#2022 has been the year of the most growth for me and i really dont want it to end ive met so many cool people and have just Gotten Better | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

princeanxious · 1 year ago

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Hi! I was wondering about your Lost Guardian au from ages ago, do you think you’ll ever plan on updating it and if not, could someone else take up the fic?

So heres the thing. If someone wants to write a fic *inspired* by The Lost Guardian, i’m not gonna stop them, and i’d probably feel super honored so long as the inspiration was correctly credited!

As for ‘taking up the fic,’ the short answer is no.

I have active drafts and the rest of the story already planned out to its finish, notes, even a branch-off fic set post-story that will likely go up on my nsfw blog if i ever get around to editing it. The Lost Guardian hasn’t been abandoned, it’s simply on hiatus. (And yes, i recognize 3 almost 4 years so far is a really fucking long hiatus. The Chapter 9 draft doc was made in december of 2020, and last edited in July 2022)

I started writing that fic whilst still in highschool, a time where I was 17 and didnt have to worry yet about getting my license or maintaining a part time job, i had an over abundance of freetime even partially to my detriment, the fandom was booming and I had plenty of feedback, and this fic was (and still *is*) a story im proud of.

But i’m 22 now, working a full time job to pay rent and account for a number of minor ‘disabilities’(best word i have for them atm) that I cant ignore or push to the side nor treat poorly, from the lasting effects on my body of stunted growth to celiac/glutent intolerance to adhere to that directly determines how easily my body functions for the week, to dealing with glasses i cannot afford to break and taking care of teeth i cannot afford to fix, taking care of my mental health and using the free time i have to do what brings me the most joy at that time.

The sanders sides fandom has heavily quieted down with the season finale hiatus and I’d like to think I did pretty well for going six long years dedicated solely to that without cracking under the silence, because *I knew* when I caved to something else it’d be a long while before I had the drive to come back with any sort of resolution to my active works. Thats just how my hyper fixations work. I cannot focus on multiple at once, it’s too much to process simultaneously and takes away my enjoyment bc I tend to watch/consume things repeatedly to catch every little detail i missed. And it doesn’t help when one loses steam because their content barely breaks 100 notes(80% of which are likes, 15% are reblogs with the occasional comment, and 5% are self-reblogs) when back in the height of it all, a few thousand notes was pretty average interaction. This blog still has about 11.5k followers, almost all of which came from the height of the fandom period. So for now i’ve moved onto the FNAF DCA fandom, bc it is fresh and new to me.

I know you didn’t mean to poke the bear here, I get it, but like.. C’mon. Any other fic of mine likely wouldn’t have gotten the same reaction in full but, still. I’ve had to answer this question a handful of times over the years at the point, which might be why this response feels so charged, and i’m sorry.

I don’t mean to come off as snippy or rude, but it *is* kind of invasive to offer to finish one’s creative work when it’s taking too long and theres very little payback for it. I’ve got adhd, delayed satisfaction isn’t a thing I experience. Just guilt that it wasn’t finished in a way for me to post it in time before I broke and lost all motivation to share it.

In my head, TLG has been long finished and held the ending for years, theres just been no energy to put in the effort of finish writing it for others to read. I’m still trying to get my life together to change that, don’t get me wrong, but the American economy is literally in shambles so who knows how or even if i’ll manage that. Call me selfish for being content with only mentally having my creative story’s ending and a collection of rambles and notes to show for it, but at the end of the day, it’s still my story, and i dont feel comfortable with people trying to ‘take up the mantle’ to finish it, when they don’t know how it ends.

I’m glad you like it enough to want to, though, I really *really* am. I’m just sorry I haven’t been able to finish it for you all. And i just don’t know when that will be, I just know that I *want* to do so, however long it takes.

#luka answers #sanders sides #tlg fic #the lost guardian au #luka’s aus #luka rambles #luka rants

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applejongho · 2 years ago

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2022 was the first year I considered myself an actual content creator and has also been my first full year of gif making so I thought it would be fun to compile some of the giffing highlights of the year. thanks jazzy @woosansang for tagging me in this event! In combing through all of my gifs I found a lot of growth and improvement in my own gif making skills (coloring is so much better (!!!!!!!), sharpening is so much better) which is something I'm really proud of because it was always something I beat myself up for. There is always room for improvement but that doesn't negate where I am now!

