#WE DID NOT JUST DELETE OUR ENTIRE CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT AND WENT BACK TO ONLINE CLASSES

[irisesforyoureyes]

online classes are such a bitch

[queenlua]

hey, i started following you recently and ur bio says ur a hacker? any tips on where to start? hacking seems like a v cool/fun way to learn more abt coding and cybersecurity/infrastructure and i'd like to explore it but there's so much on the internet and like, i'm not trying to get into anything illegal. thanks!

huh, an interesting question, ty!

i can give more tailored advice if you hit me up on chat with more specifics on your background/interests.

given what you've written here, though, i'll just assume you don't have any immediate professional aspirations (e.g. you just want to learn some things, and you aren't necessarily trying to get A Cyber Security Job TM within the next three months or w/e), and that you don't know much about any specific programming/computering domain yet.

(stuff under cut because long)

first i'd probably just try to pick some interesting problem that you think you can solve with tech. this doesn't need to be a "hacking" project at first; i was just messing around with computers for ages before i did anything involving security/exploitation.

if you don't already know how to program, you should ideally pick a problem you can solve via programming. for instance: i learned a lot back in the 2000s, when play-by-post forum RPGs were in vogue.  see, i'd already been messing around, building my own personal sites, first just with HTML & CSS, and later on with Javascript and PHP.   and i knew the forum software everyone used (InvisionPowerBoard) was written in PHP.  so when one of the admins at my RPG complained that they'd like the ability to set multiple profile pictures, i was like, "hey i'm good at programming, want me to create a mod to do that," and then i just... did. so then they asked me to program more features, and i got all the sexy nerd cred for being Forum Mod Queen, and it was a good time, i learned a lot.

(i also got to be the person who was frantically IMed at 2am because wtf the forum is down and there's an inscrutable error, what do??? basically sysadmining! also, much less sexy! still, i learned a lot!)

the key thing is that it's gotta be a problem that's interesting to you: as much as i love making dorky sites in PHP, half the fun was seeing other people using my stuff, and i think the era of forum-based RPGs has passed. but maybe you can apply some programming talents to something that you are interested in—maybe you want to make a silly Chrome extension to make people laugh, a la Cloud to Butt, or maybe you'd like to make a program that converts pixel art into cross-stitching patterns, maybe you want to just make a cool adventure game on those annoying graphing calculators they make you use in class, or make a script for some online game you play, or make something silly with Arduino (i once made a trash can that rolled toward me when i clapped my hands; it was fun, and way easier than you'd think!), whatever.

i know a lot of hacker-types who got their start doing ROM hacking for video games—replacing the character art or animations or whatever in old NES games. that's probably more relevant than the PHP websites, at least, and is probably a solid place to get started; in my experience those communities tend to be reasonably friendly to questions. pick a small thing you want to do & ask how to do it.

also, a somewhat unconventional path, but—once i knew how to program a bit of Python, i started doing goofy junk, like, "hey can i implemented NamedTuple from scratch,” which tends to lead to Python metaprogramming, which leads to surprising shit like "oh, stack frames are literally just Python objects and you can manually edit them in the interpreter to do deliberately horrendous/silly things, my god this language allows too much reflection and i'm having too much fun"... since Python is a lot of folks' first language these days, i thought i'd point that out, since i think this is a pretty accessible start to thinking about How Programs Actually Work under the hood. allison kaptur has some specific recommendations on how to poke around, if you wanna go that route.

it's reasonably likely you'll end up doing something "hackery" in the natural course of just working on stuff. for instance, while i was working on the IPB forum software mods, i became distressed to learn that everyone was using an INSECURE version of the software! no one was patching their shit!! i yelled at the admins about it, and they were like "well we haven't been hacked yet so it's not a problem," so i uh, decided to demonstrate a proof of concept? i downloaded some sketchy perl script, kicked it until it worked, logged in as the admins, and shitposted a bit before i logged out, y'know, to prove my point.

(they responded by banning me for two weeks, and did not patch their software. which, y'know, rip to them; they got hacked by an unrelated Turkish group two months later, and those dudes just straight-up deleted the whole website. i was a merciful god by comparison!)

anyway, even though downloading a perl script and just pointing it at a website isn't really "hacking" (it's the literal definition of script kiddie, heh)—the point is i was just experimenting a lot and trying a lot of stuff, which meant i was getting comfortable with thinking of software as not just some immutable relic, but something you can touch and prod in unexpected ways.

this dovetails into the next thing, which is like, just learn a lot of stuff. a boring conventional computer science degree will teach you a lot (provided you take it seriously and actually try to learn shit); alternatively, just taking the same classes as a boring conventional computer science degree, via edX or whatever free online thingy, will also teach you a lot. ("contributing to open source" also teaches you a lot but... hngh... is a whole can of worms; send a follow-up ask if you want that rant.)

