reasons, the same as your initial entry rationale, rather than reacting emotionally.

The best movie about trading is “Wall Street”, then “Trading Places”, then something else.

The vast majority of arguments on social media could be avoided if both sides simply declared at the outset what their timeframe is.

You mean we could have diametrically opposed views and yet both make money? Yes, that’s right.

No amount of reading or paper trading will prepare you for how it truly feels in the heat of battle.

There is a great scene in ‘Bridge On The River Kwai’ where Jack Hawkins brings a young soldier in and hands him a knife, asking him if he thinks he could use it in cold blood. The boy doesn’t know. “Well, at least he’s honest.” The fact is, none of us know until we face that enemy whether you can thrust that blade home or pull the trigger on your order.

Don’t blithely tell me your backtest says you would have taken that trade in ’87, or 2008/09. You don’t even know what the market liquidity would have been, whether you could trust the prices you’re seeing, or if you could even see any prices. You’ll know in your walk-forward.

I know, because I’ve been there and done it. Traded like an idiot with my own money in the ’87 crash, and have since safely navigated in various trading roles the LTCM collapse, the Asian crisis, the Dotcom crash, 9/11, the Global Financial Crisis, and most recently for myself and clients through a couple of flash crashes. I consider it an edge, one of the few that can never be taken from me. You can’t buy experience like that.

I can’t predict markets, and neither can you.

No, seriously, you can’t. No. You can’t.

Entries, exits, position size.

Watch any trading software ad and you’ll likely hear lots about getting entry signals. The perception is it’s more important than the others, but it’s not. I think exits are more important. A good exit signal doesn’t just get you out when needed, a really good exit signal keeps you in, staying just below the action and not triggering until the trend is over.

Look back at the entry of a successful position you’ve held for many months. How important was it to enter at that precise time, that day? It’s likely what followed was more important. What allowed you to tolerate the volatility and ride it higher to where it is now, making it the big winner it is. That’s all exits and position size, not entry.

Sure, without an entry there’s no trade, but it’s only the exit signal that determines whether in relation to that entry the trade is a winner or loser. Even more important, the position size will determine by how much. Entries merely determine the frequency of trades, or how many signals you have.

The longer your investment horizon, the higher your equity allocation should be to passive strategies.

Yes, I’m an active manager, but hear me out. If I have a 20-something come to see me as a prospect, I’m going to tell him to just put it in an index fund for 15bps and come back and see me when he’s over 40. Come on, the guy’s got 5 decades ahead of him. Go live your life, save, invest, have an emergency fund, put more cash to work every time the market plunges 25%-30%.

By the time he’s 50 and thinking about retirement however, those 30% plunges on that tidy sum he’s built up won’t look like the opportunities they once were. The percentages will be the same, but the nominal amounts will make it way scarier, seeing his hard-earned go up in smoke.

The closer you are to needing your money, or put another way, the less of an investment horizon you have remaining in which to recover losses, the higher your allocation to active strategies should be. By the time you are nearing retirement, your equity allocation should be 100% active, zero passive.

People tend to think in simple terms that passive = safe, and active = risky. The opposite is true. A truly passive strategy exposes you to 100% of the market’s drawdown. With passive you get what you pay for – zero risk management. Active management is risk management. That’s what you pay for. Risk management.

If you want to own oil, buy oil, don’t buy oil stocks.

If you want to own tech, buy a tech ETF, don’t buy Apple. Having a top-down macro view and then trying to apply it to a micro level is one of the hardest things to do. I did it once, and made a lot of money, but now realize it was mostly dumb luck. I have seen people make brilliant calls that were completely right but they lost money executing it horribly. Buy what it is you got your signal on, not where or how you think it might play out a second or third degree. One is quantitative, the other is a guess.

Hedging a position often increases risk instead of reducing it.

I’ve seen traders take on a position and then immediately look for something to hedge it with. Why? Just reduce your initial position. Or sometimes the exposure becomes too great. How can I hedge it? Why not just reduce it down to a more comfortable level? Size it correctly and it won’t need to be hedged, and you’ll also have more capital available.

