#also a hacker and a guy who can create guns with the power of imagination

[brokenhardies]

so i started working on amber's own little team (cosmic misfits) and i love them so much so far :')

[treh-co]

FAHC Headcanons

So I feel like a good amount of my hcs are a lot different than other people’s??? And I’ve done a LOT of thinking abt them so! Here’s kind of like a masterlist of my general hcs! I’m just gonna go through this person-by-person.

(This got Kinda Long, so it’s under a read more. Sorry mobile users,)

Geoff

Obviously, he’s the one who started The Fakes. Basically, he went into the military after high school, came back and was like “Damn. Hated that” and then some old friends are like “Hey wanna do crime” and he was like “Fuck it”. That ended up being the beginning of The Roosters, which would grow to become the most powerful crime syndicate in Los Santos.

However, when they started shifting more towards managing the organizations they controlled, Geoff felt like he was missing the hands-on action. With the others’ blessing, he branched out to create his own gang under the syndicate, which would be the Fakes.

Geoff was the acting boss, supervisor, and manager of the Fakes for many years, while still juggling responsibilities with the Roosters. After a while, he felt the stress of it all begin to weigh on him, so he decided to pass some of it off. He made Trevor the acting supervisor of the crew’s regular business, while he handed management of behind-the-scenes matters to Lindsay. He’s still technically the boss, though, and any Big decisions go through him.

Jack

Jack actually met Geoff when they were in the military together. While he was a journalist, she was a pilot, and while she’d always been a sort of straight-laced, innocent kid growing up, she discovered that she actually loved flying. More than that, she loved the excitement of a chase or a gunfight. When she got back, she found herself bored.

That was around when Geoff called her up with an offer- one that not only allowed her to get back in the cockpit, but promised twice the action way more money than she ever got in the military. Of course, she said yes.

Jack’s main role in the crew is transport and evac. She can fly or drive anything, from a city bus to speedboat to a cargobob. Unofficially, she’s a sort of second-in-command for Geoff. He usually discusses any business stuff with her before making decisions. She’s also probably the most capable medic in the main crew, though she’s not an expert, and will pass off the responsibility if they have access to someone more formally trained.

Gavin

I imagine Gavin comes from a criminal family. Nothing exciting; standard white-collar stuff, embezzlement and fraud. They were substantially wealthy from their exploits and sent him to private school and all that, but Gavin found it all horribly boring. By the time he reached high school, he was experimenting with every type of low-level crime he could think of; theft and vandalism, all that shit.

Eventually, his habit of making enemies got him in over his head, and eventually he found himself in serious hot water. Out of options, he forged some papers and got a flight out of Britain. He’d far from learnt his lesson, though. He didn’t plan on cleaning up his act, and he decided to hide in plain sight, in the most crime-infested city America had to offer- Los Santos.

That was where he met Geoff. He was working odd jobs around the city, still new to America (and, though he’d never admit it, pretty lost and scared- he’s only sixteen). He gets hired by some asshole to take out Geoff, and he isn’t familiar enough with the scene to know better, so he goes for it. When Geoff has the knife out of his hands and a gun pointed at his head in less than two seconds, he’s pretty sure he’s fucked- but Geoff doesn’t shoot. Because fuck, how the hell is he supposed to take out this scrawny, terrified kid? So he talks to him instead, and when he finds out that Gavin has no loyalties to the guy that hired him and has a much broader skill set than Geoff would have expected, he decides to take him in.

As for my take on The Golden Boy- I personally don’t see Gavin as a hacker, and tbh I personally Cannot picture him suave enough to be some smooth-talking informant. In my mind, he’s sort of the crew’s everyman. He does a little bit of everything- stealth, dealing, hacking, fighting- he isn’t really an expert at any of it, but if you need something done, he probably knows enough to help. 

Michael

Michael was raised in New Jersey with his brothers. His life was fairly normal, to be honest. He got a gig as an electrician, and it sucked, but he was doing okay. And then his mom got sick, and things started falling apart. Long story short, he ended up turning to more unsavory ways to get the money she needed for her treatment. He found out that he was pretty good at making bombs, and even better at cracking skulls. 

Michael only ever dipped into those practices to help his mom, but once you go in, it’s pretty hard to get out. He was running with a gang in New Jersey for a long time, until one day, their leader sold them out to the cops. He and some friends ran away to Los Santos, but still got caught, and suddenly he was locked up in a LS prison.

It was in prison that he met this guy named Gavin. After bonding through some good old fashioned prison fighting and saving each other’s asses, Gavin told him that he’s part of a powerful gang that was planning on breaking him out. He said that he needed help with the prep work they  needed done on from the inside, and if Michael helped him, they’d break him out with Gavin. Against every instinct, Michael agreed, and they broke out together. After they got out, Geoff decided to offer Michael a job- partly because he was impressed with him, and partly because Gavin wouldn’t stop whining until he did.

Michael is great for a steady gun or a good fight on missions, but his expertise is in demolitions. He’s self-taught, but he’s one of the best in the business, and he has fun with what he does.

Lindsay

Lindsay has always thrived on chaos. This presented itself more innocently in her childhood, but once she reached her teen years, it quickly spiraled into something more dangerous. She was always looking for something more risky, more exciting. Speeding, then shoplifting, then vandalism; it was never enough.

That being said, it shouldn’t have been that big of a surprise when some friends easily talked her into her first burglary. From then on, it was an easy slide into the more serious world of crime. She was a gun for hire by twenty, had long left her well-meaning parents behind, travelling with no real goal and making both allies and enemies everywhere she went.

When she cropped up in Los Santos, trailing gunfire and spray-paint cat tags where she went, Geoff knew she was meant to be one of them. He hired her for some odd jobs at first, just to make sure; but just a few looks at her style proved his theory. He offered her permanent position and she took it on a whim.

True to her role, Lindsay is the crew’s wildcard. Sort of like Gavin, except her skills are more specifically in the “fuck shit up” range.

Jeremy

Born and raised in Boston, Jeremy had a not-so-great home life and started hanging with the wrong crowds from a young age. He grew up through fistfights and car wrecks, and by the time he was grown, he didn’t really know anything else. He was actually pretty close with his gang back home. They were the ones who taught him the importance of loyalty; how important it is to have people you can trust. Nothing good lasts forever, though. When another gang- much bigger, much stronger- started picking them off, their leader made the tough choice to disband. Despite communal reluctance, she got them all set up to go underground in different parts of the country. Jeremy was sent to Los Santos.

While there, Jeremy saved a boy he saw being jumped in an alley. The boy turned out to be a hacker and information dealer named Matt. Jeremy was homeless at the time, and Matt offered to let him stay at his place as thanks. Somehow, this quickly turned into them being roommates and friends, and then partners, when they decided it would be a good idea for Jeremy to tag along on Matt’s deals for protection.

While helping Matt, Jeremy made a name for himself in underground fighting rings, known by his half-joke moniker “Rimmy Tim”. One night, a non-regular sat in to watch the fight, and afterwards approached him with an offer. The stranger was one Geoff Ramsey, and the offer was for a job with the Fakes. Jeremy happened to know who the Fakes were- and be a big fan of their work. He was nervous, but he accepted the offer, and it only took a few weeks for them to essentially pull him in.

