#(if anyone is interested in other transcripts feel free to let me know for future posts)

[thislovintime]

You might recall older posts featuring audio and/or quotes from Peter's June 1983 interview with NPR (such as here, here, here, and here). There are also some audio snippets on this fan page's YouTube channel. But since the full audio is too long to upload to YouTube, I transcribed the full audio interview, and thought I'd share that transcript here for anyone who might be interested in reading this snapshot of a moment in time.

Terry Gross: "Um, you wanna wait for the coffee before we start?" Peter Tork: "Yes, let’s wait for the coffee." TG: "Good. It’ll be a couple of minutes. We’re waiting for the coffee. Yeah." PT: "Push the button that says stop. [long silence] Does he have to get a key to stop the tape machine? (chuckles)" TG: "So, soon as the coffee’s ready, we’ll…" PT: "We’ll just hit it. (Speaks louder) Okay, now, the thing about the songs is, snatches, this is that, the piece of this, that’s all right, but if you put on songs, then I’m just gonna be the whole..." [recording cuts off]. TG: "Are you comfortable talking about The Monkees?" PT: "It’s a mixed bag. Sometimes I am. Actually, to tell you the truth, I’m not comfortable but it’s not because I… about talking about The Monkees, it’s because I haven’t had a cigarette since yesterday." TG: "Do you wanna light one up?" PT: "Noooo." TG: "Oh, you’re trying to stop." PT: "Well, I’m trying to put it off." TG: "(laughs) Savor it a little." PT: "Put off the next cigarette for, well, hopefully for a very long time, but just not smoke one right now." TG: "Okay. How did you first hear about the Monkees audition?" PT: "Stephen Stills called me and said, 'Go try out.'"

TG: "He auditioned?" PT: "I don’t know whether he auditioned exactly, or whether he had just met the producers socially, but… Steve was a friend of mine on the Village streets in early 60s. He, as a matter of fact, hit town and became instantly known as that guy who looks like Tork, which was my name in those days. And I ran across him on the street. I said, 'I know who you are. You’re the kid who looks like me.’ He said, 'I know who you are. You’re the kid I’m supposed to look like.’ Anyway, so we cut back again to a couple of years later, and Steve knows this guy, and it turns out to be Bob Rafelson, one of the producers, who says to him, in his own inimitable way, 'Well, we like ya a lot, but your hair and teeth are wrong for our production, they ain’t photogenic. You know anybody who looks like you who’s got good hair and teeth?’ Stephen said, 'My friend Peter.’ And so Stephen called me and said, 'Go try out for this thing.’ And I said, 'Yeah, yeah, sure, Steve, yeah, right, instant success, gimme a break.’ And he said, 'No, no, really, try out.’ 'All right, all right, all right.’ So, you know, I took my hard-earned savings, which I’d been making washing dishes at this club in southern, way southern California, fifty miles south of Hollywood, and took a bus up to Hollywood and back down again, and up and down for auditions. And eventually won the part." TG: "What was the audition like?" PT: "Well, it started off with just a huge gang of kids in the office. The office had one secretary type and two offices, one on either side. You went into which ever one was free next and if they didn’t like you, that was it. If they did like you, then you went into the next guy’s office when he was free, and if he liked you, then they sent you to this — they gave you a, what they called a personality interview: they just had the cameras running on the set of I Dream Of Jeannie or something, and they asked you questions. And then, if they thought that was… that was actually also, I think, a photogenic test — photo genesis test (chuckles): Were you born in the camera? But after that, then came the regular screen test, which was scripted, and they had a set there, and a director, and he said, 'Do this and do that, and don’t do this and do this other thing.’ And they had, by that time, had gotten down to eight guys, and they divided them up into teams of two, and each one of them did the screen test with the script and the stage actions: 'Hey, man, what’s really the matter?’ 'Aw, I don’t know, it’s about Celia, you know.’ 'Yeah, yeah, I know, man.’ Like that." TG: "So that was the audition." PT: "That was, well, that was the whole audition process." TG: "Did, did they test you for chemistry with each other, since this was a band that was put together by producers?" PT: "No, they made, they made their assumptions and shot. They said, Well, we need one of these and one of these, two from column A and one from column B." TG: "Yeah, so, so what were the types that you were supposed to fit?" PT: "Well, I actually think that what they did… They didn’t just say, 'Actually, we need one of each of these.' What they said was, 'We’re going to need a bunch of qualities and pretty much the qualities… and we need them somehow or another combined among these guys.' I think basically one of the reasons I was chosen was — I can think of two good reasons why I was chosen. One is that I brought that character of the dummy to the audition. And they needed an odd man out, a guy who is like a little, you know, slightly turned from the other guys; straight-ahead rock and roll band, and one kind of simpatico, simplicico kind of a guy, and that was my character. And so that was one of the reasons why I was chosen. The other reason I think I was chosen is because I did the screen test in one take. At least, I thought it was impressive, I hope they did, too. In any case, it was like that, I got — I was the odd man out, Davy was the little British or romantic, and then two other guys, one of them light and crazed, and the other kind of dark and serious. And so that was the way it was balanced out." TG: "Were you asked to watch Beatles movies or listen a lot to Beatles records to develop the kind of sound and image that they had?" PT: "No." TG: "Were you self-conscious of The Monkees being considered to be like a Beatles imitation band?" PT: "Well, I — there was a lot of criticism to that effect and I think I took it to heart, and now I think I took it to heart too much. Because, really, it was, I think in some ways, Micky and Davy had a healthier attitude about it as I look back on it now. They didn’t go for that imitation this or organic that, you know, they just read their scripts, they came to the studio and read their parts, and that was all they ever cared about doing. You know, 'Give me a part and pay me at the end of the week.’ That’s all. And if I’d had that attitude, I would have been a lot happier. I would have been able to not worry. Because I heard a lot of different criticisms — and it all sounded as thought it was coming from one seriously important source, to me in those days. That was how I was. And I now see that each person had their own little carping to do. For instance, nobody ever said, to, in my knowledge, in those days, that we were a bunch of talentless actors. Everybody said we were talentless musicians, but not talentless actors. Because in Hollywood, we were respected pros doing what we had to do, cranking out this stuff week in and week out. You got it out, you were a pro; that was all anybody cared about in Hollywood. And so I said, Well, at least we had that much respect.’ I later find out that the struggling New York actors crowd are calling us talentless actors. But what I heard was the struggling musicians crowd in L.A., and all of the would-be-goods that are going, Well, these guys don’t play their own instruments,’ and all that… horseradish." TG: "You find that the rap has changed about the program? Because so many people look back on it affectionately now as being, like, a real pop piece from that period?" PT: "I don’t — it’s a good question. I don’t know whether the rap itself has changed, but I’m hearing more good rap about it. Which maybe comes to the same thing." TG: (laughs) PT: "You’re laughing because I spilled my coffee." TG: "Because you spilled your coffee, yeah. Did the studio control your personal life or your image? Like, was it okay to have girlfriends?" PT: "Oh, sure." TG: "Um, was it okay to be seen with them?" PT: "It’s okay to have sex. (laughs)" TG: "(laughs) You never know with studios, like how much control they’re exerting or what they want you to look like to your public." PT: "Well, they wouldn’t let us criticize the war in Vietnam." TG: "Really?" PT: "Really." TG: "Did you want to?" PT: "Yup. I actually did, to a New York Times reporter, and they made me, asked me very seriously, very strenuously, to call her and ask her to withhold that section of the interview. And I did, and she did, she was very kind about it. But it was… I look back on it and it seems kind of silly, but I think that the whole point of the project was: don’t make waves. Look like revolutionary, look like something new, but don’t make waves. On the other hand, in the experience of an awful lot of our audience, we were something new. So I can’t knock that." TG: "Do you think you would have been more of an activist if you weren’t part of TV at the time?" PT: "I don’t know. I never did march, you know, I never did carry a sign. The only thing I ever did was a sit-down strike someplace. Not much. You know, I never really did get into activism, and I don’t know whether it’s just because I’m a flat-out coward or I have some deep understanding of the cosmic truth of the fact that it doesn’t do any good or whatever, in whatever case, that’s just — that’s what it is, I don’t do it much." TG: "Bob Rafelson, who was one of the producers of the show, is now also known as a director of such films as Five Easy Pieces. Have you kept in touch with him at all?" PT: "No." TG: "Did you, like, go to see his other movies?" PT: "I happen to have seen some of the other movies… Of course I saw Five Easy Pieces because we were still associated with those guys as that movie was being put together. I mean, Easy Rider, and then I saw Five Easy Pieces because it was Jack Nicholson who helped us make the movie Head, the Monkee movie. And, and I think, I think Jack is super. And of course, one of the things that I — I have a feeling about Jack because I see the crazy guy that he portrays on screen and I see him in life and he’s still got that, that something, you know, out of bounds is still there, and still, in his actual character, he is one of the great open-minded, open-hearted sweeties that I know. And to see a man with that, these vast, seemingly vast, differences, working and playing these crazed people on screen, and still — I mean, the reason that he’s as big a star as he is, is because he does have the capacity to be abstract about his own work. You should have heard, you should have seen what it was like working with him. He’s a great technician, which is one of the great attributes. You can’t be a crazy maniac like that and not be a good technician if you want to have a career. Because you’ll just go out of bounds without any kind of viewing. And… wow, how’d we get off on that?" TG: "Did you want to pursue acting after The Monkees?" PT: "I didn’t care what I did. I, I’m an entertainer. If I act, or play music, or like I’m doing tonight at Godfrey Daniel in Bethlehem, if I do that… I have a rock band now, it’s called The Peter Tork Project and we’ll probably be swinging through here. And we play thumping rock and roll, we just really beat the bejesus out of things and really stomp. And we have a hard time getting people to believe it, because I do my acoustic act and it depends almost entirely on rapport, and I don’t rock out too much because how much rock and roll can you do on an acoustic guitar or a piano? But… I do, so it’s very, a kind of quietish show, it’s a nice, mild show." TG: "What kind of material do you play solo?" PT: "Well, I do essentially… it’s like there’s an overlap. I do a large part of the same material in both shows. I do do some old Monkees songs, just because I know people want to hear that kind of stuff. And I do do some oldies, ‘50s rockers. And with the band, then we go on to the more heavy rock and roll, the band plays that and rockier stuff. And acoustically I play that and farther out stuff, more ballads, some… a J.S. Bach piece on the piano, one, count ‘em, one. And… like that. So, it’s old, old tunes; I play some more introspective stuff in an acoustic set." TG: "What kind of music do you listen to when you have time to listen?" PT: "Baroque, reggae, current pop from time to time if I happen — I don’t buy current pop records but I get them from my family for gifts and so on. I like Men At Work, I got that for Christmas, I thought it was great." TG: (laughs) PT: "That kind of stuff. The Police. Good — I like good music in almost every form. About the only kind of music that I really have a very hard time taking is opera, and Mozart. For some reason, Mozart I think is awful. I don’t know how come he’s so revered and so treasured. Out of about every dozen pieces that I hear, I think one is inventive and interesting, and the other seem to me just to be scales with flourishes." TG: "Well, I’ll send you all the angry mail when we get it. (laughs)" PT: "No thanks!" (laughter) TG: "Peter Tork is my guest, if you’re just joining us, who got started in, um, and came in very young when he was in The Monkees." PT: "Wait a minute, wait a — that’s not my start! I was playing in the Village for two and a half years. (jokingly) Made his mark in the entertainment industry, you might say, that, that would be fair." TG: "What kind of material were you playing in the Village?" PT: "Folk songs. Just the old folk songs, and 'Blowin’ In The Wind,' and protest songs and folk songs, five-string banjo stuff." TG: "Word was on The Monkees show that it was really studio musicians who were doing the instrumental part while The Monkees were actually doing the singing. Is that true?" PT: "The first two records. After that, we did a record all by ourselves, almost all by ourselves. And then after that, we went into a mixed mode, where it was a professional drummer and I’d be playing bass, or, you know I’d be playing guitar and we’d have a professional bass player, or something like that. At the outset it was — and the thing was that nobody was sure whether we could play, nobody had any idea of how much time. I mean, they really, you know, when you hire a professional studio musician, you know what you’re getting, you know that you can knock off a complete track of two tunes in three hours, maybe more. Just take them in, put the music in front of them, and hit it. And say, More of this, less of that, and okay, you got it. And that’s the way it goes. And they just didn’t know what it was like, and so because our services were needed most critically for making the TV series, it was just regard… also, Donnie Kirshner didn’t like to have people who couldn’t be told what to do. As a matter of fact, you may have noticed that, after he and The Monkees parted company, he decided that The Monkees were not plastic enough for him, went and did the Archies." TG: "Did he organize them also by audition?" PT: "The Archies? You’re kidding." TG: "I don’t know the whole folklore of the Archies." PT: "You know — have you ever seen an Archies comic book?" TG: "Yeah, oh! Of course. What am I thinking? Right." PT: "The Archies were those comic book characters, and whatever singers were willing to do what Kirshner paid them to do, did the records. And after that, they left. There were never any Archies, there never were. (laughs) Like I said, The Monkees were too real for Don Kirshner." TG: "Did you think of Kirshner as being an absurd character?" PT: "Yes." TG: "But powerful." PT: "Well, in his time he was powerful enough. He just was one of those characters whose set up and system happened to jibe with the commercial demand of the times. I don’t think Kirshner knew what he was doing at one level. At another level, he knew perfectly well what he was doing. He was… he listened to music, and he created music that he liked, and it sold millions to thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds." TG: "I’m getting the feeling that you were in a kind of awkward position of kind of understanding what kind of manipulation was happening and at the same time being willing to go along with it because it was good for your performing career." PT: "Well, I don’t know whether it was good for my performing career. The reason I went along with it is because I never took any initiative of anything on my own account. Really basically, I just did wherever I was pointed. You know, Stephen said, ‘Go try out,’ I tried out. They said, ‘Come here, do this.’ I did that. ‘Sign here.’ I signed there. And really, I’m just — I’m only recently now getting to the point in my life where I’m beginning to say, ‘Let me figure this out. What is it that I really want? What steps do I have to take, and what…’ And even then, you know, I have to recognize that I have no control over events. All I can do is say, ‘This is the kind of thing that I’d like, and this is the kind of thing that I have to do to make my chances better.’ And then I do that, and then I have to just let the results be whatever they are, to get into trying to make results happen, you know. As a matter of fact, in some ways that was one of the problems that… when I broke up with The Monkees, I left because I couldn’t get those guys back into the studio to do the same kind of thing that we’d done on our third album, which was Micky on drums, Michael on guitar, me on piano, our producer on bass, Davy Jones playing rhythm sections, and then hiring the occasional string player or something like that. Micky said, 'You can’t go back.' He thought he was Thomas Wolfe. And Davy said, 'I don’t wanna be banging a tambourine day in, day out. You guys, it takes you 54 takes to get your parts down, I’ve got my part down first take. Just bang a tambourine. I’m sick of banging a tambourine, Peter, I hope you don’t mind.’ 'Okay, Davy.’ And so we went into this mixed mode. But I wanted the guys to be a real, live group. I had this Pinocchio/Geppetto complex, you know. And when they wouldn’t go for it, I really — it burned me out. And there I was being burnt out because things wouldn’t happen my way, and it was a case of His Majesty The Baby, trying to, you know, have his own way. If I had had the good sense God gave me, I might have noticed that I was having my own personal way, that is, in the sense that I wanted for myself was happening. I could be in the studio playing bass or guitar or piano on every single cut The Monkees did from then on if I wanted to, but that wasn’t enough for me, I wanted things for other people to do, otherwise I wanted to produce and direct and write the script for the whole shebang." TG: "Why did you want everyone to be playing? Because you thought it was more honest? Or was there another reason?" PT: "I thought it was more honest, I thought it was a bigger deal, I wanted a real live group, I thought that this was the way things were done; I was a victim of the same illusions that other people were criticizing us for shattering in their lives. In other words, you’re not a — you don’t just do this all by yourselves, you’re not an organic group, you don’t this, you don’t that, and how could you, you’ve broken my heart.’ As if, you know, as if we’ve broken their heart, as if it wasn’t the shattering of false illusions. If you hang on to false illusions, of course your heart’s gonna get broken." TG: "Did you try to organize the band to maybe rebel against —" PT: "Mh-hm." TG "— the producer." PT: "Well, we did organize the band, and we did get — rebel against Don Kirshner, but it was Mike and me wanting to — each for reasons of our own — and Micky and Davy went along. And then we did the thing, and then everybody said, 'Well, that’s enough of that, thanks very much.’ And I went, 'No, no, no, you’ve got to do it the way we planned, the way I had in mind for us to do,' you know. The fact that everybody went along with what looked like my plan obscured my vision of the fact that everybody was doing what it was they thought they had to do for reasons of their own. And when their reasons changed, and their behavior changed, and my plan didn’t change, I went after them screaming to try to mend my shattered illusions. What a jerk." TG: "(laughs) How did being a television star and a recording star affect your schooling and your ability to have friendships and things like that?" PT: “I don’t know that it affected my ability to have friendships. Basically I don’t think I knew how to be or have a friend beforehand, and I don’t think I learned while I was in that operation. I mean, I had some good buddies, you know, but that wasn’t the same thing, I didn’t really understand. There was only one person in my life that I could turn to when I was hurting who happened somehow to know what it was, what it took to stop me hurting, and that was a woman named Karen Harvey, who later joined me on the West Coast. And I thought, well, here’s a friend come to join me and this will be a real friend. And we were pretty good friends, I guess, but there wasn’t any that, you know, that — I didn’t know what a friend did in a sense of how, on a day-to-day basis, do you maintain your friendships, do you go out of your way to make sure that things are nice and right and, you know, the kind of work that a friendship takes. You don’t just have a friendship without work. And I didn’t know that. And I’m not so sure I know it now. I can say it, but I don’t know if I have, I have the real gut understanding it takes. But in any case, so that… And my schooling, the reason that I was in entertainment was because I’d flunked out of college for the second time, and I never did finish and get a graduate — I mean, I never did get a bachelor’s degree. And to this day, I haven’t got one and I don’t know whether I ever will." TG: "Well, you don’t exactly send resumes around when you’re playing concerts. (laughs)" PT: "No, they didn’t ask me for my degree when they asked me to play Bethlehem. At the Godfrey Daniel tonight in Bethlehem, PA. Those of you who are within driving distance of there, who are within the sound of my taped voice now should hustle out there and take your money so that you can get in." TG: "Speaking of money — how much profits did people in the band, of The Monkees, have, from the millions of records that were sold, and the TV profits and syndication?" PT: "We got the usual — we got standard minimum shares of the TV show and the records. We got a raise, a modest substantial raise, some, you know, medium kind of a raise, after about six months they gave us a raise. We always got the standard record deal, which was: the group gets five points, which was five percent of ninety percent, and so we split one and a quarter points, which is, what, one and three tenths percent each person of whatever the going price was. And we get that today. If they sell a record, The Monkees Greatest Hits album is still on the Billboard middle-of-the-road or some — there’s some special chart that Billboard has that we’ve been on for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks." TG: "How do you feel about that?" PT: "Well, it’s money, I don’t care." TG: "Did you retire as a wealthy young man from the —" PT: "No. No, I didn’t. I retired as a man with some indeterminate amount of money which somehow indeterminately ran out." TG: "So, when you left, did you want to be known as the former Monkee or did you want to erase that part of your past —" PT: "I tried to erase it." TG: "— and start anew?" PT: "I tried to erase it completely." TG: "How do you do that?" PT: "Well, you just don’t do anything connected with it, just absolutely refuse to have anything to do with it, and… basically what I did was I retreated into — I wound up retreating into Marin County, California, which is just north of San Francisco. And there I worked, I belonged to a worker-owned restaurant, waited tables and was part of the cooperative that owned and operated the restaurant. Nominally owned the restaurant; it was actually owned by this guy whose parents had left him some GM stock, and he bought this thing and the co-op was supposed to pay him to buy him out over the long haul. I think they have done finally, I think it’s now a real workers’ co-op. And I worked there, and I retreated, and nobody said anything to me about my Monkees past except one or two guys said, You know, I’m glad to see you just on the street schlepping around, that kind of thing, which made me feel good. I belonged to a few groups; I belonged to a thing called the Fairfax Street Choir, which had 35 voices in the rock section and was very hard to stage. (laughs) Those little coffee house stages, 35 guys and women. And I also belonged to a kind of second on the bill act in San Francisco called Osceola for a year or so. And that kind of thing. And nobody said anything about The Monkees to me." TG: "Are you in touch with the former members now?" PT: "Occasionally." TG: "I would imagine that some people would be happy to see, like, a reunion. Would you ever imagine that happening? PT: Yeah. The only problem with that is mounting it and making it acceptable to everybody. The problem is, the real problem is that I can’t much see myself going onstage and doing an hour of Monkees greatest hits playing bass and getting offstage. I don’t think that any amount of money would particularly… I don’t suppose that no amount of money, but I don’t think that any amount of money that anybody would be interested in paying me would make me want to do that. I… And I don’t see what conceivable creative project could interest the four of us that would be backed with enough money to make it worth our while to develop any good germ of an idea into something full-blown. I just, I don’t see it happening, I just think that the chances are astronomical against it. It’s possible. We’re all alive. The Beatle reunion is not possible. I’m just reading Lennon’s interview, and he says that thoughts of a Beatle reunion are like going back to high school. Why don’t you go back to high school? When are The Beatles getting back together? When are you going back to high school?" TG: "Is that how you feel?" PT: "I — like I said, I would think that any just simple remounting of The Monkees greatest hits songs on a stage would be that, yes." TG: "Oh, but if you were able to do other material." PT: "That’s what I’m saying. If I thought that it could be creative and useful and engage everybody to the fullest of their capacities, I would, I would consider it. But who’s gonna, you know, pay for us to have hotels, to keep us supported in the styles to which we are accustomed for the two months or three months that it would take to create, carve, mount, produce and rehearse a show that would involve all of us to the maximum of our new capacities. I don’t think it can be done." TG: "How do you feel about audiences?" PT: "What do you mean, (laughs) how do I feel about audiences? What kind of a question is that?" TG: "Okay, because fans have kind of played it both ways with the members of The Monkees, you know, I think when the TV series was on and when millions were being sold, there were millions of fans who were really adoring. And then when you leave a group like that and everybody wants to hear from you only in that context, it’s probably —" PT: "How long have we been on that topic, on this? We’ve been a half an hour, we’ve been almost the entire show on that topic." TG: "What topic?" PT: "The Monkees." TG: "Right. So…" PT: "(gently) So what’s your question?" TG: "So do you have a mixed feeling about fans and audiences?" PT: "Well, fans and audiences are different. Audiences come and they catch the show and they like what I do or they don’t, and that’s up to them, and that’s just the way it’s supposed to be, no matter whether I ever was a Monkee or not. And fans… if a fan, if somebody really needs to remember The Monkees and identify with that, I have nothing to say about that because I don’t know what’s going on with them or what chord I may have touched at some point way back when that they still need to strum on themselves. And it’s none of my business." TG: "So where are you living now?" PT: "I live in Venice, California, legally and technically. As a business matter, I spend most of my time in New York. I still am a registered voter in southern California, my driver’s license is southern California, I’m married, I have children in southern California, I go back there as often as I can and be part of the family, I just don’t get out there very often, and as a business matter, I spend most of my time in New York. Eighty percent." TG: "Where have you been doing most of your performing?" PT: "The New York area these days, mostly. I went to southern Canada, southern Ontario to do a few shows, I’ve been to Boston, I’ve been upstate New York, and I did Pittsburgh a couple, about a year ago, I guess. You know, I operate out of New York basically because you can’t operate out of L.A. You cannot make a living as an entertainer operating out of L.A. Not that I make such a great living operating as an entertainer out of New York, but at least there’s a sense of whatever level I’m on, I can go to the next level and operate on that level for a while. In L.A., you either have to make it or you die. That’s it: you’re either making it or you’re dead. And once somebody has been to the top and come away, you don’t, as far as I see, get much of a second chance in L.A. I tried to knock around as a character, comic character actor for a while, and I got people to: 'Hi, you know, it’s good to see ya,' and they laughed at my jokes, and then they never invited me back." TG: "Um, I forgot what I was gonna ask you." PT: "(laughs) A hell of a note for a professional interviewer." TG: "(laughs) Oh! Do you watch TV much now?" PT: "A fair amount." TG: "Do you watch it very critically, having been — and also seeing what kind of roles are available, I imagine…" PT: "No, no, I don’t watch mass media pop TV much. Hillstreet Blues, that’s about it. The rest of what I watch is CNN, cable news, I don’t know if you get it here." TG: "We don’t get cable here yet." PT: "You don’t have cable in Philly? (jokingly) Oh, you poor people! MTV, also on cable, and, um, the odd cosmos show. I, I saw Carl Sagan say astrology had been completely debunked on a scientific basis. And I go, wait a minute. Not that I’m such a fan of astrology, but there’s no scientific proof that — it’s like, anything you don’t like, if you define it the way you don’t like it, you can prove it doesn’t exist. Like, he said, 'The premise is that the stars have a profound influence on life.’ No, that’s not it." TG: "Do you watch a lot of rock video?" PT: "I watch a fair amount of rock video, and a few pop, the news, you know. Then I listen to music and I read, and I perform and I rehearse, and I run around and take care of business, and that keeps my days filled." TG: "Will you be performing tonight at Godfrey Daniels?" PT: "I’ll be performing at Godfrey Daniels in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania." TG: "And which instruments will you be playing?" PT: "I’ll be playing the guitar, the banjo, and the piano. All at once. (laughter) No, no, seriously, folks, all kidding towards one side, I’ll be playing those three instruments, if they have a decent piano in Bethlehem; I didn’t bring my piano with me." TG: "I want to thank you a lot for talking with us. Thanks very much for being here." PT: "Well, I’m — it was all right, thank you, and I, I just, I just hope it turns out an audience in Bethlehem, that’s all." TG: "Thanks for coming." PT: "Okay." [audio cuts off]

I uploaded the full audio to Google Drive, here.