Besides my improvement as a gif maker, here are some highlights of the content:

the first eight months of the year belonged completely to jongho. I was at peace with the world. everything was fine. and then, everything changed when the dude with the cane attacked. I now have another bias. thanks and fuck you hongjoong

there were always spooky posts. no matter the time of year.

this was the year I started and completed my AUteez series, where I match ateez with an alternate universe that fits them. This series is a testament to my coloring skills and shows off my imagination. One of my favorite things I've done, ever

my 2MVapplejh series, where I color match two music videos that (usually) have similar elements in them. I also really like this series too but I don’t work on it that often

no pressure tagging! the instructions are simple, post links to both your most popular and your favourite sets for each month in 2022. I also included special mentions every month and tracked my hongjoong descent by comparing the amount of posts I made of him vs jongho. ha.

@2h0gi @hwanswerland @sanhwaiting @sanchelinz @jjongho @jonghho @chwejongho @jeong-yunhoes @mingified @cruellajoong @xuseokgyu @hwichanis

JANUARY

most popular: hongjoong in halazia

favorite: spooky jjong and rhythm ta

special mention: my first post using vapoursynth!

total posts made: 21 (4 are jongho....................... 12 are hongjoong)

if you’ve made it this far... 2022 was really bad for me (in terms of personal life) but ateez helped me out tremendously by keeping me entertained. I hope 2023 will be better for me and I’ll have a chance to grow in my self-expression, confidence, and, well,,,, ateez content creating lol. I already know there will be at least one big event – I’m going to hit 1k followers!

See y’all in 2023!

#applejh2022yr #ok to rb #in fact pls do rb i love hearing what other people think

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hjeojeo · 3 years ago

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I was reading some of my old personal journal-esque rambles i’ve written in past and now i feel like

yeah i’ll pick that up again >:)

but god yeah i dont really remember where i last left off so i wont try to pick up where i left off, I’ll just try to like i guess

put a starting point, starting with this one so that i know what i’m just adding onto as i write more journal posts in future

I’m really glad to be using tumblr again cause

wow so many significant changes in my life and growth happened here

first of all I got together with jude cause of tumblr, uhhh...almost 9 years ago!

i went through 2 additional polyam relationships on tumblr

(2015 - 2017 with manie 2020-2022 with beth/venti)

i ran away from my abusive family while on tumblr ...that was probably the biggest one

(it was in 2014)

i learned more about my gender identity and sexuality while on tumblr

OH!!

that’s a big one to talk more about

so i’m planning on making some big steps towards transitioning this year

i first wanna take care of a upcoming surgery for our cat, and then have more brain space to tackle the entire transitioning process like find a gender therapist first to be able to get on hrt

but yeah I”m really looking forward to it and trying to not get too impatient with myself : )

i think a lot of my old journal posts were centered around my mental health and the understandings and growth i would go through

so i think a really important one from recent (by recent i mean either anywhere from few months back to a year ago..my sense of time is p bad) is finally understanding how saving face doesn’t truly protect me. growing up i was heavily conditioned to always save face as if that’s what would protect me as an immigrant, a poc, and as an afab ueer/trans person.

but thanks to long talks with jude, i was able to just like...kinda look at how my life had been and reailzed. it never protected me. it just kinda had hurt me more to have so many layers of not trusting people. but more importantly not trusting myself. cause saving face for me was out of not trusting myself to put my foot down, to say no, to enforce my boundaries, instead i’d manipulate and lie out of uncomfortable situations and feared confrontation the most.

so being able to grow out of that bit by bit has done wonders to my mental health. being able to trust yerself really is just priority when it comes to mental health, imo.

ah lets see

another thing that’s been amazing is

i found out that i have adhd, and iw as able to get on adderall june 2021, and my gosh. my life really turned upside down. being able to be on top of my work made room for more personal enrichment and passions and.

i am so grateful to jude’s and my primary-care-physician for it. rest in peace, clarke, words cant describe what you did for me.

oof okay before i tear up about that.

i’ll wrap up this really like disjointed rambles with one last thing,

nowadays i spend a lot of my time watching my friends stream while i work, or streaming myself, and also part of a new ttrpg campaign and i’ve been so invested in that ; __;

there is so many wonderful stuff being built up in jude’s and my life and i couldn’t be more thankful.