Jeremy is, in simple terms, the crew’s muscle. He drives, he shoots, and most importantly, he can fight. If anything needs doing that involves those three things, he’s good for it.

Matt

Matt grew up in a small, boring town with a small, boring family. He filled his boredom with the digital world. Eventually, he started diving deeper; learning how to code, and then how to program, and then how to hack. By the time he was seventeen, Matt was going by the alias of “Axial” on dark-web forums, dealing information and breaking into everything from private systems to locked-down, international servers.

After turning eighteen, Matt decided he was sick of his home town and used the money he’d gained from his illegal business to disappear and move somewhere more exciting- Los Santos. After a few months of living there, he met a boy named Jeremy, who saved him from a deal gone wrong. He liked Jeremy, and it seemed like Jeremy liked him; despite the suspicions they both probably should have had in their lines of work, they became fast friends and roommates, deciding to work together.

When Jeremy got hired by the Fakes, Matt was disappointed, but resigned to the fact that he would be back on his own. Until he was pulled away from his work one night to a knock at the door, and found the Vagabond there, ready to take him to the penthouse. Apparently, the crew had been in need of a hacker for a while; and a certain new member had put in quite the good word for him.

Matt is, obviously, the crew’s hacker. He doesn’t really go on the field too much; he’ll tag along if there’s a proximity requirement on his part, or if a bunch of people are unavailable and they really need a backup driver or something, but for the most part he operates from the penthouse. He’s usually on comms during the heists to give directions or help with security or recon in real-time.

Trevor [TW: Sex work mention]

Trevor grew up in a trailer park in Blaine County, raised by a single mom. She loved him, but was involved with all the wrong people. When an altercation with an ex-boyfriend ended up deadly, fourteen-year-old Trevor up and ran as fast as he could, and ended up in the streets of Los Santos. He got by with begging and soup kitchens at first, but he started picking up tricks, on his own or from others he watched. Pickpocketing, manipulation, shoplifting; whatever he could use to get a bit of an advantage, he took.

It was just a while after he turned eighteen that a man he met outside a bar proposed he enter a different “path” of business. Trevor was reluctant, but he was also desperate, and the man made a lot of promises. He ended up spending two years as a prostitute, until one night he’d had enough. He killed the man who’d been selling him and ran once again. 

Once again faced with life on the streets, he returned to what he knew he was good at- lying and stealing. He came up with the alias of Reached, and became a thief and informant by commission, fairly well-known. He became close associates- maybe even friends, if such a thing existed in Los Santos- with another duo, Rimmy Tim and Axial. One day, they gave him a call- saying their new employers needed someone with his skills on a job. To make a long story short, when the Fakes met Trevor, he was pretty much already a part of the team.

Trevor is a thief by trade. Stealth, deception, and stealing is what he does best. He’s a master lock picker and an expert at slight of hand, and is far too good at putting on an innocent face. 

Alfredo

Alfredo was raised by a big, loving family; but people are a product of their environment. A combination of wrong place, wrong time, and peer pressure had him messing around with local gangs far before he should have even seen a gun. But Alfredo always had a knack for precision, and he had the aim of a trained vet, and he was probably a little too busy being cocky to understand the risks he was taking.

Eventually, those risks caught up with him. He was in a lot of hot water and he knew his family was in danger. He couldn’t let them get hurt on his account, so he ran to protect them. He considered turning a new leaf when he got to Los Santos, but quickly realized that if that was the plan, he’d picked the wrong place to do it. It wasn’t long before he was dragged back into work as a gun for hire.

He was good- really good, and when some hot shot rolls into the city with a sniper and skills like that, it shakes things up, and word gets around. Word even gets to some of the most powerful men in the city- including Geoff Ramsey, who decides that if this kid is really as good as he’s heard, there’s no way he’s letting him get snatched up by anybody else first. His invite to Alfredo is more short-notice than it was with the others, but he and the crew click in about two seconds flat, so it really doesn’t take a lot of convincing.

Obviously, Alfredo is their sniper. He’s a hell of a shot with any gun, and can do fine with up-close combat when he needs to, but he’s at his best when he’s giving cover from a rooftop.

Fiona

Fiona comes from one of France’s most infamous criminal organizations. Her parents run the group, and she was raised, essentially, as the heir to the business. She’s been trained since she was a child to be the best at any skill she might need. An array of languages, hand to hand combat in five forms, dozens of weapons, from blades to melee to guns- most of all, she studied deception.

There was a small problem, though. Fiona appreciated everything her family did for her- but there was also no way in hell she was just going to drag on the family business. She wanted to make a name for herself, and she wanted more than the stuffy, starch-white world they were giving her. So she ran away to America. She spent a few years travelling, testing out different paths. At one point, she ended up in long-term employment with a gang. Except she ended up hating said gang, and she wanted out.

Luck happened to be on her side. One day, she was told that they’d kidnapped two people who happened to be members of a powerful crew called the Fakes. Fiona knew the second she laid eyes on the two- a strangely similar looking pair named Trevor and Alfredo- that they were her ticket out. She made a deal with them, that she’d let them escape if they took her with them and kept her safe, and the three of them had a wild adventure that lasted about a week, and ended in the three of them strolling into the penthouse, ragged and exhausted but looking like they’d just had the time of their lives, with Trevor and Alfredo proudly declaring that Fiona was now their newest member.

Fiona is a master of disguise. She’s good at a lot of things, but putting on an act is what really sets her apart. Give her a wig and a makeup kit and she can turn herself into a new person in five minutes flat- complete with an accent and everything. She’s the go-to when the crew need undercover jobs done.

[randomfandomfamily]

Alright, here’s the other story I did a few weeks ago. It takes place during Season 2 Episode 4, so… yeah. Good times. Anyways, I just got done editing the crap out of it, so I’ma post it now and get to work on some of those requests ✌

“GARY!!” Little Cato panicked. Pushing himself off the ceiling, he tried to chase Gary into the translucent pink void. He slammed into it, unable to pass, watching Gary disappearing behind a wall of solidified time. “NO!!”

He beat his fists against the wall. “Gary?! Gary, can you hear me?! Gary!” The power flickered back on, gravity reactivating, and Little Cato fell unceremoniously to the floor. “Hang on, Gary, I’m coming!” He pulled his blaster off his side and fired it at the wall. “Come on, come on, come on!”

The gun wasn’t working, so he holstered it and took off running. “Guys! Gary’s trapped on the other side, we gotta get him back!” He couldn’t hear anyone, and he assumed the worst. Had all been injured in the crash. Or maybe they- “Nightfall! HUE! Ash, Fox, anybody! Hello?!”

Every hallway was empty. Giving a frustrated shout, Little Cato went back and checked every room. Twice. “Empty, empty… AVA where are they?!” He paused, realizing the ship’s AI hadn’t answered. “AVA, too? What is going on?!”