here's where i should note that "hacking" is an impossibly broad category: the kind of person who knows how to fuck with website authentication tokens is very different than someone who writes a fuzzer, who is often quite different than someone who looks at the bug a fuzzer produces and actually writes a program that can exploit that bug... so what you focus on depends on what you're interested in. i imagine classes with names like "compilers," "operating systems," and "networking" will teach you a lot. but, like, idk, all knowledge is god-breathed and good for teaching. hell, i hear some universities these days have actual computer security classes? that's probably a good thing to look at, just to get a sense of what's out there, if you already know how to program.

also be comfortable with not knowing everything, but also, learn as you go. the bulk of my security knowledge came when i got kinda airdropped into a work team that basically hired me entirely on "potential" (lmao), and uh, prior to joining i only had the faintest idea what a hypervisor was? or the whole protection ring concept? or ioctls or sandboxing or threat models or, fuck, anything? i mostly just pestered people with like 800 questions and slowly built up a knowledge base, and remember being surprised & delighted when i went to a security conference a year later and could follow most of the talks, and when i wound up at a bar with a guy on the xbox security team and we compared our security models a bunch, and so on.  there wasn't a magic moment when i "got it", i was just like, "okay huh this dude says he found a ring-0 exploit... what does that mean... okay i think i got that... why is that a big deal though... better ask somebody.." (also: reading an occasional dead tree book is a good idea. i owe my firstborn to Robert Love's Linux Kernel Development, as outdated as it is, and also O'Reilly's kookaburra book gave me a great overview of web programming back in the day, etc.  you can learn a lot by just clicking around random blogs, but you’ll often end up with a lot of random little facts and no good mental scaffolding for holding it together; often, a decent book will give you that scaffolding.)

(also, it's pretty useful if you can find a knowledgable someone to pepper with random questions as you go. finding someone who will actively mentor you is tricky, but most working computery folks are happy to tell you things like "what you're doing is actually impossible, here's why," or "here's a tutorial someone told me was good for learning how to write a linux kernel module," or "here's my vague understanding of this concept you know nothing about," or "here's how you automate something to click on a link on a webpage," which tends to be handier than just google on its own.)

if you're reading this and you're like "ok cool but where's the part where i'm handed a computer and i gotta break in while going all hacker typer”—that's not the bulk of the work, alas! like, for sure, we do have fun pranking each other by trying dumb ways of stealing each other's passwords or whatever (once i stuck a keylogger in a dude's keyboard, fun times). but a lot of my security jobs have involved stuff like, "stare at this disassembly a long fuckin' time to figure out how the program pointer got all fucked up," or, "write a fuzzer that feeds a lot of randomized input to some C++ program, watch the program crash because C++ is a horrible language for writing software, go fix all the bugs," or "think Really Hard TM about all the settings and doohickeys this OS/GPU/whatever has, think about all the awful things someone could do with it, threat model and sandbox accordingly." occasionally i have done cool proof-of-concept hacks but honestly writing exploits can kinda be tedious, lol, so like, i'm only doing that if it's the only way i can get people to believe that Yes This Is Actually A Problem, Fix Your Code

"lua that's cool and all but i wanted, like, actual links and recommendations and stuff" okay, fair. here's some ideas:

microcorruption: very fun embedded security CTF; teaches you everything you need to know as you're doing it.

cryptopals crypto challenges: very fun little programming exercises that teach you a lot of fundamental cryptography concepts as you're going along! you can do these even as a bit of a n00b; i did them in Python for the lulz

the binary bomb lab is hilariously copied by, like, so many CS programs, lol, but for good reason. it's accessible and fun and is the first time most people get to feel like a real hacker! (requires you know a bit of C beforehand)

ctftime is a good way to see when new CTFs ("capture the flag"s; security-focused competitions) are coming up. or, sometimes CTFs post their source code, so you can continue trying them after the CTF is over. i liked Stripe's CTFs when they were going, because they focused on "web stuff", and "web stuff" was all i really knew at the time. if you're more interested in staring at disassembly, there's CTFs focused on that sort of thing too.

azeria has good ARM assembly & exploitation tutorials

also, like, lots of good talks out there; just watching defcon/cansecwest/etc talks until something piques your interest is very fun. i'd die on a battlefield for any of Christopher Domas's talks, but he assumes a lot of specific x86/OS knowledge, lol, so maybe don’t start with that. oh, Julia Evans's blog is honestly probably pretty good for just learning a lot of stuff and really beginner-friendly?

oh and wrt legality... idk, i haven't addressed it here since it hasn't come up in my own work much, tbh. if you're just getting started you're kind of unlikely to Break The Law without, y'know, realizing maybe you're doing something a bit gray-area? and you can cross that bridge when you come to it? Real Hacking TM is way more of a pain-in-the-ass than doing CTFs and such, and you'll learn way more with the latter, so who cares lol just do the fun thing