[satoshi-mochida]

Tobyfox has provided a status update on the second chapter and beyond of Undertale sequel Deltarune in celebration of Undertale‘s fifth anniversary today.

First, here are the latest screenshots from Deltarune‘s second chapter:

Get the full update below.

Introduction

Hi everyone.

If you’re reading this, you must have been sticking around for about five years.*

I want to express my gratitude for everyone that has supported and encouraged me over this time.

Thank you.

I’ve said it many many times before, but I didn’t expect the simple game I made to receive so much attention. Because of that, many interesting things have happened, and now I can even spend my time making another game.

It seems both of us received a lot of happiness from this occurrence.

If it’s okay, I would like to keep striving to do things that make both of us happy.

Let me know what you think about that.

*Since the Undertale demo released in 2013, the game has really existed for 7 years. It’s already been more than 25% of my life…

Deltarune

I will make another.

I am making a game called “Deltarune.” It is the second game in the Undertale series.

The game will be released in many “Chapters,” the first of which I released two years ago on Halloween. Since that time, I’ve been working hard to figure out the rest of the game.

However, it’s a game that’s much harder to make than Undertale.

Graphics are more complicated and several times more involved.

Systems are more complicated.

Exposes the weak points of my creative and artistic ability.

Plot is much harder to tie together (more characters, more important locations).

Significantly more content than Undertale in one playthrough (especially cutscenes).

I have only made one game ever.

Unlike Undertale, this is the type of game that would normally have many designers working on each aspect of the game.

A story writer, a composer, an audio director, a map designer, a battle designer, a minigame designer, and an overall director. Instead, all of those roles end up handled by me.

The good news is that a few months ago, I completed a significant milestone regarding the game’s design. I completed readable outlines for every chapter in the game, including first-pass dialogue for almost all the cutscenes, examples of the music, etc.

Although certain details are still hazy, the flow of the game and all major events and battles that take place are now clear.

In summary, I largely spent the past two years writing, composing, designing, and drawing. However, that’s not the whole story.

We had actually attempted to develop the game since the time too. Development started around March 2019 and a 99% work was spent on investigating engines alternate to GameMaker, which I used for Chapter 1.

Without getting into the details, I decided a few months ago to go back to GameMaker after all. It still felt like the best fit for the project. So using Chapter 1 as a base, we’ve started creating Chapter 2 since May 2020.

A lot of progress has been made since that time. I believe we can complete this chapter, content-wise, before the end of the year (not accounting for translation, bugtesting, and porting).

I feel very confident. And the strange thing is, even though we ended up using the original engine, I don’t regret the lost time, either. Not only was I still busy designing the game, but during that long period, I was able to think of many ideas that make the game’s story and characters better.

I’m glad that I’m making the Deltarune that I have now and that we are making healthy progress.

Deltarune Status Estimate

■ Chapter 2 (04.15.20 – 08.13.20)

Phase 1: Design

Main Design: 100% (dialogue, etc.)

Initial Setup: 100% (stuff involved setting up people to make the game, adding debug tools, documentation, etc.)

Phase 2: Implementation (05.01.20 ~ 08.13.20)

Art: 90%

Cutscenes: 80% (90% are started, needs 2nd pass)

Bullet Patterns: 70% (enemies are mostly completed, bosses are about 40% done, needs 2nd pass)

Non-Bullet Battle Elements: 30% (Some ACTs are done and enemies are fightable, but interactive ACTs need to be completed and polished and the bosses aren’t programmed outside of bullet patterns)

Audio: 80%

Maps: ??% most are started or placeholder, most need 2nd pass. NPC interactions are completed in all spots where written.

Other: 65%

Phase 3: Finishing

Balancing: 0%

Bugfixing: 0%

Translation: 0%

Porting: 0%

(Honestly, a lot of stuff FEELS like 80% to me, but the truth is that what’s there is quite rough now. Polish ends up taking a lot of time, so the real actual time value may be around 50% done…? We’ll see what happens. It’ll be a lesson for everybody.)

■ Chapters 3 and Beyond

Phase 1: Design

Story and General Game Progression (first-pass): 100%

Cutscene Dialogue (first-pass, lacking cutscene instructions): 95%

Map Design (textual): 70% (varies per chapter, earlier chapters totally completed)

Map Design (drawn): 0% (this takes a lot of wrist energy so I don’t do it until we start programming)

Enemy Design (conceptual): 90% (all bosses are known)

Enemy Design (bullets / visual): 80% (varies per chapter, earlier chapters totally completed)

Music (concept): 95%

Music (completed): 50%

Visual Design:BG Concept (first-pass): 75%, Important Character, Bosses (first-pass): 100%

Phase 2

Sprite Art: 20%?

Other Content Creation: 0%

Phase 3

Release Readiness: 0%

(These numbers can be somewhat deceptive though. My true design style is to reach the moment where we have to make something, then suddenly think of something different at the last minute. This is always how it’s been with me and my work. It feels like no matter how much I plan, everything comes down to what I think of at the last second…)

Team and Disability

You may have noticed from my phrasing, but yes, there is a team helping me create the game. Other than me, there are about three active team members working day-to-day, with a few other people pitching in from time to time.

Their roles of the main members are overall content implementation and organization, bullet pattern implementation (part-time), and art (Temmie). Other than designing, I still have the role of system programmer.

I’m extremely grateful to have a team helping me carry out my design especially because of my disabilities, which have also made development more difficult.

Although I have long suffered from wrist and hand pain, about five months ago my wrist was the worst it’s ever been. I could not play the piano, use the mouse, and barely could use the keyboard. I navigated everything through voice to text.

Through weightlifting, exercise, and various equipment I have been able to somewhat increase the stamina of my wrist to an extent. Various solutions have included trackball mice for each hand, using voice to text whenever possible, using a foot pedal to click the mouse, etc.

Now I can use the mouse and keyboard for a certain amount each day provided I take frequent breaks. I wish I could work without stopping. Once the world situation improves I would really like to take physical therapy again and/or investigate surgery to repair my wrist.

Future Plans

Once we finish Chapter 2, I would like to use it as the base to create future chapters from. After gaining experience from this chapter, I think making future chapters will be easier.

Part of me wonders if we could make the game faster if we increased the size of the team and did something insane like create multiple chapters in parallel. However, another part of me understands that, adding more people doesn’t guarantee that the game will be created faster if it’s not done properly. I’m already just barely avoiding becoming a bottleneck on development even with a team of this size, due to my physical limitations.

To that end, I am interested in making a list of people that could potentially help me make the game. I’m not 100% sure if I’m going to ask anyone to help, but I think if I could find just 1 person that works well with me, it’s worth asking.

Chapter 2 is proceeding at a good pace, so if we do take anyone on, it will probably only be for Chapter 3 onward. So please understand that anything you send in may not have an immediate result.

People I Am Looking For

Feel free to send in your portfolio if you have the following qualifications:

Worked in the game industry before

Worked under NDA before

Have professional references

A degree of creativity while also being okay with just following directions

Fluent in English

People I Might Actually Use

Music Transcription / Basic Arrangement (Part-Time)

I usually start making songs by playing the piano and singing. An important step after this is to take this basic outline and transcribe it into melodies and chords. Though there are not too many remaining songs to transcribe, it would still help my wrist to have someone else start this process for me. Although I know many musicians, I’m sheepish to ask for help to them, because the main role is actually just to help me compose my own music…

Helpful qualities:

Good at transcription.

Can stand listening to me sing.

Optional: can use an old version of Fruity Loops.

Bullet Pattern Programming (Part-Time)

I’m looking for someone to help me program bullet patterns into the game. These people will work from text and visual designs to create fun battles that match the feeling of the game. I already have one person helping with this, but I think a second person would help a lot. You have to be able to use Gamemaker Studio 2 to manipulate objects on the screen / okay with using pre-existing scripts to accomplish this.

Helpful qualities:

Sense of fun and understanding of player perspective and gameplay balance. This aspect is [many times] more important than programming ability.

Reliable.

Able to make patterns based off of visual/text instructions.

Fine working with a poorly made battle system.

Able to sprite bullets.

Good visual / timing sense.

Minigame Programming (Part-Time)

There are a few minigames and small interactive events in the game, which appear in and outside of battles. These could take any kind of form… who knows what I’m thinking! Have you made a game before?

Helpful qualities:

Same sense of humor as me.

Some level of spriting ability is useful.

You have to have made a game that is fun.

Ability to work together with me.

Unlikely to Hire, But Send Me Your Information Just In Case

Cutscene Programming (Part-Time)

Besides the battles, the largest amount of content in the game is definitely the cut scenes. You will have to understand Gamemaker Studio 2, but the majority of the work is simply using a scripting system that I created to make characters move around the screen. The most important quality you can have here is not programming ability but the ability to efficiently use the system in order to create scenes with a good sense of humor, timing, and emotion.

I’d strongly prefer to hire someone I know to do this because it involves the story. So I most likely won’t hire anyone else.

Helpful qualities:

Can take text instructions and impart a proper sense of timing, humor, and weight to them.

Fine working with a custom scripting system (or smart enough to make something better that makes the game easier to make).

Art (Part-Time)

Sprite art—Temmie has already drawn a massive amount of art for the game, and continues to do so. And I actually already have a few other artists that have helped me that I’m more than happy to keep working with if things become more overwhelming. So currently I actually don’t need any more artists.

However, personally, I’d really like to build up a portfolio of available pixel artists and even concept artists. It’s not as if this is the only game I will make during my life. Anyone chosen for this game needs to be able to match the style of the game, but I’m interested in seeing people with different styles as well. Knowing that I have different options can open my mind up to different creative pathways.

Helpful qualities:

Can take bad looking sketches and turn them into art that looks good (magic).

Don’t mind if your work gets completely drawn over or thrown out.

Anyone that can draw cute or cool poses is good.

Uninterested in seeing people that have an art style outside of the scope of the game.

Write (Full-Time)

Someone needs to transform into a new wrist for me.

Helpful qualities:

Flexible.

Doesn’t hurt.

Musical sense.

That’s everyone I’m looking for. The only other kind of person I might hire would be a single jack-of-all-trades type that can do any sort of things such as cutscenes, bullets, or even system programming, with a good degree of visual flair. (But if you can do those sorts of things, aren’t you busy making your own game already!?)

Anyway, I’ll show you the e-mail now. Just make sure you read these rules first:

Don’t send in e-mails about anything else!

Don’t send to other team members, Fangamer, etc. about helping out!

Got it? Then please send your information to this e-mail address:

deltarunejobs@fangamer.com

Since Fangamer will be sorting through the e-mails for me, we’ll stop taking e-mails at the end of September so they don’t get overwhelmed. Ultimately, I’m only looking for one or two people, and to make a list of the rest of the potentially helpful people in the world.

Undertale is available now for PlayStation 4, Switch, PS Vita, and PC via Steam and GOG. Deltarune Chapter 1 is availble for PlayStation 4, Switch, and PC via Deltarune.com.

[imagineclaireandjamie]

Here I am, minding my own business scrolling through when I stumble upon deep within. Already I’m so invested! Thank you for this wonderful story... can’t wait to read more!

I know I’ve answered this prompt, but it made me so happy that I did it twice. Enjoy the next part:

Deep Within The Darkness Peering: Part i; Chapter THREE.

“Have you ever done anything impetuous?” The question was rhetorical and John knew it having known Claire since college, she already knew that he had. “The other week someone was airlifted in, a prisoner, and I need to help him.”

“What? Claire? Are you insane?” He spluttered, holding the phone close to his ear as he paced the length of his large office in shock. A high flying barrister in the city, John rarely had to attend to questions from her regarding his job so it had come as a shock to him when she’d called so out of the blue.

“Before you say anything, he hasn’t put me up to this. Please, John, just hear me out, okay?”

“Jeez, why could this not be something simple?” He asked, massaging his temples with his free hand.

“He was up for parole but the fight that landed him in my care got back to the governors and whilst he was in the hospital they denied his request and rubber stamped it. He’s been told he can’t appeal, that it’s final. But he didn’t start the scuffle, he was so badly injured, he flatlined once on the table and spent another week in an induced coma. He told me he didn’t fight back and I trust him. I don’t know what happened, what they did to him, but something tells me their purpose was to keep him there for the foreseeable future.”

“What’s his name?” Pulling his laptop from its bag, he let it load whilst grabbing a tumbler and a new bottle of whisky, clearly it was going to be a long night.

“Jamie,” she began, shaking her head and correcting herself as she wrapped her frozen hands around a warm cup of tea, “James Fraser.”

“Christ, Claire! You know what he did right?”

Taken aback by the fact that John knew who Jamie was without even having to look him up, she nearly dropped the boiling liquid onto her lap. “Yes, but--”

“But nothing. You cannot be serious. He *beat* a captain beyond recognition and left him for dead in an alley. If they denied his request then it’s because his conviction is too severe, that and they probably don’t trust that he can rehabilitate himself." His research was leading him deeper into the case as he read the transcripts from various stages of Fraser’s trial. “How can we prove that what he says about the fight in prison is accurate? You might be right, he might not have instigated it or even lashed out during it, but I doubt there’s any evidence to support his claims.”

“So there’s nothing to be done?” Hanging her head in defeat, she let out the breath she’d been holding, her stomach feeling hollow at the prospect of failing him.

“You didn’t make him any promises, did you?” He asked cautiously.

“No. I didn’t even mention that I was contemplating this, I didn’t know what chance I had of getting a hold of you in time, let alone you knowing his case.”

“I don’t - really, I just know *of* it.”

“And what do you know about the cop, the guy he attacked? One of the guards mentioned him in passing.”

John could tell there was more to it by the tone of her voice but didn’t press for information. Shaking his head, he considered his options. He knew some home truths about the man, opinions and facts that he’d heard pass through the high court offices and as much as he trusted Claire, she seemed to have a vested interest in Fraser and he didn’t want to lend hope to her cause where there was none.

Against his better judgement, though, he stuck to the truth - reciting as much as he felt able to divulge. “His name is Captain Jack Randall. Quite a decorated officer, he has been known to employ less than favourable methods of extraction when it comes to confessions but nothing has ever come from the claims. He’s like Marmite, it seems, either you love him or…” he took a deep breath; the truth, he told himself again, “you hate him.”

“John,” she asked, her spine tingling as she felt hope and fear mingle in her belly, “is there a chance that this...Randall...is stretching the truth? O-or that he caused the fight? To try and keep Jamie inside?”

“I don’t know, Claire. Honestly. I’d have to look further into it. But, and I’m playing devil's advocate here, absolutely anything is possible. It’s rare, but where there is corruption, it often runs deep.”

-- --- --

Throughout her next shift she ignored the feeling in her gut, the twinge of discomfort that had the power to render her immobile if she stopped to think about it for too long. Keeping her promise, she went to see Jamie one last time before they discharged him but they didn’t speak much. She wanted to reach out to him, to tell him about the conversation she’d had with John, but something told her that it was unfair to raise his hopes - especially with a new batch of guards on duty, two she did not know.

“Do you need anything?” She asked, placing the back of her hand lightly against his forehead mimicking the motions of checking his temperature to keep her hands busy. “Something more to eat, or your wounds redressed...just in case?” Without asking for further permission, though, she took the salve that she’d placed in the draw beside his bed and massaged a little more into the chafed sores that lined his wrists. She’d taken to silently doing this every day. The handcuffs that bound him rubbed, and she could tell he was bothered by it - though he would never say.

“Thank ye, nurse Beauchamp,” she could tell by his immediate formality that he was being wary, “but I dinna need anything more.”

“Take care of yourself, Mr Fraser.” She said, returning the sentiment.

Pulling the blanket up and over his stomach, she smiled sadly before returning back to her waiting patients. It was hard to leave him, much harder than she’d originally thought but John was a bloody good barrister. If anyone could help it was him.

The rest of the day dragged at an exceedingly slow pace and every moment she had time to herself she considered going back to check on him one last time. And every time she did, Glenna would raise a brow at her and subtly shake her head. There was nothing more she could do for now and loitering around would only arouse suspicion.

She did, however, hang around the nurses station long enough to watch the corridor clear as they led him away. Looking at his feet, he didn’t glance up though she willed him to, just for one last chance at reassurance. Her heart dropped in her chest the moment he was out of sight, a feeling of loneliness taking root in the base of her stomach.

“Come now, Claire,” Glenna whispered, rubbing her elbow gently, “final rounds before dinner, maybe Mrs Greaves will tell us another tale of her time in the army, aye?”

The red button on her answering machine was blinking wildly by the time she arrived home. As she threw her keys in the bowl beside the door and removed her shoes, she pressed play, put her work lanyard by her keys and half listened to the first message.

“Stupid spam companies.” She cursed as a woman with a cockney accent wittered on about accident claims. It wasn’t until she heard John’s voice that she began to fully pay attention. Quickly rewinding the tape, she replayed the message, the breath catching in her throat as hope swelled in her chest.

“Hi Claire, it’s me, John,” his manicured English accent seemed more prominent on the tape making each of his words clear and pronounced, “it turns out you were right about the fight. There’s video evidence from the security footage that shows the prisoners setting to your Mr Fraser. It’s too pixelated to make out what happened to start it, or what they used to cause him such damage but it’s enough for me to make a clear case for another hearing of his probation case. I called the hospital, they said you’d be off by midnight. Please get some rest now and meet me in the cafe at the end of your road for breakfast - we’ll talk more then.”

Pulling out her mobile, she penned him a quick message, a real smile covering her face as she slumped against the wall, relief coursing through her.

Morning seemed ages away, the hours ticking by slowly. Unable to relax, Claire sat in bed with a cup of tea and a new book. The mattress was comfy, a new one she’d purchased not long ago, and she couldn’t help but hope Jamie wasn’t in too much pain sleeping, once again, on his prison cot. The alarm woke her some time later as she blinked her eyes sleepily, sat upright in bed -her book now resting on her lap- and slid herself from beneath the sheets. Noting the time, she dressed quickly, pulling the scarf around her neck as she walked the few steps between her apartment and the tiny greasy spoon she occasionally purchased breakfast from.

John was already there, looking massively out of place in his suit and tie, supping quietly on his first cup of coffee. His first words to her, though, were only cautiously optimistic.

“I just have to warn you, Claire, there is still a lot standing between Fraser and his freedom. Remember, he attacked a policeman, he’s served half his jail time and has amassed a good record whilst being incarcerated. That,” he said, looking pointedly at her, “will work in his favour and now we can be certain he didn’t instigate or take part in the assault against himself it’ll make him seem more of a good candidate. But, there is one thing you have to know…”

She waited, certain that no matter what John said she was set on her course. “It won’t matter.” If they had cause to hide information about the skirmish to scupper his probation case, there was no telling what else they were capable of.

Surveying her expression, he could tell she wasn’t backing down. “He has no place of residence listed on his file. With no home, no accepting family, he’ll just be denied again. Once he’s served his time, in full, they’ll let him free without worrying too much about that. But for probation to be approved you need to provide evidence of a fixed, permanent address.”

“So...what if I offer mine up to him, just for the duration of his probation.”

“You do know how long that would be, don’t you?”

She didn’t, but she knew he’d clue her in.

“Four years, his total sentence is eight years.”

“Shit, John, he’s been inside since he was twenty!?” The colour drained from her face, her nails digging into the rough wooden table. Burying the shock, she swallowed, wrapping her hands around her small glass of water to keep herself still. “It doesn’t matter, I don’t care how long it would be for, my offer remains the same. If he needs a sponsor, I’ll do it.”

Sighing, John brought his hand to rest over hers. “This is all very gallant of you and I’m sure he’ll be really grateful to you, but I need you to seriously consider the consequences of this decision, of the choice you’re making.”

“I trust him, John. I know you think it’s madness, I can tell by the look in your eyes. And yes, I don’t really know him all that well. But I just *know*, something in my heart tells me this is the right thing to do, that he needs this. You didn’t see him after he got the news. You didn’t see his face, the fear etched deep behind his eyes. He’s terrified, John. Petrified. It might be a naive notion, but I got the distinct impression he didn’t feel safe going back there. For all we know, the damage might have already been done. But if anything else happens to him, I’ll never be able to forgive myself.”

“Alright then.” Squeezing the side of her palm, he took one last sip of his drink and placed the mug back onto the table. “Just know, though, if any harm comes to you, I’ll never forgive myself. And if he does something to jeopardize his probation, it may directly impact on you. On your home, your career...your wellbeing.”

“Thank you.” Resting her head against his shoulder, she breathed an easy breath, the scent of boiled coffee filling her lungs. “I really appreciate you taking the time to work on this for me.”

After a brief term dating at the beginning of university, John had confessed his true proclivities to Claire and they had turned into fast friends. His family, like hers, had a certain reputation and his parents were clear on his path. Degree, law school, marriage and kids; and though they hadn’t been outwardly disappointed by his confession when he’d finally worked up the guts to tell them, his relationship had suffered because of it.

Claire had stuck by him, had moved to Glasgow shortly after he’d been promoted here and had become more like a sister than a best friend. Her story had hit him harder than he cared to admit. With no remaining family of her own, she had a tendency to gravitate towards people who needed a home and even if Fraser turned out to be unworthy of her help, he knew she wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about it if she didn’t at least try.

“I’ll do what I can. It could take a while, a few weeks maybe, so don’t panic if we don’t have an answer immediately.”

“Will it take as long as the original hearing.”

“Six months? Gosh no. I could take up to a month, depending on whether the board drag their heels, but if we put a little pressure on them -not enough to anger them, mind- we should have an answer in a week or two.”

[missmentelle]

1/2 I have just started uni and I'm already failing basically...I am in a Medicine related major (I think that's the US word for it?), but it's not really for me and we have to study a lot of chemistry/physics/math which I absolutely fucking hate. I skipped a lot of unskippable classes already, and one of the teachers (who i'm actually afraid of) really dislikes me, which doesn't make it easier. My mom said that if I wanted to work instead

I would gave to pay back the tuition and they wouldn't support me anymore financially. Plus there aren't many good positions for an 18 yo high school graduate. I don't know what to do, I feel trapped and miserable, and anyway, how do I tell anyone that I don't want to study OR work because I just want to die?? Like that's the only thing I'm looking forward to. From their perspective, that's not an option apparently...but I have no motivation to struggle with this shit anymore.

Hey, I’m really sorry to hear that you’re in this situation. The transition from high school into college or adult life is not a smooth one for many people, and I’m sorry to hear that you are struggling. It seems like there’s a lot going on for you right now, but I think there are some steps that you can take to start to detangle this mess a little bit:

Seek out mental health services. Any time you are so overwhelmed and stressed out that you want to die, that is a mental health emergency and it’s time to seek some help. There is no shame in seeking help - many, many people do during their first year of university and beyond. It is not a sign of weakness. If you are still enrolled at the university, you should have access to the campus’ mental health services - make yourself an appointment ASAP. If you’d prefer, and you have access to it, you can also seek out mental health services from an outside provider. There is a way through this, even if everything seems like hopeless bullshit right now, and it’s important that you give yourself a chance to get through this. 

Have an honest conversation with your parents, if you can. My parents used a similar scare tactic with me - I could live at home, rent-free, so long as I was in school. If I left school without graduating, they would charge me for room and board, and I would’ve had to get a job. At the time, it felt like my parents were trying to put unnecessary pressure on me and punish me for failure. In hindsight, though, I realize that my parents - both college dropouts themselves - realized how hard the world was without a college education, and this was the only way they felt they could ensure that I was taking my education seriously. You obviously know your parents a lot better than I do, but I suspect that their reasoning might be similar. If you can, sit your parents down for an honest conversation about your situation. It won’t be easy. But it’s important that your parents have a complete understanding of what’s going on. You’re not struggling in college because you’re partying too much, you are struggling because you are experiencing a serious mental health situation. Be honest with your parents about what’s happening and how you’re feeling, and see if they will work with you to help fix the situation. Very few parents want to see their children suicidal, and if there is any chance they will help you, it’s worth a shot. 

Speak to your academic advisor. I know that it can be tempting to want to just run away from this whole mess, but you need to talk to your academic advisor (or whatever your equivalent is). Tell them the whole story about what’s going on - I guarantee that this is not the first time they’ve had a student in this situation, and it won’t be the last. Ask them if there is anything you can do to salvage the situation - is it possible for you to drop the classes without leaving a negative mark on your transcript? Are there any tutoring programs you can access? Does your school offer any kind of “fresh start” program for students who had a bad first year? Ask your advisor about the resources available to you, and the options you have for how to proceed from here. 

Arrange to take a year or a semesters’ medical leave, if possible. Most universities will allow you to take medical leave if you are experiencing serious physical or mental health issues that make it difficult for you to continue school. This lets you take time away to rest and recover without affecting your standing at the university - you can remain a student, even if you are not enrolled in any classes that year, and return to the school if you choose to when you have recovered. This might be a good solution for you; you could take some time away to focus on your mental health, figure out what you want to do moving forward, and have the option to return to your university if you choose to. Sometimes having a chance to take breather, knowing that school will still be there for you to go back to, is the best choice for your mental health. Taking a leave of absence also gives you a chance to grow and mature a little bit, and leave you more equipped to make decisions about your future. 

Re-evaluate your career options, and talk to a career counselor if possible. It seems pretty clear that your program is not a good fit for you - if you dislike math and science, then a STEM-heavy course is probably not going to be a good choice for you. It also seems like you feel trapped between two possible options: this specific program, or a minimum-wage job, But those aren’t your only options - there are a lot of different programs and careers out there that might be a better fit for you. You could be a teacher, editor, social worker, nurse, marketer, dietitian, lawyer, analyst, politician - the list goes on and on. If you could snap your fingers right now and be done with college, what career would you like to have? What’s something that interests you? What might be a good fit? You don’t necessarily have to be sure, but having a few ideas would at least give you a starting point for figuring out where to go next. Most people transfer majors at least once during college - I certainly did. It set me back an entire year, and I have never once regretted it. Education is more than just math classes you hate - explore some of the other options that are out there. If transferring to a different university would make you feel more comfortable, that’s also something that you can look into. 

