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max-levchin · 10 months

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Shamir Secret Sharing

It’s 3am. Paul, the head of PayPal database administration carefully enters his elaborate passphrase at a keyboard in a darkened cubicle of 1840 Embarcadero Road in East Palo Alto, for the fifth time. He hits Return. The green-on-black console window instantly displays one line of text: “Sorry, one or more wrong passphrases. Can’t reconstruct the key. Goodbye.”

There is nerd pandemonium all around us. James, our recently promoted VP of Engineering, just climbed the desk at a nearby cubicle, screaming: “Guys, if we can’t get this key the right way, we gotta start brute-forcing it ASAP!” It’s gallows humor – he knows very well that brute-forcing such a key will take millions of years, and it’s already 6am on the East Coast – the first of many “Why is PayPal down today?” articles is undoubtedly going to hit CNET shortly. Our single-story cubicle-maze office is buzzing with nervous activity of PayPalians who know they can’t help but want to do something anyway. I poke my head up above the cubicle wall to catch a glimpse of someone trying to stay inside a giant otherwise empty recycling bin on wheels while a couple of Senior Software Engineers are attempting to accelerate the bin up to dangerous speeds in the front lobby. I lower my head and try to stay focused. “Let’s try it again, this time with three different people” is the best idea I can come up with, even though I am quite sure it will not work.

It doesn’t.

The key in question decrypts PayPal’s master payment credential table – also known as the giant store of credit card and bank account numbers. Without access to payment credentials, PayPal doesn’t really have a business per se, seeing how we are supposed to facilitate payments, and that’s really hard to do if we no longer have access to the 100+ million credit card numbers our users added over the last year of insane growth.

This is the story of a catastrophic software bug I briefly introduced into the PayPal codebase that almost cost us the company (or so it seemed, in the moment.) I’ve told this story a handful of times, always swearing the listeners to secrecy, and surprisingly it does not appear to have ever been written down before. 20+ years since the incident, it now appears instructive and a little funny, rather than merely extremely embarrassing.

Before we get back to that fateful night, we have to go back another decade. In the summer of 1991, my family and I moved to Chicago from Kyiv, Ukraine. While we had just a few hundred dollars between the five of us, we did have one secret advantage: science fiction fans.

My dad was a highly active member of Zoryaniy Shlyah – Kyiv’s possibly first (and possibly only, at the time) sci-fi fan club – the name means “Star Trek” in Ukrainian, unsurprisingly. He translated some Stansilaw Lem (of Solaris and Futurological Congress fame) from Polish to Russian in the early 80s and was generally considered a coryphaeus at ZSh.

While USSR was more or less informationally isolated behind the digital Iron Curtain until the late ‘80s, by 1990 or so, things like FidoNet wriggled their way into the Soviet computing world, and some members of ZSh were now exchanging electronic mail with sci-fi fans of the free world.

The vaguely exotic news of two Soviet refugee sci-fi fans arriving in Chicago was transmitted to the local fandom before we had even boarded the PanAm flight that took us across the Atlantic [1]. My dad (and I, by extension) was soon adopted by some kind Chicago science fiction geeks, a few of whom became close friends over the years, though that’s a story for another time.

A year or so after the move to Chicago, our new sci-fi friends invited my dad to a birthday party for a rising star of the local fandom, one Bruce Schneier. We certainly did not know Bruce or really anyone at the party, but it promised good food, friendly people, and probably filk. My role was to translate, as my dad spoke limited English at the time.

I had fallen desperately in love with secret codes and cryptography about a year before we left Ukraine. Walking into Bruce’s library during the house tour (this was a couple years before Applied Cryptography was published and he must have been deep in research) felt like walking into Narnia.

I promptly abandoned my dad to fend for himself as far as small talk and canapés were concerned, and proceeded to make a complete ass out of myself by brazenly asking the host for a few sheets of paper and a pencil. Having been obliged, I pulled a half dozen cryptography books from the shelves and went to work trying to copy down some answers to a few long-held questions on the library floor. After about two hours of scribbling alone like a man possessed, I ran out of paper and decided to temporarily rejoin the party.

On the living room table, Bruce had stacks of copies of his fanzine Ramblings. Thinking I could use the blank sides of the pages to take more notes, I grabbed a printout and was about to quietly return to copying the original S-box values for DES when my dad spotted me from across the room and demanded I help him socialize. The party wrapped soon, and our friends drove us home.

The printout I grabbed was not a Ramblings issue. It was a short essay by Bruce titled Sharing Secrets Among Friends, essentially a humorous explanation of Shamir Secret Sharing.

Say you want to make sure that something really really important and secret (a nuclear weapon launch code, a database encryption key, etc) cannot be known or used by a single (friendly) actor, but becomes available, if at least n people from a group of m choose to do it. Think two on-duty officers (from a cadre of say 5) turning keys together to get ready for a nuke launch.

The idea (proposed by Adi Shamir – the S of RSA! – in 1979) is as simple as it is beautiful.

Let’s call the secret we are trying to split among m people K.

First, create a totally random polynomial that looks like: y(x) = C0 * x^(n-1) + C1 * x^(n-2) + C2 * x^(n-3) ….+ K. “Create” here just means generate random coefficients C. Now, for every person in your trusted group of m, evaluate the polynomial for some randomly chosen Xm and hand them their corresponding (Xm,Ym) each.

If we have n of these points together, we can use Lagrange interpolating polynomial to reconstruct the coefficients – and evaluate the original polynomial at x=0, which conveniently gives us y(0) = K, the secret. Beautiful. I still had the printout with me, years later, in Palo Alto.

It should come as no surprise that during my time as CTO PayPal engineering had an absolute obsession with security. No firewall was one too many, no multi-factor authentication scheme too onerous, etc. Anything that was worth anything at all was encrypted at rest.

To decrypt, a service would get the needed data from its database table, transmit it to a special service named cryptoserv (an original SUN hardware running Solaris sitting on its own, especially tightly locked-down network) and a special service running only there would perform the decryption and send back the result.

Decryption request rate was monitored externally and on cryptoserv, and if there were too many requests, the whole thing was to shut down and purge any sensitive data and keys from its memory until manually restarted.

It was this manual restart that gnawed at me. At launch, a bunch of configuration files containing various critical decryption keys were read (decrypted by another key derived from one manually-entered passphrase) and loaded into the memory to perform future cryptographic services.

Four or five of us on the engineering team knew the passphrase and could restart cryptoserv if it crashed or simply had to have an upgrade. What if someone performed a little old-fashioned rubber-hose cryptanalysis and literally beat the passphrase out of one of us? The attacker could theoretically get access to these all-important master keys. Then stealing the encrypted-at-rest database of all our users’ secrets could prove useful – they could decrypt them in the comfort of their underground supervillain lair.

I needed to eliminate this threat.

Shamir Secret Sharing was the obvious choice – beautiful, simple, perfect (you can in fact prove that if done right, it offers perfect secrecy.) I decided on a 3-of-8 scheme and implemented it in pure POSIX C for portability over a few days, and tested it for several weeks on my Linux desktop with other engineers.

Step 1: generate the polynomial coefficients for 8 shard-holders.

Step 2: compute the key shards (x0, y0) through (x7, y7)

Step 3: get each shard-holder to enter a long, secure passphrase to encrypt the shard

Step 4: write out the 8 shard files, encrypted with their respective passphrases.

And to reconstruct:

Step 1: pick any 3 shard files.

Step 2: ask each of the respective owners to enter their passphrases.

Step 3: decrypt the shard files.

Step 4: reconstruct the polynomial, evaluate it for x=0 to get the key.

Step 5: launch cryptoserv with the key.

One design detail here is that each shard file also stored a message authentication code (a keyed hash) of its passphrase to make sure we could identify when someone mistyped their passphrase. These tests ran hundreds and hundreds of times, on both Linux and Solaris, to make sure I did not screw up some big/little-endianness issue, etc. It all worked perfectly.

A month or so later, the night of the key splitting party was upon us. We were finally going to close out the last vulnerability and be secure. Feeling as if I was about to turn my fellow shard-holders into cymeks, I gathered them around my desktop as PayPal’s front page began sporting the “We are down for maintenance and will be back soon” message around midnight.

The night before, I solemnly generated the new master key and securely copied it to cryptoserv. Now, while “Push It” by Salt-n-Pepa blared from someone’s desktop speakers, the automated deployment script copied shard files to their destination.

While each of us took turns carefully entering our elaborate passphrases at a specially selected keyboard, Paul shut down the main database and decrypted the payment credentials table, then ran the script to re-encrypt with the new key. Some minutes later, the database was running smoothly again, with the newly encrypted table, without incident.

All that was left was to restore the master key from its shards and launch the new, even more secure cryptographic service.

The three of us entered our passphrases… to be met with the error message I haven’t seen in weeks: “Sorry, one or more wrong passphrases. Can’t reconstruct the key. Goodbye.” Surely one of us screwed up typing, no big deal, we’ll do it again. No dice. No dice – again and again, even after we tried numerous combinations of the three people necessary to decrypt.

Minutes passed, confusion grew, tension rose rapidly.

There was nothing to do, except to hit rewind – to grab the master key from the file still sitting on cryptoserv, split it again, generate new shards, choose passphrases, and get it done. Not a great feeling to have your first launch go wrong, but not a huge deal either. It will all be OK in a minute or two.