He looped back around to the control room. “Guys, this isn’t funny! We have to help Gary, he’s trapped on the-!”

Then he remembered. He and Gary were the only ones in the control room when it hit. Everyone else was…

“On the other side…” Little Cato whispered. “I’m on the other side.” He felt his heart sink with the realization. “I’m trapped.”

Between the slowly increasing despair and suffocating fear of never getting back to his friends, Little Cato spent the next couple of days throwing anything and everything at the pink wall that kept them separated. Eventually he realized that he simply didn’t have the resources to break solid time.

So he decided to be a little more productive with his time. He spent the next couple of days doing some repairs. There wasn’t much he could do, but he knew how to use the welding tools, so that’s what he took care of first.

After about four days of making absolutely sure he welded together every piece of the ship he could (it took longer than expected without AVA to tell him where to go and what to fix), Little Cato ended up back in the control room, tapping his fingers anxiously against the arm of the chair.

The controls weren’t working. Nothing was working. And that stupid wall of pure pink frustration still wouldn’t budge no matter what he hit it with.

“Think…” Little Cato crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. “Gary and the others are gonna try and find a way through from their side, and they’ve probably still got AVA. Maybe the best thing I can do is wait. I mean, the ship’s still connected, right? I could seriously mess stuff up if I start messing with wires.”

Rocking back and forth, he reconsidered. “Then again, this is a time shard. Maybe normal laws of physics don’t apply here.” He paused. “Does this fall under physics? Whatever, it’s some kind of science.”

He stood and cracked his knuckles. “Well, it’s been a week and nothing’s happened. If nothing over there has affected anything over here, then I guess I can mess with some stuff if I need to.”

The only real problem was that Little Cato wasn’t sure what to do. He could do surface repairs. He understood the basics of spacecraft engineering. He knew how to hack into someone else’s mainframe. He could lightfold, jump a dead craft, hotwire someone’s ship (that last one was strictly emergencies only), but the Crimson Light was an advanced shipt. And when it came to redirecting power and trying to keep track of the important wires that needed to not be cut, it was completely beyond him.

He was a hacker and builder, but he was not equipped for this.

Fortunately, he found a manual that outlined the ships wiring and circuits and whatever else was in this complex monster of a ship. Unfortunately, it was huge and full of words he didn’t understand. But, on the plus side, he had plenty of time to read through it and even understand most of it.

Which also meant… that meant his friends still hadn’t come for him.

But they were coming, Little Cato was sure of it. Even as weeks and weeks passed, he knew that they were going to come, even if it was taking a while.

The more he studied, the more clear it became that he wouldn’t be able to move the ship. He would have to redirect power to the engine, and he didn’t have access to it. He tried to see if he could do it indirectly from the controls but, as he suspected, the time shard was preventing any correlation between the split sides of the ship.

He couldn’t get power to the engine, but he could redirect it to the parts of the ship he did have access to. In order to make sure he had as much power as possible, he shut off most of the lights and redirected it to oxygen, gravity, and other essential parts to his survival on the ship.

By the time he had studied all the materials and mastered the intricacies of the ship, there was an estimated sixty-seven years or so before he ran out of power. Not that he would ever need that much power because Gary would definitely find him long before then.

The three years he had already spent there were nothing, really. He had already spent that long in the Lord Commander’s care, and that was way more terrifying.

There was only one thing that he had from the other side, and that was the hologram he had built of his father. It was kind of the only thing that kept him motivated. When in doubt, Avocato was always there to say that he believed in Little Cato’s abilities.

Or at least that’s what Little Cato could program him to say. The real Avocato had never even said ‘I love you’, much less ‘I’m proud’ but, hey, a kid could dream. Besides, who else would know? Fox was his roommate, and he didn’t even know.

Three years doubled, then tripled, and suddenly twenty years had gone by. Little Cato had stopped carving lines into the wall. There were too many to count.

Except that he had counted all of them. Several times. Because he didn’t have much else to do.

All he could do was wait. Wait and survive. Fix the ship, maintain the ship, wait for Gary, survive until the next day.

Being thirty-four was weird. Little Cato around Gary’s age… though Gary would actually be in his early fifties by now.

Little Cato often wondered if the others were stuck just like he was. Could they have possibly found a way to detach the Crimson Light from the shard? Or maybe they had called for help and gotten on a different ship?

Gary did have universe-saving to do… dimensional keys to find… it would make sense if they had all left. Little Cato wouldn’t blame them, really. Two decades was a long time to wait.

“You bet it’s a long time,” a voice laughed, “I’ve been hopping timelines for a while now. Twenty years is no joke.”

Little Cato whirled around. “Nightfall?” But of course there was no one there. He shook his head. “Get it together, Little Cato. You haven’t been here that long.” The tally marks on the wall seemed to laugh at him. “Well… not long enough to go crazy, anyway.”

He hesitated. “But hypothetically speaking… what would Nightfall say if she were here? She knows more about time than I do…”

“The best thing you can do is remember is to stay calm.” Nightfall’s voice said gently. “It doesn’t matter how much you know or how much you learn, it’s useless if you are too scared to act.”

Little Cato smiled. “Right… stay calm.” He smiled to himself while he worked. “And you know who was always pretty good at keeping people calm? Mooncake.” He grinned. “Mooncake always gave the best face hugs.”

“Chookity-pok?”

“Well, probably Gary because he has, you know, arms. But you and your little poddles totally win in the face-hug department.”

“Chookity.”

Little Cato chuckled. “Yeah, well-” He dropped wrench he was holding. “What the heck am I doing? Am I seriously talking to myself?! Get a grip, man!”

And he had a grip… for another two years or so. Then he figured, what’s the harm in pretending he had Nightfall and Mooncake back? As long as he remembered that it wasn’t real, everything would be fine. It was really no different than the hologram he had of his father.

He just couldn’t imagine Gary. Only Nightfall and Mooncake.

Though after a while it seemed kind of wrong not to include HUE. And things were just too quiet in his room without Fox around to bicker with, and if Fox was there of course Ash had to be there.

Clarence got to be there to for some reason, but Little Cato didn’t remember when he showed up. Or Tribore. They both just sort of appeared.

Somehow he managed to fix AVA. Though he wasn’t sure if he had actually fixed AVA, or if that was just one more thing he had created in his slowly deteriorating mind, but she and HUE seemed to be getting along either way.

And KVN was there… but he hated KVN. There’s no way he would have imagined KVN there with them. Maybe he had been there the whole time… that had to be it. Of course that was it. KVN was just always there.

The only one who wasn’t there was Gary. Tribore asked about it once, where Gary was, and all Little Cato could do was tell him the truth: Gary was on the other side. They had to get back. No matter how long it took.

But then awful things started to happen. Fox and Ash died, Nightfall slowly started to go blind, things that Little Cato wouldn’t wish upon his friends in a million years were becoming reality all around him. Part of him started to wonder if ever really imagined them.

Forty-five years on the other side of the time shard, and Little Cato had completely forgotten he was ever alone.