I know it can feel like your life is over if you mess up your first semester of university, but it’s not. These things happen. It’s okay to mess up. You have discovered that this program is not for you, and that is still a form of progress. Now it’s time to pick yourself up, reach out for help, and start looking for something that might be a better fit. Best of luck to you!

[philosophicalparadox]

The Twins and Paternity

Ok, this is going to be a LONG post, because there is just SO MUCH to debunk about this whole “the twins have different fathers” thing. 

Because it may not be as true as you think. In fact, it’s more likely given what we know that they really are identical twins. 

Huh? But they look different!

Aaaaaand that is why this post is so long: that’s right folks, buckle up and let’s take a field trip down the road called Epigenetics and Gene expression. (in other words, this is going to get really sciencey)

TLDR: Twins can be identical genetically, but have different phenotypes and even completely different body structure due to gene mutation that occurs during gestation. This gene mutation modifies how genes are expressed, but does NOT modify the genes themselves. The fact that the twins are BOTH half demons, well...we’re going to get into some rather strange examples I have from personal experience about animal hybridization and gene expression, simplified as much as I dare. Also, prepare for wikipedia references, because they may not be superb but they offer a good summary of everything I looked up, via Wiki’s citation page. (Yep, I went there.) You’re welcome. 

More below the cut: 

First, let’s look at what we know:

The twins are Monoamniotic, meaning that they share the same amniotic sac in utero. This is something ONLY achievable in identical twins. 

With me? Good, because here’s where that get’s messy:

Monoamniotism and Size/parasitism

Monoamniotic twins are also monochorionic, meaning that they share a placenta. This, unfortunately, can lead to embryonic parasitism, since the twins in a monoamniotic/monochorionic relationship (called, affectionately, “MoMo twins”) share blood between not just the mother and each of them, but between one another also. As a result, it is not uncommon in “MoMo” twins for one twin to be larger or stronger than the other. 

Also, blood is not sometimes distributed evenly over a placenta, especially in the case of MoMo twins, which have a very large placenta to share between the two. Consequently, it is not unusual for one twin to be short of an adequate blood supply, and therefore become thinner and smaller. While it’s rare, sometimes one twin may die in utero for this reason. 

I say this as a matter of interpretation, not fact, but it appears to me that MoMo twins seem to be one step shy of conjoined, since they share everything from blood and nutrients to hormones, not only with mom, but with one another also. 

The Process

The diagram above shows at what stage during the development of a (single) foetus it can split into twins, and the results thereof. 

Most people have an erroneous assumption that identical twins are always produced during the initial phases of gestation, when the egg is first dividing. (Morula stage). However, this is not remotely true of all identical twins, which is why you get things like the Conjoined twins above, which do not split into separate organisms until the, putting it in layman’s terms, “DNA blueprint” of their entire basic structure is already determined. (Basically, as the Embryonic Disc stage, every cell is primed to divide in a specific way, to become a specific, basic thing -- heart, spine, brain, etc. Before this stage, however, there are still “gaps” in the blueprint -- All of the chromosomes and genes are there, but they haven’t  quite “ordered” the cells to become those fundamental things like organs yet. Now, as the foetus grows, more cells will be “directed” by the DNA they contain to serve a function, but at the Embryonic Disk stage, most of the vital organs “blueprints” are complete.)

DNA replication and Mutation:

Recap, because for some people, high school was a long time ago. 

DNA divides using RNA as a transcriptor, in order to “copy” the DNA -- the RNA can modify the DNA depending on what it’s specific structure is and how it transcribes the DNA during replication. This is how viruses do their business, by transcribing thier RNA into your DNA, and changing what a cell does or how well it functions by screwing up the DNA pattern. (which is why there really IS no limit on what a virus can do or what symptoms it can cause.)

However, errors do happen in transcription naturally, which is also how things like cancer form. When the RNA fails to “copy” the DNA correctly, it can mess with the senescence of the cell, causing it to divide indefinitely. On a less severe note, this is also how gene expression can be modified, even in identical individuals. Once RNA mis-transcribes something, future cells containing the ‘error’ are produced, and produced, and produced unless another RNA ‘failing’ changes the gene expression again. 

Gene expression in twins:

Because identical twins have identical Chromosomes, they usually have identical gene expression, which is basically how a visible a gene is. Now, they don’t ever have 100% identical DNA, due to those naturally occurring transcription errors, but their chromosomes are identical, and so are most of their genes. 

That means, however, that both twins also share not only every dominant trait, but every codominant and recessive trait. And, due to DNA replication errors, identical twins DO sometimes come out looking nothing at all alike, exactly because sometimes, rather than a cell’s DNA replicating to produce the “dominant” trait, it will instead transcribe for the recessive, and continue to do this until the gene becomes expressed as recessive. 

It is not clear, by my findings, if MoMo twins are more or less suceptible to this, so I can not answer from that angle. 

Gene expression and interspecies hybridization:

Ok, trip down memory lane time for me -- I used to work for a snake breeder, who knew a snake breeder, that knew a snake breeder...

Ahem, anyway, did you know that most “corn snakes” in the pet trade aren’t “corn snakes” at all? They’re almost always hybrids of the Texas Rat snake, Fox snake, Milk snake, or other Colubrid species. I once owned one that was Corn x Fox x Gopher snake -- he is currently a whopping Seven feet long, and has a very impressive girth. 

However, when I purchased him, he looked just like a normal corn snake. He had a bit of a different patten, and had very vibrant oranges and yellows and reds, with some seriously high contrast -- he was gorgeous. 

I met his parents at the store I got him from -- Mom was HUGE. I’m talking six feet at least, and with a “fire and ice” colour mutation. She was pretty, but damn was she big. I assumed it was just a fluke, and bought the boy anyway. 

I called her, the breeder, later on, when he got to be five feet long and had a seriously bad attitude, puffing up and hissing at just about anything. I wanted to know if it was a genetic thing, or a husbandry thing. 

She kindly told me he was F3 (third gen) Gopher hybrid, and that gopher snakes tended to be more defensive, claiming that he had “inherited those genes from mom”. 

Point of my story is : He looked just like a corn snake. 

But he was not, nor is any “corn snake” you find in the pet trade anymore, unless it is wild caught. 

using the same example, let’s talk about “high show” and “low show”: 

My corn snake was “High show” for typical corn-snake traits; orange body colour, markings (mostly - he had some barring that wasn’t typical, but that is owed to the barring in gopher snakes being dominant, I think.) and slender, active body. 

Now, that doesn’t make much of a case for twins - but it does offer insight into hybrids not necessarily looking hybrid-ey.

Demon Genes and Human Genes -- where to draw the line?

The following is fan speculation, not anything confirmed in canon:

Eminescu says, sometime in the middle chapters somewhere, that demon genes and human genes can combine in “interesting ways”. 

The question here becomes -- why did Rin get the “demon genes” and not Yukio? 

By sheer fluking chance, I wager. 

From what I can conjecture about, it appears that, at it’s most basic tennet, demon “parasites” being introduced into human hosts causes a kind of genetic splicing, but with the addition of “turning on” genes that, in humans, have been dormant for millions of years.

Demons who inhabit  (at least human) bodies produce atavisms, or throwbacks to ancestral traits. Tails, long canines, thickened fingernails, etc. are all traits humans once had, before they were homo sapiens. Long before. 

It could just be a splice thing, (which I will come back to in another post) whereupon the demon’s genes influence the addition of the tail and whatnot, but I’m of the mind that thier genes couldn’t splice effectively unless there was a genetic weakness to exploit -- the existence, perhaps, of dormant atavistic traits. Which could be why so few of the “host bodies” for Lucifer and crew could not be used. It takes a certain human, of a certain bloodline, to possess these traits, particularly in abundance. 

Now, that leads to some interesting speculations about Yuri, which I shall delve into thusly: 

Yuri and Demon genes

It is possible that Yuri is part demon herself, which would logically increase the odds of demon genes being passed on via copulation with a demon. After all, Satan is going to be dominant for some of the same genes, as the all-father, so it would make sense for those genes to come out when they breed. 

We don’t see any of those genes in anyone but Rin though. Why? Well, that could be the infintessimally small percentage of a chance that Yukio, while he inherited those same demon genes, simply doesn’t “show” them. He has them, but due to the infinitely complicated rules of hybridization, may not show them through. 

Now, a disclaimer: It could be, and is an equally valid point, assuming Katou doesn’t have a biology degree, that they DO have different fathers. However, until we have the answers in canon, it is equally as likely that they don’t. I merely hadn’t seen ANY post claiming the offensive -- that Satan sired them both. 

Feel free to reply with opinions, fact checks, etc! Unfortunately, I can not apparently link anything to add credibility (stupid Tumblr and their anti-linking bullcrap I guess - because Wikipedia apparently isn’t a source, and neither are any of it’s sources) and if I’ve misunderstood anything, please inform me! I spent five hours researching this stuff, but one day’s worth of study does not make me an expert! 

[plotbunny-hutch]

Hermione Granger and the Firebird 4/4

Part 1 here

Part 2 here

Part 3 here

Nagini. 

Nagini is . . . oh, boy. 

So, previously on Hermione Granger and the Firebird: the Giving Cup, Helga Hufflepuff’s sacred goblet, once used to bind alliances and give strength to the weary, is dead. Before that, it did its damnedest to tear apart Hermione and her Hunt–and it nearly did. Viktor and Ron came close to killing each other. Mila, Darina, and Aleksi aren’t talking to each other. Tihomir is . . . well, he’s being Tihomir about it, which means that everyone keeps an eye on him when it’s his turn to cook. Tiho’s dad thinks a little baneberry in the tea adds variety to family meals and keeps the kids on their toes. Sirius won’t leave dog form. 

Oh, and everybody has Horcrux nightmares. 

So, running low on sleep and patience and general sanity, the Hunt makes a stopover in Godric’s Hollow. There’s an old Order safehouse there. And Harry has never seen his parents’ grave, or the place where he was born. 

Okay, and Hermione wants to meet Bathilda Bagshot and maybe gloat a little about the Wiltshire Smythe/Devonshire Smith thing. Wouldn’t you?

Now, in their youth and excitement to be done with this damn Hunt and finally get some sleep in a proper bed and never talk to their fellow Hunters again at least until they get really bored, our brave heroes make an elementary mistake. They split up. 

Harry doesn’t really feel like visiting his parents’ grave and having a lot of feelings in front of a bunch of Bulgarians, even if he did kind of save their lives and even if they do feel indignation on his behalf both loudly and frequently. They’re proving to be awfully handy in a scrap–but they’re still Hermione’s friends, really, not his and Ron’s. Viktor, meanwhile, has some serious shit to say to Ron, and Mila, Darina, and Aleksi have some serious shit to say to each other. 

So, with Hermione and Sirius in tow, Harry heads for the graveyard. Viktor takes Ron out to the safehouse’s broom shed to see if they can salvage enough brooms for the Hunt. Viktor and Tiho are the only ones old enough to Apparate, and Tiho isn’t great at Side-Along. Only a few hastily-enchanted Portkeys and some serious cardio have kept them ahead of the Death Eaters. The remaining Bulgarians set about fixing dinner and checking wizarding radio for news. 

(The news, by the way, is not great. There seems to be a roving band of young radical terrorists on the loose, staging Death Eater attacks through the countryside in order to continue their lawless spree: three ex-Hogwarts students, expelled by order of the Minister, and a gaggle of foreigners, one of whom rather eerily matches the description of international Quidditch sensation Viktor Krum. If you happen to see any of these hooligans, seek cover and report your sighting to the Ministry at once.)

“I know you care very deeply for Hermione, and you are very good at apologizing,” Viktor says over a pot of old broom polish, “But between apologies, I do not think you are very good at being her friend.” 

“James and Lily were family,” Sirius says, barefoot in a snowy graveyard, holding Harry while he cries and Hermione looks awkward. “I shouldn’t have left you. Not with Hagrid, not with anyone, I never should have left you.” 

“I hate what I said to you, and I know I can’t ever make up for it,” Mila says to Darina and Aleksi. “But it’s killing me to see it drive you two apart. Please don’t let me being stupid wreck this. It’s good for you. And I want you to be happy more than I want you.” 

“Hm,” Tiho says to the stewpot. 

“I’m . . . going to give you two a moment,” says Hermione, inching off stage left as Harry and Sirius weep on each other. 

The Hunt is changing her. It’s happening faster all the time. She used to be able to spend all day in the library; just the thought of it makes her itch now. The others complain and pick at blisters around the evening campfire, and get distracted in mid-conversation, and slug about in the morning. Hermione has walked across half of England in the last three weeks, and she feels like she could run forever. 

But she can’t, because her Hunt needs her to stay close. So she doubles back and forth along the trail. She does her hand stretches and picks idly at the hilt of her sword. Hermione can be patient. 

Well, she tries, anyway. 

Bagshot House is close, so close, and she knows that the boys will only be bored if they come with her. She spares a guilty thought for Aleksi–but no, he’ll forgive her, if she takes lots of notes for his capstone paper and maybe writes him an introduction letter. 

So she goes to Bathilda Bagshot’s house, which is obviously a terrible idea. She has a lovely time over tea, gloats only a little bit about the Smythes, and takes lots of notes for Aleksi’s capstone paper. She says her goodbyes to Bathilda Bagshot, a sweet old witch who doesn’t seem to get out much, and sets off down the street. 

Which is when the Aurors pop in and Stupefy her. 

Hermione wakes up wandless and, more horribly, swordless in one of the Ministry’s charming detention cells. It might even be the same one she was held in after the Tottenham Court Road attack. 

“Seriously?” She shouts at the ceiling. “It takes you thirty bloody minutes to respond to a Death Eater attack in the middle of London and two seconds to pick up a delinquent student in the arse-end of the West Country?” 

Which is how she discovers that she is officially no longer a student. 

Oh, she thinks, in a distant floaty sort of way, this is what being dead must feel like. 

“Focus on your studies, dear,” her mum had always said, sternly, and “Don’t you ever jeopardize your future,” her dad had always said. They worked so damn hard to give her a good life, and this had always been the deal: you work hard enough to make opportunities possible, and we will make them happen for you. 

Mum, dad, I’ve been expelled. Hermione could die of shame. 

She reaches – stops – drops her hand into her lap, empty. No sword. Right. 

She looks at her hands for a minute: gloved in scars from fingertip nearly to elbow. Callused from sword drills. Dirty under the fingernails. A splinter, dug into a callus where she can’t feel it or reach it with her teeth. Empty. 

She keeps her eyes on her hands when the Aurors come in, when they manacle her hands and walk her down the hall towards the trial room. 

She’d stopped studying Muggle maths in primary school; she’d kept up her science reading, because it was interesting and because it helped her spellwork, but she hadn’t taken proper Muggle exams in ages, and would Hogwarts even give a transcript as proof of enrollment? What are her options? Does Hermione even have options anymore? Or has she thrown them all away like an idiot, waving a wand and toting a sword and swanning about like a hero when there are no heroes––

It is at this point that a minor hell breaks loose. Historians would later sit down and agree that, more or less, this is what happened on the thirtieth of October, 1995: 

In Godric’s Hollow, Hermione’s Hunt became aware that they had lost their Huntswitch. A panicked wizarding househusband (Reginald Cattermole, age 47) shouted at Harry and Sirius as they crossed the street in front of his house that he was calling the Aurors. The two sprinted back to the safehouse, where a brief consultation with the radio-operating group clarified that they were all wanted fugitives, at which point Ronald Weasley, age 15, said “Where’s Hermione?”

At approximately 2:10 p.m., the Hunt mounted their hastily-repaired brooms and began the long flight from Godric’s Hollow to London with all haste. 

At approximately 2:30 p.m., an alleged Death Eater (Amycus Carrow, age 52) spotted the Hunt in situ and loosed spellfire, shooting down Darina Dimitarova, age 16. 

Alexi Nikolov, age 16, and Mila Ganina, age 17, immediately dove to render aid; on finding Dimitarova badly injured, Alexi cast a yet-unidentified Dark curse; Carrow’s dismembered body was later found by Muggles in Dunkeswell, Yarcombe, and Chard. 

After a brief argument, Ganina remounted her broom and rejoined the Hunt while Nikolov stayed to administer emergency healing. 

At approximately 3:30 p.m., while flying over Salisbury, another Death Eater sighted the Hunt, heading towards London; after consulting with Peter Pettigrew (age 35, widely believed to have been possessed by You-Know-Who, age indeterminate due to spectral status), Bellatrix Lestrange, age 44, gave chase by broom with a squad of junior Death Eaters. 

At approximately 4:00 p.m., Sirius Black, age 36, peeled off from the Hunt to engage the pursuing Death Eaters, shooting down three before a third struck him with an artritoma curse, forcing him to make an emergency landing. 

At approximately 4:15 p.m., while flying over Epsom, a small force of wizards and witches formerly associated with the vigilante group known as the Order of the Phoenix rose to engage with the remaining Death Eaters; one, with a hex later described as a repurposed cooking charm, dispatched Lestrange. 

The leader of the nominal Order force (Kingsley Shacklebolt, age 42) made it known to the remaining Hunters that Voldemort had announced his intent to attack the Ministry of Magic. Spurred on, the now united force (numbering about thirty) made for the Ministry to oppose him. 

At 4:36 p.m., a blasting hex brought down the gates of the Ministry, opening the way for a large force of Death Eaters, as well as a small pack of werewolves. 

In the ensuing combat, another blasting hex caved in the passage between the Ministry detention cells and Trial Room 3, nearly killing Hermione Granger, age 15, and her escorting Aurors. 

At 4:41 p.m., the Hunt and the Order descended on the scene, pincering the Death Eaters between the broom-mounted force and a small band of Aurors rallied by Percival Weasley, age nineteen. 

At 4:53 p.m., Ronald Weasley and Harry Potter, age 15, found Granger half-trapped beneath rubble (and by all reports extremely cross) and levitated her free. Weasley and Potter attempted to dissuade her from joining the battle while unarmed; in reportedly strong language, she insisted on finding her weaponry, then. 

At 4:59 p.m., probably guided by some arcane Hunt magic, Granger discovered the Sword of Gryffindor (bonded to her some eleven months previous) bound with gleipknots in a Ministry holding cell; reunited with her primary weapon and with little hope of recovering her wand in a timely manner, she then joined battle. 

At 5:07 p.m., Death Eater reinforcements arrived on the scene with a Peruvian darkness hex cast simultaneous to a choking, noxious fog. 

With the majority of the defending force struggling to breathe and outlook grim, Granger did something extremely inadvisable with the Sword of Gryffindor which cleared the fog, resulting in distinctive scarring and hair loss patterns on survivors of the First Battle for the Ministry, as well as a permanent scorch mark on all the walls of the Ministry Atrium at a height of roughly seven and a half feet. 

Fog cleared, it became obvious that Pettigrew, clearly possessed by You-Know-Who, had taken the field. 

At 5:15 p.m., Gryffindor’s Sword in hand, Granger rallied the defending force for a charge at the remaining Death Eaters. Both sides took heavy casualties; the defending force retreated deeper into the Ministry

At 5:28 p.m., defending morale, faltering at the failure to completely repel the Death Eaters, was bolstered by the arrival of reinforcements from Hogwarts: the full complement of teaching staff (less one Severus Snape, age 34, who as a double agent was at the time embedded in the invading force) as well as several students who had begged, borrowed, or stolen their way into combat. Rubeus Hagrid, 65, was accompanied by a number of magical creatures which later proved instrumental in defeating the Death Eaters during the three-day Siege of the Ministry. 

At 7:34 p.m., another large-scale blasting hex caused a number of internal collapses in the Ministry, killing some dozen members of both forces and dividing the defending force in two. By strange accident, much of one defending force was of an age to have fought the first war against Voldemort; the other was primarily at or below the age of adulthood and included Granger and what remained of the Hunt. 

Injured but still mobile, Ronald Weasley assumed the role of strategist to the Young Defenders, orchestrating a series of guerrilla attacks on the invading force throughout the remainder of the night. Meanwhile, Granger determined by Hunt magic that the remaining Horcrux was mobile and within the Ministry but mainly stayed in the Atrium with the bulk of the invading force. 

(“Bets that he’s wearing it?” 

“Ugh.”)

At sunrise on the 31st of October, the latest strike force is returning from their predawn raid. 

“Bagged a werewolf!” One of the Gryffindor upper-years brags. Hermione thinks of Professor Lupin with a shudder. 

“Did you sleep at all?” Viktor’s hand is warm on her shoulder, only a faint tremble showing the strain of the last three weeks. Had it only been three weeks? It felt like an eternity since she sat across from him in his uncle’s library and said I’m doing it with or without you, but please let me do it with you. 

“A proper Huntswitch doesn’t need sleep.” 

“Hah. After year and a day of training, maybe. You have been Huntswitch three weeks.” 

Cheeks burning, Hermione looked up at him. “Well, I don’t have the luxury of time. I’d better be a proper Huntswitch now or we’re all doomed.” 

“Doomed? Now I know you have not slept.” Viktor grinned at her fondly. “Hermione Granger is never doomed.” 

“Pff.” 

Light down here in the shattered Ministry has gone strange, blue witchlights clashing with cheery mock-electric fixtures on the blink. Cormac McLaggen and Katie Bell have broom-lamps for night flight pinned to their robes, casting dark orange beams in whatever direction they face. Shadows are confusing and colors are wrong. 

“Go ahead, Ron,” Hermione says, when everyone has assembled and for some reason is looking at her. Ron’s the one running this meeting. What are they looking at her for?

“Er, right. So this is us, near as we can figure,” Ron marked their rough map of the Ministry, “And most of the Death Eaters are still in the Entry Hall, with You-Know-Who. There are two exploratory forces here,” the holding cells, probably freeing or killing prisoners, “and here.” The Department of Mysteries. “We think the Order are fighting them there, Angelina saw spellfire before she doubled back.” 

“How many are left in the Entry Hall?” 

“Forty-odd, last count. Could be more coming any moment. And we’re thirty-two.” 

“Thirty-one; I don’t want Tiho fighting with that concussion.” 

“Thirty-one.” Ron rubs his nose, lost in the map. Then he looked up. “How do you feel about brooms?” 

“Not great.” 

“Oh, then you’ll love this.” 

Hermione does not love this. Whatever wizarding storybooks say, wielding a sword from broomback is an absolutely terrible idea; even more so when you have someone else riding sloth grip underneath you. 

“It’ll slow us down, but it’s the only way to get everyone in the fight,” Ron had said, glowering at his figures as he scratched in the earth exposed by shattered cobblestones. “And with our shock troops, you won’t need to be fast.” 

Now, Ron is fifteen, and his grasp of Muggle combat theory is shaky at best. When he says shock troops, he literally means shocking troops; students of apparating age who show up in the middle of the invading force, grab whatever elbow is handy, and apparate across the room, deliberately splinching their passenger along the way. Which is a pretty shocking experience. The twins are experts and manage to teach the trick to a handful of others; the remainder are picking it up as they go. 

Meanwhile, the broom riders are providing cover fire and targeting the werewolves, who the shock troops don’t dare apparate close enough to bite. And Hermione, with Viktor on sloth grip steering because he’s probably the only one who can manage it, is near the end of her Hunt. 

“I think he is wearing it,” she shouted down to her pilot, “Every time he moves, it–,” and then she claps eyes on Nagini. And she knows. 

“Bloody fuck, another living one.” 

Here’s the thing about living Horcruxes: being one is pretty damn miserable. Harry describes the first fourteen years of his life as one long low-grade migraine, blurring his vision and making things like sports nearly impossible. He doesn’t wear glasses anymore. And that’s not considering the emotional and spiritual feedback, the constant internal struggle of a self against another self. Hermione can’t imagine how strong he is to have survived that and still come out, at the bottom of it, a really decent person.

But other things can happen to a living Horcrux, stranger and darker things: Parseltongue in a boy who has no blood link to any known Parselmouth, a well of power stronger than any fifteen-year-old wizard really ought to be, the willpower to survive even a partial Dementor’s Kiss. 

Harry was a Horcrux for fourteen years. Nagini has been for going on eighteen, though Hermione has no way of knowing that. She does know, as she knows it is her prey, that something is very wrong with this snake.

It’s big, for one, bigger than any natural venomous snake; it moves with a near-human intelligence across the field, striking at shock troops and occasionally catching one. 

(Hermione can’t look at the falling troops, can’t look, can’t let herself watch)

“Okay,” she shouts at Viktor, “New plan. Kill the snake.” 

But of course, she’s a Horcrux, nearly indestructible; no spellfire on earth will kill her. Maybe Fiendfyre could, but Hermione can’t make Viktor burn her friends along with her enemies. She just can’t. 

Her hand goes to the sword. Right. End this like it began; the old-fashioned way. 

In a maneuver that will define wizarding warfare for the next century, the two barrel down from the air. Viktor casts a binding hex, trapping Nagini for a few crucial seconds as he pulls up and Hermione falls from above like a star, like a dying phoenix, sword burning in hand. 

When she wakes, there is ash. Flakes of charred cloth and broomtwig float down around her; indistinct twitches and moans happen at the edges of her vision. She can’t seem to make her hands let go of the sword, awkwardly angled half-under her. 

Oh. And there’s Harry. And Voldemort. 

Voldemort wearing Peter Pettigrew is a horrible sight. He moves wrong, and breathes wrong, and looks awful around the edges, like bits of him are fading in and out of existence. He looks – bubbling, like a cauldron about to blow. Hermione should know, she’s been Neville’s potions partner for years. 

And when he speaks, everything in Hermione twitches to end him. 

She has been hunting pieces of this man’s soul for sixteen months; now he stands before her, fatally weakened by blow after blow, harried as by hounds, torn as by arrows. The Hunt burns in her. It wants blood. It will not be denied. 

She is not sure how Neville is there, but he is, scrabbling through ash and rubble to pull her from the blast zone that was Nagini. He practically shoves a potion down her throat, and then another, and then he dumps another one over her head when she can sit up. She’s vibrating now. She needs to kill it. Her throat’s not working right, but she looks at Neville and the sword and Voldemort, who is still taunting Harry, and he understands. Neville has always been good at reading people. 