A cursory look at the master key file date told me that no, it wouldn’t be OK at all. The file sitting on cryptoserv wasn’t from last night, it was created just a few minutes ago. During the Salt-n-Pepa-themed push from stage, we overwrote the master key file with the stage version. Whatever key that was, it wasn’t the one I generated the day before: only one copy existed, the one I copied to cryptoserv from my computer the night before. Zero copies existed now. Not only that, the push script appears to have also wiped out the backup of the old key, so the database backups we have encrypted with the old key are likely useless.

Sitrep: we have 8 shard files that we apparently cannot use to restore the master key and zero master key backups. The database is running but its secret data cannot be accessed.

I will leave it to your imagination to conjure up what was going through my head that night as I stared into the black screen willing the shards to work. After half a decade of trying to make something of myself (instead of just going to work for Microsoft or IBM after graduation) I had just destroyed my first successful startup in the most spectacular fashion.

Still, the idea of “what if we all just continuously screwed up our passphrases” swirled around my brain. It was an easy check to perform, thanks to the included MACs. I added a single printf() debug statement into the shard reconstruction code and instead of printing out a summary error of “one or more…” the code now showed if the passphrase entered matched the authentication code stored in the shard file.

I compiled the new code directly on cryptoserv in direct contravention of all reasonable security practices – what did I have to lose? Entering my own passphrase, I promptly got “bad passphrase” error I just added to the code. Well, that’s just great – I knew my passphrase was correct, I had it written down on a post-it note I had planned to rip up hours ago.

Another person, same error. Finally, the last person, JK, entered his passphrase. No error. The key still did not reconstruct correctly, I got the “Goodbye”, but something worked. I turned to the engineer and said, “what did you just type in that worked?”

After a second of embarrassed mumbling, he admitted to choosing “a$$word” as his passphrase. The gall! I asked everyone entrusted with the grave task of relaunching crytposerv to pick really hard to guess passphrases, and this guy…?! Still, this was something -- it worked. But why?!

I sprinted around the half-lit office grabbing the rest of the shard-holders demanding they tell me their passphrases. Everyone else had picked much lengthier passages of text and numbers. I manually tested each and none decrypted correctly. Except for the a$$word. What was it…

A lightning bolt hit me and I sprinted back to my own cubicle in the far corner, unlocked the screen and typed in “man getpass” on the command line, while logging into cryptoserv in another window and doing exactly the same thing there. I saw exactly what I needed to see.

Today, should you try to read up the programmer’s manual (AKA the man page) on getpass, you will find it has been long declared obsolete and replaced with a more intelligent alternative in nearly all flavors of modern Unix.

But back then, if you wanted to collect some information from the keyboard without printing what is being typed in onto the screen and remain POSIX-compliant, getpass did the trick. Other than a few standard file manipulation system calls, getpass was the only operating system service call I used, to ensure clean portability between Linux and Solaris.

Except it wasn’t completely clean.

Plain as day, there it was: the manual pages were identical, except Solaris had a “special feature”: any passphrase entered that was longer than 8 characters long was automatically reduced to that length anyway. (Who needs long passwords, amiright?!)

I screamed like a wounded animal. We generated the key on my Linux desktop and entered our novel-length passphrases right here. Attempting to restore them on a Solaris machine where they were being clipped down to 8 characters long would never work. Except, of course, for a$$word. That one was fine.

The rest was an exercise in high-speed coding and some entirely off-protocol file moving. We reconstructed the master key on my machine (all of our passphrases worked fine), copied the file to the Solaris-running cryptoserv, re-split it there (with very short passphrases), reconstructed it successfully, and PayPal was up and running again like nothing ever happened.

By the time our unsuspecting colleagues rolled back into the office I was starting to doze on the floor of my cubicle and that was that. When someone asked me later that day why we took so long to bring the site back up, I’d simply respond with “eh, shoulda RTFM.”

RTFM indeed.

P.S. A few hours later, John, our General Counsel, stopped by my cubicle to ask me something. The day before I apparently gave him a sealed envelope and asked him to store it in his safe for 24 hours without explaining myself. He wanted to know what to do with it now that 24 hours have passed.

Ha. I forgot all about it, but in a bout of “what if it doesn’t work” paranoia, I printed out the base64-encoded master key when we had generated it the night before, stuffed it into an envelope, and gave it to John for safekeeping. We shredded it together without opening and laughed about what would have never actually been a company-ending event.

P.P.S. If you are thinking of all the ways this whole SSS design is horribly insecure (it had some real flaws for sure) and plan to poke around PayPal to see if it might still be there, don’t. While it served us well for a few years, this was the very first thing eBay required us to turn off after the acquisition. Pretty sure it’s back to a single passphrase now.

Notes:

1: a member of Chicagoland sci-fi fan community let me know that the original news of our move to the US was delivered to them via a posted letter, snail mail, not FidoNet email!

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newtafterdark · 10 months

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I found this old CD-ROM from 1997 by pure chance! It just arrived in the mail too, so I haven't had a chance to put it into my CD drive yet, but I am excited!!

This is a CD-ROM specifically for the parents, but judging by the booklet it seems to also have a few bits of extra content on it that is not found on the official software?

Important note: This was not made by the company that made FinFin, but a German company unaffiliated with them. That being said, it has an ISBN number, price tag and everything! You could've bought this easily back in the day!

I plan on fully translating the booklet & whatever is on the disk itself into English and post it all on here. Also, I'll try to get all of the files from the disk and put it up somewhere for everyone to download for free!

#finfin #fin fin #wayneradiotv #lemme throw that tag in here as well since most folks know of FinFin because of Wayne #I might also get in contact with the person who runs the un-official FinFin wiki and see if they want the files for the archive as well!#If there is an actual executable program on the disk I'll stream it to you all on Twitch #everyone needs to see more of FinFin #Newt's ramblings #the book of finfin

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izicodes · 4 months

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Saturday 20th January 2024

Someone asked me earlier this week a question that I didn't really deeped about beforehand. Basically, I was stuck answering it and it boggled my mind ever since because it stuck to me how I didn't think about this earlier on?

"What are your career goals?"

Since I started learning programming and Web Development back in 2020, I just thought "Oh getting a proper job in Tech would be great!"... but now I got it, it's like okay what now? Do I just continue this, learn new things, and just stick to this position?

I had to answer this person straight away for specific reasons but I said "Maybe being a Senior Software Engineer would be nice 🤷🏾‍♀️" and yeah I'm sure having that title would be great for my Dad to boast to his family and mates about "Oh my daughter is a Senior Software Engineer~! 😎", which honestly I don't mind as he's happy, but what else? What do I actually want to work towards now - short and long-term?

But making short and long-term goals is very important. For some people, this helps them have a path for them to work towards. I am one of those people because that's what I did to get where I am now in my programming journey, but I didn't think THIS far as to what next after I got the job I wanted. I came up with some ideas but I might work on them a bit:

Senior Software Engineer be nice?

Whatever a CTO actually does? (long-term)

Be proficient enough in Web Development technologies to teach others properly maybe? Especially the younger generation (HELP I tried teaching my sister coding and she called me a nerd...)

Work on my own web app product thingy?? and sell?? and earn money?? (confused about how I would do that though)

Venture out to Game / App Development maybe? (long-term)

Ability to work anywhere internationally (I have other goals where I would have to visit countries so would also like to work in Tech as I complete those side-quests)

Right now I am comfortable working FOR someone / company - I'm the type that SOMEHOW I become a CEO I still would work than be a no work/meetings/travel to conferences type of CEO if that makes sense

Help other companies temporarily on Web Dev stuff (free or paid, I don't mind - just want experience, innit?)

Work in another country maybe? That doesn't speak English though cause that's cheating (to me, I like challenges and language learning is a really good one)

But maybe now I will have something to work towards, but I will soon convert this bunch of ideas to a roadmap a bit~! 🤔

Thank you for reading and hope this makes you think about your own goals in terms of career/work/profession~!

#xc: side note post #codeblr #coding #progblr #programming #studyblr #studying #computer science #tech #study inspiration #career advice post #career tips #career advice #career

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pinkpastelcalesti · 5 months

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LANDSCAPING LOVE || Bakugou Katsuki x Reader || Chapter I.

SUMMARY -> Tired of bouncing back and forth between the U.S. and Japan after graduating college, you’ve finally secured the career of your dreams: You’re Japan’s first heroics cartographer, a title bestowed upon you due to your quirk and specialty, that creates geographic maps for hero agencies across the country. While your work is highly respected and sought after, you’re known for a more niche reason among your coworkers at the Dynamight Agency: the food you make is fucking amazing. When Dynamight himself inevitably gets word that you’re coming for his cooking title on his own turf, chaos ensues and you find yourself competing against your boss for not only best chef, but also to win over his heart.

CONTENT/WARNINGS -> Pro hero AU, agency reader, reader with a quirk, fem/AFAB reader, reader is originally from America, reader is bilingual (English and Japanese), strangers (more like coworkers that don’t get a chance to speak much) to friends to lovers, fluff & chaos, minimal angst, suggestive humor.

LENGTH -> 7.9K

MASTERLIST

Running late for your first agency project presentation was not on your bingo card this year.

Because of nerves and the constant fear that you were going to tumble over your words during your presentation, you pulled a semi-all nighter and stayed up until 3 a.m. rehearsing your slides and your speech for the Dynamight Agency’s meeting on your current geographic project.