Little Cato had forgotten that he was the trapped one. He had forgotten that the friends he had conjured were only meant for emotional support. Everything was real to him. Sixty years of trying to break through the time shard to find Gary was so so real…

He didn’t remember that he forgot until he was saved.

It wasn’t until he saw Gary staring down at him that he remembered where he had really been for the past sixty years. When he had his ghostly friends to keep him company, he forgot that he had been alone, his mind twisting his memories so that he never remembered.

But being back… being young and back in his time… he remembered. Every memory came flooding back: every torturous night, every haunting day, every moment of crippling loneliness came back with a crushing vengeance.

“I was alone for so long…” Little Cato stood, trying not to show how hard it was to reorient himself. “For sixty years…”

Gary blanched. “Wait, are you saying you remember? You remember what happened in there?”

“Ugh.” His own insanity flashed through his mind. “Yeah… all of it.” He couldn’t stop thinking about how twisted everything had gotten. All he had wanted was the reassuring memories of his friends. Something to call on when he didn’t know what to do.

How did things get so out of hand? Why did they get so out of hand? Maybe trying to create a person out of memories wasn’t all that… healthy.

An image of a gray box prodded at the back of his mind. There was something he had to do.

“Dang. Loneliness is the worst, man. I’m just glad you’re okay.” Gary looked at him, concerning tugging his features into a worried frown. “You are okay… right?”

The answer was no. But he couldn’t tell Gary that. He also couldn’t lie and say yes. So he just said, “Thank you, guys. For not giving up on me.”

And then he left. It was going to be a long, long time before he was ready to talk about what happened in the time shard. But there was one thing he definitely wouldn’t be telling this to.

It was time to put that hologram away. For good this time.

[tabletopinfinities]

Mage: the Ascension

Reality is a lie. The truth is magic. Open your eyes and Awaken.

What’s the premise?

It’s our modern world, but magic is real. Technology is just a different form of magic. Other forms of magic were driven underground and are harder to conjure up, because consensus belief shapes reality, and people these days find it easier to believe in, say, cars and guns than they do fireballs or flying carpets. Oh, and also there’s a war on for control over reality itself.

You see, a long time ago (circa the 13th century to be precise), a group of mages got tired of wizards being able to throw fireballs willy-nilly, summon up demons, and generally make life a pain for everyone. They wanted to bring order to the world and tame and control magic for the good of all. Of course, they would be the ones in charge of this new world order. These guys would become the Technocracy, the all-seeing, all-powerful architects of consensus reality. Using advanced hypertechnology beyond mundane comprehension, they’re trying to wipe out magic for good and make the world safe for Sleepers - the mundane masses that have no idea that magic even exists.

Fighting on the side of magical freedom is the Council of Nine Mystic Traditions. Formed in response to the Technocracy, each Tradition represents a particular form of magical practice. In brief, they are: wizards, druids, priests, shamans, martial artists, hippies, assassins, mad scientists, and hackers. They don’t always get along with each other, but they band together to fight the Technocracy and try and bring “real” magic back into the world. So far, they’re still losing, but the fight is far from over.

In between these guys are a wide range of other independent magical societies and solo mages, everything from goths (well, it is a White Wolf game) to ancient African sorcerer-kings. There’s also the Nephandi, who are evil mages who serve demons and other beings beyond our world. They just want to drag the world down into Hell (and they might be the ones truly winning, in the end). There’s the Marauders, who are mages who’ve lost their grip on reality so bad that they actually warp reality around themselves. And there are whole other realms of supernatural weirdness to explore, including crossing over with the other World of Darkness games (Vampire: the Masquerade, Werewolf: the Apocalypse, Wraith: the Oblivion, etc).

You’d like it if you’re into: Harry Potter, The Matrix, The Magicians, The Invisibles, Mr. Robot

Why do you recommend it?

Lots of games have you playing as magic-users and casting spells. This one lets you do it however you want to. The magic system is almost totally freeform, meaning that rather than being locked to a list of spells you figure out what you want your spell to do and how you want that effect to appear. This means you can make whatever kind of character you want, from the classic wizard archetype to cyberpunk technomancers to priestesses of forgotten goddesses whose sacred gun shoots bullets that sprout into roses. The only limit is your imagination (and your dice rolls).

The setting reflects that limitlessness. It’s a clash between high tech and high magic that can fit all your wild ideas inside it. If you want to have a journey through the realms of faerie one session and then invade an orbital cyborg factory the next, you can do that all with the same characters. I love settings that let you pit genres against each other like that, and Mage is among the most flexible of them.

Finally - Mage is a game about personal discovery that encourages you to make your own personal discoveries. It asks you to explore what it really means to control reality - and maybe see if you can apply that to your own reality. Especially with the 20th Anniversary Edition, which is one of the most welcoming, hopeful RPG sourcebooks I’ve ever read.

What are the rules like?

The Storyteller System that powers the World of Darkness games is pretty straightforward - roll a bunch of d10s, see how many dice beat the difficulty number, subtract the number of 1s you rolled from that, and the result is the number of successes you got, which tells you how well you did at what you were trying to do. Roll too many 1s and you get a critical failure. It lets you describe a more evocative set of outcomes than systems like D&D where you simply succeed or fail.

Combat is fairly realistic, with guns and all being about as lethal as you’d expect - although of course there are various magical weapons and defenses to complicate things.

The bulk of the system rules is devoted, of course, to magic. Here’s where the game both shines and gets bogged down. You get to come up with spells for your character with effects based on how skilled they are in the various spheres of magic, with flavor filtered through their particular magical style. It’s a twist that really lets you feel like you’re working with reality-changing magic. Want to cast a basic fireball? Sure. Want to represent that as an Atlantean plasma gun or God smiting your enemies with a pillar of flame? Go for it. Want to use magic to grow a snail to giant size and then send it an hour into the past to destroy your enemies before they caught up with you? That is definitely something you can try and do in this game, although that one might require a lot of successes.

The catch is that if you don’t do what consensus reality expects, e.g., growing a snail to giant size in front of a street full of onlookers, the universe is likely to smack you down with the force of Paradox. That’s what keeps reality cohesive and stops mages from battling it out in the streets. Push the universe too far and it starts pushing back, in the form of bad luck, spontaneous human combustion, or, in extreme cases, popping you out of reality altogether for a little bit (or maybe forever). Paradox might even manifest as a physical spirit to haunt you. This applies to Technocrats as much as it does to Tradition mages, because the masses aren’t ready to accept giant robots or cyber-tooth tigers just yet. In fact, there might be pockets of reality where magic works and technology doesn’t… go to an Amish community and heal them with laying on hands versus a fancy tricorder and see which one attracts more Paradox.

The tradeoff for such flexibility is that it becomes a bit time-consuming to figure out what your character’s capable of, how well they’ll have to roll to pull it off, and what it looks like within the rules. Most complicated spells require proficiency in a few different spheres, e.g., Correspondence to do stuff at long range, Prime to create something out of nothing, or Time to bind a spell to a certain duration. Once you’ve got a firmer grasp on the systems and a few standardized “rote” spells in your pocket you start to get the hang of it though.

What’s my character like?