They stand, boy and girl and sword, and they walk: slow, painful shuffle-steps muffled by ash. The twitches and moans are clearer now; they are people, or what’s left of them. Hermione doesn’t look. She just walks, firmer with every step, leaning on Neville whenever she wobbles and still gripping her sword. 

Never drop your sword, Gyorgi says, though your hands bleed. He would be proud. 

And now Voldemort has cast a spell, and Harry another, and the two meet in the middle. 

Your wand has a brother, Ollivander says. Once there was a phoenix that gave two feathers, only two in all the world. 

This is Voldemort: he has never, not once in his life, looked aside from his goal. He has not wavered; he has not strayed. When fled, he chases. When pushed, he pushes. Hermione sees him, the horrible twisted bubbling back of him as he throws every inch of strength into pushing against the brother-bond, and she sees what he could have been. Sometimes you just get a wizard born for the Hunt. 

But he’s wrong, twisted in every way, barely even a person anymore; the Hunt is all that’s left of him, hungering endlessly, ravening without cease. And Hermione is a Hunter too. 

Together, Neville and Hermione lift the sword. Almost gently, they thread it between the third and fourth ribs of a man who was once Wormtail and is now the eighth Horcrux of Tom Marvolo Riddle. Harry’s brother-bond holds the man who tried to kill him once and failed. Harry’s brother-bond holds him until his bones are all that’s left. It’s almost gentle. No blowback. No death-throes of a divided soul fighting to live. Only the end. 

Hermione is very tired. She would like to sleep now. 

She startles awake in the Hospital Wing. 

“Hush now, dearie, it’s over. It’s over.” Cool hands on her forehead and where is her sword–

Hermione is very tired. She would like to sleep now. 

She startles awake in the Hospital Wing. 

“Hey, easy. Easy. Hermione? It’s me, it’s Ron. You’re all right. We’re all okay.” And then, yes, her sword is there, hilt familiar as her own skin. “Here, Madam Pomfrey said not to let you have this, but I think she’s bonkers, who wouldn’t want a sword in your shoes. Or, er, hospital gown.” The words are helping; she focuses on them, pins all her attention to that voice. “So, er, it’s been a few days. More like a week, I reckon. Er. You did it. Personally, I mean. You killed Voldemort.” There’s a pause, and a wet sniff. “Congratulations?”

And then, oh no, he’s crying. Ron’s crying. “I–I thought I killed you, I thought I sent you off to die, Hermione, and you’re – you’re –,” 

“‘m l rt.” 

Sobs. Well, honestly. Hermione clears her throat and tries again. “‘m ull-rht. Ron.” And it hurts, but she grabs his hand anyway, because that’s what being a friend is. 

It takes a few more weeks before she can even walk far enough to visit Viktor in the next bed. Ron had insisted that they be installed next to each other, apparently, which Fred or maybe George had whispered to her with a wink at the end of a big group visit. Most of the shock troops had come through all right. The broom troops had actually been worse off, at least those still in the air when Nagini had gone up like a dying star. Muggles were calling it a sewer explosion. 

Viktor is alive. That’s probably the best that can be said about his condition. He might walk without a cane someday, one of the nurses from St. Mungo’s had told her with a sympathetic look. He isn’t quite up to speaking yet, but on a nice overcast afternoon when the sun isn’t too bright, he likes to sit with her and hold hands. Hermione sees many more awkward letters full of Feelings in her future, but right now, she can’t quite bring herself to care. 

Oh, Fudge is dead, by the way. Some Undersecretary defected to the Death Eaters and killed him during the siege. She’s still at large, and so are at least two high-profile Death Eaters. But most of them are dead. 

Hermione doesn’t let herself know any more than that. She’s going to be at least half a year healing from these last three weeks, Madam Pomfrey has told her in no uncertain terms. She’s made her first kill (has in fact killed her first kill several times, depending on how you count it) and the Hunt is sated for now, but it still lingers in her. It would be so easy to choose this prey, to say yes and run what’s left of her feet to rags after them. So she doesn’t. 

There are letters for her. A devoted throng of second-years headed by Colin Creevey are screening out howlers, but that leaves so much silent mail. Strangers thanking her for saving the Wizarding World. Foreign governments (oh, that’s Mila’s mum’s handwriting) offering her sanctuary (she did sort of technically invade the Ministry, didn’t she?). Hunters in the Americas congratulating her on her first kill and welcoming her to the Hunt. All sorts of people. Oh, and a letter from her mum. 

Viktor thumbs a tear off her cheek and gently takes the letter out of her hands. 

There are funerals. Lots of funerals. They never get easier. 

“They want to give us Orders of Merlin,” Harry says, standing awkwardly at the foot of her bed, not really sure what to do with his hands. “For killing Voldemort, you know. You, me, and Neville. I made sure they knew who did it,” he says, defiant. Harry has never wanted to be a hero. Heroes do too much standing alone for his liking. Harry would much rather stand with his friends. 

“Okay,” Hermione says, kind of at a loss. “Do you think they’ll still make us take our OWLs?” 

Harry blinks at her and then starts to laugh. Then she does, too. 

“Seriously, I haven’t studied at all.”

“Well, if they won’t give us an extension for saving the world, I bet we can retake them next year.” 

Next year. And the next, and the next. Hermione has a sword on her hospital nightstand and scars on her fingers. She’s still not quite sure where her wand is. She’s been absent from school for two entire months and might still technically be expelled. But with all those years stretching out before her, free from Voldemort and Death Eaters and fucking Horcruxes, Hermione feels rich. 

They talk about prophecies at the Order of Merlin ceremony, and when Dumbledore finally recites the damn thing even though she warned him not to, Hermione could just scream. 

Divination. Ugh. 

But the medal looks nice enough on her chest, opposite the strap of her baldric, and she’s finally healed enough to stand and walk around for a few hours without aching, so she even mingles a little. But then Viktor waves to her from a nice corner seat, Mila and Aleksi and even Darina beside him. Hermione tows her boys over to sit with her Hunt and gossip and tease each other about Mila’s dashing new facial scar and Viktor’s wheelchair biceps. Between that and the finger food, it’s not a bad evening all round. 

So long as they don’t replace that ugly fountain with a statue of her, Hermione thinks she might even chalk this one up as a win. 

There’s so much that Voldemort does not know, so many powers beyond his comprehension. He knows nothing of love, or friendship, or compassion. He doesn’t really know very much about Dementors and brother wands. The power of a good sharp murder stick is also foreign to him. 

But above all else, he does not know the power of Hermione Granger. 

THE END

[whysperingwoods]

Services Offered

As promised, here is a list of all the services I currently offer. This post will be kept up-to-date, so please click here to make sure you’re looking at the most recent version so you can see what is open.

You can find customer reviews here.

Prices listed are not negotiable, but I do accept payments by installment if needed. It may be an option to get certain services at a lower rate for less time, but these will be on a case by case basis so please message me directly and we can discuss it. I may also accept trades (trade information is available at the bottom of this post). Methods of payment are via Etsy (listed items only), Paypal, or Ko-Fi. 

This post covers: services offered, details descriptions of services as well as prices, and a general idea of what to expect for each service. Please feel free to DM me if you have any questions. You can also email me at chaoskyan@gmail.com  (this post is set to reblog every couple days, so if you don’t want to see it please blacklist #serviceschaoskyan)

Readings

Tarot • 30 minute interactive tarot reading available on Etsy: This option is perfect for most kinds of readings (general, love, career, spiritual path, conflict resolution, personal growth, etc) and is probably the one you want.  Please note that while this is a 30-minute reading, the time it takes me to type up the initial spread is NOT included in that thirty minutes. This means you should plan for at least one free hour to give yourself time to ask follow-up questions and not feel rushed. Most readings last between 45-60 minutes.

• Past life readings now available on Etsy: I still require that we discuss beforehand via messages or email so I can gauge your expectations and get a general idea of what timeframe would be suitable for the reading. The minimum amount of time past life readings is one hour. As with all my readings, this doesn’t include the time it takes for me to type the initial spread (that is free). You should plan for a minimum of 2h free if we’re doing a live reading, most readings take between 90-120 minutes. If the reading looks like it is going over the 2h mark and there is still a lot of information or questions to go over, you will need to purchase an additional 30 minutes at the usual rate. I will always warn you when we are approaching our time so you can decide whether or not you would like to wrap up the reading or continue further. Please note these readings can be very intense, and sometimes it is better to stop at the 2h mark and do a follow-up reading at a later date so you have time to absorb all the information. Follow-up readings are also charged as regular 30-minute readings, so you can purchase those via the Etsy link above. 

Here’s what you get in a past life reading:  - Positive and negative personality traits - General overview of life path - Traits that have been carried over (good and bad) - Unresolved issues affecting your current life - Suggested methods for resolution

It’s important to note that this covers one past life only, and if you would like to know about other past lives you will need to purchase them separately. I don’t recommend doing more than one of these in the same day. We can get an idea roughly how many past lives you have in the session if you would like, but please be aware that the issues which are carried over from one life to the next are usually the same and it’s not usually necessary to go through all your past lives to resolve those issues (of course, if you would like to do it just because you’re curious that’s totally fine!). 

• Shorter readings, single card readings, etc: I prefer in-depth readings, but if you’re really intent on having a one-card reading feel free to send me a message and I may say yes. Honestly, this is entirely mood-based so I can’t give any guidelines on when I will or won’t allow these. If the issue is that you don’t have enough money for a full reading, just let me know and we can look into whether your questions are appropriate for a short reading or if paying in installments would be a better idea. 

• Spirit communication: See the section on Spirit and Death work

• What to expect during a reading:  Before the reading we’ll discuss what you would like to find out. I shuffle the deck and you tell me when to stop so I can cut the deck and draw the spread (this may vary depending on the type of reading).  Most of my readings start with a 3-card spread adapted according to your question. I type out the reading for the first three cards, and from there you may ask clarifying questions and I will draw more cards as needed.  I will send you photos of the initial spread, and follow-up photos if clarifying cards were drawn. After the reading you may request a PDF containing a transcript of our chat and the spread photos for future reference. I will send you a link to a review form once the reading is complete, as they help me improve my readings and also provide testimonials for potential customers.

Fire Scrying available on Etsy 

This method is very different from tarot and is most suited to general readings, getting direction in spiritual or arcane matters. It can also be great for “what do I need to know right now” type readings. The readings normally consist of images and impressions that I can provide limited interpretation for, and which makes sense to the customer when it is related. Please let me know if you’re not sure whether a fire scrying reading is suitable to your question and I will help out. When you purchase a fire scrying reading, it is a 20-minute session where I do the reading and afterwards I will type it up and send it to you by email. This is not an interactive reading, but I can answer clarification questions if the information was available during the reading. 

Other Methods

At this time I offer tarot and fire scrying exclusively. I will eventually be offering other methods such as runes, egg reading, tea reading, shufflemancy, favomancy, and others. This space will be updated when those are available. 

Rules in Regards to Divination

For the most part, there is always a way to ask the question so that it is appropriate, doesn’t invade anyone’s privacy, and doesn’t make false predictions. Don’t worry about what your questions are and whether or not they’re “okay”, I will discuss with you the best way to word the question so we can get to the answer you’re looking for. I will also be able to gauge your expectations and advise you on the limits of the reading.

Spells, Sigils, and Other Items

I offer custom spells, sigils, and in the future will be able to provide other items depending on your needs. These are on a case-by-case basis and priced accordingly. They are tailored to your needs, your level of experience and comfort, and your abilities. Full instructions are provided in a PDF file, but you may also request a guided session if you feel more comfortable. Please note that I do not perform spells on your behalf. The goal is to help you through it the first time and answer any questions you may have, so that next time you feel confident enough to do it yourself and without fear or anxiety. 

The options in order of price:  • Step-by-step instructions, you gather the ingredients yourself • Step-by-step instructions, I gather the ingredients and ship them to you • Either of the two options, plus accompaniment during the spell/ritual/etc via text chat, email, or over the phone.

These are all completely custom, and will be tailored to suit your craft, beliefs, etc. If you have any specific needs such as being home-bound, working within a certain budget, closet-witch, allergies, etc, please let me know so I can adjust accordingly. Please be aware that if you’re working with a tradition that is closed, partially closed, initiatory, etc, I may not be able to assist. If this is the case, I will refer you to someone more appropriate. 

Spirit and Death Work

A significant portion of my practice involves working with various entities (spirits, demons, local gods, homunculus and thought form creation) as well as working with death and the energies surrounding it. I do not work with helping the spirits of the dead cross over or assisting lost souls. 

 • Spirit communication:  I can provide help with establishing communication paths between you and your guiding spirits. My preferred method is via a 30-minute tarot reading, where I will act as the messenger between yourself and the spirit. The goal of this session is to determine how you can engage with your spirit directly, rather than relying on a third party (i.e. me). This type of reading is specifically for guiding spirits or spirits trying to enter into contact with you for whatever reason. I do not provide readings to communicate with passed loved ones unless those options are applicable. 

Avenues of discussion may include:  - Your spirit’s preferred method of contact - Signs to look out for that may indicate your spirit is trying to communicate with you - Ways to strengthen the bond to your guiding spirit so as to facilitate and encourage communication (offerings, ways to worship, locations that bring you closer, etc) - Any messages that need to be imparted at the time - Any questions the querant has for or about their guiding spirit 

On the topic of “Spirit Adoption”: I’m not interested in getting involved in any kind of discourse on the topic, but I do not offer this service for communication between “adopted” spirits from these centers and you. Firstly because this service is meant for conversations between yourself and guiding spirits, but secondly because I’ve yet to see any of these shops not be a complete scam. At best you’re getting a thoughtform, which isn’t a bad thing but is certainly a false representation of what they’re selling, and at worst you’re getting a completely unvetted spirit and inviting them into your home and life with potentially disastrous consequences. I’m not saying all of these places are necessarily scams, but I’ve yet to see one that is doing what it says it’s doing. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

• Homunculus and Thought Forms: The information listed under the “Spells and Sigils” section is applicable here. I do not create these on your behalf, but I can walk you through the process and assist you with how to do it. The goal is for you to learn and become comfortable with it the first time around, so any subsequent instances you are able to do this on your own and confidently. 

Potential Hauntings, Curses, etc

I get asked about this all the time, so I’m just going to put the information here for future reference:  The chance that you or your family have been cursed to the point of causing actual consistent and severe damage is extremely unlikely. 

If someone is telling you your house, job, family, wife, child, etc is cursed and you have to pay for their services to get rid of that curse, there is a 99% chance this person is full of shit and out for your money. 

So, if you’re concerned about being potentially cursed or hexed or haunted by demons or whatever, feel free to message me and I will give you COMPLETELY FREE instructions on what to do. Spoiler, the instructions are almost always the exact same and involve some elbow grease, zero priests, and under $20 worth of supplies. You’re welcome.

Group Seminars, Mentoring, Consultations

I have started giving group seminars via select Discord servers. Free classes are available at my discretion. Group classes can be requested and will be held on temporary servers. These require a minimum of 4 people attending and will be posted publicly so others can join. Price of admission will be $5 per person, with an option to buy an admission for someone else to allow people who can’t afford it to attend. Format of the seminar will depend on the subject, some will be more along the lines of guided discussion whereas others will be hands on and may require some materials (if this is the case it will be indicated in the sign-up post, and I will provide the lowest-cost alternative every time). I obviously won’t hold classes on things I don’t feel I have enough experience to teach, so please understand if I decline a request it’s for a good reason. Topics I am comfortable with include but are not limited to: intuitive tarot reading, how to read tarot professionally, how to deal with “craft”-block, working with various deities, adapting spells from old grimoires or folk practices, how to write your own spells.

I won’t do any form of mentoring online. I’m happy to answer questions, but I don’t have the time currently to dedicate to one single person and I feel that kind of thing is best done in person anyway. 

Consultations are handled on a case by case basis. I can consult in matters that are related to finding your path, figuring out next steps, honing your skills, achieving certain goals, etc. If the area you’re interested in isn’t something I know about or feel sufficiently confident in assisting with, I will decline. 

Trades

I may allow trades in place of cash payment. Trades must be of equal value.  I do not accept reading/divination swaps. I’ll accept artwork or physical items in exchange, but please contact me first so we can work something out. The types of items I’m always looking for include: herbs/spices of most kinds, dried flowers, seeds for various plants, bottles (always), art supplies (always), statuettes, crystals (very rarely). I may be interested in weird random junk, books, materials of all kinds, so honestly your best bet is to just ask and I’ll let you know if it’s something that would interest me. On the topic of artwork, this is VERY case-dependent as I’m usually pretty picky so if this is something you want to offer, please provide your portfolio up front and a backup trade option. Declining an art trade is by no means a reflection or your abilities as an artist, I just tend to look for a very specific range of styles and designs so please don’t take it personally at all!

[osberend]

A third approach to communicating romantic and/or sexual interest (and various other matters)

(Substantial philsophical preface/background analysis follows; skip to the TL;DR if you just want to read the suggested approach itself.)

My views on Ask Culture vs. Guess Culture are well-known among those who are likely to read this post. I firmly believe that it is every free, competent adult’s right to make any request or offer they please to, or to ask any question they please of, any other free, competent adult[1]. Likewise, it is the right of every free, competent adult to say yes, to say no, to decline to answer, or to respond with a question or proposal of their own.

The unfortunate reality is that some people will feel compelled to say yes to explicit requests, either out of a misperception of explicit requests as euphemized demands (as they indeed are in some Guess Cultures (delendi sunt!)), or out of a feeling of that it is somehow impolite to say no.

Some of the latter may not actually say “yes,” but instead “regretfully” give reasons why they can’t do the thing, that are not their actual motives for declining (e.g., “I’d love to, but my parents are very conservative, and they’d hit the roof if they found out.”). Of course, someone who hasn’t been indoctrinated with ridiculous, anti-liberty conversational memes may perceive the given reasons (and statements of regret) as sincere, and try to find ways around them.

And, of course, some such statements are sincere. As far as I can tell, the essence of true Guess Culture bullshit (as distinct from Ask Culture with confusing, non-standard vocabulary) is mandatory ambiguity as a condition of politeness: A demand can never be known for certain to be a demand, nor a refusal to be a refusal, without being rude.

As a matter of principle, my stance here is plain: These realities are just all the more reason that “Guess Culture[2]” delenda est. And if you tell someone that they’re free to say no and they refuse to believe you, any unfortunate results of that refusal may or may not really be their fault, but they’re sure as hell not yours.

That all being said, rights are one thing, and preferences another. I have a right to ask my friends for money every time I see them, and I like having money. But I don’t actually do that, partly because it would irritate them, and I want my friends to be happy. And partly because it would frustrate my own purely selfish aims, when taken as a whole; any money I managed to get would probably benefit me a good deal less than the strain on (or complete loss of) my friendships would harm me.

Similarly, I don’t actually want to have sex with[3][4] women[5] who are only having sex with me because they feel like it would be rude for them not to, let alone because they fear that I might harm them if they don’t. That prospect conflicts with both my benevolence and the intersection of my libido and my pride: I want women to want me, and to walk away from a sexual encounter with me satisfied. Even if I never see them again, I want them, when they think of me in the future, to do so with fondness. (And, ideally, with lust as well. But fondness will do.)

And if I am going to see them again, that’s all the more reason to care about their preferences on the matter at hand as well as my own. I’d rather keep a friendship than have a one-night stand or a brief romantic relationship, followed by their breaking off contact entirely. And I’d rather move slow on the physical side of a romantic relationship, if that’s what will give the best odds of the relationship lasting.

Not to mention that both my sense of benevolence and my desire to be pleasingly thought of are quite a bit stronger when it comes to a friend or a girlfriend than when it comes to an acquaintance or a stranger.

It’s also worth noting that people who believe in Ask Culture can nevertheless fall prey to a sense of obligation and/or a sense of guilt at the prospect of giving a refusal, thus not entirely practicing Ask Culture in this matter. There are various possible reasons for this. They may believe in Ask Culture but still have conditioned emotional responses from growing up Guess. They may have scrupulosity, and feel guilty whenever they know they could do something to make others happy, and don’t do it. They may make dubious utilitarian analyses that convince them that the expected pleasure that the asker will get out of a yes is greater than the expected cost to themselves. (The last two have a very nasty synergy, of course.) And so forth.

So the most straightforward Ask Culture approach, “just ask to have sex[3] with any competent, free adult that you want to have sex with,” is not an ideal approach, at least in general. And the Guess Culture Dance of Mandatory Ambiguity is (still) worse.

The following third approach has worked out well for me thus far, but my sample size to date is quite small; your mileage may vary. Anyone who wishes to submit additional data from their own experiments is certainly welcome to do so. ;)

TL;DR: Tell the other person what you would like to do, and what (else) they should feel free to ask you to do. Then, offer them the opportunity to ask you to do any of those things, if they are so inclined.

Some additional best practices:

Whenever possible, preclude their making that request as an immediate, direct conversational reply to your offer, to minimize the risk of their feeling that it would be rude not to make the request, due to their having internalized Guess Culture memes (delendi sunt!) that say that you wouldn’t have made the offer if you didn’t expect them to take you up on it.

For similar reasons, and also to avoid poor decision-making when rushed, make the time frame for making requests as open-ended as possible.

Example of my actual use of this approach (very roughly a direct quote; it’s been a while, and I didn’t exactly make a recording for future transcription):

I like you a lot and enjoy spending time with you, just as a friend. I think you’re smart, and funny, and a good person. I also think you’re beautiful, and sexy, and I am definitely attracted to you, and would be interested in dating and/or having sex with you . . . but only if that’s something you want. So if you want to continue to just be friends, that’s fine, and I’ll treat that as the default in the absence of further communication; you don’t have to say or do anything. But if you want to go on unambiguously romantic dates, or engage in various sex acts, or make out a bunch but not have sex, or pretty much anything else of that general nature, feel free to let me know any time after, say . . . five minutes from now. Odds are pretty good that I’ll be down for whatever you have in mind, but even if I’m not, I won’t be offended that you asked, or otherwise respond negatively. Nor will I feel pressured or obligated to do it just because you asked, so that’s not something you need to worry about.

A rather more traditional (and much shorter) line, for a rather different context, that still follows both of the above best practices:

Hey, I just wanted to let you know that I think you’re the most attractive woman in this bar. I’m sitting in that booth in the corner over there, if you feel like continuing this conversation; otherwise, have an excellent evening. [tips hat, departs for booth]

This broad approach also extends naturally to asking for information, or to offering it.

[1] Subject, in most cases, to not having had the latter demand that they not speak to them.

[2] Cultura Conicientis? I don’t actually know Latin, but this seems like it should be right, based on some poking through wiktionary. @funereal-disease​?

[3] Or date.

[4] Or play board games with, for that matter. Discussions of these issues tend to focus primarily on sex, and secondarily on dating. But those are hardly the only areas in which they’re relevant.

[5] Or men, for that matter, although I’m gynosexual enough that the odds of my propositioning a man and him feeling obligated to say yes would be pretty low under any conversational protocol. And that’s even before we consider that oppressive Guess Culture seems to correlate (albeit imperfectly) with anti-liberty views on sexuality that don’t exactly encourage men to be polite when propositioned for sex by other men.

[illumoux]

IB ➞ Art school???

I’ve gotten some PMs with questions about taking the IB Programme in high school and how it’s now affecting me in art school now so I thought I would finally do a Post(TM) about it. Again, everything I’m about to talk about is based on my personal experience but please feel free to talk with me if you have any concerns about this post. I want to put myself out there and help others if I can since I had so much support getting to where I am now. If you have any other questions about art college or the likes, please feel free to shoot them my way 💘

WHAT IS IB?

The International Baccalaureate Programme (aka. IB) is a “fast paced” program for middle and high school students that’s supposed to promote students to think independently and critically. At my school, there was a set courselist, with one or two elective choices. Some courses were Standard Level (SL) and some were Higher Level (HL), which certain post secondary schools allow to swap out for first year credits. IB is different in different schools and different countries though, but overall, It’s meant to be an alternative and more challenging high school experience. 

IB + ME: 

I can’t say I had the most positive time in IB or anything since I was also REALLY struggling with mental health at the time and had hated every moment I was in high school. But upon reflection, there really were things to be gained from the experience. Pros and Cons. 

I was in full IB until second semester grade 10. At that point, I was already thinking about studying art after high school, but was afraid to commit to it entirely because there was so much pressure from my parents and peers to go into a “respectable” career and get a “high paying job in science or math or business” or something. So I dropped to partial IB as a compromise and took IB math, Art and HL English, as well as regular Ontario Uni level Physics, Bio, CompSci, etc etc etc. 

DO YOU USE ANY OF THE STUFF YOU LEARNED IN IB CLASSES IN ART SCHOOL? 

No. 

I have an official credit for Grade 12 Advanced Functions but the most math I do now is occasionally multiplying by 12. Could I solve a quadratic equation now? Don’t even know what that is anymore. 

BUT! You never know what could inspire you. I was so interested in quantum physics, I’m literally writing a story about parallel universes. Learning is almost always good. 

LET’S TALK ABOUT IB ART FOR ONE HOT SECOND: 

I did find IB Art incredibly applicable and helpful because it taught me how to keep a sketchbook and understand the creative process, neither of which you actually directly get graded on in the animation program at Sheridan but is personally tremendously beneficial for developing ideas and creating pieces. Now I draw thumbnails for everything I do. And I appreciate them!

Even if you walk away from IB Art with the most garbage collection - no sweat, it’s only high school and it’s learning the process of creating art that is so so important! When I applied for Sheridan Illustration (the same year I was accepted into Sheridan Animation), I basically repeated a simplified version of the IB Art process and was accepted into the program with a portfolio score of 80, with 9/10s in Process/Ideation, Media Exploration and Sketchbook, which you REALLY focus heavily on in IB Art. 

I would highly recommend taking IB Art if you are thinking about doing art after high school, or doing art in general. 

BEING AN ART STUDENT IN IB:

I hate that Art Kids(TM) have a bad rep. People always assume that art is a dead end career and we all starve and we’re all morally questionable people but that’s not true at all!