You’ve been working for the company for 7 months now, and this project is the first large-scale assignment you’d been given since you started. You’ve worked on smaller, personal projects for Dynamight and other pro heroes, but this project was your pride and joy, seeing as it was requested by Dynamight himself.

Your quirk, landscape, allows for you to create an entire mental map, in very graphic detail, of the area around you within five miles. This includes the visualization and relative scale of buildings, sidewalks, roads, and alleyways. Your quirk works when you place your bare hands on the ground, which sort of sucks because the city’s grounds weren’t exactly the cleanest. In order for you to utilize your quirk correctly, you grew up practicing cartography of all sorts. One could say your quirk opened up doors to many different career paths, such as engineering or urban planning, but you had decided early on that the best way you would be able to help people is by utilizing your maps for heroes.

Heroes use maps for everything, and you were going to profit off of that no matter what. Your quirk could expand past the five mile radius if you kept bouncing around to different areas, drew their maps from your memory, and combined all maps to create one whole map of a specific city or town. During your time in undergrad, you majored in and graduated (Summa cum laude, may you add) with a degree in geography, your main focus of research being urban cartography. Heroics cartography didn’t exist, so you figured the next best thing would be urban areas.

Your undergraduate research consisted of said urban cartography, and because of your academic standing, you were offered a study-abroad program for geographers that was located in Tokyo, which you took without a second’s hesitation. You always dreamed that you’d be helping U.S. heroes, however, during your time in Tokyo, you fell in love with the entirety of Japan and the vast landscapes you got to visit and draw. Your research professor oversaw your projects, which consisted of city maps, data collection, and utilizing GIS software to create digital maps that could be used for multiple different areas, whether that be infrastructure planning, evacuation routes, or heroics, your main focus.

Your current job as a heroics cartographer is a first in Japan. While it’s not that well-known that you’re the first person to ever have such a title, the pro heroes around you seem to understand its importance. Your job at Dynamight’s Agency allows you to create maps for Dynamight and his sidekicks to use for patrol routes, monitoring high crime areas across the city, and visualizing the areas where property damage occurs most. Not only do you work for Dynamight, but your skills have been requested and used by other pros across the city, including but not limited to Deku, Shouto, and Red Riot.

You really got into this career out of sheer luck and fate. While you were drawing up maps for the city during your third year of undergrad, pro hero Red Riot had reached out to you after he accidentally destroyed one of your maps at the post office in Musutafu during a fight with a villain. He’d picked up the broken display and noticed your name in the corner and contacted you through your professor. Initially pissed off because you’d just finished that map literally a week and a half prior to its destruction, you gave him grace and told him you’d be in touch with the post office to create a new one.

He ended up paying you back for the damage, and upon realizing how detailed your maps were, inquired about your skills in cartography. It was quite jarring, sitting in Red Riot’s agency at the ripe age of 20, sweat dripping down your back through your blouse as one of the top heroes in the nation asked if you’d be able to draw up a map of a large electrical facility for him to use for an upcoming mission. He’d apparently been trying to find an up-to-date map of the interior, but had no luck. Within a week, you were being driven in a fancy company car to the facility so you could use your quirk and recreate the building’s interior infrastructure.

After you’d created the map for him, Red Riot, or Eijiro, as you now get to call him, had asked that you look into working for the pros after you graduated. He was under the impression that you were actually a Japanese university student, so you had to break the news that you actually worked in the U.S. Upon realizing, Eijiro explained that he would be more than happy to get you in contact with plenty of heroes that could use your work and give you a job abroad for almost double the pay you’d be receiving if you stayed in America.

Turns out that keeping in contact with a top hero in Japan that destroyed weeks of your work within 3 minutes of a fight was a good idea after all. Eijiro was the one who ultimately hooked you up with a job under the roof of Dynamight’s agency. Once you’d graduated, you decided that you’d work in the U.S. for a little while longer to build up your experience and resume before you decided to go abroad.

You ended up staying in America for two more years after graduation, traveling across the country and working with urban geographers in cities like Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, New York City, and Washington D.C. During this time, you were given full travel privileges to fly to Japan and help Red Riot and his pro hero allies develop brand new patrol map routes across different cities. You loved this part of your job most, and after finishing up your second year post-grad, decided to make it official and asked Eijiro if the job position was still on the table.

He would go on to give you one of the prettiest smiles you’d ever seen and excitedly tell you that yes, it was always available to you. Being friends with Eijiro meant not only a once-in-a-lifetime career connection, but it also meant realizing your potential early on.

You absolutely adore the work you do for Dynamight and his peers and wouldn’t trade it for the world. However, if you don’t hurry the hell up and get to your building in the next 7 minutes, your dream job might as well go poof. Dynamight absolutely hates when people are late, and you’ve had the pleasure of watching him blow up on company execs for showing up 15 minutes late and “wasting his fuckin’ time.”

Working for a man like Bakugou Katsuki was definitely a wakeup call the first two months you were at his agency. Turns out that while he approved your position that would inevitably change the way cartography was viewed in the modern world of heroes, Bakugou didn’t exactly care to look into what you specialized in, or so you thought. You really hadn’t had a chance to actually speak with him aside from filling him and his manager in on upcoming projects and maps you were in the process of making. After 7 months of working for the agency, you’d spoken to your boss a whopping four times, all lasting under three minutes.

This presentation you were about to give is the first one where Dynamight would be present, and fuck if you weren’t about to shit your pants from not only nerves, but fear that you might not get in the door on time for its start.

Racing past the front desk and haphazardly greeting the security guards before flashing your badge to be let through the agency gates blocking visitors from reaching the elevators, you managed to press the button for the remaining elevator on the ground floor that was being sent up.

You probably looked like an absolute atrocity in front of your fellow coworkers, with windswept hair and panting in the virtually silent elevator, save for the whirring of the machine as it took you up to the fourteenth floor of the building.

As soon as the doors of the elevator opened, you booked it down the hall to the meeting room, with 43 seconds to spare before the clock hit 9 a.m. sharp. “So sorry I’m running late! I was supposed to be here setting up earlier but some big stupid bitch tried hijacking the bus I was going to take-” you began in a rush, placing your bag and coat on your chair in the large room with a round table full of your team members and other coworkers from the analytics department.

Your team member Carl, one of only three others in the cartography department at the agency, hit your foot from under the table while calling out your name. “You’re speaking in English, we have no clue what you’re saying,” he whispered, with you quickly muttering out an apology. “Shit— sorry about that— slips my mind to switch back and forth sometimes. Apologies for not being here sooner,” you bowed to the ten workers in the room, suddenly realizing Dynamight himself nor his manager had shown up yet. Thank god, you let out a small breath of relief.

“Is Dynamight going to be in soon or should I begin without him?” You asked as your other team member Kanako grabbed your computer out of your bag and plugged it into the projector while you began pulling out your speaker notes.

“Said he’d be in soon, had to catch up with Red Riot about an ongoing police chase outside the city,” your last team member Naomi spoke out loud. Naomi was your resident work bff, and was also the one that regularly reached out to Dynamight for you to inquire about starting new projects or letting him know of recent updates. She honestly didn’t even like having to email her own boss that much, but she was more than happy to run into his manager and talk about the highs and lows of cartography if it meant staring at the poor man like he was on the lunch menu.

“Well that at least gives us some time to set it up. Sorry you all had to wait on me to get here to pull up the slides.” You felt guilty that your team had to sit in awkward silence with a department that rarely ever interacted with your own for probably a solid 20 minutes, but at least you got to the room before Dynamight so you didn’t risk a verbal ass beating in front of everyone.

As soon as you’d finished laying out the hand-drawn maps of your project out on the round table, Dynamight himself opened the large oak door and walked into the meeting room, glancing at you for a split second before sitting in the chair that was opposite of you, towards the back of the room and for him to be able to see everyone clearly. His manager trailed in behind him, scolding him for not slowing down and hearing his run down of how the meeting would go. Dynamight only waved his hand in the air at his manager before casting his sharp gaze back to you.

You felt a twinge of anxiety race up your body. You really hadn’t been expecting him to come to this meeting until Naomi filled you in two weeks ago that he wanted to attend. Guess it meant he actually did pay attention to what he hired you and your team for. Regardless, you bowed to him and began speaking, not waiting for him to tell you to start, as he wasn’t one that gave directions to grown adults.

“Thank you for joining us today, Dynamight. The project that my team and I have been working on recently is one you formally requested for us to start three months ago,” you clicked the presentation remote that flipped to the next screen on your slideshow. “As you requested, the cartography department created digital and physical choropleth maps of the districts within Musutafu and their relative crime rates within the past year.” You pointed towards the round desk. “The top map is the same as the map you see on our slideshow,” you spoke in a quick, easy-to-understand manner and glanced at everyone’s faces to gauge their reactions throughout your presentation speech.

The maps that Dynamight had asked for were so that he would be able to see if his patrol routes needed to be changed in order to monitor areas of Musutafu that were still unresponsive to patrols by heroes in terms of crime decreasing. If there was one thing your boss prided himself on, it was his patrol routes and his ability to cut crime and villain attack rates in his designated areas in half. However, recently there was an uptick in petty crime rates, and in order for him to not get shit on by the public for a “lack of appropriate response,” he put in a formal request for your department to create maps relating to recent data changes in crime rates across the city.

You and your team were more than happy to fulfill this request, as it meant working with real, recent data and meant you got to visit neighboring hero agencies and compare their patrol route crime rates with Dynamight’s. Any excuse to get out of your department’s office on the fifth floor was a godsend because your back really couldn’t handle anymore work days where you were hunched over the large workbench mapping out the city for hours at a time.