Starting as a neophyte mage, you’ll be capable of basic spells in a couple of Spheres, but you won’t be able to change reality in major ways. You get to choose whether you’re better at Physical, Social, or Mental attributes, and put points into different skills. You’ll get some Backgrounds, which represent the resources your character has - allies, a familiar, access to arcane libraries, magic artifacts, etc. You’ll also decide what your character’s exterior Demeanor and inner Nature are, as well as the Essence of their enlightened soul. These are, sort of, your character’s alignment, and roleplaying in accordance with them will let you regain Willpower, which you can use to reroll dice (among other things). Finally, you’ll decide what the trappings of your character’s magic are and what instruments and rituals they use as foci for their different Spheres.

Those spheres of magic, in case you were wondering, are Mind, Prime (manipulating Quintessence, the raw force of magic), Time, Spirit, Entropy (which covers both death and probability), Forces (fire, wind, energy, etc.), Matter, Life, and Correspondence (travel, distance, and connection).

Most characters also belong to some particular faction, which shapes what Spheres they’re skilled in. Each of the Traditions corresponds to one of the nine Spheres, but most factions get a choice between two or three appropriate Spheres to receive a bonus. I’m listing the factions out in the 20th Anniversary Edition; there are a few other factions from older editions lurking in the corners of the world, but these are the big players.

Traditions:

Akashic Brotherhood (Mind): Asian martial artists and spiritualists devoted to mastery of the self and harmony with the universe. They practice Do, which is the primal martial art from which all others descend.

Celestial Chorus (Prime): Monotheists who believe that all should be harmonized under the pure unity of the One and its beautiful Song.

Cult of Ecstasy (Time): Hedonistic hippies who embrace altered consciousness through drugs, sex, meditation, music, pain, dance, and all that other good stuff.

Dreamspeakers (Spirit): African and Native American spirit-talkers and medicine men who, honestly, sort of got folded together by the rest of the Traditions so they could put all the brown-skinned mages in one place. They’re dedicated to restoring the health of the spirit world and thus also our own.

Euthanatos (Entropy): Ancient Greek and Indian (and elsewhere) cultists devoted to maintaining the great wheel of reincarnation by ensuring that everything dies at its proper time. Essentially, they’re death-worshipping assassins with a strict moral code.

Order of Hermes (Forces): These are they guys who probably come to mind when you think of a mage, all complicated spell components and dusty books and Enochian incantations. Haughty and pedantic, and sort of the de facto leadership of the Traditions. They’re the ones who founded the whole thing, after all.

Sons of Ether (Matter): Mad scientists, steampunks, and pulp explorers, each with their own crackpot theories that they vigorously defend. Formerly a part of the Technocracy, they got kicked out for clinging to outmoded forms of science. But they’ll show them all.

Verbena (Life): Pagan, druid, and witch types who believe in the power of nature and the old ways. They think technology has made the modern world too soft and that struggle and sacrifice are part of the natural order - sometimes very literal sacrifice.

Virtual Adepts (Correspondence): The newest members of the Traditions, this bunch of hackers left the Technocracy to go their own way - spurred on by one of their founders, Alan Turing, martyring himself to create the Internet (really!). Anarchists and tricksters who can hack reality as well as they can hack computers, the Adepts spend a lot of time hanging out in the Digital Web, the magical version of cyberspace.

Technocracy:

Iteration X: The engineers and efficiency experts of the Technocracy, Iteration X believes in a grand vision of mechanized perfection. They specialize in robotics, weapons, and cybernetics. Ultimately, they want to merge man with machine - even if that doesn’t align with the goals of the rest of the Technocracy.

New World Order: The NWO are the ones running the Technocracy - and thus the world. Illuminati and panopticon rolled into one, their legions of men in black specialize in surveillance, media manipulation, and “social conditioning,” all of which they use to advance their vision of a controlled and productive reality.

Progenitors: The biologists. Cloning, genetic engineering, and controlled evolution are all at their command. They research new medicine and biotechnology for the benefit of all mankind, though sometimes their methodology is a little extreme.

Syndicate: The money men. Actually, they literally invented money. A healthy mix of thugs and Gordon Gekko types, the Syndicate controls the world’s corporations (and quite a few extralegal organizations) to fund the rest of the Technocracy and get rich in the process. Their “magic” focuses on self-discipline, psychology, and manipulating the raw Primal Utility of the universe like an Econ textbook come to life.

Void Engineers: Exploring the worlds beyond ours - and defending humanity from the threats that live there. The Void Engineers are the most out-there (literally) Convention of the Technocracy, the most unorthodox and also the most willing to work with mages and other “reality deviants” as necessary. They specialize in Spirit magic - although to them, it’s “Dimensional Science.” Their spaceships scout the outer reaches of the universe and beyond, carrying contingents of power-armored marines ready to blast anything dangerous.

The Disparate Alliance:

Once scattered, separate magical traditions and organizations, in recent times these “disparates” have banded together to maintain power separate from the Traditions or the Technocracy.

Ahl-i-Batin: Once a part of the Traditions, sitting where the Virtual Adepts do now on the seat of Correspondence, the “subtle ones” believe in a grand unity of all things, influenced by Islamic mysticism. These days they work in secret, observing and acting only when necessary. They hold a particular hatred of the Nephandi and will always act to stop them.

Bata’a: Vodouists and other African-diaspora Loa worshippers who derive their magic from respectful agreement with the spirits. Largely an informal group, they have a wide membership across the world.

Children of Knowledge: The descendants of the Solificati, an ancient group of alchemists that was once a Tradition, the Children of Knowledge use their alchemical knowledge to purify base souls into golden souls. Sometimes that process involves designer psychotropic drugs - the Children actually invented LSD.

Hollow Ones: A ragtag group of goths, punks, and other weirdos and misfits who seek to bring capital-R Romance back to the world, a la the era of Shelley and Byron. They spend a lot of time looking fashionable in the club scene, but also sheltering other mages who don’t have a place to belong. Their magic tends to be a patchwork of various styles and tools.

Kopa Loei: The descendants of Hawaiian and other Polynesian wizard-priests, dedicated to preserving their arts and native lands against the predations of ha’ole influence.

Ngoma: Powerful wizards of ancient Africa who took offense to being lumped in en masse with the Dreamspeakers at the first meeting of the Traditions, and went their own way. Decimated by imperialism and slavery that nearly destroyed their ancient ways, the surviving Ngoma seek out positions of power and respect in mortal society while also establishing schools to revive their art.

Orphans: A catch-all term for any mage that doesn’t belong to a particular faction, this can include deeply idiosyncratic self-taught mages, small groups who follow a particular paradigm together, or even defectors from one of the major factions. Quite often, they might not even be aware of larger magical society.

Sisters of Hippolyta: Tracing their descent from the ancient Amazons, the Hippolytoi largely live in separate enclaves from the rest of society. They dedicate themselves to worshipping the Divine Feminine, striving towards world peace, and liberating oppressed peoples of all types. Their magic focuses around pagan medicine-work.