But being that Token Art Kid in IB (outside of IB Art class) actually made me feel awful back then. I was always kind of an odd one out. That’s not to say that people weren’t nice or anything. But there was so much pressure to not go into art. Ever since I was a kid, I’d always wanted to be an “artist when I grow up” but I found that in high school, I’d often say that I was “interested in art but was also thinking of pursuing an alternative career in this and that” because I was afraid of being looked down on in an environment where everyone around me wanted to do something “brainy”. Admitting that I wanted to do art almost felt self depreciating because everyone else was actually going to get a “real job” and live “better lives”. But that’s totally not the case! I ended up spending a lot of time taking a bunch of science and math courses I didn’t really like to maintain my twenty thousand irrelevant Back-Up Plans.

IB AND LEARNING SKILLS: 

I think no matter what you do, having good organization and time management skills is always going to be so so important! 

Sheridan Animation is such a loaded program, you really have to try to schedule your time well. I used to complain about the IB courseload but I honestly feel like Sheridan Animation is so much more laborious. We had 8 courses + an elective last semester, each about 2 to 3 hours a week, plus all the time you had to put into doing homework and living life and sleeping. 

Even though IB is meant to keep you busy to force you to learn good work ethics, I don’t think forcing someone to work harder necessarily means that they are going to learn how to manage their time. I was 100% unmotivated and depressed and self destructive in high school. I was in IB for four years but I always studied the night before an exam up until the very last one. And when I graduated and moved out, I realized that I was a mess and I had to change, and it was that self realization was what motivated me to learn how to slowly put together my life back together. Only then did I start taking steps to curate my life and learn how to plan ahead and schedule my week and get! stuff! done! 

So all in all, maybe IB does put you in an environment where having good learning skills will benefit you, and maybe that will motivate you to learn how to maintain a good work ethic. But I really do think skills like how to study and learn and live life is something that you have to be aware of as an individual and want to work towards. Being in IB may help with those things, but it isn’t going to suddenly grant you powers to study two weeks in advance and keep track of all your assignments in a way that works for you. You have to learn to do that yourself. 

HL CREDITS (AT SHERIDAN): 

Not all schools acknowledge HL credits. Sheridan claims to. I know people in Sheridan Animation who have used their HL credits at other universities before coming to our school but I’ve never spoken to anyone at Sheridan who has used them in a Sheridan program. 

This is lowkey a call out post @ Sheridan, but I have tried applying for advanced standing with my IB HL credit to replace my electives twice, but neither time went through. They claimed to not have the proper paperwork, and when I paid for IB to send my transcript to Sheridan, it was never found (despite there being a confirmation email from IB that it had been sent to the right place) so I was unable to get it processed due to a lack of paperwork. And when I tried to follow up through email, I was ignored. 

(If you have successfully gotten your HL credit request to go through at Sheridan, please PM me and tell me how :’^)) 

I do know for a fact that even if you could, in theory, replace some electives at Sheridan with your HL credits and as long as you still had enough courses a semester to consider you a full time student, you would still pay the same amount of tuition. You would just be less busy. 

SHOULD I TAKE IB THEN? 

Honestly, it’s up to you and your own life! 

I know I rambled on for so long only to give the most passive and watery advice but I think you should do what you believe is best for you! Just be aware that whatever you choose is going to lead you to a different future and all your actions will have consequences (good or bad or either) and be okay with that. 

Sometimes, I wish I didn’t do IB so I could have more free time to draw. Maybe if I drew more in high school, I would have gotten into Sheridan Animation a year earlier. But if I did that, I wouldn’t have learned how to paint in Art Fundies and have the friends I do now and live with people I love. Everything I’ve ever done up to this point has brought me here and I wouldn’t change a thing about the past so all I can do is work on making my future, you know :)) 

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading. Good luck! 

[fluentlanguage]

De-Brief From An Organiser: Women in Language 2018

A few weeks ago, I was proud to co-organise and witness the first ever Women in Language conference, a unique online event designed to champion, celebrate, and amplify the voices of women in language learning. It was not my first online conference about language learning, but certainly the first I partly created and the first one ever to feature an all-female line-up of speakers.

In today’s article, I am going to lift the curtain and share my official de-brief as one of the three members of our organising team.

What I Felt at Women in Language

Let me start with the most important thing: I enjoyed every single presentation that I saw. And as I was often online making sure everything went smoothly, those were almost all of them. The quality of our many speakers at Women in Language was excellent, and the range of topics kept things interesting and inspiring.

Women in Language delivered on a few extra levels too. It felt as inspiring and intense as every offline conference could feel, with the added bonus of allowing me to sleep in my own bed. I adored seeing #womeninlanguage posts on social media, and to hear from our attendees in the live chat and Facebook group. And most importantly, I got SO inspired and motivated to learn languages in a brand new way!

If you want to learn more about languages, join the extraordinary four-day online conference #womeninlanguage with presentations by 50 incredible women! Day 2 has just started 😉 #language #onlineconference #cpd #neverstoplearning #alwayswanttoknowmore #passion

A post shared by Barbara TRANSLATIONS (@barbara.peckova) on Mar 9, 2018 at 4:09am PST

What I Learnt About Language Learning

A lot of the impact of four days of language love cannot be put into words. It’s a boost in motivation, a renewed commitment, a burst of energy. And at Women in Language, I got all of those out of it and more. I got to know more of our conference attendees and boosted my own desire to learn and teach languages in new ways.

Here are the most important lessons from Women in Language that will be essential for all language learners:

1) Dabbling Is Legit

At Women in Language, we celebrated the huge diversity of how people learn languages. You can choose whatever language you want to learn, and you can learn it for 2 weeks or 20 years, and you can dabble in a handful of languages at once if you want to. This is all “allowed”, and won’t make you any less of a language lover or polyglot.

Sometimes it’s easy to feel self-critical as a language learner, and to tell yourself that you’re doing this wrong if you don’t use Anki or speak from day 1 or spend many hours on your project. But dabbling is perfectly legit, and you are allowed to feel proud of it.

2) Compassion Matters

Leading on from the previous point, compassion was a regular theme of the conference. When you’re faced with so many blog articles and Instagram posts and YouTube videos and language books telling you what to do, it’s sometimes hard to remember that everyone has a bad day.

You can’t always be happy and you can’t always be 100% gold in Duolingo. Compassion means allowing understanding and empathy for yourself when times are tough, but also for other language learners. No one method is the right one. Allow other people to feel good about themselves, and extend that same kindness to yourself.

3) Everyone Loves Transcribed Audio

Finding something interesting to watch or listen to, at the right level, and then with a transcription…that’s difficult. But it’s also what a lot of our conference attendees wanted, and you certainly CAN find it online. If you want to get a few ideas, check out Speechling, Glossika, Rhinospike, and Movieclips on YouTube.

And by the way: Just listening is NOT enough. If it’s just a wall of sound, you’re not doing much good. You’ll need to know what you’re hearing. Find input that you can engage with, and check against your own skills. For more about this, listen to my podcast episode about listening skills.

4) There’s So Much to Talk About

It’s never enough to practice speaking by doing the “Hello how are you where do you live” dance over and over again. Speaking practice is best when you’ve prepared something interesting to talk about. And lucky for us, there are tutors and learners who already discovered this too, and they’ve even put together lists (like this one) of questions and conversation prompts.

5) When Your Brain Is Having Fun, You Learn

All too often we think of language learning as a STUDY activity, in all caps. But it’s just not necessary to do things this way. Language can be learnt through story, through fun activities, through play. The most important things are exposure and repetition, not how hard you study or how much your language experience feels like work.

Though some of these lessons may read as happy-clappy positivity notes, I found that they often helped to ease a learner’s mind and allow them to take a break and come back to language learning with new energy and enthusiasm. After all, we want to get fluent while having fun, right?

What Do You Think?

Whether you attended Women in Language 2018 or not, what do you think about those lessons above? Are you a dabbler, or a hardcore study nut? Leave me a comment below to join the conversation.

In part 2 of this blog article, I will put on my co-organiser hat (a very stylish hat, for sure) to tell you more about how Women in Language was organised, what we learnt in the process, and what you should consider if you want to run or contribute to an event like this in future.

Organising A Successful Online Conference

I’ll start with what we looked for in our speakers and talks.

For this first ever conference, we used our own network of interesting women to ask if they wanted to speak at Women in Language. Their social media accounts, blogs, youtube channels, relationships with us were what put them on the radar. So if you’re dreaming of speaking out yourselves, making yourself very visible is good advice.

Before contacting our speakers, we considered some guidelines about the types of talks we would be looking for. In addition to practical topics featuring tips and techniques for language learners at “Beginner” and “Advanced” levels, we also chose the tracks “Living with Language” and “Working with Language”. Each speaker we contacted let us know which of the four themes they would like to address in their presentation, and was allocated one. This way, we ensured that no topics would be repeated and we could offer a varied programme on every single conference day.

Here are just three of the 25 talks we saw at Women in Language:

Some of our speakers came to us with a firm idea of the talk they wanted to present, while others found themselves unsure at the start. As our programme officer, I found myself receiving several messages saying “I don’t know, maybe I have nothing to say after all.” If you have ever hesitated to put yourself forward for an opportunity, here is the thought process that does stop them in their tracks: “Maybe I don’t have anything to say here.” Meaning “Maybe my experience, my voice, my passion are not valid. Others will have more to say.”

I extended offers of a little “talk surgery” to those who needed an idea boost, and without exception it was the speakers themselves who came to me with fantastic topic ideas, and who delivered on them 100%. In fact, I found that the most intriguing topics came from a place of passion and excitement in each speaker’s mind. Topics like “Learning With Crime Novels” and “Managing Motherhood and Language Learnings” are not a language learner’s most burning question, but that’s exactly why they make incredible conference topics: They are real, and invite us to think differently.

Some People Voiced Different Opinions

I won’t lie to you, at times it felt hard to be out there putting together this positive, kinda feminist event. Some commenters felt that it was a wrong move towards equality, unnecessarily excluding male voices. To those guys, I want to remind you that we welcomed and celebrated male voices throughout the event - it’s just that this time only women got to speak “on stage”, and every single one of them brought expertise, commitment, quality, enthusiasm, and outstanding topics. We set out to show the language learning world from a different angle, and I was so encouraged to hear from several male attendees who were enjoying the conference just as much as everyone else.

If You Want To Be a Conference Speaker

If you are considering applying to speak at a language conference, please don’t hesitate. Even if you were to hear a no, don’t worry and keep putting yourself forward - maybe the programme is full already or the conference can recommend a future event for you to try.

Don’t be shy about suggesting a topic outside the memory-boosting-fluency-fast-track-performance mainstream. Don’t wait until you’re fluent in 16 languages. You’re good enough right now, as long as you have a cool topic. And what’s a cool topic? Your own experience!

You are so cool when you are yourself.

I want to give kudos here to all those women who agreed to speak and trusted Shannon, Lindsay, and me with Women in Language. You absolutely killed it, and we appreciate all the hard work you put into giving a great online talk at an event you’d never heard of before.

Many of our speakers were new to presenting online. From my perspective as a blogger and podcaster, I’m used to speaking to an empty room and waiting until later to see if anyone connects with my words. But these guys were new to the whole environment, and they handled it brilliantly.

Tickets

When we put together our event, we knew that it was a risk to ask for payment from attendees of an online event. Many other online events are open to attendees for free, but we wanted to create an atmosphere where the sales pressure is off, and where our audience members were just as invested in having a great time as we were.

We found that the ticket sales achieved this goal, and allowed over 250 audience members to join us from all over the world. This reassurance also helped us relax and increase our commitment to Women in Language. So on the ticket selling front, we are happy to note that all went well and we are now able to give a donation of over $400 to our chosen charity, Kiva. The charity supports entrepreneurs who do cool things to alleviate poverty around the world.

Here I want to say thank you to our audience members, who went ahead and trusted us organisers with a brand new conference idea. Some purchased a ticket and even took time off work, others were unable to attend but joined the conference to support celebrating and amplifying women’s voices in language learning. We appreciated your trust and support.

About The Technology We Used

In terms of technology, we used a setup of Google Hangouts on Air for our live broadcasts and embedded them in individual Teachable lectures via YouTube. We also added individual Chatango chat boxes in each lecture.

At the end of any session, the viewers could click “Complete and Continue” at the top and move on to the next session in our packed programme. Credit here goes to Shannon for leading us on the setup of a gorgeous page and ensuring the information was up to date.

This format added to the feel of hosting a real conference, where you would often walk into the next room for another talk. But in addition, it made us into the Netflix of language learning, where any previous talk could be streamed from the beginning right after it was published.

All talks were offered on a single track (no two at the same time), which kept the conversation focused and helped create a live chatroom community. We also added an “after hours” experience through a dedicated Facebook group for Women in Language attendees.

Marketing Women in Language

Our marketing campaign, headed up by Lindsay, made it easy for Women in Language to get seen. We obviously talked about Women in Language in our own blog, podcasts, social media, newsletters, youtube, and wherever you see us.

Lindsay also prepared some beautiful pictures and tweets for the speakers and the attendees, so that everyone could easily spread the word about our event. We are so grateful that you guys supported us and shared your excitement before the event. It helped us so much.

Shout out to our friends How To Get Fluent, Language Learning Summit and Langfest for inviting us to present our new event, and to Mezzofanti Guild for hosting a guest post written by Shannon. Check those guys out - they are doing amazing work.

The Organising Team

Between three organisers, we found that we were able to play to our strengths and largely handle the large workload of running a conference like this one. We stayed in contact with each other through direct messages, but also weekly meetings, and the project management software Asana. When your organising team is living on three different continents, it’s helpful to ensure online communications are as good as they can be.

Our track record of collaborations was a key to our success. Lindsay, Shannon, and I were no strangers to each other’s work. We knew already that we appreciate each other’s work and that each of us knows how to use all parts of the technology and marketing setup. We had also met in person before and solidified our friendship. Throughout the organising process, we were able to stay supportive and open to suggestions from each other.

Sometimes, it can take courage and grace to reach out to a colleague and trust that they’re on board with your idea. From the minute Lindsay first mentioned the idea of Women in Language and Shannon hopped on the first Skype call to join us, that was something we committed to.

I am grateful that I had the opportunity to run such a cool project with two colleagues and friends that I respect so much.

What We’ll Do Even Better Next Time

So we were excited, we were buzzing, we enjoyed four days of a successful conference full of tips. But that doesn’t mean that there weren’t any mistakes to learn from.

On the technology front, a few hiccups taught us the following lessons. Maybe you’ll find them useful one day, so I’m sharing them here:

When you want to embed your YouTube events in another page, it pays to set up a dry run so that you’re double sure the embed will show up the way you want it to.

When you are planning to invite someone to a Google Hangout, you cannot send them a “join link” in advance because the software will discard that link the minute you close the video window in your browser. And then your speaker’s link will be useless and they’ll be confused.

Don’t click “eject” when you want to reset your Hangouts partner’s setup as they joined your Google Hangout. They won’t be able to join again, and you’ll have to create a new event.

Power Point going full screen in Google Hangouts is a bit of a gamble, so stay calm, have a dry run, and prepare trouble shooting notes to make sure all goes smoothly.

In terms of the programme, we tried a new format of round table discussions which was successful at large. The two-hour time slot did discourage some audience members from watching it though, and that’s something I had not expected and we will look into providing shorter round table discussions next time.

Finally: I feel fired up to expand our commitment to diversity and ensure we include more global voices. Our line-up was international but still looked largely like us: white women who speak English a lot. Even if each of them is different in nationality or language line-up, this still gives our attendees an unintentional impression of what the “norm” is. We can add to that during future events, and I’m excited that we now have 27 speakers who can help us grow our network and look for polyglots and language experts from more diverse backgrounds.

What About You?

Did you enjoy the online conference?

Have you ever thought about becoming a conference speaker?

I’d love to hear from you in the comments below.

[mipliophile]

A short teaser for my soon-to-exist podcast! Check it out and feel free to send me some feedback.

Transcript:

Hi everyone, and welcome to Mipliophile. I’m Melissa, and I will be your host. So, this first episode is just meant to be a little bit of an introduction to what I want this podcast to be about.

This podcast is meant to be something of a hobbyist podcast, with a focus on books and reading. So this will include book talks whenever I finish a book, as well as doing things like doing book talks for the backlog of books that I’ve already read prior to doing this podcast; Because there are books that I have things I would like to say about. Another thing I would like to include is something that I started on my Youtube channel, which is a series going on about the books by Mark Z. Danielewski called The Familiar. I started this as a way to kind of promote the books and get them out there because I don’t see a whole lot of people talking about them and I would like to continue that with something of a fresh start on this new podcast. And I would also like to start doing a segment on MZD’s other book, House of Leaves because I am in book clubs for both of these books on Facebook and they are hosted by the author himself, which I think is really cool and I think I could give a lot of quality content in a podcast about these books.

What I would like to know from anyone who is interested in following this podcast in the future is what are some things that you guys look for when you are clicking on blogs or Youtube videos or podcasts that are about books. When you look for something--when you look for a book talk, what are some of the topics you’re hoping that they’ll cover; Just in general not about any one specific book. What sort of things are you hoping they’ll discuss, what sort of fun little asides do you hope they’re going to have when discussing books. Things like that. I would love to know, and I would love to see if I could incorporate some of these ideas into my podcast, because I know that I’m not always looking just for someone to ramble about their star review and how much they like the book and basically just give a review that I could find on Goodreads about a book. So, if you’re looking for things that are-- for other things, other than just, ya know, a review when someone is talking about a book, let me know, and I will see if I can start incorporating some of those ideas into my podcast, because I think it would be really interesting to include other ideas and try to include things that people are actually looking for, if they’re looking for something different.

If you would like to drop me a line about these ideas, or just follow me on social media, you can find me on Tumblr at Mage-Of-Mip.tumblr.com OR on my book blog, Mipliophile.tumblr.com. You can also find me on Instagram at MageOfMip. Those are probably some of the most active social medias you can find me on, other that, hopefully, now, Anchor. So, go ahead, if you’re interested, follow me on those social medias, follow me on Anchor, and drop me a line if you have any ideas for what you might want to see in a podcast with a focus on books. Thank you guys, and have a nice night.

[jasminenoack]

“Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered you will never grow.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

“Do you think the new iPhone will think all the DevOps guys with beards and long hair are the same guy? Sometimes my friend Andrea can’t tell them apart.” - me

So I am as we all know a software engineer, but I didn’t get here the way everyone else did. I actually went out of my way to get here the weirdest way possible. I have a BA in philosophy and an MA in Psychology. I’ve had more jobs than most people my age. I ran a climbing wall, I did the continental breakfast and laundry at a hotel, I worked at a KFC, I showed up at a bakery at 3am every morning to bake bread, I combed tennis courts at a country club, I taught ESL and Pre-GED. Basically, I’ve been everywhere. And today I came across my college transcript and had a glorious moment of “how exactly did I end up here”.  So let’s talk about what mattered when I was in college.

So my BA actually says that my BA is in Pluralism and Tolerance in Psychology. It says that because as a senior in college I wanted to be a psychologist and I thought it would help me get into a Phd. It was originally suppose to be something about the sociological imagination, I don’t remember exactly what. It had a bunch of big words so my mom couldn’t understand it and ask follow up questions. But magically I managed this without a psychology class. We are going to look at my classes, and it’s all philosophy. 

I actually found a copy of what I think was basically the final version of the rational. Which lists the following works for discussion:

The Dhammapada The New Testament Lucifer Vondel Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle Tao Te Ching Lao Tzu The Tibetan Book of the Dead Letters Seneca

Essays Ralph Waldo Emerson The Writings of William James The Ego and His Own Max Stirner Personal Knowledge Michael Polanyi How We Think John Dewey Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth Richard Rorty

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Thomas Kuhn Childhood and Society Erik Erikson Love’s Executioner Irvin Yalom Freedom and Dignity B. F. Skinner Psychopathy Theodore Millon Borderline Personality Disorder: A Clinical Guide John G. Gunderson The Neurotic Personality of Our Time Karen Horney Bodies Under Siege Armando Favazza

Invisible Monsters Chuck Palahniuk Choke Chuck Palahniuk Boy A Jonathan Trigell Party of One Anneli Rufus Things the Grandchildren Should Know Mark Everett On Becoming a Person Carl Rogers Bloodletting Victoria Leatham Antisocial Behavior Benjamin B.W Olman The Schopenhauer Cure Irvin Yalom

So we start with religious texts from across the world. As well as ethics. A lot of these are ethics books that basically choose identity over similarity. Max Stirner defined Egoism. William James told us we have the right to believe a lie that makes us happy if it doesn’t hurt anyone else. Rorty tells us there is no objective truth but we must defend our personal truth as far as possible. We then fall into a dark side of psychology less about helping people and more about the ultimate sadness. Books about neuroticism and cutting. Books about negative coping skills. These are above all non judgmental books. They do not say these behaviors are wrong they attempt to explain them. Party of One is literally a book about why you should let people be loners. These are books about what it’s actually like to be sad and depressed. Novels about criminals and people who hate themselves and the world. I think these kinds of decisions say a lot about a person. These show who I was in 2009. I was someone preoccupied with not my own feelings but the hole others were in as well. I wanted to understand sadness not to fix it, but to accept it. As I said “tolerance and pluralism”: 

No one will be able to make the world a better place for others until they feel they have the right to believe in the better world that they imagine.

These two ideas, the right to individual thought and the right to change one's mind, are the foundations of a new psychology based in tolerance and pluralism.

There is a clear unity of thought and action, so if we can find the thought that is behind any action, we can more fully understand the person who is acting.

We have a sense of what human being is. When a person acts in a manner that does not correlate with that idea we tend to categorize them as having something wrong with them. 

One of the fundamentally important things that I was trying to work out at the time was why people couldn’t manage to lives the lives they wanted. I knew at that point I was strange and I was trying to work out what that meant. At 21 being strange doesn’t feel as okay as it does at 30(this is part of it gets better I guess). I wanted to figure out how I could be who I wanted to be and still feel human. And What I worked out was this idea that we need to meet people where they are. Not label them but understand them and I thought this was fundamentally right. And a lot of this I justified with Chuck Palahniuk:

"We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves" 

"It's creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time, trying to establish our own alternative reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos. What it's going to be, I don't know" 

-Chuck Palahniuk

So how does one end up at that point. Well a couple things. One ends up obsessed with cutting as a 21 year old girl because of actions as a 15 year old girl, I have faith you can extrapolate that. One becomes obsessed with loners because one is a misanthrope or perhaps has intense social anxiety. One wants to feel other people understand them. And unfortunately as a young adult at NYU from a poor family with multiple jobs, your peers do not even close to understand you. But I got lucky the books. The books understood me. 

So when I got to college I was set up to be a “revolutionary” I grew up on comic books about Lenin, Trotsky, Freud, and Marx. My dad was an anarcho-syndicalist who sent me Noam Chomsky, Al Franken and Jimmy Carter books. My mom was a pot head who watched Hair and talked about burning draft cards and free love. So I got to college and opened with a class on Socialism. I got lucky being at Gallatin there were these small seminars instead of the “how to write” classes at most of the schools. So my writing class and seminars were both about basically political philosophy. The metaphysics class was weird. It was an advanced philosophy class like 300s I think, it was about whether or not colors actually exist. I came into school and learned immediately that what this was going to be about was questioning literally anything.

As I moved through things got more interesting. My second writing class was on punk rock. Now I love the early punk ethics that are almost completely about authenticity. And I continued with classes on how to change the world. How does journalism speak truth to power? How do the courts not work? A lot of that class was on the Drug courts. 

Now I grew up in a rough time. As I think everyone does. But when I started college the wars that have now been a fact of life were just ramping up. I was an officer of an anti war group and we were all trying to cope. So I took a class on Herodotus to help me understand better. The second class here? That was actually a community service class, it was teaching a class on hip hop and social activism in Rikers Island. I don’t know hip hop at all but like I said social activism was a thing that I seriously got at the time. The ethnic groups class, well that was about racism. The detention camps in WW2, the paper sons, no Irish should apply. My entire life in college became focused on the people getting the short end of the stick. 

And then something fundamental started to happen, I started to pull in theater. I started to find heroes. Like Vodel’s Lucifer. Who is not so much fallen as he has chosen to be cast out. He is an active hero like the Lucifer of Blake. He is not a victim but making a change. And I continued with the community services classes. I made maps for the “Working Families Party” for political organizing and starting volunteering at a GED prep course in Brooklyn for the literacy classes. These weren’t just about the people getting screwed they were doing something about the people getting screwed. And to complement we pulled the Prince which was actually the Prince and the Discourses to really start to think what do the people above us actually think. Why do they think we listen to them.

I continued with the theater classes. This one brought in a new group instead of romantics like Moliere and Byron. Now we were dealing with Hobbes, Sade, and the Libertines. We were dealing with people choosing and choosing incorrectly to do terrible things. And yes I know a lot of that isn’t actually theater. But it all came in as the theater playing out in the world. And I started to take “psych” courses. These are not real psych courses as I said I didn’t take any. They were philosophy. Philosophy of how we make scientific decisions and philosophy of feelings. It’s not Freud it’s Hume, Kant, DeWaal. It’s about how we think about how we think, not what we think or why. This is important, because it’s so different than the psychology approach. It lands you in a different place if you don’t start with the thought but why it was thought. A good place.

And here we start to really look at stories. We look at the stories people tell about themselves. How we explain ourselves, taking people at their word not trying to analyze them. And then the juxtaposition of Lenin and Gramsci. Lenin a man who basically said the Rich need to tell the poor what they want and Gramsci a man is ultimate faith in the poor to decide for themselves. And of course ethics. This is important because so many organizers are like Lenin and think they know best. And perhaps because I am lucky enough to have grown up poor I didn’t fall into this. When people would bring up the poor not knowing what they want I would dismiss this. I knew poor people and they are very clear on what they want. 

The pragmatists... the pragmatists are so important. They taught us that what matters is that what we do improves the world. Not that we are objectively right. The pragmatists teach us that better is better even if it’s not perfect and that small steps matter. 