As you continued on with your presentation, you periodically glanced towards Dynamight to check his facial expressions for any annoyance or confusion at your maps. Seeing none, you internally LETS FUCKING GOOOO’d because you knew it meant at the very least that if he was understanding the maps, everyone else most likely could too.

Once you reached the last slide, you made a small noise of dissatisfaction. “When we took a look at certain districts, we did notice that the victims of the crimes committed were young women who regularly walked home by themselves later at night. They seemed to be around their early 20s to their late 30s.” Naomi nodded at you, a silent way of saying to continue on.

“I’m sure that you don’t like when many do this, and forgive me if I’m stepping out of bounds,” you began, feeling your hands sweat. “But please do take this information seriously. I know you’re a hardworking hero, so I trust your skills. But I sincerely hope the next time I check the data that the rates will have fallen. People deserve to walk home without fearing for their lives.”

Dynamight’s eyes seemed to bore into your skin, wanting to bark a clipped response back, but he managed to nod silently. You didn’t want to outright mention you yourself were scared of the trend in crime since you fit the statistic, often walking home by yourself late after all-day shifts, but it seems like he’d caught on by the look on your face.

You wrapped up the presentation and answered a couple different questions that the analytics department had about the data collection and resources you used. After your coworkers began packing their bags to leave, you noticed that Dynamight had gotten up out of his chair and walked over to you, who currently stood beside your bag, closing all the tabs you had open that were starting to overheat your little computer.

Glancing up, you nearly choked on your spit at the proximity between the two of you. He was in his winter hero suit, with the black turtleneck beneath his chest piece being pulled tight against his arms, making his muscles pop out unnecessarily in your face, but you definitely were not complaining. Bim..g… muscles… you thought, trying not to stare too long.

“Y-Yes, Dynamight sir?” You managed to sputter out, all too aware of your team members looking at the two of you now. Dynamight managed to grunt in acknowledgement before speaking. “Wanted to ask if you could make one of your fuckin’ maps for Deku. The shithead keeps begging me to ask, he wants one to hang up in his office of his patrol routes.”

Your eyes widened in surprise. Of course you would make him one, but you didn’t expect for Dynamight to ask you directly. Typically he forced his manager Atsuno to write out emails of requests he had. You managed to nod eagerly to him. “Yeah, no problem. I can email him later and ask about details. Thanks for letting me know.”

Dynamight only grunted once more before turning on his heel and leaving the room, leaving Atsuno to give chase to his boss as he bowed quickly at you and gave his appreciation for your presentation before leaving the room himself.

The only ones left in the room now were your teammates, and all it took was one glance between the four of you before you all let out a holler in excitement. “We did it! You did incredible up there girl,” Naomi slung her arm around you as you pulled her in for a hug. “I was shitting bricks the whole time, I don’t think I realized how intense Dynamight’s stare can be.”

Kanako and Carl high fived you as you all made your way to the elevator to take back down to your department. “Our first big project presentation and we didn’t get screamed at for a minuscule error? I think we deserve to celebrate tonight,” Carl wiggled his eyebrows towards you and Kanako, with Naomi agreeing excitedly.

“Bar or at someone’s place? Should we drink? Oh we’re totally drinking.” You couldn’t help but smile at your coworkers beside you. You were so grateful to have them beside you while you’d adjusted to the agency life the past couple months. All three of them had come from a specialized area in the analytics department that related to gathering information data on the public, which included things like crime rates and damage assessments.

When your job had been approved, Atsuno told you that you’d be working in a new department in your own section within the agency with some people taken from the analytics department, taking you off guard. You’d surely thought you’d be thrown into analytics too, seeing how geography and cartography could squeeze into it somehow.

Meeting your team for the first time, you were more than grateful to have them work with you as you’d expected to be alone in your department for a while. You helped walk them through the basics of cartography and digital mapmaking using current software, quickly realizing the talent each one had for different areas. While you were technically the head of your department, you felt like everyone pulled their weight equally and deserved to be held on the same level.

“We can go out or I can make us something,” you spoke out loud as the elevator dinged open. “I know you guys have been bugging me about cooking since I bring my own lunches everyday.” Naomi cheered beside you, agreeing as Carl and Kanako hummed in thought. “I’ll pitch in for ingredients if Carl and Naomi buy the alcohol,” Kanako said, casting a glance to her coworkers that were chanting, American food! American food! Over and over again to one another.

All in agreement, you quickly got off on the fifth floor and entered your department room. Located towards the right hand corner in the back of the large office floor, the department itself wasn’t noticeable to the general eye unless you went looking. You each had respective offices lining a small back hallway, with the room at the very end of it being your workshop that expanded into a large open-area space containing desktops, workbenches, and cartography supplies strewn around the place. Atsuno had been kind enough to order a custom nameplate to go above the awning of you and your team’s hall, with Heroics Cartography Department written out in beautiful gold lettering, contrasting nicely against the cool grey paint of the wall.

“Let’s lock in on the rest of the requests and orders today so we can leave at a decent time,” you said, closing the door to the workshop as everyone spoke in agreement. Carl called out your name as you were booting up the desktops to pull up emails from your clients. “We doing hard liquor shit tonight or going with something like wine? Need to pair it well with whatever you’re making.”

You hummed in thought. “We could definitely do cocktails. I was thinking about making gumbo since it’s still cold outside.” You grabbed your phone that was situated in your bag and opened up the Notes app to create your grocery store list. Luckily Japan kept up with their spices and typically had an American section in larger stores where you could grab some of the spice mixes needed for your food.

“Make it spicy as fuck girl, I wanna feel tears pouring out of my eyes to your incredible cooking,” Naomi said, sending you a dreamy look. “If I make it too spicy, Carl’s gonna shit his pants. We all know this man can’t handle spice to save his life.”

“Hey! Will not,” Carl scoffed in surprise. “I just got dunked on by my ancestors because they thought it was funny to give me no spice tolerance in a country that literally eats spicy food in almost every meal.” Kanako managed a laugh at that, sending Carl a sympathetic glance before speaking to you. “If it’s not too much trouble, you could always split it into one pot being spicy and one pot being milder.”

“Fair point, but y’all better eat every morsel of my food. Southern cooking isn’t for the weak,” you mentioned as you scrolled through your finished grocery list, checking for any missing items. Naomi sent you a questioning look before asking you, “you’re from the south U.S. right? Isn’t that like hella country?” You sighed as you nodded. “Yeah, but I lived in the city, not necessarily rural. Didn’t stop me from cooking all types of recipes though.”

“Well wherever you were, you managed to become a pretty kick ass chef on your own. Your lunch always looks god tier.” Kanako said as Carl and Naomi nodded in agreement. You felt your face heat up in embarrassment at the compliment. “Living on your own in college will make you think of some wild new recipes in the name of using up all your groceries to not waste food.”

“That’s for sure, I lived off 20 different cup ramen recipes I created myself with random items from the dining halls I could snag before I got caught.” Carl muttered out loud while he pulled different sized calipers from his desk drawer to begin sketching up a project for Chargebolt.

“Food is food, for real,” you nodded in solidarity. There’s been one too many times where you felt too lazy to make full meals during school, which meant being stuck with random microwave food you kept for low energy days in your apartment kitchen. “Can’t wait to get shitfaced and discuss the existential dread of fucking up on expensive mapping paper,” you mused. Being an absolute geek over geography and cartography, you’ve caught yourself in too many drunken rambles about work-related topics when out with college friends after finals and papers were finished up for the semester.

“Let’s do our best so we can enjoy our Friday into the weekend!” Naomi pumped her fist in the air as she spoke, all of you cheering in agreement.

ೄྀ࿐ ˊˎ-

Later that night, after you all managed to finish up your progress for the day and headed out to grab your respective supplies for your celebration, you found yourself humming to a random 2010s playlist that Kanako had thrown on randomly while you cooked in the kitchen of your apartment. You lived not too far from the agency, a 25 minute walk or an 8 minute bus ride, in a nice neighborhood adorned with townhomes along the street, away from the major roads but still comfortably accessible. The salary you had now had blessed you with the opportunity to live in a nicer place, but you still opted for a more homey feel rather than all the modern bullshit that people were raving for. You really hated the idea of solid white walls and no color in your living space.

Your apartment was on the smaller side but it was just you who lived there. Naomi actually lived in the townhome across the street on the second floor. You both had found out early in your job at the agency, walking home at the same time and going from that awkward “going the same way, sorry” to “oh word you live here?” It meant that you had regular girls nights together and grew close, the friendship between the two of you falling into place naturally. Kanako and Carl were actually roommates in a flat that was a 10 minute train ride away. It truly was fate that all of you managed to not only work well, but vibe with each other outside the office too.

As you finished plating your dishes in bowls, you could hear the conversation flowing between your team in your living room. A couple drinks had already been thrown back and you were more than aware that drinking before you had food in your system was probably a bad idea, but you were about to eat anyways so fuck it. You were already two Moscow mules deep by the time you’d finished up the gumbo.

“Food’s ready!” You called out from the kitchen, the open floor plan making it easy for you to get the attention of everyone else sitting on the couch watching Love is Blind. That show was a debatable one, but you enjoyed watching Carl’s bewildered expressions at the absolutely heinous jokes Kanako would throw out about the men and women of the show and some of their horrible personalities.