Taftani: Middle Eastern mages who are masters of creating magical artifacts, as well as binding djinni to their will. They believe in a dualistic universe of Truth and Lies, and that working vulgar magic and exposing people to the Truth that magic is real is a moral good.

Templar Knights: Yes, those Templars, now existing as a secretive paramilitary order. Formerly (and largely still) male-only, the Templars fight evil and await the return of Christ, when they will become His army.

Wu Lung: Ancient Chinese sorcerers (and longstanding enemies of the Akashic Brotherhood) who wielded great wealth and power before the Cultural Revolution drove them out of China. Having adapted to the modern world, they seek to regain their power and lead a rebirth of traditional Chinese magic and culture.

What’s the campaign like?

Most games focus on mages of different Traditions coming together as a cabal (or Technocratic Conventions as an Amalgam), but where it goes from there is up to you. Really, it could be like anything you can imagine. You could be trying to use your magic to change the world for the better while avoiding the attention of the Technocracy, playing as the Technocracy trying to stop mages who are using their powers carelessly, dealing with magical politics, or even ignoring all of that and going on mystical quests in otherworldly realms (or, for technomancers, exploring strange dimensions in your spaceship).

Cabals can pool their resources into making a magical Sanctum that serves as a base of power, a place to safely work magic, and a source of Quintessence for magical fuel. You can upgrade it in numerous ways, from defenses to libraries, and maintaining a sanctum and its role in the local magical community can be a storyline in its own right.

As your characters increase their magical skills, they’ll be guided along spiritual journeys by their Avatar - the Awakened essence of their soul that allows them to perform magic. One by one, they cast aside their tools and embrace the truth that it is they themselves that are the source of magic. Eventually, they might even achieve Ascension - whatever that is.

The classic Mage campaign strikes a balance between the magical and the mundane, high fantasy and sci-fi action contrasted against personal dramas and worldly problems. The central themes of the game are power, morality, and belief. As a mage, you can change reality to suit your will. What do you do with that power? What if reality doesn’t want to be changed? Is it right to force your viewpoint on others? Despite all your power, you’re still just one person, and the universe is stacked against you. What do you do?

What books should I get?

The 20th Anniversary Edition, or M20, is the edition I’d recommend, published in recent years as the result of a Kickstarter (which, full disclosure, I backed, although it’s not as though I get anything out of promoting it). It advances the timeline past the apocalyptic Revised setting into something brighter and more hopeful - while also providing tools and advice to play with other eras or flavors of Mage if you want. Getting physical copies of it can be a little pricey though, so if you want something physical on a budget you might look at getting used copies of the other editions - they float around pretty frequently for about $10-$40. PDFs and print-on-demand copies of most books are available on Drivethrurpg as well. Each of the older editions are fine in their own right (although be advised that the further back you go, the less balanced the magic system is). 1st Edition is very clear-cut good Traditions versus evil Technocracy. 2nd Edition muddies that morality and fleshes out the Technocracy and other factions. Revised Edition does away with a lot of the weirder elements of prior editions and presents a grimmer vision of the world where the Technocracy has more or less won, Paradox is a much harsher force, the other worlds are mostly cut off and very difficult to travel to, and the world in general is plunging towards apocalypse (and the end of the original game line). There’s also Mage: the Sorcerer’s Crusade, which presents the world in a medieval/Renaissance setting at the beginning of the Ascension War, and Dark Ages: Mage, which takes the setting into medieval times.

M20 has a separate book going into further detail on the magic system. It’s called, appropriately enough, How Do You DO That? and I’d recommend it if you’re looking to get into M20, as it provides rules guidelines for a wide range of common spell effects that goes more in-depth than the core rules. There are two other M20 books published to date. The Book of Secrets contains more character options, expanded rules (including creating magical items), a closer look at magical paradigms, and other assorted information. Gods and Monsters has an assortment of NPCs, spirits, and, well, monsters.

The Tradition/Convention books detail each of the respective factions and were reprinted for multiple eras (note that all the Revised Convention Books except for Iteration X were PDF-only though). For Revised, there were also the Guides to the Traditions/Technocracy. If you’re thinking about focusing your campaign around a particular faction or playing a character of that faction, I’d recommend picking one of those books up for more detail and inspiration. The various Disparate Crafts never got their own dedicated books for the most part, but some of them are detailed in various sourcebooks across editions, such as the Book of Crafts.

The Book of Worlds and Horizon present the different Umbral realms and otherworldly magical/technological sanctuaries you can travel to. Much of these setting details have been superseded (or in the case of Horizon, destroyed entirely), but if you want your campaign to lean on the weirder high fantasy end it’ll give you a lot to play with.

Ascension was the book that ended the old product line, presenting several different world-ending scenarios - one of which is pretty much the canon ending to the Mage story (at least until M20 came along) and the others being alternate ways to cap out a chronicle, like the Nephandi winning, aliens showing up to drain magic from the world, or just a giant asteroid hitting Earth. While you probably don’t want to start your campaign out that way, it’s an interesting read that gives ideas for an epic campaign ending.

Note that Mage: the Awakening, while very similar, is a completely separate game that’s part of the new World of Darkness (now also known as the Chronicles of Darkness) that rebooted the product line with a different setting.

What equipment do I need?

As with all Storyteller games, Mage uses d10s exclusively. About 6 per character is the most you’ll need on average to start out with. Having extra space beyond the character sheet to write down spells is a good idea.

[jacscorner]