And we see again here 2 more philosophy of science/psychology classes with the last groups that brings us to 4 I think. Classes that ask “is it enough that a scientist said it”. Why do we think people should think the way they do? If we don’t have a good reason why would we enforce it? Then we question the amount of politics that is actually really theology. And lastly the Existentialists. They had been coming up the whole 4 years, but here’s where they really focused in for me, especially Heidegger. What does it mean to exist? What does it mean to be? Who do I want to be? 

So what’s the point of college? Why do it? Well it’s about thinking about who you are and who you want to be. It’s a time for navel gazing. It’s a time to realize who you are. It’s a time to really grow into yourself. Or to start the process. The only way to do that is to really think about who you are. 

So take advantage, figure out who you are, change the world, be a better person.

[rosaofswords]

A Journaling Sample

Disclaimer: everyone journals differently, everyone interprets the cards differently. This is just how I used my journal to write about how I see the cards today. (Ask me tomorrow and I might see something different, I’m not even consistent unto myself.) 

I wanted to share this particular entry because it really highlighted some of the choices and changes I made for myself that I discussed in the post I put up earlier this week:

1. You can see in the photo above the new highlighter system with a colored band up at the top of the entry. Gosh that just looks way more satisfying that what I was doing before AND let me write magin-less, which was great and let me focus on the writing itself.

2. This is my entire tarot practice for today. Because I am not doing multiple readings for myself, I was really able to dive into it and think about how it connects to things in my life. I am also working with a deck that is really accessible to me because I know I am really low on energy/spoons at this time and I am not doing tarot study at this time. (Tune in next month for some serious tarot study, energy permitting.) 

So without further ado, here’s a transcription (with slight edits for clarification) of the entry:

Mentor Reading - Six of Stars - Mountain Dream Tarot

When I shared my mentor card this week with my patreon discord, my friend ( @nicstoirm ) pointed out the thoughtful, almost worried look on the giver’s face. I had noted it in my own journaling earlier* but they read something interesting into it that I had not: "can I help this person or am I expended too much already" I feel like this sentiment is particularly evident today and I am so grateful that they brought it to my attention. 

Two of Wands - Ten of Wands

The contrast between these cards is overwhelmingly obvious. The posture is similar, as is the framing. 

In the Two a man stands before a low brick wall and two sticks in the ground framing the ocean view on the right side of the card. One hand holds an orb - traditionally a globe, but I like to think of it as a crystal ball - which holds his attention, his other hand hangs empty, casually resting at his side. 

The hooded figure in the tend stands by a higher wall. Where there might have been two sticks, there is now a think support column for the structure’s ceiling. Even the trees outside the structure feel like a wall. The figure uses both arms to carry ten wands/sticks. 

I am thinking about the talk on productivity and positivity I took notes on last night. (It was a workshop hosted by bullet journal bloggers Little Coffee Fox and Boho Berry. Yes, I am in that deep with the bullet journal craze, shhhh.) The biggest takeaway for me was the idea that procrastination is not laziness, it’s a place of anxiety and fear. Situation avoidance is part of the flight response, but in avoidance those tasks, duties, and obligations stack up on us and box us in like this Ten of Wands. When you are procrastinating you are not resting, you are not taking care of yourself. You can no longer see the sea from an open roof top or hold new visions for your future in your hands. 

Obviously, I have a fairly passionate response to these cards: this is where I am at. The significance of the repeat model in the Two of Wands and the Six of Stars is not lost on me either: Do I have the energy to take on more and still be able to breathe freee? Will new obligations box me in? I need to be careful where I invest my energy right now so I can be back at the place of the Two of Wands with my hands free and able. 

The Two of Wands has come up a lot this summer, which makes sense overall. I am opening up to new possibilities and trying to reach that place of open view again. It’s more of a goal than a place I am really in. Figuring out how to downsize the physical and emotional clutter in my life is a daunting but extremely worthwhile enterprise.  

*If anyone was curious, I read into it a carefulness in direction to their task and concern for the person who is receiving. “Will it be enough?” It redirects the story of worthiness and charity, which I like and think about a lot. A few previous entries this week definitely fell in line with that meaning as well. 

[dailyaudiobible]

08/13/2019 DAB Transcript

Nehemiah 5:14-7:73, 1 Corinthians 8:1-13, Psalms 33:1-11, Proverbs 21:8-10

Today is the 13th day of August. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I am Brian. It's great to be here with you today as we continue our journey toward the middle of the week, and for that matter toward the middle of this month. I'm glad that we could be here together to take the next step forward in our journey through the Scriptures. And we’re in this really interesting, really dramatic story called Nehemiah and there’s so much for us to learn in this book about the way leadership works, the way that Nehemiah handled a task that he was given that was far beyond his capability and all of the oppositions that he faced along the way. It gives us such a life lesson. So, we’ll pick up where we left off yesterday were reading from the Good News Translation this week. Nehemiah chapter 5 verse 14 through 7 verse 73.

Commentary:

Okay. So, back to Nehemiah. Yeah, obviously the last part of our reading today was a number of lists about people who had returned from exile, but before that, and throughout this story of the rebuilding of the wall of Jerusalem, we should notice that Nehemiah…like…he assessed the situation before he got anyone involved and then when they launched, they launched strong and they faced all kinds of opposition, but as we’ve read over the last three days, these oppositions only got like…it only escalated…it only amped up the closer they got to finishing the wall. We should maybe give us a little bit of an exhale when we think of our own mission, like where not the only ones who ever face opposition. This is everybody. And today we got to see kind of what was burning inside, like what Nehemiah's heart was like, what was a motivating because he gave it to us in print form. He didn't take the resources that was given to his position. Even though his predecessors as governors had taken their pay he didn't. And there was nothing wrong with them getting paid for what they did. It was just that he saw the burden the people were under and as their leader he tried to live by example and lighten the load and be a part of the story with them instead of taking advantage of him. And, so he paid out of his own pocket what it cost for him to be in the position that he was in, which could've only showed everyone around him, everyone under him that he was in the struggle, that he was in it with them, but it also showed the people that Nehemiah was looking for this opportunity. Like he wasn't looking for personal gain. He had one mission and it was a mission that burned in his heart when he served the King of Persia and that was to rebuild the wall to see that the temple would be protected. And so, that was it. He would accept nothing less or nothing more. That was it. In fact, Nehemiah goes on to tell us that he was so devoted to the wall that he refused to acquire any land. And that might be like well, “you’re just putting another feather in your cap buddy. We get it. You're a good guy. You were a good guy.” But it’s actually a pretty big thing what he’s saying because this is Jerusalem, right? This is Jerusalem, who has been…that has been destroyed, but this is a city that is sitting in the center of things, a very valuable piece of property. And now, with walls going up and a temple going up, like this is the primmest of prime real estate for the future. Like, this is where you want to invest cause thus city's coming back. He didn’t at all. It wasn't wealth that he was after, right? It wasn’t in position or power or prosperity that he was after. He wanted to finish what he started, what God gave him to do. So, then Nehemiah faces the politics of the whole situation, right? So, ridicule didn’t work, taunting didn't work, and they planned attacks and attacks didn't work. And, so, they tried to intimidate Nehemiah specifically. First by inviting him to basically a summit, like “hey…come out to the plane of Ona. We have some things we need to talk about.” And the  enemies of Nehemiah, the enemies of the people are just exposing themselves. They see that the wall is about to be completed so they want to get on terms with Nehemiah. Actually, they want to lure him away so that they can discredit him, but he won't go. Like he will come down. He’s basically, “I’m up on this wall and I'm not coming down from this wall to meet with you.” And that's when this open letter comes, right, this plot to send word all the way back to Persia to the king that Nehemiah has built this wall and is rebuilding the city and plans to become the king of Judah and rebel against the king of Persia. And even prophets are bribed in the mix here to discredit and make Nehemiah look bad. So, basically we’re watching the systematic attack on God's plan that was birthed in the in Nehemiah’s heart. And Nehemiah, as the leader of the vision, of this plan, the leader of this whole effort, how he responds to all of these things, right? We don't have any little asides in the book of Nehemiah where Nehemiah’s, you know, hiding out in some kind of house somewhere with his head in his hands asking if he missed God, right? Like with all of this that keeps…all these attacks that keep coming against me, maybe I just missed God or maybe I just missed it somehow and then we start to try to figure a way out of whatever it is. What Nehemiah did was keep moving forward. Like, one way or another, as slow as it might've been, one foot in front of the other, one little bit of progress forward every day. And I feel pretty confident that some of you needed to hear that today straight from the Bible, unfiltered.

Prayer:

Father, we come into Your presence, and whether we’re facing any of these things right now, we’re all on the same page about what we’re talking about here. Whether it's our current circumstance, we know what's going on and we’ve felt this before, and frankly, we've given up more times than we haven't. So, come Holy Spirit and let us see this lesson that is just sitting here in the story of Nehemiah about continuing forward no matter how slow the progress and no matter who's saying what, no matter the intimidation against us. If we know that You have asked us to do something, then help us to complete it and to do it with honor and to do it in Your name. Come Holy Spirit we pray. In the name of Jesus, we ask. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website, its home base, and it is indeed where you find out what's going on around here.

And the Daily Audio Bible Family Reunion is coming up that we've been talking about for a while. Now we’re actually almost there. Two weeks is it? Yeah, let me look at a calendar. Two weeks from Saturday is the beginning, August 31st through September 2nd, which is Labor Day weekend here in the United States. We’re gonna get together and have a Family Reunion and have fun and play together and get to know each other and spend some time in the evenings together. And China’s telling me she's thinking about maybe Bible trivia or hosting a little Bible trivia competition out there one afternoon. We’re just gonna have a good time and looking forward to it very much. So, hopefully you can come. All of the details can be gotten at dailyaudiobible.com in the Initiatives section. Just look for Family Reunion 2019. And we will be there and hopefully you can be there too because what fun is that if you’re not there? Just like the Daily Audio Bible, what fun is that if we don't do this together? So hopefully you can come. And get the details at dailyaudiobible.com.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com as well. There is a link and it lives on the homepage and I humbly, humbly, humbly thank you for your partnership. If you’re using the Daily Audio Bible app, you can press the Give button in the upper right-hand corner or, if you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill Tennessee 37174.

And, as always, if you have a prayer request or comment 877-942-4253 is the number to dial.

And that's it for today. I'm Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayer and Praise:

Delta Alpha Foxtrot this is Victor Romeo Sierra a.k.a. Victoria in Missouri. I just had to call and thank you thank you thank you for reminding all of us, I know it’s been a while since you called, but thanks for reminding all of us to contribute to this fabulous platform of the Daily Audio Bible so we may all continue to receive it. I want to shout out also to the others who have called, Free Indeed from Maryland, Sheila from Texas, and someone, possibly it was one of you too, called and talked to us about paying where you are fed. How beautiful! I just love that. So, I just want us all to think about how much we learn each day from Brian’s commentary. The words that we receive, we’re receiving teaching, we’re receiving an education about the Bible and God word every day. Would you pay a dollar for the word being read to you and the outstanding and excellent commentary that we receive every day that we learned so much from? They both lead and guide us. I would be a dollar. I would be more than a dollar. I am paying more than a dollar. Please consider sharing a dollar a day or more. Some of us, you know, most of us, or a lot of us, some of us would not miss $30 a month coming out of our budget. Some of us wouldn’t miss more than that. Technology is expensive and it’s ever-changing. So, thank you so much for considering a gift to maintain our daily bread, our Daily Audio Bible and sustain this…this beautiful word and gift that we receive from Brian every day. Thanks, love everyone. Prayers and blessings. Bye-bye.

Hi family this is his little Cherry in Canada and I just got up and I’m so grateful because I had a good night last night. I even was able to lie on my back for a little while and haven’t been able to do that for weeks and weeks and weeks. So, I’m so grateful. Thank you for your prayers. I wanted to let a few people know I’m praying for them. Christine in Washington state, you mentioned that your daughter had a scope to look at her stomach and biopsy and that the pictures don’t look very good and you’re feeling worried and anxious and I completely understand that because I have a daughter too and I’ve been through some things with her. And I know it seems like the enemy has power to get to us sometimes when we’ve been serving the Lord or when we’ve been getting close to the Lord and then we’re hit with different things. It does feel like we’re being attacked, and I know that we are being attacked but sometimes it’s easy to give the enemy more power than he has, to feel like where at his mercy and he’s just doing whatever he wants in our lives. But we have to believe that he is a defeated foe and the truth is that the cross was more than enough to render him impotent and powerless. And ultimately Jesus is the one who is writing a story. And even when we are attacked, he takes the very thing the enemy intends for evil and works them for good and it’s a choice to believe that. So, Christine I’m praying for you and for your daughter and I’m believing that God is working all things together for good not just in your life but in her life as well. He is faithful to both of you and He is writing your story and He is carrying you to the happily ever after that His blood bought for you. Praying for you. Thank you, family. Bye bye.

Good morning this is Tiffany Locke from Arizona. It is August 9th, 2019 and I am calling for Christopher in pretzel city. You say you’re lost and you should be somewhere that you’re not in your spiritual life and I’m calling to say that I am praying for you and that you should begin to thank God for small things, silly things, things that you wouldn’t even think that you should consider or that God would consider, silly things such as driving down a street filled with traffic lights that you didn’t get stopped out one of them. You say thank you God that I had all green lights. And maybe the enemy will come in and try to make you feel silly but keep going. Thank Him for your breath, the ability to walk, the ability to see, your dog, your house. Begin to thank him even if you don’t feel thankful at the moment because those feelings will come, and then God will start to put things into your head to be thankful about maybe. I don’t know. Maybe He won’t but maybe you’ll start seeing more things. And keep thanking Him. Begin to worship Him, begin to praise Him, and don’t worry about what kind of person you are right now because He’s gonna take care of that. God is so good, and He knows more about you than you could possibly know about yourself. Pour yourself out to Him. Tell Him how stressed you are. Tell Him how upset you are or how happy you are or any of those things. Begin to talk to Him. Talk to Him no matter what time it is. Talk to Him when you are so angry you can barely stand yourself. Just say I’m so angry! God has big shoulders and He loves you more than you could possibly understand. I pray that you will receive this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Hi, this is Victoria Soldier just calling to pray for some of the DABbers. I am seeing…a lot of them have been getting sick with cancer and I wanted to pray for Indiana…Ken from Indiana, his two daughters and his wife is going through stress and anxiety. I wanted to pray for Tracy and thank her for the encouragement to the DABbers and Demetrius and the lady in Africa. And I wanted to pray for those who are sick and going through and needs a financial blessing and who needs…one lady needs a spouse. She was praying for a spouse. So, I ask God to bless her. Gracious father we just praise You today. Oh Lord I thank You Lord. I thank You because I know that You have a very special breakthrough for the people of God. Oh Lord we’re being attacked on every side. The enemy is afflicting us with sicknesses Lord but we know that You said that the devil comes in like a flood, but the spirit of the Lord takes up a stand against him. Lord we thank You Lord. We thank You because You never leave us. We thank You because You’re still mighty. We thank You because You’re still awesome. We thank You because You’re still omnipotent. We thank You because You’re still holy. We thank You because You’re still worthy. Oh Lord we just ask You Lord to touch Lord. You touch father You do whatever. You do whatever Your will Lord. You heal our bodies Lord. You heal our bodies. You heal our marriages Lord. You heal Your people Lord. You strengthen them on every hand. Oh father in the name of Jesus You have Your way. They’re being attacked by an enemy. Oh Lord in the name of Jesus we just thank You Lord. We’re looking for Your blessing. When the devil kicks…

[queenchemistry]

I'll be at UMich this fall ('21) as a STEM student in the LSA, and I wondered if you had any advice, especially within the specific context of U of M. Thanks ✨

Hi there!! :) I feel like I have a lot of advice for incoming freshmen and I’ve been busy with work, so it’s taken me a while to compose this reply but here we go:

Advice for incoming freshmen in STEM at UMich!

Figuring out what classes to take & when:

See what your AP/IB scores count for at LSA here. Not having to retake introductory classes can make a huge difference in your 4-year planning (or may mean graduating early)! But it might help to retake certain intro classes if you don’t feel confident about your abilities to succeed in the higher level classes.

If you’re worried about a class because you heard it was a GPA-wrecker, consider taking it at a community college over the summer. Your grade will show up on your transcript, but it will not affect your GPA.

If you have an idea of what majors you are interested in, you can look up “UMich [major] worksheet” or go to departmental websites at umich.edu for a list of required classes for each major. An example from the Chemistry department is here. The pre-health advisory courses can be found here.

If you have no idea what majors you’re interested in, that’s okay! Use your freshman and sophomore years to explore the sciences. Most science majors at LSA will require some calculus and physics, but also look into courses like organic chemistry and introductory biology. If you’re pre-health, you’ll have to take a wide variety of introductory classes anyway. You can find a list of LSA majors and minors here.

Try to get calculus out of the way as soon as possible! It could be required for physics and upper-level chemistry courses. Or if you find out you love math, you’ll be glad you’re on track for the math major.

Keep a manageable course-load for freshman year. Your first semester will require effort to adjust to university life. Advisors say first-semester freshmen should take 14-16 credits (about 4 classes). In my opinion, you should focus on a balance between easy and hard classes. For instance, in my first semester, I took organic chemistry 1, calculus 3, a writing class, and UROP (research + seminars for credit). So basically my schedule was: a difficult class I’m interested in, a difficult pre-requisite, an easy class required for LSA, and an easy “class” that I was interested in.

How to succeed in science/math classes at UMich:

General advice: give 110% effort into your first midterms- do all the homework, textbook readings, practice exams; attend every lecture, go to office hours, form a study group… the possibilities are endless! After the first exam, you’ll figure out which resources you need to put the most time into to succeed in a class. 

Some specific resources you can go to for help include the Math Lab, the Physics Help Room, and the Science Learning Center (SLC) for introductory physics, chemistry, and biology classes. The SLC has study groups that you can register for at the beginning of the semester, as well as drop-in tutoring.

Make friends with the people sitting next to you in class! You don’t have to become BFFs, but it helps to at least exchange numbers so you can text about meeting up to study.

Try to get on your professor’s good side. It will help you tremendously in the future if you can have a professor write you a strong letter of recommendation, and it can help in the short-term to have your professors like you. Best ways to do this? Introduce yourself after the first lecture, attend office hours whenever possible, sit in the front of the class, and ask/answer questions during class. If you’re feeling extra spicy, you can even ask your professor out to lunch or coffee. There will be emails sent out mid-semester about professor lunch date coupons. I forget the technical name for this though haha.

Math: “Michigan Math” is supposedly infamous for its teaching style. As my residential advisor put it, “the class teaches you how to build a table, but the exam will ask you to build a chair.” That is to say, the math classes here are fairly conceptual rather than computational. To prepare for exams, review the assigned homework problems, in-class examples, and past exams (which can be found online) and be able to solve similar problems. Figuring out how to approach a problem can be the hardest part, and that’s where talking to professors, tutors, or friends in your class will help.

Physics: There are several physics sequences at UMich (algebra-based physics for the life sciences, and regular and honors calculus-based physics). I took the life sciences physics because the math was less intensive and I like health-related subjects. However, I’ve studied with friends in other physics sequences and it seems like the same general advice applies: understand how to do all the problems you’re given. I found physics here to be more computational than conceptual, compared to math. I believe all the introductory physics classes allow some kind of notes to be brought in; it helps to write down how to do specific problems from past exams, the lectures, and the homework.

Chemistry: I keep hearing that organic chemistry 1 and 2 are the hardest classes at UMich. Based on the grade distribution for the classes (mostly A’s and B’s), I don’t believe this is true. You don’t need to remember much from gen chem to do well in orgo, though it helps to have a background in drawing molecular structures and in acid-base chemistry. My best advice for organic chemistry is to complete the coursepack (a workbook full of old exams) and compare your answers with friends, tutors, and professors. Talking about the chemistry requires an understanding of it, so keep discussing the course material with anyone you can! It might help to know orgo 1 is more conceptual and orgo 2 is more memorization-based. As for gen chem, I’ve heard it is a bit harder than AP Chemistry since it’s packed into one semester, but the online homework is helpful in preparing for exams.

Biology: I don’t know too much about the intro bio classes here, but my general advice still applies here. A friend told me that the bio classes are saturated with a lot of information that you need to memorize, so you have to start studying early and stay on top of the material. Look at lectures beforehand and take good notes. Know that it’s okay to feel overwhelmed; there’s a lot of material you’ll need to know, but it’s definitely possible to know it.

Extracurricular shenanigans:

There seem to be two common opinions among STEM students regarding participation in extracurriculars: either narrow it down to a few activities that are most meaningful to you, or smush in as many résumé-builders as possible. Personally, I think a few meaningful extracurricular experiences are more important than half a dozen clubs that will eat up your free time.

Research is huge at Michigan! There are research opportunities everywhere on campus and in every field, so it’d be a shame if you graduated without taking advantage of that. If you have a good idea of what you want to major in, then look for related research labs by perusing the departmental sites on umich.edu. If you don’t know what you want to study, brainstorm your research interests and look for labs in different departments that meet your interests. Once you’ve found several (~5-10) labs you’re interested in, write the professors in whose labs you’re interested an email briefly stating your interest in their research, attach your résumé, and ask for an interview (also tell them your schedule). It’s not terribly common for freshmen to participate in research their first year, so it’s more than okay to wait until sophomore or junior year to start research.

STEM clubs can be a great way to network with other STEM students at UMich! I can’t think of all of them off the top of my head, but the ones I know about include Out in STEM (oSTEM) for LGBT students, Society of Women in Engineering (SWE), Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) (which has both a residential program and a non-residential program), the chemistry/science fraternity Alpha Chi Sigma, and the American Chemical Society local chapter. If you’re looking for a good club, you can hit up FestiFall in the beginning of September and attend the mass meetings of clubs you think you’d like. For the rest of the year, you can search Maize Pages for clubs you’re interested in.

There are also several pre-health extracurriculars that you can find by attending the pre-health orientation, which occurs after move-in. I think all LSA students should receive an email about it early September or late August. If you can’t make the orientation, it’s not a biggie. You can find the pre-health extracurriculars in the same way you find any other extracurricular.

That’s all I could come up with for now! If you’ve got any more specific questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. :) And if anyone else has related advice, go ahead and let us know!

Best of luck and go blue!

[cryptswahili]

Peter Todd on the Essence of Bitcoin

Audio interview transcription — WBD068

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Peter Todd. I use Rev.com from translations and they remove ums, errs and half sentences. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

You can subscribe to the podcast and listen to all episodes here.

In this episode, I talk with Bitcoin legend Peter Todd. We talk about the essence of Bitcoin, why it worked whether other attempts at digital currencies failed as well as key topics such as fungibility, lightning and why other projects are scams.

https://medium.com/media/ff83f743006e77b61bf2549648386e0b/href

Connect with What Bitcoin Did: Listen: iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | YouTube | TuneIn Follow: Website | Email | Blog | Twitter | Medium | Instagram | YouTube

Interview Transcription

Interview Date: Saturday 26th Jan, 2019

“Anyone who understands economics and finance and how markets work will be a maximalist because it is more efficient to have one currency than a bunch of ones.”

— Peter Todd

Peter McCormack: Hi there, Peter. How are you?

Peter Todd: I’m great, thanks.

Peter McCormack: Thank you for coming on the podcast. I’ve wanted to talk to you for quite a long time. I followed a lot of your work. And, one of the things that really stood out for me is when I went on your blog, and not only did I not understand the content of your articles, I didn’t even understand what they were about.

Like there’s a certain level of technical competence that I think you have to have to kind of understand this work. And, I then read about a story that you were emailing Hal Finney and Adam Back when you were at like 15?

Peter Todd: Yep.

Peter McCormack: I’ve got to ask about this. What’s the background? How does a 15-year-old start talking to Hal Finney and Adam Berk about Hashcash? What’s the journey to that?

Peter Todd: Well, the great thing with the Internet is, no one knows that you’re dark, and even when they do, they don’t care. And I mean, if you go back far enough, as a young kid, I watched a lot of Star Trek and thought the ideals of democracy and freedom of speech, they’re all said and well and good.

And, my dad’s an economist by training. So initially, really early on, I got interested in the freedom project, which is a decentralised censorship resistant publication network. Long story short is, it lets you make a website that no one can take down, lets you publish.

And I thought, “Oh! That’s really cool.” And, got interested in it, did a little bit of work on it. So actually, first time I kind of worked on creating an exploit, was actually against Freenet. The work I created a tool to go and map out the interconnections of different nodes, so those are all well and interesting.

But, I think the big issue with Freenet network, was, as I was thinking to myself, “Well, obviously the next step is you need decentralised money. Just being able to publish your thoughts isn’t enough. Political movements need money. Take a look, political movements for the marginalised, the poor.

If you’re a rich person, you have the way of funding the things you need to fund to make your political movement happen, whereas the poor don’t have that. We are often kind of talking about it in reverse, the rich will gain politics, and so on. And, reality, I mean you can’t kind of stop that. But, for the disadvantage, you definitely need that option to be able to move money around. You need to be able to without surveillance.

So, I think long story short is, somehow or another, I wanted upon a mailing list, the Blue Sky mailing list, which if I remember correctly, it was advertised on the Freenet mailing lists. So, I signed up, we started talking about stuff, and I spent a lot of time trying to invent Bitcoin, and like many people completely failed at it.

And, it’s really interesting looking back and seeing just how wrong I was, in almost 180 degrees offset what was the right answer. And, a lot of people, I think, had that experience.

Peter McCormack: So you tried to invent a Bitcoin?

Peter Todd: Yeah. I was one of many, many people trying to create decentralised currency. And, really failed at us.

Peter McCormack: What was version?

Peter Todd: Well, I think … I mean, I didn’t have a proposal, ’cause I realised all my thoughts on it weren’t going to work. But, I think what I caught so wrong was I had thought about Hashcash in terms of the thing that controls the creation of money. And, that’s not actually an important thing. The creation of money is not the important thing. It’s preventing double-spending that is.

The creation is just a onetime event. Allowing money to be moved consistently, and accurately without double spend, is actually the critical thing. And, unfortunately, because I tied proof of works to the creation so tightly, I never really came up with the concept of, “Well hang on.” No, no. We tied proof of work to the changes in the ledger, to make sure it’s difficult three or at the changes.