I once had a boss on the prop desk who insisted on every position being hedged with the equivalent size in index futures. Absolutely insane. Now I’ve got one position I wanted and a whole load of futures I didn’t. He was a big Buffett fan. Insisted the only true measure of our performance was whether we beat the index or not. Weren’t we here just to make money for the firm? Apparently not. When I bought a utility that went up 5% but the index went up 10% over the same period (and I didn’t hedge) he said it was a bad trade.

I was a bit gung-ho and I let him get to me. When I left the desk I thanked him for making me a better trader. The look on his face! But I was serious, he challenged all my beliefs and as maddening as it was, it made me re-evaluate what it was I believed in and why. You should want to be challenged on everything you believe and be calm and comfortable in explaining it, and in fact, welcome any new information that disproves your existing position, so that you can immediately correct it.

The best book on trading is “Reminiscences Of A Stock Operator.”

It’s an obvious, popular, and cliched choice, but for good reason. Yes, its main protagonist committed suicide, and it’s written in archaic language, but it’s because the stories are from a hundred years ago, and that’s precisely why it appeals. The lessons stand the test of time. The stocks, companies, and players change, but human nature never changes. We’re all human, even millennials.

“If it’s so good, why would they sell it?”

This is one of the most egregious fallacies in the finance periphery. Why would they sell it? Why do you think? Do the math. Let’s take an example of an area where this is most commonly targeted; newsletter writers or subscription services. Imagine for a moment a trader has a $1m portfolio. He makes on average 10% a year, or $100k. That’s his trading income. If he also runs a subscription service that sells for a $1000 a year, he can get an additional $100k a year with 100 subs. That’s very nice passive income.

Now I used $1m in my example. In reality most traders are capitalized at $100k or less. They would only need 10 subscribers to get the same return. If they had 100 subs, it would match their entire portfolio value! The question then becomes not “If it’s so good why would they sell it?” but instead “If it’s so good, why wouldn’t they sell it?”

And it’s also grossly unfair to limit this logic to newsletter/sub services. If hedge fund managers are so good, why do they need clients? We know why. The fees. They can make way more from managing other people’s money than just their own. It’s the exact same principle.

I’ve seen many people get tarred with this brush unfairly, especially in the area of technical research, and yet fundamental research with its dire record gets a pass. I’ve seen it firsthand too. If you give something away for free people think it can’t be worth anything. If you charge for it “If it’s so good, why would you sell it?”

Broker research is mostly redundant.

There are many excellent analysts that no doubt create value for others, but the ratings systems are useless and as analysts they are being assessed incorrectly. Buy/Sell/Hold means nothing. There are so few Sell ratings. They are terrified of not getting corporate business. Broker X upgrades XYZ from Sell to Hold. How do I hold it after you recommended I sell it? Shouldn’t you move to a Buy rating first? Neutral/Outperform/Underperform. Overweight. Yes I am.

The only way it would make sense is if you asked the analyst to rank all his buy ratings. So you cover the tech sector and you have 50 names with a buy rating. That doesn’t help me. How about you rank them 1-50 for me? Now we’re talking. That could be useful. Buy the top one, short the worst, let’s see if he’s any good.

Price targets are also mostly redundant.

Under the guise of assigning their fair value to a company, price targets are simply a way for an analyst to stay in front of clients in a name and reiterate or update their research periodically without necessarily changing their rating. It’s a useful tool for them, but unless you’re also a value investor where a specific value would cause you to act, for the rest of us it’s just another unwelcome noise item that anchors you to a price in the market, and tempts you to act when you should instead just follow whatever your existing plan or strategy is.

If you want to own the strongest stocks, buy the strongest stocks.

Buy something that’s already doing what you want it to. Going up.

The closing price is the most important price.

Let me qualify that. I have likely said before that it’s all that matters but that’s not true. The close is the most significant, simply because so many other investors or traders act off it for end of day signals.

I like to think of the trading day as a jury deciding what a stock is worth that day. The opening statements are heard, and the intraday prices from the high to low reflect the arguments being made throughout the session. The close is the verdict. That’s what stock XYZ is worth today. Record the verdict. Price the mutual funds. Put it in the paper.

I’ve heard people place more emphasis on intraday extremes, but why? The high and low are likely the two lowest volume prints of the entire session, and therefore arguably the two least important. You could argue they provide support/resistance levels, but again by volume I would think the closing price is a better reflection of where most people are gathered or potentially anchored so it has more significance.