[purplesurveys]

863

Do you have any friends who are on and off with bfs/gfs all the time? Yeah, Jo and Aya don’t make the most stable couple. They had one really problematic stint last year where they would break up and get back together every week. They ironed it out eventually and they’ve been ok for a while, but lately I think it’s a little rocky again because I no longer see them interacting and they’ve been retweeting stuff that gives me a few hints. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve broken it off for good. When was the last time you almost cried out of exhaustion? Ohhhh boy. It was some day in Feb I think? and everything had just been going wrong for me. Andrew and I got yelled at by our thesis adviser because she didn’t like what we submitted and she gave us a day to revise three entire chapters. We stayed in the college working away from 3 PM to 10 PM then when I got home, I realized I forgot to bring with me a certain item that my org entrusted me with. Absolutely wasn’t allowed to lose it. Had a panic attack and this was when I started crying because it was so late and I just wanted to go to bed; though Andrew saved my ass by offering to go back to school at like 11:30 just to retrieve the damn thing. Lastly, that was a time when business reporting was still giving me hell and I was struggling to find a business story around campus to turn in for that week, so I was freaking out about that too. All in all a shit day. What`s a TV show you hate missing? Idk man, if I miss a show I don’t think there’d be hate attached to it. I imagine I’d miss a show because it made me happy, so this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Do you think it’s funny how people always say their pet is the best ever? It’s adorable haha but not necessarily funny. Whenever someone says it I totally believe them; I think all pets are the best :) When did you last brush your teeth? This morning.

What was the last website (besides this one) that you visited? I checked my Twitter right before this question. Do you have a friend who you think you’ll be best friends with forever? Yes, Angela is for keeps. Does it annoy you when you accidentally delete things? For the most part I can just undo and get the deleted thing back, but when that’s not applicable it can get super distressing. I know I was gloomy for a very long time when I accidentally wiped out my camera roll with photos from 2014-2016. What`s a movie / book / TV show / band / whatever you highly recommend? Movie: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off Book: Got nothing in this department. Show: BoJack Horseman Band: Paramore ha. They got a sound for almost everyone! When did you last use a dictionary / thesaurus? Two questions ago when I was looking for an adjective to best describe what it’s like to lose your entire camera roll and, essentially, good memories that you’ve made. Are you anticipating or dreading anything? I ammmmmm anticipating dinner haha. I can’t think of anything I’m dreading.

If someone could randomly give you something right now what would you like? Baked sushi :( It’s a recent trend locally and it looks so gooddddd, I just don’t wanna spend the last of my savings on it or ask my parents to buy a tray for me. What`s the most annoying thing in the world? At the moment it’s people who refuse to wear masks because they claim that it messes with their oxygen level or because they find it personally uncomfortable. When did you last use one of those water slides you put on hills? I have no clue what you mean. What are you sitting on right now? One of the dining room chairs. What skills would you like to learn / develop? Adobe Indesign and iMovie. I dabbled with these recently – Indesign for a class and iMovie to make a video for Gabie – and though I was always too scared to start using programs like these, I actually found them fun and super useful when I finally had my hands on them. When we saw each other the other day Gab was talking about using this break to take up workshops in different Adobe programs so that she’ll have more stuff to put on her resumé, so I might follow her footsteps too. What is something other people say you’re good at but you think you’re not? Teaching. I always feel like I fumble a lot, but idk I get compliments on it so I guess I’m kinda okay but I just don’t see it. What does your bedside lamp look like? I don’t have one. I used to have a wall light though. It was a just tiny lil bulb that I had to plug in to give my room a light orange hue. What did you last take a photograph of? Myself and Cooper. When was the last time you got really frustrated with technology? Yesterday. My laptop was a bit slow when I wanted my YouTube video to go full-screen, and my impatient ass already got irritated with it. What was the last funny thing someone said to you? She didn’t technically ‘say’ it but my mom was singing a song earlier and had the lyrics wrong, and what came out of her mouth instead was so wrong and so funny.  Who taught you to tie your shoelaces? My grandmother. What was the last thing you bought? I bought snacks from my girlfriend’s dad Korean food business! I got myself odeng (fishcakes) and tteokbokki (spicy rice cake) :) Do you want to move to somewhere else? If so, where? Any country with a capable government at this point. What time is it where you are? 8:04 PM. What’s your favourite picture of yourself as a child? I’m not sharing that on here, but I do have my favorites.