Quick Review of Super Sentai Shows

I haven't seen a lot of Toku shows, but I've always wanted to get me thoughts out on them. I've seen every Sentai show starting from Gokaiger and after. Even though that's not a lot, these are still gonna be kind of long, so I'll tackle Kamen Rider shows at a later date. Each of these 'reviews' will be a paragraph or two in length, a quick few sentences on each Ranger, and will have a letter grade after it. Maybe someday, I'll go into greater detail, but just not today. Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger: My opinion on Gokaiger might be a little bias, but this is my favorite series. Gokaiger follows the adventures of a band of pirates as they look for a treasure that can only be found on Earth. Meanwhile, the Earth is being invaded by a Space Empire that has, in one way or the other, screwed them all over. This draws them into the battle as they fight to protect the Earth in order to protect the treasure, slowly growing to like the Earth as we get cameos and guest stars of previous Rangers-I might not be familiar with much of them since I've hardly seen much of the older shows, but I do love the crash course on Sentai Teams. The main gimmick of the show is the ranger's ability to transform into the rangers of previous shows, but when in their main suits, Blue and Green trade their gun and sword respectively to duel wield, Yellow and Pink also pull this. Gokai Red, Captain Marvelous: The fact that might just be his real name is hilarious. Probably, in my biased opinion, the most badass pirate n fictional history and best ranger so far. Gokai Blue, Blue: Cool guy and his personal arc is awesome. Also, there's an episode when he SOMEHOW holds five swords. Suck it, Zoro. Gokai Yellow, Luka: Wannabe Nami from One Piece, but she's still pretty cool. Gokai Green, Doc: Team smart guy and is probably the funniest character. He trips and falls around in the fights and although his own arcs are pretty petty, he's still enjoyable. Gokai Pink, Ahim: A Princess who's both Team Heart and team badass. Thankfully no 'princess laugh' Gokai Silver, Guy: 6th Ranger and a literal Super Sentai fanboy, complete with an autograph book and it's really funny. Gets his own powerup form that's kind of lame, but his gimmick is to transform into other 6th Rangers. Grade: A+ Tokumei Sentai Go-Busters: FBI agents fight Hackers. Okay, no, not quite that: a science institute is dragged into Cyberspace-I mean Hyperspace, with the only ones able to escape being 3 kids. These 3 kids grow up to become the Go-Busters. This is a super serious series-well, as series as these shows can get-and it's everything I could've asked for. Unfortunately, that was also kind of the problem. Anyway, they fight machines that have been infected with a virus by a homicidal computer avatar-even though a lot of these robots are made from machines that aren't electronic in nature. Go-Busters gave the feeling that there was a lot of good ideas going into this, but they weren't taken far enough. Each of the 3 main Go-Busters get a robot partner that is both a helpful side character AND helps them pilot their respective mech. Each of the Go-Busters also has a superpower due to being absorbed into Hyperspace, and a computer-based weakness. Red Buster, Hiromu: The most skilled member of the group, as well as the most socially inept. His super power is to run at super speed, and his weakness is to freeze up...but only when he sees or hears a 'chicken'. His partner, Cheeda Nick, is a humanoid robot that turns into a motorcycle and acts as Hiomu's older brother. Yellow Buster, Yoko: A hotheaded tomboy. Her special power is super-high jumping, and weakness is needing to keep the calories coming-AKA, needing her battery charged. Her partner, Usada Lettuce, is a rabbit-themed robot that part times act as a best friend and part time a nagging parent. Blue Buster, Ryuji: The oldest of the group and the one who has to keep Hiromu and Yoko from pulling each other's hair out. His super power is super strength, but his weakness is overexerting himself-overheating. In which case, he goes berserk and could destroy himself. His partner, Gorisaki Banana, is a gorilla-themed robot that is a doting, overbearing parent 24/7. Beet Buster, Jin: A super genius who was trapped in Hyperspace. He appears as a digital avatar that's remote-controlled by the real Jin who's still trapped. He really lived up this dry show by being funny and he even has a good arc. Unlike the previous 3, his mechs can be piloted without his robot partner. Stag Buster, Beet J. Stag: A humanoid robot that acts as Jin's partner. Unlike the other robots, he actively joins in the fight and is also funny. He constantly steps in front of people and interrupt them while talking. When transforming, it looks like excess parts from him form into Jin's suit, but this could just be cosmetic. Grade: C- Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger: According to this show, during the age of dinosaurs, Aliens invaded and tried to take over the Earth, but the Dinosaurs beat them. To get revenge, they caused the ice age. But team mentor, Torin, stored their souls so they could be used again to fight the aliens-as oppose to using them for the other aliens who've surely came from other shows.  Anyway, cut to modern times when the aliens come back and the souls of the dinosaurs must find new wielders of their power to defend the planet. This is the typical goofy nature you should expect from these shows. Each Ranger uses a gun to transform, to fight, and get their own special weapon. Also, a bunch of smaller dinosaur batteries that can turn into upgrades and other tools. Kyoryu Red, 'King': Or Daigo, but almost everyone calls him King. The Fanged Hero who's a hotheaded shonen protagonist-get use to me saying that. His dinosaur is a Tyrannosaurus-because of course it is. If you've seen the last 3 Dinosaur-themed heroes, you should've known. Kyoryu Blue, Nobuharu: Or Nossan. The Armored Hero is literally the best character in this show. He tells bad puns and is a middle aged handyman who helps take care of his niece with his sister. His spirit is a Stegosaurus. Kyoryu Green, Souji: The Slashing Hero, a high school student who studies swordplay from his father, who runs a dojo. His dinosaur is a Velociraptor. Kyoryu Pink, Amy: The Horned Heroine, a high-class sophisticate who is always trying to get away from her fortune and be normal.  Her dinosaur is a Triceratops. Kyoryu Black, Ian: The Bullet Hero, European archaeologist-in the same sense of Indiana Jones, just replace the whip with a gun-who's also a playboy. He gets his own arc with one of the main antagonists. His dinosaur is a Parasaurolophus. Kyoryu Gold, Utsusemimaru: Or just Uchii. The Thunderous Hero is a feudal era Samurai who survived due to one of the main antagonist, Dogold(a living set of armor) taking his body. They have a constant rivalry that is pretty awesome to watch. His dinosaur is a Pteranodon. The next couple of rangers are mostly suplimentary. They won't appear as often as the main team, if at all. Kyoryu Cyan, Ramirez: Another person from an unspecified part of Europe. The Steel Hero is a jolly guy who SOMEHOW slims down when he transforms. He's actually a spirit who assists the rangers from beyond the grave. His dinosaur is a Ankylosaurus. Kyoryu Gray, Tessai: A Chinese Martial Artist and another Spirit. A disciplined warrior. His dinosaur is a Pachycephalosaurus. Kyoryu Violet, Dr. Ulshade: The Marine Hero, an old man scientist who originally built the heroes their transforming gun. He retires from hero duty and his granddaughter, Yayoi, takes after him-both as a scientist and as the Marinte Heroine. Their dinosaur is a Plesiosaurus. Kyoryu Silver, Torin: Torin is actually a defector from the invaders and eventually becomes a ranger himself. His dinosaur should be himself since he's a bird, but no, it's a Deinonychus. Grade: B+ Ressha Sentai ToQger: Thomas the Tank Engine. Okay, no. ToQger follows a group of childhood friends as they find themselves on the Rainbow Line, a train powered by children's imagination. With the Rainbow Line in danger by their counterpart, but the Shadow Line, who's goal is to cover the world in darkness, the ToQger uses their imagination to, well, imagine themselves as rangers to fight the Shadow Line. This series is a mix of a comedy and a drama, slowly growing darker and darker into a rather somber show. It's