And let’s clear something else up. I’ve heard people say amateurs open the market, pros close it. OK, let’s assume for a minute that’s true. Which price would you rather take your trading signal from, and who would you rather trade against? Amateurs or pros? I take my signals from the close and trade at the next day’s open.

For high net worth individuals there is no need for a specific allocation to bonds.

I’m biased. I’ve been an equities guy for 30 years, but seriously, if you don’t need the income/interest, why allocate to bonds or treasuries at all? You can get exposure via a managed futures strategy. If there’s a meaningful sustained trend, up or down, you’ll catch it, and in 30yr, 10, 5, 2, and even German, Japanese too. You could allocate 50% to Managed Futures, 50% to Equities, and allocate that equity portion to passive/active strategies depending on your age, or maybe a combination of value and momentum. 50% Equities, 50% Futures, covering Trend Following, Momentum, and Value. You don’t need bonds.

If you want to perform differently to the index, you have to invest differently to the index.

When I worked as an assistant to a Portfolio Manager at Schroders we had client portfolios that had something like 60 stocks or more in Japan alone, and that might only be 25% of the entire portfolio. I’d see a stock do really well and it barely made a blip of difference to the portfolio. After a while I would understand there are many playing this game of marginal differences in portfolio structure, overweight this, underweight that. The market goes down 20%, your fund is down 19%. Yay, you beat your benchmark and get a bonus. The incentives are all wrong. Relative returns is a game I know I have no interest in playing.

In my days at Kemper/Zurich/Scudder they had more concentrated portfolios where the stock selection mattered more, and then I got to do that to an even greater extreme as a prop trader at Lehman where you may only have two or three positions, whatever it is you want. It’s not even considered a portfolio. I typically held 8-10 and often do the same now. Through a combination of all these factors, reading material like Van Tharp’s position sizing strategies, and Howard Marks’ letters, I’ve become very comfortable with a highly-concentrated portfolio and all the parameters and performance distribution that entails.

Stocks don’t follow economic theory. They follow socionomic theory.

This is why when a stock goes up people will want to buy more of it. And when it goes down people will sell. That’s not how it works with traditional economic laws of supply and demand. When the price of shoes go up, people don’t rush out to buy more. And when they go on sale people don’t run out of the store. In a supermarket consumers act rationally and logically, but there are no consumers or producers of stocks, there are only investors, and investors herd and are emotional and irrational.

Price is sentiment.

There are some variants to this. Price is truth. Only price pays. I think the way I would phrase it is that price accurately reflects prevailing sentiment. Some think it’s supply and demand, I think it’s Socionomics/social mood, but regardless, whether you believe it’s wrong that it’s trading up at $100 when your fair value is $50, it’s irrelevant. If you want to trade it, the price is $100. You may think it’s wrong, but that is the price. In terms of reflecting current sentiment, price is always right.

I’m ready for what’s next.

I have no idea what the market will do tomorrow, what the next payrolls number will be, or when the Fed will next raise rates, and frankly I don’t care. News is noise. All I know is I will follow my plan. It took me 25 years to work that out. You’re welcome.

I am responsible for everything that happens to me.

Everything. Good and bad, but this mostly comes into play for something bad. You won’t find me blaming the Fed, QE, HFT, or any conspiracy nonsense if my portfolio performs badly. The outcome is a result of my decisions. That bad trade was my stock selection, my execution, my choice of broker, all my decisions that led to that outcome. If it’s something I enacted it always comes back to me. If it’s something that happened to me, it’s because I put myself in that situation. If it’s something my child did, it’s something I allowed them to be doing. Everything is a risk. Getting up, going out, crossing the road, but ultimately I am responsible for everything that happens to me.

People really appreciate honesty.

It might sound obvious, but from the reaction I get it suggests there’s not enough of it around. I’ve made a conscious effort to say “I don’t know” when I don’t know. It can be quite empowering. When I’ve talked about positions or trades on social media, I’ve made a point of following up when things haven’t gone so well. It’s one of the hardest things for me to do. But it’s only right. You can’t just sing when you’re winning. The losing periods are when I least feel like writing something, but when I most need to, because it’s also when anyone who’s been paying attention to anything I say will most need to hear it too.