Do you like your neighbours? I suppose they’re okay, in a sense that they haven’t done anything to annoy me. I’ve never talked to them in the last 12 years that I’ve lived here though haha I always felt like my mom could take care of the socializing stuff – and she has been. Does your room need to be cleaned? Nah I’m barely in it these days. It’s mostly spotless and things are stacked up neatly. Do you have a good relationship with your family? I wouldn’t say it’s good, but it’s not bad. Super lacking in the emotional aspect, though, and it’s a big reason why at the end of the day I can’t call it a good relationship. What is something people are surprised to hear about you? That I don’t like fruits. The horrified gasps and expressions never get old. Do you make judgments about people straight after meeting them? Only if they blatantly act like a jerk. Do you hate any particular groups of people? I mean I hate racists, abusers, rapists, Karens... but if you mean to ask if I hate any race or people of a certain sexual/gender orientation then most definitely not. Do you fall up or down stairs usually? Down :( Do you constantly break things? (By mistake or otherwise) HAHA yes. What was the last bug you saw? Kinda looked like a moth but I’m not sure what it was exactly. Are there any smells which make you feel nauseous? Rotten egg, any fruits lol. What is the scariest thing you`ve ever gone through? Random men play-lunging at me when I’m walking outside and then laughing once I jump or whimper. I don’t know if there’s a certain script that those fucking pigs follow, but I’ve had several of the exact same experiences through the years. That’s why my friends can always poke fun at the fact that I drive everywhere no matter how close my destination is – at least I feel safest that way. Do you have anything unusual in your bag? No. I only carried the essentials in the last bag I used when I went out the other day. Are there any people you know in real life that you only talk to online? Yeah, there’s a bunch of people I don’t really get to see irl. Some of them are friends who’ve migrated, some are my friends’ parents, my relatives who’ve always lived in the US, etc. Do you think people who don`t care about education are dumb? In the Philippines they will definitely be considered careless, dumb, and having no ambition. But I know education isn’t as big of a priority in other countries and that college isn’t a necessity in those places, so I guess there’s a cultural difference here. What`s your favourite key on a keyboard? I don’t pick favorite keyboard buttons lol. Do you always finish what you start? Nah I’m a little terrible at that, especially if we’re talking of passion projects. I collected Starbucks planners for like six years and was never able to completely fill up any one of them. Who`s your favourite character from The Simpsons? Or do you hate that show? I’m not a big fan of the show but just because I relate to her a lot and the fact that she’s intelligent and a goody-two-shoes, Lisa. Have you ever had any friends who always tried to steal your things? Nah wtf? I’d so easily stop talking to them if all they did was steal from me lmao What is something you will never understand? People!!! Who!!! Aren’t!!! Nice!!! To!!! Servers/Baristas/Anyone working in a job that has to directly deal with customers!!! When did you last laugh hysterically? Probably earlier this afternoon watching a Good Mythical Morning episode.

[hydraelwrites]

Welcome back to our ongoing series about things to ask your Beta readers. Check out last week’s post, questions about characterization.

This week, we delve into the nuts and bolts of your book – the plot, the conflicts, and the structure. I’m focusing on this in order of what is most essential for a story. Good characters can carry a bad story better than anything else, and poorly handled characters will kill an otherwise good story like a knife to a heart. If you survive the character challenge, however, the next thing that will choke your story to death is if it falls apart in the analysis.

What���s interesting about these kinds of structural things is, if you do them well, the reader won’t notice them. Outside of the most hardcore bookworms, most people don’t praise a book for having good pacing, or a well-drawn conflict. Plot is really the only thing that most people will talk and care about. However, that doesn’t mean they don’t notice them. Think of the structural stuff like the CGI in a movie – if it’s well done, you’ll completely overlook it. If it’s poorly done, it will be painfully obvious. And if it’s amazingly done, it will draw attention for all the right reasons

Look at those claws. Look at them. (from Screenrant)

Let’s get to the questions you’ll want to ask.

What were any consistencies you noticed?

This is a broad question that covers a lot, and you’ll definitely want to plan some follow-up questions to make sure you hit all the angles it has to offer.

First of all is checking to make sure things besides characters were consistent throughout. Did the reader have a good sense of where things were and what was going on in them? Were there breaks in the internal consistency of your novel, or did it all hold together well? This will also cover plot holes, although you might want to read this post to decide when it’s actually important.

The next thing to check is if the things you meant to have consistent were, in fact, consistent. Did you have a symbol you wanted the reader to notice through repetition? This is where you check for that. Same goes for motifs or themes (which we’ll cover more later.) Were they noticeable enough?

Finally…this is also where you find out if you had repeated phrases or ‘ticks’ that were distracting or annoying. This one is easiest to explain with examples. When I was first starting off as a writer, I tended to have people quirk their eyebrows all the time. Surprised? Quirk an eyebrow. Curious? Quirk an eyebrow. Annoyed? Quirk an eyebrow. Flirty? Quirk that thing! Confused? How else do you express that besides quirking your damn eyebrow?