Peter McCormack: Right.

Peter Todd: And, my thinking on my kind of solution where we have some kind of decentralised database, how do you do that? I don’t know. It can be attacked, it can be civil attacked. And, I just constantly shot down ideas, and could never figure out, how do you make this work, when the answer was juts so simple. But, it was 180 degrees opposite what I was working on.

Peter McCormack: But, I’m guessing you’re saying it’s simple ’cause the answer was Bitcoin, right?

Peter Todd: I mean, literally someone could have sat down … Like honestly, it’s to the point where one tweet from the future, saying how Bitcoin works, would probably have been enough info for me to have created Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: But, what is the key, the one key element then?

Peter Todd: Using proof of work to make changes to the ledger difficult. That one sentence, I think, encapsulates the key part of Bitcoin that we were missing back then.

Peter McCormack: So, it’s more the game theory than the code?

Peter Todd: I don’t even … The point is, I don’t even think the game theory part is a really critical thing. Like, absolute core of it that you must have is tying proof work to changes to the ledger, to make it expensive to change. You could probably have Bitcoin without even a financial reward. It would still work far better than any of the crazy ideas people had come up back then.

Peter McCormack: So, the Bitcoin white paper comes out, you’re obviously are aware of it, you read it. Is it obvious at the time or?

Peter Todd: Absolutely.

Peter McCormack: Oh, immediately you could?

Peter Todd: Yeah. For me, I believe I read the Bitcoin white paper for the first time, like late 2009. And, I remember, you know when I read it, I was like, “Oh, shit! I should’ve thought of that.” It was actually, for me, it was opposite many people.

For me, I read it, and this is obviously gonna work. And, only later did I come up with reasons why it wouldn’t.

Peter McCormack: Right.

Peter Todd: Whereas, for many people, they read and think, “How would this ever work?” And then, later they’re convinced it does. But, I’d been primed, ’cause I’d already worked on this and tried very hard. So, when I saw it that’s … It just was so obvious to me. “Oh, I was wrong. This was the missing piece”

Peter McCormack: How, as a 15-year-old, do you make the leap from realising that there is a need for money to finance certain projects and things, to it must be having to be a decentralised type of money that doesn’t already exist? How do you make that leap?

Peter Todd: I mean, the idea of e-money and cypherpunk stuff around that was not exactly like an unknown concept. I partly even read Sci Fi stories at the time talking about that. The notion of credits is really sort of a common term in Sci Fi stories. I mean. it’s just …

And also, money itself has a property. I mean, sure, it’s issued by the government, but paper money I can give to you, and no one can stop me. The idea that money would have to be controlled on transaction basis is this very new thing, pushed by big companies who want to go make money off this, and Law enforcement who would like to surveil everyone. This is the opposite of how money should work. This is not the status quo.

Peter McCormack: So, this Bitcoin worked then, or is it working?

Peter Todd: I mean, in terms of doing what money should do, it’s a hell of a lot closer than say PayPal. It’s a lot closer to what PayPal was meant to be. I mean, people who started PayPal wanted to create censorship resistant e-currencies. They didn’t have the tech to do it, and they didn’t have the legal frameworks to get away with it.

So, they didn’t. But, that was the initial concept with PayPal. So, Bitcoin’s a lot close to that. I mean, Bitcoin has scaled boldy problems. But, the core thing of what Bitcoin does is much closer to that than alternatives, certainly closer to things like Liberty Reserve, which of course got shut down.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I guess there’s always been the centralised problem, right?

Peter Todd: Yeah. Centralisation kills things if they have adversaries. Often centralisation’s way to go. I mean, I have approached it myself, called Open TimeStamps, which is absolutely centralised. There are four calendars of the Open timeStamps system. I run two of them, two other people run another two.

It’s a centralised system. But, Open TimeStamps doesn’t really have adversaries in this way that Bitcoin does. And, no one’s going to profit by shutting down Open TimeStamps in the way you would with Bitcoin.

And also, because Open TimeStamps relies on Bitcoin for the truth of the timestamps, the central third parties on a position to fake things.

Peter McCormack: Okay. So, I wanna … I should’ve asked this at the start. I love asking this question, ’cause it’s so simple. And, the first time I heard it was when Epicenter asked Adam Berk, and it also blew my mind, just hearing it set out. So, I’m just gonna ask you again. What is Bitcoin? The answers are always different as well.

Peter Todd: Well, I’ll give you a different answer.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Peter Todd: Which is, Bitcoin is a shared data structure, that we make artificially expensive to change, by destroying energy every time we update it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. I’ve heard that one like four times. No. I’m joking. Yeah. I’m only joking. Okay. Okay.

Peter Todd: Bitcoin is an elephant, and it’s pink with like little spots.

Peter McCormack: I love the energy angle. So, you’ve been around since the start, right? It’s 10 years and-

Peter Todd: Not quite.

Peter McCormack: Pretty much.

Peter Todd: I mean, I’ve known about Bitcoin, since nearly the start. But, I actually got more active into it a bit later. And, the reason is, I mean, relative to many other developers, but the reason is because when I first learned about Bitcoin, well, I’d just started a new job at a crazy startup. And then, I was crazy enough to then also try to do a physics degree, while I was at the startup. So, I didn’t exactly have a lot of free time.

Peter McCormack: But, I mean, I’ve gone through the exercise of going through old mailing lists, and old Bitcoin talk forums. And, there’s a number of names I recognise. A number I don’t. And, I’ve seen you in there commenting and talking. So, you were there like pretty much since the start.

Peter Todd: I mean, I started working on this stuff full time 2014.

Peter McCormack: 2014.

Peter Todd: Which is a lot earlier than many people.

Peter McCormack: But, having been there, through the whole experience, how do you take it all in, because even though you knew it would work, there’s a difference between knowing theoretically it would work.

Peter Todd: Well, remember, I thought it would work.

Peter McCormack: You thought it would work?

Peter Todd: And then, I started realising, hang on, this isn’t as good as it sounds.

Peter McCormack: Right. Okay. We’re going to come back to those things. But, 10 years on is still exists. It holds billions of dollars in value. At one point, hundreds of billions. There is the talk of ETS. We have futures. We have so much happened. Did you foresee all this?

Peter Todd: I mean to be perfectly honest, this it doesn’t really surprise me that much. I mean, you always gotta be a bit careful. I mean, your memory of what you thought five years ago can be a bit vague. But, I don’t think if you’d asked me that many years ago, would it? Could it get to where it is now? I would have said no.

I think I would have said, “Yeah, I mean, this is plausible. It is an obvious utility. Digital gold is obviously useful. So, if things don’t fail and it continues to grow, I mean, surely could get to this point.”

I think the more interesting question is, well, how big could it get? And, I would actually put relatively small limits on it. We’re not gonna see … First time I bought Bitcoin, I bought it for 20 cents of a Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Right.

Peter Todd: And, I tell you, that was the best financial decision of my life. The worst financial decision of my life was only buying $20 worth.

Peter McCormack: Hold on. What is that? That’s like a hundred Bitcoin. Yeah. But, we won’t have hindsight.

Peter Todd: But, the thing with that is looking at how that grows. I mean, how many zeros is that times? Call it 10000 times growth or whatever, depending on what price you pick. We’re not going to get another 10000. The world economy is too small for that. We’re not that far away from having more money in Bitcoin than in the US dollar and gold combined.

Yeah. That’s if I remember correctly, it’s like a hundred X. That’s pretty … That’s a lot smaller than 10000X.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. But, I’m not convinced you care that much about price beyond the wider kind of a PR [inaudible 00:12:17] and brings people into the system. I don’t think you’re that. I don’t see you as somebody that is incentivised by the price.

Peter Todd: Well, I mean price is a funny thing, ’cause people often say, the price doesn’t matter. And, that’s definitely not true. Bitcoin security model relies on it being valuable. There is no getting around that. And, it probably would not work, if the price was said a thousand times less. Someone would probably attack it for kicks and giggles.

Peter McCormack: So, you were saying you started to look at the reasons why it won’t work. What were the main issues that you found, and where the things you attempted to try and break?

Peter Todd: Well, really, like the one big thing for me was when I realised, “Oh yeah. Scalability really matters, and this stuff doesn’t scale.”

Peter McCormack: Right.

Peter Todd: I figured that out, you kind of says embarrassingly late. But, in terms of like how long I was looking at Bitcoin seriously, fairly early. From the time I started looking at Bitcoin seriously, to when I realise this, and how important it was, we’re probably talking like three or four months.

And, that was while I was at a startup, doing a university career at the same time. Simple truth is, I just didn’t pay that much attention to it for quite a few years. And, when I realised that, well, I got very active and tried to solve this problem. And, also importantly got very active in debating people who thought it wasn’t an issue.

Peter McCormack: So, were you debating Rodger?

Peter Todd: Oh, he wasn’t around but around then.

Peter McCormack: Like you were going about earlier, okay. So, who would be debating this?

Peter Todd: Gavin Andresen, and actually literally debating Gavin Andresen on Bitcoin talk forums was probably the thing that got my name up there.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay. Because-

Peter Todd: There is a thread on Bitcoin talk where I disagree with Gavin Andresen, and it just spiralled.

Peter McCormack: And what? The disagreement was what? Block size?

Peter Todd: Exactly.

Peter McCormack: Okay. What did he want?

Peter Todd: His viewpoint was, yeah, he can … If I remember correctly, his exact viewpoint was you can have an unlimited block size. And, that was just such an extreme position. I laid out, very carefully, why this did not work. And, it wasn’t the first time there’d been a disagreement on that, but at least for me personally, that was the timeline when, “Hey, this is Peter Todd, the guy who disagrees with Gavin Andresen on this. And, these seem are a good point.

That’s really why my name got known. And, things just built on there.

Peter McCormack: But, there are different reasons why … Well, people give different reasons for why a larger block size won’t work. Some people I’ve heard discuss it because it doesn’t scale in computer power, ’cause of nodes.

Peter Todd: Remember, the notes Gavin’s view there was an unlimited block size. He thought the incentives were such that miners would voluntarily restrict the size of their blocks, even though they could make the biggest blocks if they want. And, I laid out basically with a bit of math and game theory why this is a bad idea.

That wasn’t even like a bigger picture. It’s just this is broken, because miners can do this when they create a bigger block, they’re going to push out the competitors. That’s kind of the arguments in a nutshell. And, the simple reality was, I was right on that. And, that’s just so well supported by academic research since. And, Gavin was just dead wrong.

Peter McCormack: And, has he ever come back and said, “You were right”?

Peter Todd: Nope.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Peter Todd: I mean, there’s a reason why he’s no longer involved in Bitcoin in any real sense. He just wasn’t competent enough to do it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. There’s probably more than one reason as well, right?

Peter Todd: Supporting Craig Wright was probably not the best move. But, all that stems from the fact he just isn’t that competent at what he was doing.

Peter McCormack: And, I guess it requires a certain level of competency to be able to work at that level. And, it doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of people at that level.

Peter Todd: No, definitely not. No. Most programmers in general, do you not have the capability to work on this stuff, because they don’t think it adversarially. It’s a tough thing for people to imagine. Most people are just not used to imagining, “All right, what are the bad things that could happen?”

Whereas for whatever reason, I, and a few other people, are good at that. I’m quite happy to imagine all the ways people could screw people over.

Peter McCormack: What do you make of Luke’s ideas around a smaller block? Is it 300K?

Peter Todd: I think his technical arguments for that are good, but I think he doesn’t understand the social side of that, which essentially makes it impossible. And after all, I mean, let’s face it, Luke is a crazy evangelical Catholic. He has very, very, very strong beliefs that are ultimately driven by very strongly held principles.

He is, to us, an evangelical crazy Catholic. But, that comes from him having very well defined beliefs and very strongly held principles. And, the logical conclusion of that is his belief system.

And, I think what Luke … I’m not even sure I could say that he fails to see, ’cause he may very well understand this perfectly, but you know why Luke would say something like that is, he has the principles, and he takes it to his conclusion. Whereas the way I’d put is, “Yeah. I mean, he’s not wrong, but it just ain’t gonna happen.”

Peter McCormack: Right. Okay. Where do you envisage the block size being in the future? Do you think it was gonna stay as it is, or do you think at some point there’ll be a change?

Peter Todd: Oh, I think it’s plausible actually for the rest of life of Bitcoin, we’re not going to see another block size increase. And, the reason why I say that’s plausible is ultimately things lightning and whatnot work pretty well. And, what would it be right now? Like 15 transactions per second or something is actually a fair amount.

And, the way people use Bitcoin, like after all, for Bitcoins be wildly successful, it doesn’t necessarily mean that people are actually making payments on it. Bitcoin as a store of value can be an incredible success story.

I think the bigger threat we would have is actually Bitcoin’s inflation schedule, ’cause in the long run … And, this isn’t a short term thing, but this is like 10, 20 years down in the future, there might not be enough inflation to pay for security.

Peter McCormack: I just wrote that down, actually. So, I’ve got a couple of questions about that. So, if it’s just a store of value, and there wasn’t enough Bitcoin being moved around for fees, and the mine of rewards have dropped, that’s a huge risk for the security of Bitcoin, right?

Peter Todd: Absolutely.

Peter McCormack: And-

Peter Todd: But, that’s a risk like 10, 20 years in the future. That is a very long time. And, by then, who the hell knows what the risks are?

Peter McCormack: But Peter Todd thinks adversarially, and I think that goes into the basket of things that you probably are thinking about now.

Peter Todd: Yep. Well, let me look this way. If I were able to go back in time, and redo Bitcoin, ’cause of course, I am Satoshi as is everyone else.

Peter McCormack: I’ve read it. I’ve read you invented Bitcoin at 12.

Peter Todd: Yeah, yeah. If I was able to go back in time and create Bitcoin from scratch, I would have made it have a perpetual say 0.5% or 1% inflation rate.

Peter McCormack: Okay. That’s controversial, for some people.

Peter Todd: I’ll put it this way if you can’t afford like a 0.1% or 0.5, or even a 1% inflation rate, what the fuck are you doing with your life? It’s 1% a year. So what?

Peter McCormack: So, who have you discussed that with? And, like you don’t have to name names. But, have you discussed that with people? What’s the general reaction? Because there’s no reason for that not to be introduced in the future, right? I mean …

Peter Todd: I think the general reaction is … Well, first of all, Bitcoin right now has what a 4% inflation rate. We’re a long way from any of this discussion being relevant. So, I think the general reaction right now is, it's pushing it to the future. It’s just not a discussion worth having right now.

It’s drama, and of course, you look at my twitter account, and I don’t shy away from that. But, most of the development community wouldn’t really wanna touch the issue. And, I think they’re right. There is no reason to touch this issue until it actually matters.

Peter McCormack: What about if Lightning Network is hugely successful? And, people stop using the base chain, because Lightning is fast, and it’s cheap, is instant. Could we get to the point where there’s no argument to use the basechain, because Lightning is as trusted as the base chain? Do you see what I’m getting at?

Peter Todd: Well, I mean, Lightning security model is riskier than the base chain. It just doesn’t … Lightning, there’s a good reason to use it beyond scale. I mean, Lightning has much better UI experience. But, the simple reality is the Lightning security model is more dangerous than Bitcoin itself, assuming that you’re able to wait for confirmations.

Under certain cases, Lightning can actually be much more secure. I mean, if I go pay you with Lightning, the security of that payment from the point of view of being reversed 10 seconds from now is far better than the main chain ever could be. In effects, it will be better probably what an hour or two into the future.

But overall, if you’re making big payments that aren’t time sensitive, main chain has better security. On the other hand, this idea of Lightning taking my transaction fees, that’s not unique to lightning. Tons of things do this. Exchanges do this. Probably the most payment volume that happens is actually on exchanges. Liquid side chain does this as well. Liquid takes transaction fees away from the main chain.

There’s no end of things that take transaction fees away from the main chain. And, the inflation arguments I would give is very simple. It’s, well, make sure you always have this mechanism to ensure that the chain keeps marching forward.

Even with transaction fees, you actually need this for a kind of subtle to game theory technical reasons. The simple reality is, Bitcoin without an inflation subsidy has a much worse security argument than Bitcoin with an inflation subsidy, even if you have transaction fees paying for things.

Peter McCormack: I haven’t heard you talk about this a lot though, right? So, are you waiting? Is it a case of priorities? Deal with what needs to be dealt with now? And, you’ll bring this up in 10 years?

Peter Todd: Yeah. It’s just isn’t relevant for literally like another 10 years or so.

Peter McCormack: What about 10-minute blocks across the solar system though? When is that going to be a precedent? I read that.

Peter Todd: Well, yes. I did a talk, actually. I believe the title of the talk was a solar powered space miner. Yeah. Solar Powered Space Pirates, a Threat to Bitcoin. And, the simple answer to that is yes, if space travel becomes cheap enough that big mining operations are operating far enough away from earth that the speed of light gets people out of consensus, yeah, Bitcoin’s fucked, and we’ll probably have to increase the block control.

Peter McCormack: And, say are you general evil?

Peter Todd: Yes, I’m a bad person capable of love.

Peter McCormack: Okay. Outside of Bitcoin, ’cause other Bitcoiners are very Maximalist in nature. But, I have seen you talk about Zcash and a theory. Like, what’s your position on alternative coins and alternative currencies?

Peter Todd: Well, the thing is, I’m not a Bitcoin Maximalist. I’m a Maximalist. Anyone who understands economics and finance, and how markets work will be a Maximalist because it is more efficient to have one currency than a whole bunch of different ones. That’s just not a controversial opinion. And, it’s a controversial opinion amongst scammers who want you to go by their ICO.

But, standard non-scam driven, economic thinking, this is not a controversial opinion. This is how the Euro got created. And, there are certainly downsides to not having multiple currencies. The one world currency thing has a lot of very real economic problems. But, they’re not problems that apply to things like Bitcoin.

For digital payments in a decentralised environment, it’s just natural to end up with one coin. Whether or not it’s actually Bitcoin, who the heck knows? But, Bitcoin’s technical design and sort of technical ethos currently are definitely the most suitable for being the one currency everyone uses.

That’s just a matter of like simplicity, reliability, of disinterest in making deep dangerous changes. And, there’s just … Conservatism is a good thing for that store of value. It’s just a pretty obvious set of combinations that mean Bitcoin’s kind of the default there.

Peter McCormack: But therefore, is it good to have competing alternative currencies?

Peter Todd: I mean, it’s not going to hurt things. But, for the most part, the competing alternative currencies are scams.

Peter McCormack: Every single one?

Peter Todd: Well, some are more scammy than others.

Peter McCormack: Is Ethereum a scam?

Peter Todd: Ethereum is a funny example, because the way it was launched, and the way it was promoted, that’s much more of a scam than any of the surf currency itself. Had Ethereum, for instance, been launched. I mean, it’s hard to kind of come up with an example of where this would be possible.

Let’s suppose, hypothetically, somehow launch Ethereum, where it was just an add on to Bitcoin, where somehow the people behind Ethereum were making money off of it. This isn’t really technically feasible, but let’s assume for the sake of argument was. It would still wind up being a scam, even without a separate currency, because they were advertising things that they knew would not be possible.

Ethereum is just a bed of lies if you will. And, I think it’s very unfortunate, ’cause it also means a lot of academics, because they can get grant money from this, and because Ethereum is easy to experiment on. I think it’s pulled down ethical standards of academia.

And, it’s just an unfortunate position to be in. And, this is also … I mean, maybe a good way to explain this is the private chain side of things. Well, some of that’s perfectly reasonable. A lot of the more grandiose claims made are effectively scams. And, it’s sort of a new interesting category of scam where it’s not like we’re directly ripping people off, but rather were lying about what our products can actually do, and we’re getting away with it because it’s security.

And, in security, well I can sell you a magical rock that keeps lions away. How do you know it doesn’t work? There are no lions around.

Peter McCormack: So, what are the main claims for Ethereum then that you think of false?

Peter Todd: I mean, it’s a funny one, ’cause it’s tough to pin down because the main claims were designed to be vague. Claims like this is a world … A great example is the world computer thing. What does that actually mean?

When you start thinking about any reasonable interpretation of it is, no, this is total bullshit. But, it’s presented in a way which is vague enough, it’s tough to argue against. You’ve got to play pin people down on what does a world computer mean? What’s it actually computing?

Now, you ask a normal person, I think, “Oh yeah, computations done somehow on Ethereum.” And, it’s no, that’s not how it works at all. Your Ethereum node redoes the computation. It’s not a computer, it’s a verifier, whereas the sort of general way of building consensus applications I push is client-side verification, which is quite explicit.

Yes, we have this big dataset that your computer verifies. And, other people don’t even have to verify the data. They don’t even necessarily know what it means. They may never even have a copy of it. But, if I want to convince you that something’s true, like I just sold you a house, I give you the data to prove it’s true, and you verify that data yourself, and you come to a conclusion that yes, you now own a house, or no, I’m trying to defraud you.

That is a sane way to talk about block chains. A world computer is not. A world computer is a pie in the sky scam material. And, even Vitalik, I mean he’s kind of admitted, “Well, the world computer stuff was a bit of a red herring.” I’m sorry. The moment you say red herring, and please go and invest in my thing, you’re probably scamming someone.

Peter McCormack: I don’t get the feeling he intentionally scammed somebody.

Peter Todd: You know about his quantum computing thing?

Peter McCormack: No, tell me.

Peter Todd: Well, just prior to Ethereum, he was involved in a quantum computing scam.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Peter Todd: And, essentially what the scam was was they would do simulated quantum computing that would somehow be better than anything else. It just didn’t make any sense. And, his claim is, “Oh! I kind of young, and just had higher hopes for it. That’s all.” No, you weren’t that stupid.

First of all, you were like 19, at university. You knew what this was. You knew this was bullshit. Yeah. The guy’s got the mind of a scammer, basically. He’s got the intentions of a scammer.

He’s very clever about it. He’s not someone who is careless. He’s not someone who gets himself clearly involved in a scam in the way that you can prosecute. But, he’s pushing dishonest stuff. I mean, that’s what scammers do.

Peter McCormack: So, ETH 2.0, I’m guessing you’ve read some of the specs.

Peter Todd: I mean, it’s one of those things where he just go put up a whole bunch of complex shit on the wall to try to be resistant to criticism. I think I believe Greg Maxwell was the one who deserves credit for this. But, he’s pointed out how the general approach of Ethereum crowd is, they put something out, it gets shot down because it doesn’t work. So, rather than go back and fix the problems, they make it more complex.

And, if you keep repeating this, eventually you appear to be secure, not because you’ve actually created something secure, but rather, you’ve created something sufficiently complex, it’s just too much work to criticise.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. I mean, I’ve read James Press, which is medium posts recently looking at ETH 2.0. I don’t know if you saw it.

Peter Todd: I might have.

Peter McCormack: I mean, the only thing I could think of when I was reading this is, “This just seems an insanely complicated way of creating a distributed database.” I was written about sharding, and then I was reading about state rent, and that certain things would be on chains. And, I was just thinking, “What’s this for?” I just can’t get my head around it.

Peter Todd: It is designed to be sufficiently complex that you can’t criticise it. Now, on the other hand, if I wanted to explain to you how Open TimeStamps works, I could do that in a morning, including the part where I explain how hash functions work. It is dead simple.

If I wanna explain to you how my proof Marshall Project works, I’d probably have to go spend the afternoon as well. This stuff is designed to be dead simple. I mean, this is why, on my twitter profile for a long time, the pinned tweet was, “A blockchain is a chain of blocks.”

Peter McCormack: I knew that was coming.

Peter Todd: Yeah. Blockchains are not complex things. People try to make them complex things, so they can go sell stuff, or in the case of academic skill, write papers and make them relevant. But, they just aren’t that complex.

Peter McCormack: Yup. And, they have one purpose. Like, Jimmy talks about this a lot. The blockchain has a really good purpose for Bitcoin and money. Nothing else really. And, I’ve tried-

Peter Todd: I actually disagree on that.

Peter McCormack: Well, that’s good, because I’ve tried to be open-minded, and tried to kind of just be as open-minded as a can say, “Okay. Is there something else here?” Like-

Peter Todd: You’ve gotta remember because I define a blockchain is a chain of blocks, I would actually have the viewpoint that, “Yeah. Blockchains are worth adding basically anything.” I mean, the moment you have a data structure, where you even wanna create a backup of it, it might as well throw it blockchain in there so it can update and ensure you have a complete copy.

My Open TimeStamps project, it’s a centralised system that creates timestamps, long story short. Well, one issue with it is if the central servers go down, you want to have a backup of all the timestamp proofs they made. How do you make that backup? Well, currently, you go and go through this HTTP, RPC, restful protocol, total box standard stuff, and he just download one after another.

How do you know that your copy of the back up is the same as mine? Well, obviously you gonna add hashing to it. Well, how are you going to add hashing to it? Well, why don’t you go and make updates, and have one update hash another? Oh, what do you know? We’ve created a blockchain.

Peter McCormack: Indeed a blockchain, yeah. Okay. So, I met with Zac Prince of Block Fight, and we have a long chat about Bitcoin. They do crypto back loans. And, it’s a market that makes sense. But, he also said, it doesn’t make sense when they’re Lending money, say to Argentina, that if you’ve got to lend out Bitcoin because it’s volatile.

He said it makes sense to do a stablecoin. A stablecoin is built on Ethereum. So, whether it’s a scam or not, the fact that people are building things that people are using, how do you sit with that?

Peter Todd: Well, so the point I’d make there is, the stable coin’s built on top of Ethereum. From a tech perspective, that could actually be the right decision. And, the reason why there can be the right decision is, yeah, I mean the infrastructure is there. We know we can throw together something. It doesn’t work as well as it could. But, the tooling’s there, we can get it done, push it out the door.

I’ve literally told clients of mine, “Well, you actually might want to build this on Ethereum, ’cause alternatives don’t exist yet.” We know they can exist, but the effort to actually make it work hasn’t been done yet. And, in all equally, I’d say the stable coin idea is just an obvious no brainer.