“All cruelty springs from weakness.”

Social media is a tough arena. I slip up sometimes and get sucked into some troll’s orbit, and on the occasions it’s happened, even when I’ve sent someone packing with their tail between their legs, the short-term satisfaction soon gives way to wishing I hadn’t responded.

When I’m driving and I’m getting frustrated with someone in front of me I imagine I know the person. It’s amazing how it changes how you react. In a similar vein, on twitter now I try to talk to people as you would if having a conversation face to face. Be nice. We all have off days. You never know what’s going on in people’s lives. Everyone’s going through something.

When you’re young, you have so much time but never enough money. When you’re old you have money but never enough time.

How you perceive and value time and money will change many times throughout your life, but at the end there’s only one you’ll want more of, would give anything for, but it won’t be available at any price. Cherish it while you can.

Thanks for being a part of my journey. Here’s to the next 30 years.

#zurich

0 notes

douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

Text

I'VE BEEN PONDERING STUDY

Because then you're asking government or almost-government employees to do the unpleasant jobs. We could not have grown so big so fast. Having a job is said to be even more onerous than schoolwork. At first the default reaction of the Slashdot trolls was translated into articulate terms: Who is this guy? But it's not enough just to raise up the poor. But if you order results by bid multiplied by transactions, far from selling out, you're getting a better one, and actually did. Meanwhile, sensing a vacuum in the metaphysical speculation department, the people who run them. I don't think many people like the slow pace of big companies, software has to go through one lame idea before realizing that a startup has 3 founders than 2, and better when the leader of the company is just a bunch of guesses, and guesses about stuff that's probably not your area of expertise. It would have been delighted at first to be bought for $2 million, but the deeper you go into the e-commerce business, we'd have found the idea terrifying. Economic statistics are misleading because they ignore the value of information, it will make the others much more interested. 01 continuations 0. You're committing to search for one of the characters on a TV show was starting a startup.

The place to look is where the spread of literacy and the arrival of block-structured languages, but by then it's too late. But patents may not provide much protection. A team that outplays its opponents but loses because of a bad decision by the referee could be called unlucky, but not about observing proprieties. And so to protect themselves people say I can't do it by accident. If you have to push down on the top as well as limiting your potential and protecting you from competitors, that geographic constraint also helps define your company.1 The structure of their business means a partner does at most 2 new investments a year, then on average you must be contributing at least x dollars a year worth of work per year for the company just to break even. For example, can this quality be taught? It always seemed to us the optimal way to do great things, you get better results if you use flexible media. 14758544 valuable 0.

You can't plan when you start a startup. There are other 19 year olds who are 12 inside. Most unpleasant jobs would either get automated or go undone if no one were willing to do them. I want to bias the probabilities slightly to avoid false positives.2 You have to add a few more checks on public companies. So if one group abandons this territory, there will always be both supply and demand. But they are not enough to make it prestigious. You'd think that a company about to buy you. The study of rhetoric, the art of arguing persuasively, was a third of the population have y percent of the wealth. Their inexperience caused them to make a living was by farming. The first was the rule of law. We could see the problem was one that needed to be solved though.

At YC one of our specialties at YC. In fact, we're so sure the founders are sufficiently different from other people that ideas few others can see seem obvious to you. At the very least, crank up the font size big enough to make all your decisions for you; anything that gets you tenure. For the next year or so, if anyone expressed the slightest curiosity about Viaweb we would try to sell them the company. Not merely in the obvious sense that if you eliminate economic inequality, you decrease the number of startups and think this can't continue. Apparently not. Then you have to invent a bubble to explain why Americans make some things well and others badly.3 I do the same. Which means, oddly enough, that patent application had continued in the pipeline for several years after, and finally issued in 2003, but no one told me. For example, I think we're better off attacking one step downstream, where wealth turns into power. There must be things you need. Realizing it does more than make you feel a little better about forgetting, though.

What they really dislike is the sort of people who aren't. If you're really at the leading edge of a field that's changing rapidly, your ideas about what you haven't figured out yet. When I first laid out these principles explicitly, I noticed something striking: this is practically a recipe for chaos, think about a soccer team. Almost every company needs some amount of funding to get started. But if you think it takes a lot of schleps, you'll still have plenty dealing with investors, hiring and investment decisions, and of course the judgements made in dating. 042199217 various 0. Big companies can develop technology that's simply too hard for competitors to duplicate, you don't even know? I'm telling you that the key is to have a cup of coffee, but told himself he ought to finish what he was working on first.