My characters walked around looking like this. Constantly.

It could get that bad. I once had, in a room with five characters having a conversation, every single one quirk their eyebrow at least once.

I fixed that particular tick years ago but developed a new one that my editor had to point out to me. In the first draft of Strange Cosmology, I had a habit of my characters only emoting through either their eyes or through smiling. Sometimes, occasionally, foreheads. I almost never utilized body posture, breathing patterns, or hand gestures. It’s something I’m working on currently, and it’s helping my characters feel even more human and organic.

What is the primary conflict of the book?

And after that complicated question, we’re moving onto a fairly straightforward one. Like the protagonist and antagonist question from last time, this one should be obvious to you. Odds are good you already know exactly what you have in mind for your primary conflict. However, that doesn’t mean the reader knows.

Let’s pick an example from a movie that just so happens to give me an excuse to use my favorite gif. What was the primary conflict on Spider-Man 3?

You didn’t think we were done with this, did you?

Was it Spider-Man vs Sandman? It can’t be that, because he spent the second act of the movie pretty much gone. Was it Spider-Man vs Venom? You’d think so, but Venom wasn’t actually a character until act three – and Venom becoming a character in act three meant that Spider-Man’s internal conflict with the symbiot definitely wasn’t the primary conflict, because it gets resolved before the climax. Also, Harry was an antagonist in that movie, although it made no damn sense and was just a mess even by Spider-Man 3’s standards.

If a beta-reader had been asked that question, they could have pointed out that the movie was a disaster in this regard. The movie should have picked one of those to be the primary conflict, then relegated the others to secondary or tertiary conflicts. This question will help you make sure you didn’t create a Spider-Man 3.

No one wants to create a Spider-Man 3. 

What would you call the climax of the book?

You might start picking up another trend here. These questions are a bit like what you might have answered in English class, and that’s not accidental.  Your reader should be able to break it down like a classroom assignment because anything they can’t answer is something you need to revisit.

This is especially true of the climax.

If your climax isn’t easy to spot, it doesn’t have the impact it needs. Perhaps it’s because you don’t have a clear primary conflict, or perhaps the climax doesn’t hit the way it should. Maybe you need to make the resolution clearer or ensure it has a solid impact. Or perhaps the problem isn’t in the climax itself.

If the reader points to the wrong thing as the climax, or can’t identify it, ask probing questions to find where you went wrong. Is it in the climax itself? Did you not build up to it properly?

That latter one is a common problem even among famous and talented authors. For example, I love Brandon Sanderson’s books. However, they sometimes have…problems in the climax. My personal favorite example is for Elantris. I’ve talked about this before, but Brandon Sanderson spent the entire book building up an interesting political conflict and an intriguing mystery. Then, right at the climax we are introduced to…well, I don’t want to spoil, so imagine that season 8 of Game of Thrones had ended with a sudden attack by Xenomorphs, and the climactic battle had been Drogon vs. the Xenomorphs. That’s how out of the blue it felt.

Although admittedly, that would have been rad as hell. 

Also, I got through that entire segment without making a joke about climaxes. I just wanted to get proper recognition for that.

What were the themes of the book?

It’s a bit of writing wisdom that revision is where you develop the themes. That’s very true, but when you’re writing a book themes tend to begin to emerge organically, especially in the early drafts. Unless you’re actively avoiding putting in themes, you’re going to have some part of your story develop them – and even if you were, they probably still arose.

For an example I’ve cited before, J.R.R. Tolkien famously said that he “disliked allegory in all its forms.” Yet so many people have pointed out that there is a clear theme of naturalism vs industrialization, especially in The Two Towers. 

Literal trees tearing apart a dam to flood a city that has stripped away all forest in the area? Yeah, no allegory here at all. 

This is where you check your themes. If you put some in deliberately, it’s good to know that they can be identified. You’ll still want to strengthen them in the revision process, but if you were writing a dystopia where the evil government controls its citizens through hypnotic cat videos, and you’re trying to make a point about how much time we spend online, it’d be good to know that you’d laid the groundwork properly.

On the other hands, if you weren’t trying to introduce any particular theme, it’s good to know what themes you were letting into your novel accidentally. Maybe those are the themes you want to develop in revisions to expand and give more depth too. Maybe, on the other hand, you’re accidentally including a theme you didn’t mean. For example…well, the Star Wars prequels are a fertile ground for bad writing decisions.

Stuff it, Binks. 

I don’t think George Lucas is racist. I don’t think he meant to code Jar Jar Binks as an offensive minstrel character straight out of the 1920’s, Watto as a flying greedy Jewish caricature, and the Trade Federation as a hodge-podge of Asian stereotypes. I’m sure that was not his intention.

And yet, this is where he would have found out that he’d actually done that, and thus created the accidental theme that other races are stupid or dangerous.