and maybe in future too i might ramble about another wonderful update ;O regarding another polyamorous relationship i approached a long time friend about haha, but i wanna make sure she has the space and privacy to not feel rushed so, im gonna be very reserved about talking about that for now <3

WAIT NO ONE LAST LAST UPDATE

JUDE AND I WATCHED “EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE”

AND WHOOOOOOO god we loved it so much.

definitely my favorite movie of all time now...

i am itching to go watch it again...and when it coems out on bluray cannot wait to get that too...; __ ;

#personal #hjrambles #journal

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alliecalvert · 3 years ago

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Alright it is February 21, 2022. Theo is two years and 8 months old and in 4 days Evy will be 4 months old. This stage of life is particularly fun because Theo is talking a lot and understanding more about life. Evy is smiling big and loves watching Theo play. She is very observant, she will follow you from one side of the room to the other just watching. They go to the same daycare and are so loved there. I'm very thankful to have found Kids Central. It is not in the best part of town and most of us who take our kids there are on the lower income scale. And for that I am thankful because it is a very colorful place with lots of different types of people. They get to see all races and know both rich people and poor people.

But anyway, we have had a rough few months since Evy was born. I really struggled with breastfeeding. I have postpartum depression and anxiety. Our finances took a hit since I wasn't working for a while. Theo got sick a lot and had to get tubes in his ears and also be in a sleep study because his tonsils are huge. Evy has had congestion since the day she came home and was exposed to all of our germs- probably the germs from Theos daycare is what got her the most sick.

But February has been a sweet month of growth for all of us. Andrew and I even got to go on a date and see some friends we dont get to see much. We saw Cory Wong play in Nashville and it was such a great show! We all had a nasty stomach bug last week and I can honestly say that is the most sick I have been in my entire 30 years on this earth. It was absolutely miserable- liquid coming out of all ends and not being able to control it… that kind of sickness makes it really hard to take care of a 3 month old baby who eats every 2-3 hours. And to top it off Theo got better before me and Andrew did so he had all this energy pent up and we couldn't take him back to daycare for the entire week because his teacher had covid. So we all spent an entire week stuck at home feeling sick and having no energy. It was so rough! Not to mention I had done well that week and had all of our meals carefully planned out and stocked up for, and a lot of that food went to waste because we couldn't eat or keep anything down!

I think that week I became painfully aware that no matter how much you try, you are not in control of everything. You can spend time planning and having expectations, but when it comes down to it- anything can happen. Things change and you get sick and things don't go how you expected them to. That is a frustrating part of the reality- but the beauty in that reality is that God is in control. We don't have to have the pressure of figuring things out alone and trying to take control of everything. This means that we can be going through something really hard but we get to live through that knowing and having hope. Knowing that God is in control and we have a sure future in him no matter what. We may not even get relief in this life, but we will have eternal life with him and it will be perfect.

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toomanysinks · 6 years ago

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Timing and why we’re all VCs

Timing is the single most valuable skill of the modern economy, but I would argue its’s the least understood and also the least practiced.

Capitalism is fundamentally about timing, since market competition is about finding opportunities before others. When should you start a company? What company should you start? When should a VC invest? When should you join a company? When should you switch industries? When should you back a candidate for public office?

Every single one of our professional decisions is about timing, and yet, we do so little to practice and perfect it. Most employees only make 3-4 major career decisions in their lifetimes — hardly enough feedback for this skill to mature. Anyone who has worked in a large company further knows that timing a product launch or a new marketing strategy has more to do with internal politics than reading market forces.

Most of us want to make more money and accelerate our careers, but the truth is that these opportunities are few and far between. Most jobs have limited growth potential. Most startups die. Most VCs don’t make money. Most political candidates fail to get elected. The difference between success and failure sometimes has to do with hard work and tenacity, but far more often with the strategy of timing.

It’s obvious that we can be too late to these decisions of course. We can miss the round of financing, we can start a company a year or two behind someone else and lose the first-mover advantage. But we can also be way too early, ahead of the market and losing out on alternative opportunities that might have been more valuable.

Now, some perceive that “timing” is synonymous with “luck.” There is some truth there, in the sense that life is random and sometimes — completely unintentionally — people stumble upon a treasure chest of gold.