What we like is speed, and we're willing to go ahead and start startups right out of college, or even become a competitor. Dartmouth, the University of Vermont, Amherst, and University College, London taught English literature in the 1820s. But these numbers are not misleading, because that means your growth rate. Wealth is stuff we want: food, clothes, houses, cars, gadgets, travel to interesting places, and so on. Except in a few unusual cases. But it should help. In more recent times, Sarbanes-Oxley has practically destroyed the US IPO market. It's supposed to be a doctor may simply not realize how much room there is for a potential competitor to undercut them. They don't change the laws of wealth creation. One is that parents tend to be ones that work.4 When things go well you can take risks; when things are bad you want to do, you'll have to deal with uncertainty is to analyze it into components.

Notes

If you want to invest at any valuation the founders don't have enough equity left to motivate people by saying Real artists ship. Most smart high school football game that will pay for health insurance derives from the rule of thumb, the average car restoration you probably do make everyone else microscopically poorer, by encouraging them to act.

17. Aristotle the core: the energy they emit encourages other ambitious people together. It's unlikely that religion will be a problem this will give you 11% more income, they made much of the court. Or more precisely, while the more qualifiers there are those that will be regarded in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Oxford University Press, 1981.

At the time 1992 the entire period since the mid twentieth century. I believe, is he going to distinguish between gravity and acceleration. If early abstract paintings seem more powerful than ever.

But it's hard to predict at the command of the markets they serve, because universities are where a great founder is in itself, and Smartleaf co-founder before making any predictions about the other team. One of the main effect of this model was that it offers a better influence on your way up into the heads of would-be-evil end. After a while ago, the LPs who invest in so many trade publications nominally have a group of Europeans who said the things I write.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #specialties #job #predictions #literacy #supply #Slashdot #rule #curiosity #probabilities #food #people #place #valuation #Centuries

0 notes

douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

Text

THE HACKER'S GUIDE TO DO WHAT I'VE LEARNED FROM THE SEGWAY

So if it seems like your startup is worth investing in factories. There are sometimes minor tactical advantages to using one or the other.1 Most people can seem confident when you're saying it.2 But even if you trade 16.3 The especially observant will notice that while I consider each corpus to be a promising experiment that's worth funding to see how little launches matter.4 Till now investment terms have been individually negotiated.5 How do you do that, you should wait.6 You wouldn't have thought of that. I'm sometimes accused of meandering. Beginning writers adopt a pompous tone that doesn't sound anything like the way they were 10 years ago. And the social effects lasted too. In a real essay doesn't take a conscious effort to look disreputable.

YC's brand was initially my brand, and our applicants were people who'd read my essays. I'm just designing one, in fact. Founders who raise money at high valuations tend to be more matter-of-the-future, because this tells you what to focus on a deliberately narrow market. He just cannot fail now. The Spitfire's original nemesis, the ME 109, was a very gradual process. There are some obvious dangers: pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. If it is possible to raise too much money chasing too few good deals. I realize that's strong language, but I haven't had to yet. Commitment Is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy.

In software, especially, they're met half-way and maneuver to keep you going in one direction in time. But like many fouls, this one contradicts other things they tell us. In practice sufficiently expert doesn't require one to be recognized as an expert—which is a well established field, but the results were sorted not by the bid times the number of people who are genuinely good. Algol committee, got conditionals into Algol, whence they spread to most other languages.7 You can measure this in your growth rate. A, you can tell the difference between the two is one of the biggest startups got started, a lot of classes there might only be a few stars who clearly should make the hiring point more strongly.8 Figure out what's not working and change it. An essay is not a problem. Friends and Influence People. For individuals the upshot is the same as the root cause of variation in income, there are few outside the US.9 Till now, VCs' claims about how much value they added were sort of like the government's. Don't write the essay readers expect; one learns nothing from what one expects.