Which segues nicely into the last question you should ask your Beta Readers…

Was there anything that really bothered or offended you?

Never, ever skip this question. It’s vital to know if there’s something offensive in your books. For me personally, you know who I want to read every single one of my early drafts? A woman. Why? Because I’m a male, and I’ve read enough twitter threads about male authors writing women and how often it goes wrong. I don’t want to be that guy. If I’ve got male gaze going on, I want to know about it, and this question is where I could find out.

You never, ever want to be the kind of writer this person is mocking. 

Now, I’m not saying that something bothering someone or offending them means you should delete it or change it. These days, it’s very difficult to avoid offending someone. If you really want to see how hard it is, go to the review section of any major book and look for the one star reviews.

You’ll start seeing some that are offended in some way or another. Some people get offended because a book has too much swearing. Some get offended because it has any kind of sex scene. You’ll see people who take horrific offense to anything that depicts – even in a negative light – violence against children or animals. There will be people offended by too much violence. And if your book does none of those things, there will be people who are offended you’re ‘playing it safe.’

However.

Once you know where your book is offensive, if anywhere, you can make a decision about if you are going to leave it in or take it out. No matter what you find here, the important thing is to discuss it and be aware of it – you need to know what is offensive so you don’t do it accidentally. It should always be a conscious choice.

And once you know about it, you have to decide if you’re going to keep it. I’ve talked about this before, but in more vague terms. Let’s get blunt this time – In Weird Theology, my editor and I fought about two things. One was how much Enki swore, and one was about Crystal and Ryan having sex. Both parts bothered her. We really went back and forth about those two bits. By the time we were done, I realized she was absolutely right about removing Enki’s verbal tick of dropping the word ‘fuck’ at least once a sentence, but I stood by and stand by the fade-to-black sex scene – although I did agree that it needed the rewrites it got to work better.

The point is, you are the author. You have decisions to make. Ultimately, it is your work.

Just don’t let this one become something that happens by accident.

Come back in the future, where we will go over the last critical questions you ask your beta readers – how immersive your story is.

Any you’d like to add in this category? Tired of me using the Spider-Man 3 gif? For the first one, let me know in the comments below! For the second, all I have to say to that is…

And while you’re here, grab your free book. Dancing Spider-Man demands it. 

Things to Ask Your Beta Readers Part 2 – Analysis Welcome back to our ongoing series about things to ask your Beta readers. Check out last week’s post, …

[thachthanhnghi1]

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Often this writer has encountered people who say they can speak a foreign language. They claim that they can count in the language. When asked how to say, for example, the number 41, a blank look comes over them, and they start to count from number one, two, etc. No, they don’t know the numbers in the foreign language.

F-1 – This is the most common type of U.S. student visa. Students make use of this visa for academic studies in the United States. This type of visa is designed for students, who want to enroll for an educational program with a college or University in the United States. It is also used to study English language at an Institute or at a foreign languages institutes to study English.

Next thing is, today world is becoming global because of internet and other easy methods of communications. Many colleges today are very popular for the wide variety of people and different cultures. Some bigger colleges are having students from the whole world and they are interested in learning some skills they can get. Spanish is the fourth most important language of the world and there is a very good chance that helps you to exchange your thoughts with the student who is sitting next to you. You can imagine that you can impress your colleague well and start conversation with them in their native language.

Now you are ready to put it all together and SPEAK! Try to do this as soon as you can and dont be afraid to make a mistake. If it is a bad mistake a native speaker will hopefully tell you. However a native speaker will not always point out your mistakes! A native speaker will not always know the grammar of their own language. (Do you know yours?). Therefore may not be able to explain your mistakes but just give you the correct answer.

Below is a simple yet surprisingly effective procedure for naming that tune when all you have are a few song snippets and some hazy memories. Your search will draw from the voluminous Usenet archives which contain one of the largest repositories of searchable song fragments on the Internet. * Write down the most unique words and phrases of whatever song fragments you can remember. Jog your memory by brainstorming on the following: Who? What? When? Where? Why?

Take your children on a lot of field trips. Get a museum and zoo pass. Join a local homeschool support group, and if possible, a homeschooling co op, where parents take turns teaching various subjects. This will give your child a chance to be with peers. A support group will sometimes offer classes, too, on subjects you may not feel qualified to teach, such as a foreign language or even Algebra.

Don’t give up when your inbox isn’t flooded with responses. Language schools rarely keep applicants’ files. If a school is not hiring at that moment, they may simply delete your e-mail. If one of their teachers has just quit, they may be desperate to hire you as quickly as possible. Never underestimate luck and timing. So be persistent. After a month, feel free to call a school to inquire about work and ask if they have received your CV/resume. After three months, feel free to e-mail your CV/resume again. Managers at schools come and go rather quickly.