Don’t be distracted by that, because there are also people who just seem to have timing nailed. There are engineers (I know because I have seen their recruiter profiles) who have joined three unicorns in a row in the first handful of employees. There are VCs who get a string of wins that is far from chance. There are CEOs that always seem to guide their companies to the right place at the right time and drive their stock valuations up.

We talked a lot about why we can’t build infrastructure in America yesterday. One of the challenges is simply timing: so many things have to happen at once for these projects to get off the ground, and most governors and mayors lack the timing skills required to get them over the finish line.

How can you practice timing? Start writing down predictions about people, companies, and markets. Check in with the companies you talked with a few years ago — how are they doing? Ditto people you met a while back. Start evaluating your predictions: were they correct? Were they too early or too late?

More importantly, start cultivating networks of friends who have a sense of pulse on the frontiers of the economy. That could mean someone at the edge of a new science (quantum computing or AI) or someone who gets marketing to new demographics, or someone who tracks new regulatory and legal changes. Find a peer group of people who get timing and practice it as a craft.

Between TechCrunch today and my former roles in venture capital, I’ve had the opportunity to practice timing a lot. I have a list of companies that I would have backed, and some have turned into unicorns while others have ended up on the ash heap of history. I’ve predicted some trends well, while flubbed others. I’ve been way too early (a huge bias for me), and sometimes stupidly late.

But all along, I am practicing that timing muscle. It’s the only way forward in capitalism, and it’s worth every investment you can make.

Mithril Capital, management fees, and VC strategic drift

Peter Kim via Getty Images

Theodore Schleifer at Recode reported a rare deep dive into the internal intrigue at a prominent VC firm, in this case Mithril Capital. From the article:

Mithril had its best moment yet last week when a portfolio company, Auris Health, sold to Johnson & Johnson for more than $3 billion — returning at least $500 million to the fund.

All appears well. But behind the scenes, a far different story has been unfolding.

The late-stage investment firm has been a slow-burning mess for the past several months, angering current and former employees, limited partners, and, crucially, [Peter] Thiel himself, sources say.

Among the issues is the firm’s huge management fee … and I guess lack of expenses?

The firm is likely collecting as much as $20 million a year in management fees, sources familiar with the figures say.

We don’t know exactly how much the firm spends, but people close to Mithril say they can’t imagine that the firm, given its staff size, is spending more than half of that on operational expenses. [Mithril Capital founder Ajay] Royan’s salary, like that of other venture capitalists, is not publicly disclosed.

One limited partner called the fees, given the size of Mithril’s staff, “outrageous.”

What? I don’t understand this line of reasoning at all. The firm negotiates a fairly standard agreement with its limited partners, and then the LPs are pissed because the firm isn’t spending the money on massive staff and large, expensive offices? The whole point of delegating investment decisions to a GP is to empower them to organize their firm to win deals and get stuff done. If — and it’s a big if of course — they can do that on the cheap, then why should an LP care at all? Burn the management fee in a fireplace if it makes the deals happen.

Ajay Royan told Bloomberg in 2017 that Mithril does not “charge excessive fees.” But he was not exactly known for being thrifty with management money. Former employees describe Friday catered lunches where costs could run over $100 per person, and Royan was known internally for a “book ordering problem” — a former employee said that “unbelievable amounts of books” would be delivered each week to the office by Amazon to maintain the firm’s extensive library.

Pro tip: take on the mantle of book editor for a major tech publication, and the publishers will mail you books for free. We get at least a dozen at the TC offices every week, which is why we write about books so often around here these days. Alas, no $100 catered lunches.

The wider story here though appears to be one of a firm completely strategically adrift. Mithril is struggling to compete against ferocious competition in the growth-stage equity market. The best deals are obvious to dozens of firms, and the ones that are less obvious have huge risks attached to them that make it hard to write the big checks required.

“[Royan] literally did not want to compete. If there was a process or bidding war or something resembling a competition, he would just walk,” the employee said. “And he would just say, ‘I don’t want to outbid.’”

Mithril is hardly the only VC firm that is strategically adrift. Every time I go back to SF, this seems to be the norm these days among venture capitalists. There is a huge amount of money sloshing around, and very few deals that are in that sweet spot between obvious and highly risky. Startups either get three dozen term sheets or none at all, since every firm is walking around with the same frameworks and metrics in their head.