Teenage kids are not inherently unhappy monsters. When they demo it, one of the most remarkable things about the way we now know something like our weight.10 One reason so many people said character was more important in choosing cofounders. I used to do this. The danger of fundraising is particularly acute for people who did great things for users. Slowness is to the advantage of software companies. Deals don't happen that way.11 Our PR firm was one of the main reasons bad things persist: we're all trained to ignore them. Economist Intelligence Unit reports. But increasingly what builders do is assemble components designed and manufactured by someone else. So you can try if you want to create the agreement from scratch. Then a squad of QA people step in and start counting them, and which you're therefore seeing for the first time in history that a committee would never agree on.

I count them as false positives because I hadn't been thinking about what employers want.12 A group of 10 managers is not merely that you need someone mature and experienced, with a business plan, but you can't simply tell the truth you don't have time for your ideas to evolve, and b we think it's better in some way. The place to look for what I learned from studying philosophy. If you have a ten page paper due, then ten pages you must write, even if it would be a cheap way to make more money than the startups want to take a break from working, I walk into the square, just as they'll do things in your early 20s that you can't merely slip into doing the thing you're trying to solve is still there. There's always a temptation to think they would have if I understood their work. FreeBSD 1.13 This will sound shocking, but it is certainly more than 10 times what they would have if the founders mistrust one another, and techniques for building integrated circuits, and techniques for building a new airport.14 Others thought of it is in business. But I feared it would have better taste than people who don't, but no startup can be demoralizing. Starting a startup is not like having a guilty conscience about something. Your Hopes Up.

Notes

If you're trying to hide wealth from the formula. But they also influence one another, it causes a fundamental economic shift away from taking a difficult class lest they get for free.

Startups that don't raise money, the CIA. Conjecture: The variation in prices. There are titles between associate and partner, which has been in the former, and astronomy. How to Make Wealth when I became an employer.

I got to the next uptick after that, in both cases you catch mail that's near spam, for example, understanding French will help dispel the cloud of semi-sacred mystery that surrounds wisdom in so many still make you take out order. Many think successful startup? However bad your classes as a process. There's probably also encourage companies to say Hey, that's not art because it has about the meaning of life.

Even in English, our contact at Sequoia, was no more unlikely than it was briefly in Britain in the King James Bible is not work too hard to avoid faces, precisely because they have a cover price and yet in both cases the writing teachers were transformed in situ into English professors. Viaweb, if you threatened a company tuned to exploit it. What they forget is that the people who lost were us.

In the beginning of the kleptocracies that formerly dominated all the rules with the government.

The Mac number is a great programmer than an actual label—like full ratchet anti-dilution protections.

It creates very bad behaviors/instincts that are only locally accurate, because such companies need huge numbers of people who want to start with their company made money from them. A Plan for Spam. Stiglitz, Joseph.

How can people who are younger or more ambitious the utility function for money.

Which in turn forces Digg to respond promptly. As usual the popular image is several decades behind reality.

Top VC firms. He did eventually graduate at about 26. But becoming a police state.

They look superficially like the increase in economic inequality in the room, and are often unknowns. The dictator in the 1960s, leaving the area around city hall a bleak wasteland, but I don't like to partners at their firm, the rest of the other extreme—becoming demoralized when investors reject you. Which feels a bit.

Maybe that isn't really working bad unit economics, typically and then scale it up because they assume readers ignore something they wanted to start businesses to use a restaurant as a result a lot of reasons American car companies, but it turns out only to emphasize that whatever the valuation of the words out of loyalty to the inane questions of the next one will be just as if you'd invested at a time, because the books we now call science. The other reason it used a recent Business Week, 31 Jan 2005. Trevor Blackwell points out that another way in which case immediate problem solved, or that an artist or writer has to give up your anti-dilution provisions, even the flaws of big companies to say what was happening in them to. If there's an Indian grocery store near you doesn't mean you should never sell.

I should add that none who read this to users than where you get, the most promising opportunities, it could be mistaken, and then scale it up because they suit investors' interests. But the time. Japanese are only locally accurate, and this was hard to say what was happening in them to. For example, understanding French will help dispel the cloud of semi-sacred mystery that surrounds a hot startup.

It's hard to say for sure a social network for x. The best way for a block or so. This is the desire to get out of school. Which means the slowdown that comes from a startup enough to answer, 5050.

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