“Girl get in here and tell me whether or not you think Gigi needs to up and leave ugly ass Damian,” Naomi said, helping you grab two of the four plates you were bringing out to the coffee table. “I can tell you right now that she does, she’s way too good for someone that looks like a chad version of Ed Sheeran.”

Kanako busted out laughing at your remark, agreeing at the resemblance. As you ate, everyone poured endless compliments into your food, making your chest swell with pride in your hobby. You absolutely loved to cook, and it helped you get through the more rough parts of life when you were struggling to keep up with the demands of school and research. Cooking was your safe space and you made sure you perfected staple recipes from home so you could share them with others, like you were doing now.

Kanako threw back another shot as she chased it with a can of Dr. Pepper before speaking your name. “You do know that your cooking could rival Dynamight’s, right?” You paused mid chew, throwing up an eyebrow at her to continue. You didn’t strike your boss as a cooking connoisseur, but you yourself didn’t look like one either, so you kept an open mind.

“He brings food to the potlucks we have during holidays sometimes. When I tell you that man can damn well cook, believe me,” she slurred slightly, the alcohol already hitting her. Naomi nodded in agreement. “Trust us when we say his cooking is top tier. He’d never admit it, but he likes cooking for others if it means feeding into his ego.” Naomi said, letting out a huff of laughter.

“I tried his signature mapo tofu once and it was so good but I literally had to call in sick the next day because I could not handle the spice he puts in his recipes,” Carl’s forehead thudded against the wood of the coffee table as he grimaced at the memory. “If he ever found out I nearly passed out on the toilet from what he called ‘baby shit spicy’, I think he’d fire me.” You barked out a laugh at that, imagining Dynamight drilling it into your teammate about not appreciating his food and getting sick from it.

Your team had been working with the Dynamight Agency for almost 2 years before you’d joined. It was always jarring to hear the stories of Dynamight from them. Your initial reactions to him early on were anything but pleasant, and still sometimes lean on the side of moderate annoyance. He sounded like a total dick at the beginning, but had apparently mellowed out after high school. You heard he’d bullied the hell out of the current number 1 hero during his time in middle school and a little bit of high school, which had made you livid.

You grabbed the handle of Tito’s sitting in front of you all and poured it into your glass before cracking open a new can of ginger beer and pouring it into the glass as well. You could feel the warmth of the alcohol spreading through you, loosening up your tongue the more you drank.

Retrospectively, you really shouldn’t have said the next thing that you did if it meant saving your ass in the workplace that following Monday.

“I could definitely kick Bakugou’s ass if we had a cook off, I mean I’m basically a god tier hobby chef at this point,” you muttered, missing the expressions of your coworkers, specifically the smirk Naomi had on her face. “You think so?” Carl nudged your leg with his own, casting you a tipsy glance. “Fuck yeah I could, I don’t think you realize how hard some southern cooking can be. If I can keep making the recipes without screwing them up, I’m pretty much a god in the kitchen.”

Naomi snickered as Kanako sighed out. “Don’t let Dynamight hear you say that. He gets competitive fast, especially when it comes to food. He was known in high school as the chef of his dorm, didn’t trust others to cook as well as he could.” You definitely could see that, as he struck you as the type to call his friends’ cooking skills trash compared to his own. You hadn’t had the chance to try anything by him yet but could assume it was pretty good if your coworkers spoke of it so highly.

“He can bring it on, I’m not scared of his ass, I bet he couldn’t cook a Cajun recipe if he tried,” Your mouth was moving before you had a chance to realize the words you were saying. “Yeah yeah, big talk for a girl that stuttered after taking one look at her boss’ biceps.” You nearly choked on your drink as Naomi absolutely obliterated you with one sentence. Damn, I really thought I was slick with the look. You sighed as Kanako simply whistled in your direction.

“Don’t tell me you’re falling for him already? His good looks are hard to miss,” she said as she handed you a napkin to wipe your mouth with. Muttering out a thanks, you tried to save yourself some embarrassment. “Oh please, if I wanted to torture myself by falling for a narcissist, I’d go for Shindou instead.” You shuddered at the thought of working for someone like him, suddenly grateful at the fact that you were working for Dynamight instead.

“Don’t deny yourself. I bet you probably had a Dynamight wall in your dorm room at some point.” Carl was an absolute menace when he got tipsy, clearly not skipping out on poking fun at you. You groaned at his comment, shaking your head. “Nah, it was a Deku wall, actually.” You weren’t lying if you thought about it, you did have a lot of respect for the hero as you’d learned more about him during your study abroad. He came from a humble background, what was there not to like about someone as sweet as the number 1?

“You always struck me as the type of person to go for someone batshit crazy though. I bet you’d probably like it if Dynamight was mean to you.” Kanako sent you a look that made you shiver. “How dare you accuse me of such nonsense,” you tutted, sipping on your drink before muttering a small, “I probably would.” Naomi slapped her hand on the table, yelling out, “I heard that you freak!”

You couldn’t help but laugh as your team members switched the topic to their picks for hottest heroes, with Carl sighing dreamily as he named Red Riot his number one choice, Uravity being a close second. During the chaos of the conversation, you forgot all about your quip towards Dynamight’s cooking.

You really should have remembered, because remembering would mean you could have prepared yourself more for your conversation with him later.

ೄྀ࿐ ˊˎ-

After the eventful weekend and nursing a massive hangover from the sheer amount of vodka you managed to drink together, your team trudged their way into the workplace again and began the process of uploading and creating new maps on ArcGIS to send over for clients’ approval. You were all lucky you got weekends off when there wasn’t a high demand of requests for maps and geographic data.

You were midway through a rough sketch of Deku’s patrol route, taking a small break to grab a water bottle from the vending machine on the second floor when you heard the first whispers.

“— she definitely wouldn’t,” a man from the finance department whispered to his coworker who was shaking his head enthusiastically. You recognized the guy who was speaking as Leo, a coworker you’d met early on that helped you budget out what was needed in terms of supplies in your current workspace. He often chatted with Naomi, who regularly contacted him to put in new orders of pencils and ink for the maps you all drew by hand. “I think she could. She’s from the west, they tend to take home cooking pretty seriously over there. No doubt she could beat him.” The other coworker beside Leo spoke. Now that caught your attention. It sounded like they were talking about you, but you couldn’t be sure. You didn’t know how many other people were in the agency that were also from the west, they could be talking about anybody, right?

As soon as they saw you, Leo nudged his coworker to shut up before waving at you with an uneasy smile. “What are y’all talking about over here? Something about cooking?” You said, walking over and greeting both of them. Leo nodded, slightly caught off guard. “Yeah, we— uh, we were talking about a cooking show we both watch! One of the chefs is from the west and she’s competing with other chefs to win a national title.” You raised an eyebrow at him, not really buying it but not really caring too much to think that hard about it. “Well remember that westerners can be pretty goated at cooking all kinds of food. She’s probably got a chance,” you shrugged before excusing yourself, waving at them as you walked back to the elevator once you purchased your water bottle.

You continued to flutter in and out of your workspace throughout the day, stopping for lunch and eating in your office with Naomi before returning back to work. However, you weren’t stupid; there were way more eyes on you today than you’d ever experienced, even more than when you first joined. You knew Naomi was sort of a gossip guru in the office, but you’d assumed she was probably flexing your cooking to anyone that crossed her path during the day.

You didn’t mind it, but the attention on you was definitely kind of concerning, especially because people kept whispering about something to do with an upcoming agency event that would include food. You figured you could probably whip up some good appetizers to bring to it, whenever it was.

As you were finishing up your sketches and scaling them correctly with the notes on your computer, Atsuno hurriedly burst through the door of the workshop, looking slightly disheveled. Your coworkers all glanced up at him at the same time before he coughed awkwardly and straightened his posture.

“New request sent in? Surely it’s not that important for you to have to run in here for,” You asked him as you wiped your hands on a towel to get rid of the ink stains along your palms. You definitely couldn’t risk messing up the paper now that you were this far along. He sighed heavily before shaking his head. “No, I uh— I had to come in here and ask that you go meet with Dynamight before you get off work. He wants to check in on the progress with Deku’s patrol route map.” You raised an eyebrow. Couldn’t he just shoot us an email? you wondered before nodding, asking if he was in his office. Atsuno nodded, offering to walk with you there, filling you in on the progress that’s about to be made with the maps your team had created relating back to crime rates along the districts in the city.

You missed the slightly concerned glance Naomi cast your way as you exited the shop.

After taking the elevator up to Dynamight’s office located on the 10th floor, you stepped off the lift and looked around the interior. You rarely ever came to this floor since it was mainly Dynamight’s office, the rest of the floor filled with smaller offices that were for his sidekicks, Atsuno, and his other head managers from different departments.

Turning right out of the elevator, Atsuno walked you to Dynamight’s office, adjacent from his own. Upon knocking, a gruff “come in” came from the other side of the door. Dynamight’s office was fucking nice.

It was as large as your own workshop, if not larger, and contained Dynamight’s desk, shelves full of memorabilia and other items, a couch in the center of the room, and what seemed to be an en-suite bathroom. His office overlooked the rest of the city, large window panes lining the wall his back was turned to. Along the rest of the non-windowed walls were frames of photos that contained Dynamight in his younger years, from when he was in high school to now. He was still in his mid 20s, but the photos along the wall told an interesting story of his life the past few years as he climbed the hero ranks.