You might want to have exposure to this currency. Why wouldn’t you want to have some nice digital way of doing it with a well-defined trust relationship? It’s just not a complex thing to talk about. It has very obvious reasons to, in much the same way like having an ETF, it makes a lot of sense for certain people.

Now, having an algorithmic stable coin, where you try to do consensus, decentralised magic to keep the price stable, there’s a pretty good reason. I think those are impossible. It’ll never work.

But, a trusted stable coin, where you have a central issuer, who you have legal mechanisms to ensure that you get your money back, yeah. I mean, why not? Hell, in some cases, a stable coin that’s actually a total fraud can actually make sense. If I’m a trader, and I want to temporarily move out of a position into a stable thing, and then move into another position, even if the stable coin is a total fraud, and there’s no US dollars or whatever backing it, it can still be useful for me as a trader, because my risk of the stable coin going belly up, and the fraud playing out maybe less than the risk I have of not moving my currency, not moving my assets into that stable currency for whatever reason I needed to.

Peter McCormack: I only see the two use cases. I see Bitcoin and a stable coin. That to me is pretty much all I think we need, personally. I mean, you probably can think of some great other examples.

Peter Todd: Well, if you’re talking about money, and things related to money, I think you’re a lot more right than people would want you to be.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. Well, do you know why? Because other people want to invent other uses for blockchain, ’cause they want to monetise it. And, other people want to shoot down stablecoin-

Peter Todd: So, I guess the way I’d put it is, if there’s a money component involved, I think you’re ultimately right. If there’s not a money component involved, and we’re just trying to do something related to some asset or some data structure, which for a reason we what consensus over, I mean, yeah, block chains basically always make sense.

But, that’s because of blockchain is just a chain of blocks. It is not rocket science. I mean, I love the example GET. People say, “Oh, but then is GET a blockchain?” And, my answer is, well yeah. it’s basically a blockchain. It doesn’t quite precisely match the linear chain of blocks in how we use it. But, why GET is a set of hashed things in a direct acyclic graph is essentially the same reason why Bitcoin is a chain of blocks.

I want to make sure that my copy of the source code on my computer is the same as your copy. That’s why Bitcoin is blockchain. That’s why GET has something nearly a blockchain.

Peter McCormack: What about privacy coins? Obviously, I’ll see you tool more about Zcash than-

Peter Todd: Say proof of what?

Peter McCormack: Privacy coins.

Peter Todd: Oh, privacy coins?

Peter McCormack: Yeah. So, I’ve seen you talk about Zcash more than, say, Monero. What’s your position on privacy coins?

Peter Todd: I mean, they make a lot of sense if they work. The only reason I want to talk more about Zcash that Monero is Monero has less wrong with it.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Peter Todd: Monero definitely could, in theory, have less privacy than Zcash. The underlying idea of what Monero is, it certainly has the potential for less privacy than Zcash. But, the Monero people have just done a competent job implementing something with very little drama, and the people behind it all seem pretty ethical. And, there’s very little criticised about Monero.

Peter McCormack: It’s the only other crypto I hold. I’ve got Bitcoin and Monero.

Peter Todd: Yeah. I mean, I hold essentially trivial quantities of Monero and Zcash, enough to use on occasion. But, in theory, Zcash should be better. Its privacy, the potential for privacy’s much better.

Peter McCormack: Is that ’cause it uses Zcash nodes?

Peter Todd: Exactly. Yeah. The difference is, in Monero, your payments might’ve come from immediately one of say 10 different people, and then of course you know a hundred and so on, whereas in Zcash, the moment you do a payment, if it’s a shielded payment, you’re now part of this big anonymity set.

What’s wrong with Zcash is sort of all the implementation details and sort of the people behind it.

Peter McCormack: Wow! So, I interviewed Zooko last week. And, one of the most important questions I think I put to him is I said, “Is a Zcash a company?” ’Cause that’s what it feels like. It feels like it’s a company.

Peter Todd: Yeah, it is, effectively. And, the reality is the way they do … The way they will do Zcash is very explicitly centralised. And, they kind of try to put fake leaves on edge. But, probably it’s a company of a few different people with really dubious ethics. It’s just …

I mean, it’s kind of fortunate, ’cause it’s a scary thing to have. The best privacy tech out there, for that type of use case, run by people who will lie to you.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. And, I’m not surprised that it seems like [inaudible 00:38:40] brothers have a preference to Zcash. It didn’t surprise me.

Peter Todd: Yeah. Well, the thing I think with it is, people in that kind of sphere, they would rather work with people who are not totally ethical. I get the sense this is why Coinbase and Zcash kind of seemed to get along, because they kind of see eye to eye on, “Well, we’re not going to strictly tell everyone exactly how this really works. We’re happy to Futz with stuff.”

I mean, when they did the trustee set up. The simple reality is they botched it. And, rather than just come and say, “Look, here’s where we made our mistakes. Here’s what we’re going to do better.” They just lied. They said it was multiparty set up in. And, the reality is, it wasn’t.

It was intended to be, but due to technical failures, I don’t think you can make that claim. In the Bitcoin world, I think had that happened with the people behind Bitcoin, they would have said, “Look, we screwed up this, this, and this. We’re going to fix this next time. Here’s the timeline where we roughly wanna do it. Here’s why this isn’t necessarily a big deal, et Cetera, et cetera.”

Had Zcash has simply done that, I think Zcash would still be a success. But, that’s not the way they think. They think, “Well, shit, we got to have good PR on this. We’ve got to preserve our money coming in.” And, after all, I mean, they get a ton of money from Zcash. They have incentives to hide flaws, because that’s her income, whereas in the more long term view, would be, “Well, all right, we might lose some money in the meantime, while we lose some market confidence. But, the longterm effect will be people will actually trust us.”

I don’t trust Zooko not to lie me.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. I’ve got to say, I trust Ricardo a bit more.

Peter Todd: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: You’re a big fan of Ripple Coin, right?

Peter Todd: Well, I think Ripple’s wonderful idea. You mean Ripple, the original concept to like peer to peer payments, right?

Peter McCormack: I’m on about Ripple Coin.

Peter Todd: Yeah. That’s remarkably scammy.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Peter Todd: It’s interesting. So, I, at one point, worked for R3. And, I should be careful what I say here, cause there’s probably NDAs, and they’re a bit … They are not very happy with me. But, long story short, I think what I can say is, initial was working as a consultant, evaluating other coins, and other systems. And, I think their business plan there was let’s just go buy something and let’s package it up and sell it to banks. A perfectly reasonable thing to do, act as middlemen.

Well, they had me analyse Ripple, ’cause at the time, there was a lot of interest among banks. And, I analyse it, and said, “Yeah, the centralised system obviously.” Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For banks, I think, that would have been fine.

Of course, I soon found out, they weren’t saying it was centralised banks. They were just flat out lying about what it actually was. So, when I did a big presentation in front of most of the world’s major banks and representatives from them, they’re like, “Wait, Ripple’s what?” ’cause they’d been lied to.

And, ripple these days, I don’t actually get the sense that’s true anymore. I get the sense that Ripple, the company, has become much more reasonable. But, Ripple’s tied to currency, and they don’t have any ability to get rid of this currency, which doesn’t really … It isn’t needed for technical reasons.

So, I think they’re putting in a very awkward position where there’s rabid fan base of big holders, essentially.

Peter McCormack: Very strange group.

Peter Todd: Yeah. Very, very strange. And, I would not be surprised if … Like as an example in Twitter, you say something about Ripple and the XRP troll army comes down on you. I would not be surprised if, for the most part, that sort of army of crazy people is actually not that involved with Ripple, the company selling things to banks. I don’t think that that dumb.

But, they can get away with it. There’s no mechanism for Ripple, the company, to actually extract themselves from the currency. Like it or not, they created the currency. They own a big chunk of it. They can’t get away from that. And, I mean this is one of the real dangers of creating coins for services. You might get tied to a coin that’s pointless.

Peter McCormack: Well, that’s why I call it Ripple Coin. I never changed from Ripple Coin, because I think it’s important for people … It was like with Bitcoin cash becoming BitCash. The alternative name, I think, was important.

I always call it a Ripple Coin, because I think people have to know, they have to know, it was created by the company. That it wasn’t a gift.

Peter Todd: I mean, it’s worse than that. I mean, last I checked in government, I haven’t looked very recently, the consensus was still controlled by the Ripple company. You can’t get away from the fact Ripple’s architecture is centralised.

The XRP community can say all they want. “Oh, all you know, it’s just nodes. You can go pick a different set.” Well, yeah. I mean, I can go pick a different currency. Unless you and I agree on the same set of nodes, the reality is we’re not looking at the same currency. And, that was really all my paper was.

I just pointed out. Yeah. Obviously, if you pick a different set of central nodes controlling the consensus than me, we can get out of consensus, and all hell will break loose. Thus, the only sane thing to do is pick the same set of servers for control of consensus.

Peter McCormack: One thing I do want to ask you about is because I think one thing, a lot of other alternative currencies have managed to do, whether it’s right or wrong, but by design have been able to create an incentive structure and financial incentives for developers.

Bitcoin is still largely voluntary, or there are some contributions in different ways. I know you’ve had a contribution. But, it’s-

Peter Todd: My point is not voluntary in the sense that developers go unpaid. It’s voluntary in the sense that the currency itself isn’t directly paying developers.

Peter McCormack: Of course, yeah.

Peter Todd: But, the reality is there’s enough money floating around for developers get paid, even total screw ups like me.

Peter McCormack: Are you still working on Bitcoin?

Peter Todd: I’m not working on Bitcoin core. But, I am working on projects around it like Open TimeStamps and Proof Marshall. And, I’ve had surprisingly good success getting paid for that.

Peter McCormack: I guess it depends on who you are though. And, the reputation you’ve built, you can be funded. But, when you say there is funds available for developers, I mean, how do they go about receiving funds? How do they do it?

Peter Todd: I mean, it’s kind of like anything. You do a bit of work, you show that you’re competent, and you find someone who’s interested in paying you to do more work. If you’re competent, and you prove that, the simple reality is there are ways to go get money. It is not the hardest part.

The hardest part is getting to the point where you’re confident. And, the things that us, even in coins which have developer funds, getting money out of those developer funds is surprisingly hard.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay.

Peter Todd: Like Zcash is a great example where the Windows clients for Zcash we’re completely unmaintained because Zcash wasn’t giving them any money.

Peter McCormack: Okay. So, ’cause I sort of say would Luke put up his patron, and I supported them. It just feels like there should be almost like something he shouldn’t have to worry about.

Peter Todd: How? I mean, the simple reality is, having funds in these coins is not a magic solution to that either. Yeah. The bigger problem is more you getting to a position where you’re doing interesting work that’s getting valued. And, if you’re able to do that, and actually contribute, getting that money is not that hard.

Peter McCormack: Is there enough developers coming through? ’Cause we talked earlier about enough of the kind of biggest and brightest minds who can really think adversarially or think outside the box. But, are there enough developers coming through who can we just work on more simpler tasks?

Peter Todd: The impression I get is mostly yes. But, the interesting thing about this is like Bitcoin core itself, that actual core software, I may not be very popular saying this, but I think it’s true that they’ve got good enough developers, maybe a little too many.

Bitcoin core itself doesn’t necessarily need to change that much. And, it can change on a somewhat slower basis than it has. I mean, it’s not really a big concern. The more interesting thing is like all the periphery infrastructure around it. Things like libraries that actually work are well documented and so on.

And, that’s not very sexy work. So, that may actually be the thing where we need more money put into. But, when you look at other coins, which should do over funds, they don’t do a good job with this either. So, it’s not like this is a magic solution that’s proven to work. This seems to be more a solution which has proven to make the people founded the coin a ton of money.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. I spoke to Brian Bishop. And, I think he says something along the lines of, “It would be great if some parts of the cost start to become compartmentalised, ’cause it’s kind of a big sprawling mess right now.” Is that correct?

Peter Todd: Oh, yeah, yeah. The fundamental like Bitcoin core architecture is not, I think, how you would do it these days. I think in the context of when it was created, it was probably the right decision to make. Do this very simple thing, which one person can create, and one person can comprehend, and it’s just one code base that’s very easy to review. But, for what we want it to do now, it’s probably not ideal.

On the other hand, I mean, people often think, “Oh! Bitcoin core doesn’t have this feature. It’s terrible.” Well, so what? Just turn on Bitcoin core node, grab the data from it and do whatever you need to do. What do you need to do? Do you need to have an index of transactions? Just follow the blocks and index your transactions. It’s slightly less efficient. But, so what?

Peter McCormack: Even if people who kind of want the base change essentially ossified. Is that the word they use?

Peter Todd: Base protocol is pretty stable. Not quite as stable as say TCP/IP. But, it’s reasonably stable. And, equally, so has the stability of TCP/IP held back the Internet. I don’t think you’d make the case at all. If anything it’s helped it by having the simple thing that works, and you can build on top of it.

Peter McCormack: I wanna ask you a bit about the work you’ve been doing. But, before that just one kind of … I’ll say one final question. I haven’t got through hardly anything here. This has been great. But, I do want to ask you about your views on fungibility, because in doing my interviews, I’ve kind of had two different perspectives.

There are some people who do want fungibility on the base chain. But, there are some like Saifedean wouldn’t. Saif’s view is that we want to say a completely transparent based chain, so we can ensure nobody is operating with say, fractional reserves. Where do you sit in that kind of field?

Peter Todd: I think his viewpoint is technically ignorant there. You can definitely have … I mean, as an example, ideally, Zcash would be completely non-transparent. In reality, it’s nearly entirely transparent, ’cause you’re actually using the shielded transaction features is hard and discouraged.

But, in theory, Zcash could be completely shielded. And, even then, it’d still be easy to be transparent. The better argument to make there is all the technology for privacy on base chains is potentially dangerous.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Peter Todd: Yeah. Example being, with Zcash, you have that trusted set up. A trusted setup could easily fail. Implementation bugs could easily cause it to fail. In fact, the fundamental Zcash library, the thing that verifies transactions, just prior to release, they found a bug in it that could have allowed a moment of inflation. And, that’s not even like a trusted set up failure. It’s just a simple bug in it.

And, it’s not an easy bug to find. You really got understand math in very deep detailed find something like that, because you’re relying completely on the math to protect you from inflation. Whereas in Bitcoin you’re relying on stuff you could explain to a drunk art student. Speaking about a fine arts degree.

So, I’m a little bias there. I liked this level. But, that’s useful, ’cause it means tons of eyes can see this stuff. When Bitcoin had this some recent inflation exploit-

Peter McCormack: CV bug.

Peter Todd: Yeah. Had that actually being used, chances are alarm bells would have gone off in tons of places, because people are looking at, doing the math, figuring out how many Bitcoins are in existence. Does this number make sense? Any idiot can do that. It’s not hard. For Zcash to do that, you need to re-implement all Zcash nodes. And, it is a nightmare.

Peter McCormack: So, I guess you’re keen on some form of fungibility, but do you … Are you keen on it, say as a side chain or some kind? Like how do you-

Peter Todd: Well, I mean, Lightning adds that. Any add on to Bitcoin that’s scalable will naturally have better fungibility. And, the reason is, to scale, you have to distribute less data to less people. It’s just not possible to create a scaling solution that doesn’t at least add privacy to some adversary.

As an example, Coinbase. Let’s suppose, well, PayPal. Let’s go really out there. PayPal, compared to Bitcoin, has better privacy against most adversaries. If I pay someone with PayPal, North Korean spies don’t know what I did.

Obviously, the US government probably has a full copy of everything. But, most of my adversaries now do you not know that I made that payment, and have no way of knowing. That is categorically better than Bitcoin from that narrow perspective.

If my adversary’s US government, totally different discussion. But, PayPal scales. And, the only way it could scale is by reducing the data available to the bad guys.

Peter McCormack: Okay. All right. Look, we’ve done a lot here, but I do want to cover some of your work. So, when I spoke to Jack Ma, he was like, “Peter’s really busy working on Proof Marshall.” I don’t know anything about it. Can you tell me, what is Proof Marshall?

Peter Todd: Well, all right. So, first of all, my simpler project is Open TimeStamps. And, Open TimeStamps proves data existed in the past. The problem with Open TimeStamps is it doesn’t prove anything about whether conflicting data also existed. An example being, I sell your house. I give you a sign digital document saying, “I, owner of 1234 Main Street sell it to you.”

What you don’t know is if I already sold that someone else. Proof Marshall fixes that problem by … It’s a library to create data structures where you have consensus over. And, what consensus means there is simply, in the definition of selling a house, all the possible places where I could have put that data, you now can see. Thus, you can rule out me selling the house to someone else.

And, how do you do that? Well, you throw in a whole bunch of Merkle trees and hashing. This is … I mean, what’s hard about Proof Marshall is that the strategy for the implementation is effectively taking pointers and abstracting that concert.

Pointers are such a low-level fundamental idea in computer science that just … The low-level mechanics of actually implementing this is challenging and tricky to do well. And, you get a lot of issues. Like, if I’m giving you a math proof that now you own this house, I want to make sure that even if the code or writing that application isn’t that careful, that math proof won’t, for instance, use up all the memory in your system.

Turns out that’s actually a hard problem. It’s not a hard problem for like Bitcoin level reasons. And, this is an economics problem. It’s just, it’s a tough thing to implement at a computer science level, or maybe I’m just not a very good coder.

Peter McCormack: So, what’s your status? Where are you at with the project?

Peter Todd: About two weeks, for sure.

Peter McCormack: All right. Is that this week?

Peter Todd: No. I mean, truthfully, it’s something where I’m always thinking, “All right, I could finish this in two months.” But, two months later I say, “Oh, yeah. I didn’t realise but this isn’t this.”

I mean, as an example, the first version I had, for how it would represent, how it would obstruct a pointer, made the assumption that you always hash the data. And, I did a bunch of work in that, and I was, “Oh, yeah. That doesn’t actually work. That causes other technical problems that, long story short, this doesn’t work.”

Another example was I had this … My most recent implementation had a thing where when you took the data, in processing, and deserialised it, you would make a copy of it. And, I naively thought, “Oh, that’s not big deal. Make a copy of it. It’s all well, and good.” Of course, I go through the adversarial think, I was, “Oh, shoot. Because I made a copy of this, now my API doesn’t have a good way of assuring I don’t run out of RAM, ’cause all of these extra copies.”

So, I had to effectively redesign it so that all the data can be operated on directly. If you’re a programmer, the term I would say is the serialised version of it is identical to what you would process in main memory. Thus, you don’t have to make a copy to process it.

And, this is all like very much in the weak technical stuff. But, to make a robust implementation that works well, you have to solve these problems. And, it’s just hard. And, because it’s still at such a fundamental level of design, having two people work on it once, it’s very challenging.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Peter Todd: ’Cause if I make a change, I’m usually changing how any of the code works. And now, if I have a partner working with me, suddenly everything they’re doing is broken. Maybe if I was sitting next to a guy in an office, this might go faster. But, it’s just not there. And-

Peter McCormack: It’s a one-man project.

Peter Todd: Yeah, yeah. For now. But, if it works, it’ll eventually work, and long store short is it’ll be a nice library to write consensus applications, to do all kinds of things you want. As an example, you could even implement GET and Proof Marshall to just have a good way of making sure you and I have the same copy code. Certificate Transparency is another example.

When you go to a website, the certificate that proves your talking to the computer you think you’re talking to, like your bank, for instance, that are published in a blockchain. The people who create certificate transparency, of course, hate the term blockchain and probably would strangle me if I said this in front of them. But, the reality is the data structure is effectively blockchain.

In proof Marshall, you could do things like that and … All right. You can do them now, but it’s just a lot less work when you have a library that just does it for you. It’s like … I mean, SQL databases are like this.

Sure. Prior to dimension SQL, you could, in theory, do anything you do with. It was just so much more work to get there.

Peter McCormack: I think I’ve kept up with about a good 50% of today.

Peter Todd: Well, it’s enough to do a 51% attack.

Peter McCormack: Well, yeah. I do wanna do that. I wanna 51% attack. We’re just going to have to do another one another day, ’cause there’s so much more wants to talk to you about. But, there is a couple of final closing things I want to talk to you about. One is just a bit left field.

I’ve noticed you tweet quite a bit about journalism. Why does that get to you so much?

Peter Todd: I think this really comes down to … And, I’ll say straight off, this is an example of not staying in your lane. This kind of phrase going around, stay in your lane, only talk about the stuff that you’re supposed to do professionally, and so on. And, I really don’t care what that for Twitter.

And, a lot of that gets down to, what does it take to have a society of the functions? You have to have people agree on basic facts around the world. And, I think the reason why I’m critical of that, same reason ultimately I’m critical of many scams in the crypto world, where people were saying things, but the projects just aren’t true, and polluting the ecosystem of ideas with false things.

And, unfortunately right now, we have a big problem with journalism where, first of all, it’s not very fun. It’s not well funded. It just isn’t that money to actually pay journalists to do their job properly.

I have quite a few friends who are journalists, and I see this every day. I mean, the timelines they have to operate on are ridiculous. There’s no way for them to do a good job given how fast they have to put out articles with how little help. And, on top of this to make money, you wind up with all kinds of dark practices, like clickbait.

And, when you combine that with the very ugly political landscape of the US, you get really ugly things like Covington, where I think it’s pretty fair to say major media organisation are, “Oh, this is a great story. Fits our narratives really well. We’re going to get a ton of clicks on this. Let’s rush published before anyone else does.”

And, the rush to publish is a really big deal. I’ve been told, directly by people managing media organisations in the crypto space, that collectively people like me are a huge competitor to them, because I can tweet faster than they can publish, and literally minutes matter in this stuff. If they’re not first to publish, they will get less clicks, less views, less money.

It sounds so stupid, but this is the truth of it. And, that pushes a cycle that just doesn’t allow for good research and good work. And, unfortunately, there are no easy ways to stop this. Maybe one of the solutions could be more use of defamation laws, and life moves on. But, there are very like very, very real risks to this for freedom of speech.

Peter McCormack: Yeah. I mean, my last interview that went out yesterday was Andrew Torba from Gab.com. What do you think of Gab? I mean, the content is tasteless. But, do you agree that …

Peter Todd: I’ve never actually looked at Gab’s website itself. And, I’m kind of sympathetic to them. I mean, I think organisations like that should be able to exist. I think the fact that they’ve been deplatformed from payment providers is a straight up antitrust issue. And, they’re not the only example of this.

I mean, the fact of the matter is companies like PayPal, MasterCard, Visa, are able to restrict freedom of speech very effectively. Not as effectively as they could without safe things like Bitcoin. But, the amount of control they have over what content gets produced is very scary.

Where deplatforming ends up is people being able to restrict speech, because they can say, “I don’t like what you’re publishing, and we’re going to cut off your money.” And, you can’t, for instance, do journalism without access to a flow of money to go pay people to do stuff.

And, this is a very, very real issue. What Patreon has done is scary. Now, as a libertarian, I’d say Patreon itself, I don’t have issues with them cutting off people. What I have issues with are the payment providers who have now said, “Oh, you’re trying to compete with Patreon, we’re going to cut you off as well.”

That’s where I think this crosses the line. It’s getting very scary as a society. So again, do I support Gab itself? Whatever. Let them do what they want. But, do I support fighting back at why Gab has a hard time running a business. That’s what matters to me.

And, I’m just not that concerned about people spreading hate on the Internet. I don’t think that’s actually a big concern for society. Particularly when we go see the left’s doing exactly the same thing but in a different context. There’s no like clear moral high ground here. And, obviously, if the left can do this, and society hasn’t collapsed, it’s not necessarily such a bad thing.

And, in some ways that kind of thing pisses me off more ’cause I definitely identify as liberal.

Peter McCormack: Well, yes I do sometimes. But, I was saying to Andrew that like politically, I’ve got no idea anymore where I am, because I’m finding so much to dislike about everyone. But also, there are these certain conservative things I do like, and then there’s a kind of liberal things I like. And, I’m just so confused. I don’t know where to position myself.

Peter Todd: I mean my entire adult life … I live in Canada. My entire adult life I’ve voted for the Liberal Party, which in Canada, the Liberal Party’s what the name suggests. It’s the Liberal Party.

These days I’m not sure I identify with them anymore. I’ll probably still go on voting for them because they’re the best of bad options. But, yeah. And, I think part of it too is like many of the social issues I do care about. Like freedom of speech, and gay rights and so on. A lot of that’s actually kind of solved.

Abortion’s legal in a lot of places. Gay Marriage is legal. The things that I cared about, we solve those problems.

Peter McCormack: Through free speech.

Peter Todd: I mean just through like the way politics moved. The Conservative party’s eventually, “All right, fine. We’ll go along with this.” And then, probably isn’t … At least in Canada, it’s probably not going to get reversed. So, now it’s like, “Oh, do I need to go vote for liberals again? I mean, the things that we’re fighting for gut solve, the things that they’re now fighting for, I don’t agree with. It’s a very strange situation to be in.

Peter McCormack: I think we could do a whole show on this. All right. Just to close out. We’ve had 10 years of Bitcoin. So, we look back. Looking forward over the next 10 years, what are the key things you would like to see happen? And, what are the most important things, not just in terms of code and develop it, but just overall for Bitcoin? What’s gonna be important?

Peter Todd: Well, I’ll give you a very specific answer, which is the things I’m working on with client-side validation like Proof Marshall I think are critical to moving this stuff to the next step. Getting past this narrative of all we need some Ethereum chain, where everything’s in one place, which we knew just doesn’t work.

I think smart contracts are actually really useful. But, they’re not useful done in the way Ethereum people want to do them. It doesn’t work technically. So, yes, this is kind of very narrow answer. But, this is the stuff I’m directly working on. And, I think that’s a very fruitful ground for making new and interesting things.

Beyond that, I mean, I’m sure the Lightning crowd, and so someone will do great work in making payments better and so on. But, on the store of value stuff, just not screwing up is enough to make that possible. So, that’s kind of my answer there.

Peter McCormack: Great. This was utterly fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on.

Peter Todd: Thank you.

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Peter Todd on the Essence of Bitcoin was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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