It’s so rare to actually hear a VC strategy that isn’t generic capital, that has some differentiation on sourcing, and picking, and growing businesses beyond the “we invest in great companies.” VCs don’t like strategy because it means making choices, and making choices means saying no to certain things, and those things might be the next Facebook. So they do everything, all the time, which really means they do nothing. And so we get book ordering problems and expensive lunches and weirdly angry LPs. What a boring mess.

Quality tech news from around the web

Written by Arman Tabatabai

Carl Larson Photography via Getty Images

South California is also seeing declining seed investment

Today, the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation (LAEDC) published its updated economic forecast for LA and the Southern California region. One interesting note in the report is an observed slow down in early-stage venture investing. The report highlighted that while growth-stage investments in CA were hitting record highs, total deal count and seed investing — both in terms of total seed dollars and seed deal count — were at their lowest points since 2012.

The data points in LA, Southern CA, and the rest of the state seem to follow the trend of declining seed rounds seen in the rest of the country. While the topic is one we’ve previously discussed and one which has heated up in recent weeks with commentary from Marc Suster, Fred Wilson, and others, it’s interesting to see the trend occurring even in more nascent startup markets.

Will “Diet CA-HSR” even get done as feds look to pull back California funding

The federal government announced that it would be pulling back $1 billion in funding that was slated for the California high-speed rail project through 2022, while also pursuing legal action to help recoup the $2.5 billion it has already coughed up. The Federal Railroad Administration is arguing that the state’s updated plan — completing only a route from Bakersfield to Merced — is starkly different from the plan for which the funds were originally allocated. Ouch.

As stock exchanges compete to attract IPOs, unicorns and investors win?

It might be getting easier for companies to go public around the world. With ample late-stage capital keeping more companies staying private for longer, looser rules from the SEC and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange may be on the way to help entice more IPOs.

In the US, the SEC proposed allowing all companies to market themselves to investors before announcing IPOs versus just those that fall under the agency’s “emerging growth” definition. Across the Pacific, Bloomberg reported that Chinese tech companies have been lobbying the HK Exchange for a number of more favorable rules, including allowing companies to maintain extra voting rights and letting major shareholders buy extra stock in the process. With a serious number of Chinese companies opting to list on foreign exchanges last year, the HK Exchange might be feeling pressure to cough up concessions that could help them win local listings — especially if the US moves forward with friendlier rules.

How Japan lost half its citizens with poor data

The Japanese government failed to pay out billions of yen in government benefits for years due to faulty data. If that wasn’t bad enough, Nikkei Asian Review reported yesterday that the government is struggling to even locate roughly half of those who are owed since they don’t have their current addresses on file.

As simple as it may seem, tracking the indebted is actually a tall task since citizens have changed residences, changed names, and since the Japanese government has historically destroyed benefit applications (containing address info) after the period required to maintain them. At this point, it’s unclear whether everyone who is owed will even end up getting paid, with the Japanese government now offering a prime example of how poor data maintenance and not just poor data collection can make a situation go from bad to a whole lot worse.

Can the race to build roads in Southeast Asia avoid development gridlock?

As we harp on our “Why can’t we build anything?” obsession, infrastructure development in Southeast Asia is continuing to heat up and everyone seems to want a piece of the pie. Japan announced plans to further accelerate investment into infrastructure and urban development in the region — where China is also actively engaged — with initial expansion talks focused on Cambodia and the Philippines. At the same time, a newly unveiled government budget in Singapore and the ongoing election in Indonesia have brought infrastructure development strategies into the spotlight, with open debate on how these projects have been and should be funded.

Obsessions

More discussion of megaprojects, infrastructure, and “why can’t we build things”

We are going to be talking India here, focused around the book “Billonnaire Raj” by James Crabtree

We have a lot to catch up on in the China world when the EC launch craziness dies down. Plus, we are covering The Next Factory of the World by Irene Yuan Sun.

Societal resilience and geoengineering are still top-of-mind

Some more on metrics design and quantification

Thanks

To every member of Extra Crunch: thank you. You allow us to get off the ad-laden media churn conveyor belt and spend quality time on amazing ideas, people, and companies. If I can ever be of assistance, hit reply, or send an email to [email protected].

This newsletter is written with the assistance of Arman Tabatabai from New York

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/20/timing-and-why-were-all-vcs/

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