Turning towards him, Atsuno cleared his throat before bowing to you and leaving, citing that he had to go sit in on a phone call with a sports clothing brand that was looking to sponsor Dynamight. He sure did clear out of here fast. You figured he was probably just busy, as all Mondays are.

Dynamight was staring into your soul again as you turned back to him and awkwardly shifted your weight onto your other foot. You began the conversation with, “you wanted to check in on Deku’s request, right?”

“Yeah. Nerd’s looking forward to it and won’t shut the hell up every time he calls me. Enjoys your work a fuckin’ ton,” he spoke, his gravelly voice sending a pleasurable hum through your body. If he wasn’t a hero, he could definitely be an ASMR YouTuber, you mused.

You gave him a small smile. “I’m surprised he’s heard of me. My work isn’t exactly groundbreaking,” you began to fiddle with your work jacket’s zipper. It was cold as shit in your office, so you had Leo sneak in an order for your team to have matching work jackets by Carhartt since they were durable and warm. “Yeah, well get used to the recognition. Your job is a first for the country. Constantly gettin’ questions about why I hired you.” You felt a small spark of annoyance work through your system. “Not sure you mean that in a good or bad way.” You huffed, walking towards his desk and sitting across from him in one of the plush seats. He eyed you with mild curiosity before explaining.

“Not a bad thing. People just don’t understand why yer work’s so important.” You nodded in acknowledgement. He wasn’t wrong. Cartographers are uncommon in the modern world now that technology has dominated the industry. You remember the times in college where people would always ask why you got into your field. You had to explain that cartography wasn’t just hand drawing maps; it related back to software and digital images too.

“I get to create anything I want on a map. My quirk’s a weird one, but it helps a lot of different people, so I’m not complaining.” You eyed the pack of pink sparkly sticky notes and glitter pens sitting next to Dynamight’s keyboard. Pinky probably brought him her new stationary set that launched recently, you thought to yourself with amusement.

“Speakin’ of, been wantin’ to ask you a question.” Dynamight caught you eying his stationary and scratched his neck in what you could assume to be embarrassment. “Shoot,” you replied, noting that the sun was finally beginning to set later in the day now that the winter solstice happened a month ago.

“Why didn’t you become like— a fuckin’ underground hero or some shit? Your quirk isn’t that niche. Could use it for raids n’ infiltrating places.” You didn’t know whether or not to take his commentary as a compliment or not, but you figured that if he was questioning your avoidance of the hero career path, it meant he noticed something in you that you didn’t.

“It wasn’t for me. My quirk is exhausting. Five miles sounds like a pretty small radius, but when I’m visualizing the area, everything is visualized. Buildings, roads, you name it. Drawing it from memory takes a lot out of me,” you spoke. “I take a while to draw and digitize my maps. It wouldn’t be easy to keep up with the hustle of hero work, let alone working within a time crunch.”

Dynamight hummed in acknowledgement. You really didn’t expect to be conversing with him about your life choices, but it was a nice break, and it meant you got to learn more about him, even if he was asking about your life.

“You still chose to work with heroes though.” You let out a small laugh. “I guess you’re right,” you began, meeting his stare. He was really pretty now that you were looking closer at him. “I figured if I couldn’t handle the stress of real hero work, that working behind the scenes is the next best thing. My maps are almost always accurate and to scale; I pride myself on it. Means that heroes can rely on the information for a multitude of things.”

He nodded, seemingly hesitating before speaking again. “Know we ain’t had a chance to talk much since y’started working here. Red begged me to put you in my agency because he figured you’d be easier to reach here and your name would get recognized if it was associated with my office.” You hadn’t really thought of that before, but he was right. Red Riot’s office was packed as it was, and you figured everyone else’s was too. It was a lucky shot that you got placed with Dynamight, since he was still looking for workers to fill in his office due to it being newer than most.

“I really appreciate Eijiro being able to start my career off like this. I never would have imagined moving across the country to start my dream job so soon, if at all,” you said, casting your gaze to the pictures on Dynamight’s shelves behind his desk. “First name basis, huh?” the hero smirked as you let out a small noise of shock. “Y-Yeah, we kept in contact a lot and he would regularly help me gain clients in different cities. Told me that we were friends and to stop addressing him by his hero name every time we talked.”

“That’s Eiji for you.” A pregnant pause followed before your boss let out a groan of frustration. “I’m not— I fuckin’ hate small talk like this. Don’t know how people do it,” Dynamight said finally, pinching the bridge of his nose before speaking again. “Couldn’t figure out how to speak to you without sounding like a dick ‘cause I didn’t do it sooner. Atsuno was grilling me about not even having a functional conversation with you yet, even though I’m the one that hired you.”

You let out a laugh at that. You had been a little mad at him for not even properly greeting you since you began your work for the agency, but you assumed that being the number 2 hero in Japan was busy as shit. “I get it, you’re a top hero. I’m sure you’re busy enough as it is, can’t blame you for not being able to talk to a cartographer of all people,” you shrugged as you spoke, Dynamight leaning back in his office chair and giving you a small nod.

“Yeah. Sorry for steering the conversation elsewhere. How’s Deku’s shitty map comin’ along?” He asked as you began going through the details of your progress.

After you explained the gist of it, he grunted in response before standing up. He’s tall as fuck, you realized as you hurriedly stood up as well, assuming your talk was over with. Dynamight walked you to his office door before stopping once you turned around to thank him again. “Thanks for uh— earlier. When you were complimenting my work. It means a lot, truly.”

“Don’t let it inflate yer shitty ego. Can’t handle another person that gets a big head after someone compliments them,” he spat. You could tell he wasn’t used to being given a sincere thanks very often. “Hey. One more thing.”

You raised an eyebrow at him as his face turned blank for a moment before he sighed and his signature scowl returned. You should have known the conversation you were having earlier was too good to be true.

“You would not be able to win against me in a fuckin’ cook off. My cooking probably beats yours by a shit ton. Watch your mouth next time you run around all bark and no bite.” You nearly fainted on the spot as your body ran as cold as ice. What the fuck. What the fuck? WHAT THE FUCK? You repeated in your head, eyes going wider than dish plates as Dynamight’s glare sent another chill down your spine.

“Shit.” Is all that came out of your mouth after he all but pushed you by your back out the door and closed it in your face.

It’s official, you think as you trudge your way to the elevator, the beginning of a migraine creeping into your skull. You were going to kill Naomi.

#pro hero katsuki x reader #pro hero bakugou x reader #bakugou katsuki x reader #katsuki bakugou x reader #bakugou x reader #katsuki x reader #bnha x reader #mha x reader #ross works

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louisupdates · 7 months

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Louis Tomlinson ‘Faith in the Future’ World Tour 2023

By: Steve Jennings (Photos and Text) | 11 AUG 2023

English singer-songwriter and former One Direction band member Louis Tomlinson is back out on the road in support of his second album, Faith in the Future. For his second world tour, he’s playing to an ever-growing audience—the crowd I witnessed could not get enough of him as evident from the adoring fans singing along to every word he sang. We spoke to Production Designer, Programmer, and Director Tom Taylor of TANCK about the tour.

Designer Tom Taylor started working on the current tour as the new album’s promo materials and aesthetics came to light. Taylor says it’s a more rugged and asymmetrical look than they’ve gone for before, meant to mirror a sort of dive bar aesthetic rather than a beautiful arena production. “This reflects the music off the latest album, which has a more grungy feel to it. There are touches in there such as the light boxes (loosely resembling the fluorescent lights of a nightclub toilet), and our custom camera housing (a hollowed out old VHS camcorder with a Marshall 4K camera inside) that bring it back to a more intimate venue feel than the true scale of the places we’re playing across the world.”

Taylor notes the show itself has definitely progressed and he would say feels more like a ‘show’ than a ‘gig‘ now; it has a start, middle, and end, with themes and segues to connect them throughout. “The video content is more to set a mood for the songs. We’re trying to stay away from anything too literal and obvious. This extends to the lighting programming as well where we largely refrain from hitting everything on the beat, fully ‘perfect’ timecoded hits throughout the rig. Hopefully the end result is that in those moments where we do go crazy with programming and rhythm, it’s much more interesting and stands out in the set.”

Since 2020, Taylor has worked with Francis Clegg on production design. They had worked together for about five years prior to that and have a complimentary skill set. “We’ve accelerated quite rapidly, taking on a design assistant in Jamie Lawrence and soon to have another member of the team joining,” Taylor says. “Whilst one of us is the company face to each artist or client, we work together 50/50 on every project behind the scenes. James Washer [Lighting Programmer] is often the first name on the team sheet when we pick up a show like this one… he just gets it; is a great programmer and time saving resource who knows how to interpret when I say something like ‘can the lights be a little more aggressive.’ Francis (Clegg) is also a fantastic programmer, so I was able to work alongside James in the rehearsals to finesse the previz programming.”

Although he’s on a MA Lighting grandMA3 surface, Taylor runs the show on MA2 software. The reason for that is because this tour goes everywhere in the world, and he knows he can get an MA2 anywhere without having to lug around small form consoles himself. Taylor much prefers to take a USB stick through an airport. “We are running a lot of things through the desk—lighting, video, camera switching, and automation. The MA makes this easier to deal with and the fixture cloning system is excellent, so I know I’m going to get a good replica of the show no matter what fixtures I get thrown wherever we go.”