As stated above, you’ll never get rich teaching English as a foreign language, and in fact, it’s pretty easy to find yourself a few hundred dollars in the red after all is said and done after a year teaching abroad. But just remember that you’re not doing it for the money. The money you lose will be the best money you can ever lose.

Movie Review: Anna Paquin In The Comedy Horror Movie Trick R Treat

At 20, Miranda Cosgrove has been acting for more than half her life. But don’t confuse her with so many of the other child performers who have gone astray. You’re not likely to see Cosgrove, who most notably starred in the kid-friendly Nickelodeon series “iCarly” for six years, getting arrested or hanging out at Hollywood nightclubs.

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This time you plan on taking final film paper, critiquing a movie an RV? While an RV offers the practicality of providing you someplace to sleep while on the road, at today’s gas prices, wouldn’t this be expensive?

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I’ll say this up front, I totally enjoyed this film. It is visually spectacular, the sound is absolutely incredible and the action is unlike anything I’ve seen in quite some time. The only thing is, I’m not entirely sure what the point was. Sure, there are some broad themes in the film that are quite obvious, but why were we taken to so many levels within the main character’s mind? We started in reality, travel then to her fantasized version of reality and then went to a completely fabricated world that left out reality completely. But why were we taken there? I’m still trying to figure that out. Did I enjoy the journey? Yes, totally. Think of this as another take on “Inception” but without any drive or purpose.

Against a quality team like Kutztown, if you become one dimensional, it’s going to be a long afternoon. We have to find ways to get a more balanced attack. How do you do that? Well, at this point of the week, we’re still film studying and trying to figure that out. It won’t be easy, to give us the best chance to win the game, we have to have a more balanced offense between the run and the pass.

Before you can reach your kids to teach them, you must lay down a solid foundation. These principles apply to life, in general, but is pertinent to this topic.

If I homework film Stay is an adaptation from the young adult novel written by Gayle Forman. The main character, Mia, is a 17 year-old who was in a tragic car accident that took the lives of her parents. While in a coma, she watches the horrific events unfold while and begins to look back over her life. Mia needs to make the decision if she wants to live or die.

A: I was doing theatre, photo journalism, working at a local channel and making a decent earning. I found myself incorporating paramount to my words, and when I started taking pictures and filming, I realized this was what I’m most passionate about. But when you have a creative bone in your body, like writing, it’s easier to expand into other aspects of a different creative trade.

There can’t be any better place on earth to learn about film making than on the back lot of Universal Studios. You have the choice of day or sleep away within the same program.

Fed up with his life, David runs away from home. It doesn’t take him long to figure out how to make the money he needs to exist. He teleports himself into bank vaults, borrows a little cash, and teleports out with no one the wiser; or so he thinks.

Baron-Cohen -Many of the filmmakers I looked up to made classic gangster films. I wanted to make a gangster film and I’ve never made one until now. I hope it is not in the same mold as normal gangster films. It is written from a female view point. Gangs have been something that America has been built on in many ways; even the Indian tribes are gangs of a sort. Gangs have always tried to gain power, and then they become legitimate and move the country forward. I come from Britain which seems to have a stable society, but if you look far enough back you find that there was some kind of gang influence in our history. The guy with the most power or the biggest army got his way, and then eventually became the king.

The Verdict: Summer action junkies won’t find anything worth their time and money to invest in Public Enemies – but it’s a cool film nonetheless. Mann movies are inherently cool movies anyway – Public Enemies is no exception to its royal bloodline. The performances are terrific – especially Depp and Marion Cottilard. (who I never got to in The Good portion of this review – sorry Marion you were terrific) It’s a solid period film that probably has no business keeping weekend box-office company with the Transformers and Harry Potter. Personally, I can’t wait to see it again. And again. And again.

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Split personality? No, thanks.

This is a hard topic for me to come out with because it’s one I’ve told nobody before. It’s a topic I’m not proud of, and one which has ruined at least one friendship, and almost ruined another. It’s one I can’t cure easily, and I’m frightened because of how much impact it has on my life.

I was a lonely child, and by that I don’t just mean I never had siblings. I had friends I couldn’t trust, and was always an outsider. I’ve covered in previous posts that I was abused, and bullied by people I was supposed to trust; and that is what I believe has caused this issue. My three other personalities.

Let me clarify for a moment that I am in no way diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, and I’m certainly not saying I do have it. I’m saying I have an issue and the majority of my personality is divided into other characters, people who I’ve become close to and have developed a bond with despite that they don’t exist.