The venue sizes this time around sort of called for a video element to be added, Taylor says. “The focus of the show is, of course, Louis, so plenty of close-up camera work to amplify his emotion. These are treated with overlays and masks created by [content creators] Two Suns and ourselves, with 3D animation work coming from Boxcat Studio. The whole system is run on a Resolume server. Camera switching is done from the MA console via Open Control, which sends OSC messages to the ATEM switcher, which ultimately sends it to the capture cards. This way we eliminate a touring video director (sorry!) and save a bunch of truck space on outboard equipment. The system works extremely well.”

Colour Sound Experiment out of London is the tour lighting, video, and rigging company. “We use them for a large portion of our shows. It’s very useful dealing with just one company who ‘do it all’ but also don’t cut any corners or scrimp to get the job done. The equipment is well maintained with a good selection of inventory to choose from.” Taylor says it probably took them about three iterations to get to the point they’re at now, keeping ideas from the previous versions until they got somewhere they were all happy with. “It was a bit of a process, but a great payoff. I should probably thank Louis and his Manager, Matt Vines, for their patience in putting it all together. There are a lot of (literally) moving parts to the stage with winches, light boxes, light bulbs, and our shuttering set piece at the back. Ultimately the show is dynamic and exciting, but all the elements sit nicely together as well.” Taylor was a bit unsure on using the GLP X4 Bars across the back because of the brightness difference to GLP’s FR10, for example, but they are exactly the right brightness for this gig without being overpowering, he says. “My absolute favorite moment of the show, where we have some crazy iridescent hyper color animation, is driven by the Ayrton Huracans… amazing lights, just don’t try to pick one up by yourself, they’re beasts!”

Tomlinson was really involved in the design of this one, and also much more open to trying new things and delivering a narrative through the show, adds Taylor. “Matt Vines should have a shout out for his contribution to the ‘ideas factory’ and being a great sounding board as we developed the show. PM Craig Sherwood has been incredible as always, never asking ‘why’ we want to make it look like a derelict bathroom, just making it happen. Finally, the tour’s secret weapon, technical maestro Sam Kenyon, who is quite literally irreplaceable, has been an excellent resource for actually delivering the show in the real world day after day.”

Production Team

Tour Manager: Tom Allen

Production Manager: Craig Sherwood

Production Design, Programmer & Director: Tom Taylor & Francis Clegg, TANCK

Lighting Programmer: James Washer

Lighting Crew Chief: James Box

Lighting Techs: Rick Carr, Amy Barnett

Stage Manager: Torin Arnold

Technical Manager: Sam Kenyon

Video Crew Chief: Dave Mallandain

Video Programmer: Jack Fone

Video Techs: Tim Curwen, Braden Pettigrew

Camera Operators: Mark Lawrence, Braden Pettigrew, Tim Curwen

Rigger: Mark Lawrence

Vendors

Lighting/Video/Rigging: Colour Sound Experiment/Acc. Rep. Haydn Cruishank

LED Trim: LED Creative

Custom Light Housings: OX Event House

Set Construction: Hangman UK

Video Content: Two Suns Creative, Boxcat Studio, TANCK

SFX: BPM SFX

Gear

Lighting

2 MA Lighting grandMA3 full-size

19 Ayrton Eurus Profile

6 Ayrton Huracan LT Profile

5 Claypaky Mini-B

12 Robe Spiider

72 GLP X4 Bar 20

16 GLP JDC Line 1000

10 GLP JDC1 Strobe

12 CHAUVET STRIKE Array 4

2 Chroma-Q Color Force II 12

16 Elumen8 COB PAR Endura

10 LEDJ Spectra Q15

3 Robe BMFL RoboSpot

Video

2 Resolume Server

23 Custom LED Trim

6 Video Screens, 2.5m x 2.5m

7 Marshall 503 Camera

3 Panasonic UE70 PTZ Camera

2 Blackmagic Design URSA G2 Camera

#fitfwt23: gear #fitfwt23: technicals #louis tomlinson #louis press #fitfwt23: crew #11.8.2023

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retrocgads · 9 days

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UK 1987

#UK1987 #THE ENGLISH SOFTWARE COMPANY #ACTION #C64 #SPECTRUM #AMSTRAD #AMIGA #ATARIst #LEVIATHAN

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octuscle · 9 months

Note

What's up bro? After that lunar landing, India seems like the place to be! Problem is, I don't think the suitcase I brought will be enough for me to last seeing everything from the Taj Mahal to the golden temple. Can I borrow one of the DEL suitcases?

There is actually another suitcase. A fairly new aluminum suitcase from RIMOWA. Looks very expensive. And doesn't necessarily match your dusty and sweaty tourist outfit…. But since no one else has contacted me: Have fun with it!

Delhi… A really huge city. But also really challenging for a tourist who doesn't speak Hindi. But slowly you get used to the strange English they speak here. And somehow you finally find the Airbnb in the old city, a stone's throw from the Red Fort. It smells of sweat, urine and exotic spices in the stairwell. The stairs are steep and you are pretty tired. Heaving your suitcases up is really exhausting. But you have made it. You'll see what's in the big new suitcase tomorrow. You just want to sleep. It looks like the bed in the room hasn't even been made yet. You don't care about that now. Just sleep…

When you wake up the next morning, your old suitcase is gone. But also your old pajamas are gone. You lie naked in bed. And something is different… Your morning wood is hard as steel. Hehehehe, that's not bad… But it's also darker somehow. A shade like a coffee with a shot of milk. Coffee! Yes, you need it now. You get out of the silk-sheeted bed and your boner leads you like a divining rod to the coffee maker in the alcove between your dressing room and the master bath. After the first coffee, quickly take a shower and then get dressed.

And then a second coffee. Your driver will be here soon. Good thing your suitcase is already packed next to you.

You don't like Noida. But many of your friends live there because they have located their startup companies there and it is easier to find capable software developers. But that's not your world either. Your family made their money generations ago in real estate and in the textile industry. And you now head the banking and finance division in your family holding company. After all, you have financed some of your friends' startups. And today one of your friends is getting married. In Noida. You'll survive that, too.

The journey was long, as usual. Getting out of Delhi takes time. But at least you were able to make a number of phone calls while your driver navigated the car safely through the traffic chaos. Now you have moved into your suite. In the corridor hectic movements between the rooms. Bridesmaids and other guests scurry from room to room. You hate this hassle. In life, you would never think of getting married. But the bellboy who carried your suitcase upstairs was hot. You call the front desk and ask for someone to help you unpack your luggage and get dressed. The hotel is one of the most preferred locations for weddings in Noida. You are a regular guest here. They know your preferences. And the bellboys love your cock. You can already imagine that now there will be a fight again, who is allowed to blow you and gets the tip for it.

Yes, that was good… Your cock dangles relaxed between your legs. Your clothes fit perfectly. So on to the ballroom. And let's see who is your boring dinner companion this time.

#male tf #reality change #male transformation #race change #indian tf

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oliviabutsmart · 9 months

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Physics Friday #5: The Wonderful World of Programming Paradigms

Welcome to the first actual post on the dedicated blog! This will be continuing on from what I started over on my main account @oliviax727. But don't worry, I'll still repost this post over there.

Preamble: Wait! I thought this was Physics!

Education level: Primary School (Y5/6)

Topic: Computer Languages (Comp Sci)

So you may be thinking how this is relevant to physics, well it's not. But really, other adjacent fields: computer science, chemistry, science history, mathematics etc. Are really important to physics! The skills inform and help physicists make informed decisions on how to analyse theoretical frameworks, or to how physics can help inform other sciences.

I may do a bigger picture post relating to each science or the ways in which we marry different subjects to eachother, but what is important is that some knowledge of computer science is important when learning physics, or that you're bound to learn some CS along the way.

Also I can do what I want, bitch.

Introduction: What is a Programming Language?

You may have come across the term 'programming paradigm' - especially in computer science/software engineering classes. But what is a programming paradigm really?

Computers are very powerful things, and they can do quite a lot. Computers are also really dumb. They can't do anything unless if we tell them what to do.

So until our Sky-net machine overlords take control and start time-travelling to the past, we need to come up with ways to tell them how to do things.

Pure computer speak is in electrical signals corresponding to on and off. Whereas human speak is full of sounds and text.

It is possible for either one to understand the other (humans can pump electrical signals into a device and computers can language model). But we clearly need something better.

This is where a programming language comes in. It's basically a language that both the computer and the human understands. So we need a common language to talk to them.

It's like having two people. One speaks Mandarin, the other speaks English. So instead of making one person learn the other's language, we create a common language that the two of them can speak. This common language is a synthesis of both base languages.

But once we have an idea of how to communicate with the computer, we need to consider how we're going to talk to it:

How are we going to tell it to do things?

What are we going to ask it to do?

How will we organise and structure our common language?

This is where a programming paradigm comes in - a paradigm is a set of ideas surrounding how we should communicate with a device. It's really something that can truly only be understood by showing examples of paradigms.

Imperative vs. Declarative

The main two paradigms, or really categories of paradigms, are the imperative vs. declarative paradigm.

Imperative programming languages are quite simple: code is simply a set of instructions meant to tell the computer specifically what to do. It is about process, a series of steps the computer can follow to get some result.

Declarative programming languages are a bit more vapid: code is about getting what you want. It's less about how you get there and more about what you want at the end.

As you can see imperative programs tell the computer how to do something whereas declarative programs are about what you want out.

Here's an example of how an imperative language may find a specific name in a table of company data:

GET tableOfEmployees; GET nameToFind SET i = 0; WHILE i < tableOfEmployees.length: IF tableOfEmployees[i].firstName == nameToFind THEN: RETURN tableOfEmployees[i] AND i; ELSE: i = i + 1; RETURN "employee does not exist";

And here's that same attempt but in a declarative language:

FROM tableOfEmployees SELECT * WHERE firstName == INPUT(1);

Note that these languages aren't necessarily real languages, just based on real-life ones. Also please ignore the fact I used arrays of structures and databases in exactly the same way.

We can see the difference between the two paradigms a lot more clearly now. In the imperative paradigm, every step is laid out clear as day. "Add one to this number, check if this number is equal to that one".

Under the declarative paradigm, not only is the text shorter, we also put all of the instructions about how to do a task under the rug, we only care about what we want.

With all this, we can see an emerging spectrum of computer paradigms. From languages that are more computer-like, to languages that are more English-like. This is the programming languages' level:

Lower level languages are more likely to be imperative, as the fundamental construction of the computer relies on a series of instructions to be executed in order.

The lowest level, the series of electrical signals and circuitry called microcode is purely imperative in a sense, as everything is an instruction. Nothing is abstracted and everything is reduced to it's individual components.

The highest level, is effectively English. It's nothing but "I want this", "I'd like that". All of the processes involved are abstracted in favour of just the goal. It is all declarative.

In the middle we have most programming languages, what's known as the "high level languages". They are the best balance of abstraction of reduction, based on what you need to use the language for.

It's important that we also notice that increasingly higher-level and increasingly more declarative the language gets, the more specific the purpose of the language becomes.

Microcode and machine code can be used for effectively any purpose, they are the jack-of-all trades. Whereas something like SQL is really good at databases, but I wouldn't use it for game design.

As long as a language is Turing-complete, it can do anything any computer can do, what's important is how easy it is to program the diverse range of use-cases. Assembly can do literally anything, but it's an effort to program. Python can do the same, but it's an effort to run.

Imperative Paradigms: From the Transistor to the Website

As mentioned previously, the imperative paradigm is less a stand-alone paradigm but a group of paradigms. Much like how the UK is a country, but is also a collection of countries.

There are many ways in order to design imperative languages, for example, a simple imperative language from the 80's may look a lot like assembly:

... ADD r1, 1011 JMZ F313, r1

The last statement JMZ, corresponds to a "Jump to the instruction located at A if the value located at B is equal to zero" what it's effectively saying is a "Repeat step 4" or "Go to question 5" type of thing.

Also known as goto statements, these things are incredibly practical for computers, because all it requires is moving some electrical signals around the Registers/RAM.

But what goto statement is used as in code, is really just a glorified "if x then y". Additionally, these statements get really irritating when you want to repeat or recurse over instructions multiple times.

The Structured Paradigm

Thus we introduce the structured paradigm, which simply allows for control structures. A control structure is something that, controls the flow of the programs' instructions.

Control structures come in many forms:

Conditionals (If X then do Y otherwise do Z)

Multi-selects (If X1 then do Y1, if X2 then do Y2 ...)

Post-checked loops (Do X until Y happens)

Pre-checked loops (While Y, do X)

Counted Loops (For i = A to B do X)

Mapped Loops (For each X in Y, do Z)

These control structures are extra useful, as they have the added benefit of not having to specify what line you have to jump to every time you update previous instructions. They may also include more "safe" structures like the counted or mapped loop, which only executes a set amount of time.

But we still have an issue: all our code is stuffed into one file and it's everywhere, we have no way to seperate instructions into their own little components that we might want to execute multiple times. Currently, out only solution is to either nest things in far too many statements or use goto statements.

The Procedural Paradigm

What helps is the use of a procedure. Procedures are little blocks of code that can be called as many times as needed. They can often take many other names: commands, functions, processes, branches, methods, routines, subroutines, etc.

Procedures help to organise code for both repeated use and also it makes it easier to read. We can set an operating standard of "one task per subroutine" to help compartmentalise code.

Object-Oriented Code

Most of these basic programming languages, especially the more basic ones, include the use of data structures. Blocks of information that holds multiple types of information:

STRUCT Person: Name: String Age: Integer Phone: String Gender: String IsAlive: Boolean

But these structures often feel a bit empty. After all, we may want to have a specific process associated uniquely with that person.

We want to compartmentalise certain procedures and intrinsically tie them to an associated structure, preventing their use from other areas of the code.

Like "ChangeGender" is something we might not want to apply to something that doesn't have a gender, like a table.

We may also want to have structures that are similar to 'Person' but have a few extra properties like "Adult" may have a bank account or something.

What we're thinking of doing is constructing an object, a collection of BOTH attributes (variables) AND methods (procedures) associated with the object. We can also create new objects which inherit the properties of others.

Object oriented programming has been the industry standard for decades now, and it's incredibly clear as to why - it's rather useful! But as time marches forward, we've seen the popularisation of a new paradigm worthy of rivaling this one ...

Declarative Paradigms: The World of Logic

Declarative languages certainly help abstract a lot of information, but that's not always the case, sometimes the most well known declarative languages are very similar feature-wise to imperative paradigms. It's just a slight difference in focus which is important.

Functional Programming Languages

Whereas the object oriented language treats everything, or most things, like objects. A functional language uses functions as it's fundamental building block.

Functional languages rely on the operation of, well, functions. But functions of a specific kind - pure functions. A pure function is simply something that doesn't affect other parts of the computer outside of specifically itself.

A pure function is effectively read-only in it's operation - strictly read-only. The most practical-for-common-use functional languages often allow for a mixture of pure and impure functions.

A functional language is declarative because of the nature of a function - the process of how things work are abstracted away for a simple input -> output model. And with functional purity, you don't have to worry about if what takes the input to the output also affects other things on the computer.

Functional languages have been around for quite a while, however they've been relegated to the world of academia. Languages like Haskell and Lisp are, like most declarative languages, very restrictive in their general application. However in recent years, the use of functional programming has come quite common.

I may make a more opinionated piece in the future on the merits of combining both functional and object-oriented languages, and also a seperate my opinions on a particular functional language Haskell - which I have some contentions with.

Facts and Logic

The logic paradigm is another special mention of declarative languages, they focus on setting a series of facts (i.e. true statements):

[Billy] is a [Person]

Rules (i.e. true statements with generality):

If [A] is [Person] then [A] has a [Brain]

And Queries:

Does [Billy] have a [Brain]?

Logical languages have a lot more of a specific purpose, meant for, well, deductive/abductive logical modelling.

We can also use what's known as Fuzzy logic which is even more higher-level, relying on logic that is inductive or probabilistic, i.e. conclusions don't necessarily follow from the statements.

Visual and Documentation Languages

At some point, we start getting so high level, that the very components of the language start turning into something else.

You may have used a visual language before, for example, Scratch. Scratch is a declarative language that abstracts away instructions in-favour of visual blocks that represent certain tasks a computer can carry out.

Documentation languages like HTML, Markdown, CSS, XML, YML, etc. Are languages that can barely even be considered programming languages. Instead, they are methods of editing documents and storing text-based data.

Languages that don't even compile (without any significant effort)

At some point, we reach a point where languages don't even compile necessarily.

A metalanguage, is a language that describes language. Like EBNF, which is meant to describe the syntaxing and lexical structures of lower-level languages. Metalanguages can actually compile, and are often used in code editors for grammar checking.

Pseudocode can often be described as either imperative or declarative, focused on emulating programs in words. What you saw in previous sections are pseudocode.

Diagrams fall in this category too, as they describe the operation of a computer program without actually being used to run a computer.

Eventually we reach the point where what were doing is effectively giving instructions or requesting things in English. For this, we require AI modelling for a computer to even begin to interpret what we want it to interpret.

Esoteric Paradigms

Some paradigms happen to not really fall in this range form low to high level. Because they either don't apply to digital computing or exist in the purely theoretical realm.

Languages at the boundaries of the scale can fall into these classes, as microcode isn't really a language if it's all physical. And pseudocode isn't really a language if it doesn't even compile.

There are also the real theoretical models like automata and Turing machine code, which corresponds to simplified, idealised, and hypothetical machines that operate in ways analogous to computers.

Shells and commands also exist in this weird zone. Languages like bash, zsh, or powershell which operate as a set of command instructions you feed the computer to do specific things. They exist in the region blurred between imperative and declarative at the dead centre of the scale. But often their purpose is more used as a means to control a computer's operating system than anything else.

Lastly, we have the languages which don't fit in our neat diagram because they don't use digital computers in a traditional manner. These languages often take hold of the frontiers of computation:

Parallel Computing

Analog Computing

Quantum Computing

Mechanical Computing

Conclusion

In summary, there's a lot of different ways you can talk to computers! A very diverse range of paradigms and levels that operate in their own unique ways. Of course, I only covered the main paradigms, the ones most programmers are experienced in. And I barely scratched the surface of even the most popular paradigms.

Regardless, this write-up was long as well. I really wish I could find a way to shorten these posts without removing information I want to include. I guess that just comes with time. This is the first computer science based topic. Of course, like any programmer, I have strong opinions over the benefits of certain paradigms and languages. So hopefully I didn't let opinions get in the way of explanations.

Feedback is absolutely appreciated! And please, if you like what you see, consider following either @oliviabutsmart or @oliviax727!

Next week, I'll finish off our three-part series on dark matter and dark energy with a discussion of what dark energy does, and what we think it is made of!

#computer science #programming #stemblr #stem #codeblr #coding #software

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