It started in year 8. Everybody in my school was getting into relationships, and I was alone. I was fat back then, and nobody really liked me. The boys bullied me, and those who didn’t were -I’d later find out- were gay. People asked me during P.E if I had a boyfriend, and after several times of saying no and being laughed at; I told them yes. I remember it perfectly. His name was Jason, and he was a year older than me. That soon passed because I left the school weeks later. But then a year later it happened again. I made up that I had a friend who I went to school with, and it got to the point where I made a social media account as this friend. Again, it passed within months when I finally made a real friend.

But then 2013 happened. I was terribly alone. My mum was “dying”, nobody at school liked me, my best friend and vanished from the only way we could communicate. All I had was myself, my internet connection, and a website I would go on and write about how crappy life was and then write creative stories which people would read and “recommend”. I created a character -I’ll name him Sam, to protect my identity and “his”- and he got an account on this website which wasn’t actually classed as social media. He was my best friend, and we had known each other for a long time. He was confident, and talented, and popular. He also had three best friends and an entirely different life. His Dad was imprisoned, and he wasn’t overly depressed. He had addictions that I didn’t, and certainly was nothing like me. It was all in good fun. I would make out we hung out together, and went to places, and people thought I was less alone than I actually was. Then months passed and Sam made his own online friends, different to those I had because people liked him more; he was happy. I felt less alone than I had in a long time because some part of me believed that this person existed. Then a couple of months passed and I realised I was falling in love with Sam. By that I mean, I didn’t love myself. I wasn’t having a love affair with myself because I hated myself. I loved how Sam made me feel, the way he spoke to me and wrote notes in an entirely different handwriting to my own that I would read. He encouraged me to stay clean, and recover. He hugged me when I needed it and we would watch lame television together. He was everything I needed.

So here I was, feeling less alone and less like I was controlling Sam. But I had the memory of doing everything he did; the notes, the online messages, the conversations etc. But with that I also failed new memories. Memories of playing shows in a band I wasn’t in but Sam was, and being in hospital when I wasn’t but Sam was. Eventually Sam and I got together. Again, I don’t mean I would make love to myself or kiss myself or do anything like that. I just had this “virtual relationship with a man who didn’t exist”. After a month of that I realised it needed to end because he had become a real person to everybody including my parents (who actually believed he was an internet friend). So I tried to get rid of him. The only way I could think would work was if he killed himself. So I acted it out. He got severely depressed, and went about his way. What I didn’t anticipate was that it would actually effect me. I was online talking to people we were friends with, and I was sobbing my heart out. I actually begged him not to die. And I have a memory of being told that chances were slim for him. I actually grieved for a man in my imagination.

The day after that I knew I couldn’t cope. I couldn’t sleep, drink, or even eat. I was constantly crying, and that’s when I realised I needed him more than I had thought I ever would. He was my only real friend, and I was in love with him.

He recovered from his suicide attempt. And we went about our life. His life became more real. He developed a past of being abused, and self harm which he was recovering from. He was an alcoholic, and his sister had killed herself years prior. He had a family, a brother, parents, and a reason to live; because I needed him. I remember him coming to school with me and we laughed through history, and he got into a fight. Except I don’t remember that because it never happened. At the time he didn’t have an appearance, and when I would picture him I pictured a blank space. He had no voice or anything. But as a year passed, those spaces were also filled in. He developed medium length brown hair which bleached in the sun, and eyes which matched my own. An angled jawline, and he wore a beanie a lot of the time. He wore wristbands on his wrists to hide old scars, and has a tattoo on his thigh which he got when he was drunk. His accent is mostly the posh side of London, but he has a lisp. He wears a retainer when he sleeps, and can’t see without contract lenses or glasses because of when he looked into a laser beam as a child. It’s sad because right now I can picture everything so clearly and I even feel like he’s here with me.

What’s also sad is that he’s now got a close friend, and they’ve been friends for four years. That friend is real, and they believes he is too. What’s even more sad is that it’s no longer just Sam I’m impersonating, but his best friend “Kane” too, though that is much less frequent. But the same principles apply; I even have memories with him too.

It’s been four years and I’m so attached to Sam, and so in love with him that I physically can’t stop. He stands up for me in arguments online, and he helps me make friends. He’s everything I’m not. I need him. But two months ago I was asked out by a guy. A real guy. And I accepted. But then the night before I realised I wasn’t ready to get rid of Sam, and I stood him up. Luckily I deleted the app and I never have to face those upset messages. But Sam is effecting my life, and I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t know if what I’ve got counts as multiple personality disorder or what. But it terrifies me, because I’m genuinely so dependant on this guy. And I’m sick of being unsure of what memories are real and what aren’t. I’m sick of feeling like this other person, or looking in my mirror and trying to make my hair look like his. I’m sick of making a basic mistake and overthinking that our friend will work it out. Or having to use words that he never uses, despite knowing he and I both speak utterly different.

Its tiring being two people, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cried. I’ve even cried out for him, pleading him to hug me and forgetting for those minutes that he’s not real…I’m scared