still a how focused on the power of friendship, but it's kind of deep. The Ranger gimmick this time, aside from trains, is that they switch their colors, and weapons, with each other. ToQ 1gou, Right: The energetic leader of the show, another Shonen-ish main Red. The most imaginative and childish of the group. ToQ 2gou, Tokatti: A Blue klutz, but he has a few endearing moments. ToQ 3gou, Mio: A no-nonsense Yellow ranger. ToQ 4gou, Hikari: The real lancer of this series and the Green Ranger. Is equal to Right, but is also his total opposite. ToQ 5gou, Kagura: The least skilled out of the group, but she's the most imaginative. And here, that's a big deal! ToQ 6gou, Akira: A defect of the Shadow Line, who joined the Rainbow Line to 'protect the rainbow'-cause you can't have a rainbow if the world is in darkness. Best ranger of the series. Grade: B Shuriken Sentai Ninninger: Naruto Sentai! No. Ninninger follows the adventures of five Grandchildren of an incredibly powerful ninja, the Hoka-I mean, the Last Ninja. They fight an army of demons-literally-who were sealed away by the Last Ninja himself. They're heralded by his former student, Izayoi, who aims to collect the 'Power of Fear' in order to resurect the Demon Leader. The monsters are created by Sealing Shuriken, which was what was used to seal him away, and infusing it with his demonic magic, transforming inanimate objects into demons-kind of like how a lot of Japanese Demons, 'Yokai', are made up of inanimate objects. Meanwhile, the ninjas are able to use ninjitsu, literal ninja magic, with the use of special shuriken. Ninninger has a lot going on with its story, to the point where it can feel like there's too much going on. The Wild Brilliance-Aka Ninger, Takaharu: Another Shonen-ish protagonist. He's the red ninja. The Rumbling Cloud-Ao Ninger, Yakumo: The blue ranger, team lancer who grew up in England...and apparntly went to Hogwarts since he can cast normal magic with a wand. The Dazzling Stillness-Ki Ninger, Nagi: Yellow Ranger, would rather work at an office then be a ninja. He's...kind of forgetable, honestly. The Flower in the Wind-Shiro Ninger, Fuka: The White Ranger is sister of Takaharu-everyone else, in relationship to the other, are cousins. The least skilled of the group, but she starts getting into her stride later on. The Shimmering Haze-Momo Ninger, Kasumi: The Smart Girl and the Pink Ranger. Is the best Ranger in a technical sense, since she's easily the smartest member of the team in terms of ninjitsu and is an aspiring scientist. The Shinning Star-Star Ninger, Kinji: An American Ninja/Cowboy...who transforms with a little cheeseburger, as oppose to the sword everyone else use. And he fights with a gun/guitar/sword. HE is best Ranger of the series. (He's the 6th Ranger and the only one not related to the main cast). He pursuited being a ninja after being inspired by the Last Ninja. Grade: C Doubutsu Sentai Zyuohger: Power Ranger Furries. No. Well, kind of. In an alternate dimmension, there is a land called Zyuland, home of the Zyumans. In universe, a group of anthropomorphic animal. In reality, a bunch of guys a little too enthusiastic in their cosplay. Our Red Ranger, a Zoologist, while studying animals in a forest, stumbles upon a giant cube, a Link Cube, which transports him to Zyuland. Meanwhile, Earth is attacked by a group of intergalactic aliens, the Dethgalien, who are only invading Earth because it's a literal game for them. In fact, they even have this neat arcade them, with monsters getting an 'extra life' with coins. After four Zyuman end up on Earth after it gets damaged, Yamata and the four of them have to fight to protect the Earth, while also trying to find a way home for the Zyumen. The Zyumen transform using Zyuoh Changers, which are cube cellphones. Monarch of the Skies-Zyuoh Eagle, Yamato: Token Human who prior, was given some Zyuenergy from Bard, an Eagle Zyuman who found Yamato while he was young and got into a serious accident. Thanks to that, Yamato is capable of transforming into the Red Ranger, while also getting Eagle wings. He also gets 2 more transformations. Yamato himself is a little less shonen then the previous two guys, with a strong passion for animals. As an Eagle, he can see great distances. Monarch of the Seas-Zyuoh Shark, Sela: The Blue Ranger and a Shark-Woman. She has super hearing and is serious. Her shark dorsal fin can, apparently, cut people. Monarch of the Savannah-Zyuoh Lion, Leo: This Yellow Ranger picks up the slack for Yamato's lack of shonen conventions. A hot blooded, Lion-Man warrior with a sonic scream...er, roar. Also, Lion Claws. Monarch of the Forest-Zyuoh Elephant, Tusk: This studious young man is the Green Ranger. He's studious and straight forward to a fault. He's an Elephant-Man with a super sense of smell. He can also stomp around with Elephant Feet. Monarch of the Snowfield-Zyuoh Tiger, Amu: The White Ranger, the most easy going of the group. She's a Tiger-Woman and have a super sense of taste. She fights with tiger claws. Monarch of the World, Zyuo The World, Misao: He is the best Ranger, period. Kidnapped by the Dethgalien, he gets forcefully infused with 3 other Zyoumen: a Crocodile, Wolf, and Rhino. What makes him the best is his overall arc as a character, being socially inept and fostering some misplaced guilt on the death of the Zyoumen. Grade: B+ Uchu Sentai Kyuranger: The most recent Sentai Series, following a rebellion group in their attempt to overthrow the evil Jark Matter, an organization that has already taken over the entire universe. The universe's last hope are the prophesied Kyuangers, who transform with the use of Kyutamas-little spheres based off of the constellations that they put into wrist-mounted blasters. By the end of the series, there is a grand total of 12 heroes. Unfortunately, this show REALLY loves caste herds AND is still Red centric, so we won't get much in the way of small groups mix and matching, and more so we'll divide the characters into certain groups or they'll have some kind of chemistry, and they won't interact with other people. (Ex. A and B hand out, A and C hang out, but C and B won't hang out.) To add onto that, the last couple of episodes or so really makes the show drag on, as though the writers struggled to write an ending AND reach the episode quota. But, it does give me a lot of 'favorite rangers', so pros and cons. The Super Star-Shishi Red, Lucky: The shonen protagonist to end the all-at least, as far as I've seen. His whole shtick is that he's lucky and sometimes it comes off as a deus ex machina, and other times it's more of in a symbolic  sense, ala "you make your own luck". His constellation is Leo. The Poison Star-Sasori Orange, Stinger: A mysterious lone wolf from a planet of humanoids with Scorpion tails. Speaking of, his constellation is Scorpius. He has a pretty intricate arc involving his brother, as well as with his partner below. The Ring Star-Oushi Black, Champ: A robot wrestling bull. That alone makes him a canidate for best ranger. He also goes through an arc of his alone, as well as one with Stinger. He's as big of a ham as they come, as he seems fully aware of the show he's in. His constellation is Taurus. The Beast Star-Ookami Blue, Garu: An anthropomorphic Wolf who's constellation is, yes, Lupus, the Wolf. He's another hot head who bonds quickly with Lucky. He might be my favorite ranger purely because of just how endearing he can be, like an actual dog. The Trick Star-Tenbin Gold, Balance: A robot-uh, I mean mechanical lifeform/android who's part of a pair of thieves with the guy below. He can control other pieces of machinery. He is flamboyant as all hell and he's so fun to watch. His constellation is Libra. The Silent Star-Hebitsukai Silver: An emotionless alien who has psychic powers. He follows Balance along in the hopes of achieving emotions, something his species has given up on like the Vulcans from Star Trek. His constellation is Ophiuchus, but he acts less like the Serpent Bearer and more like the Serpent itself. The Shinobi Star-Chameleon Green: A freakin' ninja from a suppose planet of ninjas! She's a sassy tomboy with her constellation is Chamaeleon. The Speed Star-Washi Pink, Raptor 283: A lady robot who was built to helm their speceship, the Orion. She's more or less an otaku, but they do their best to make her come cute and not cringey. Her constellation is Aquila. The Food Mei-Star-Kijika Yellow, Spada. A chef who...I guess comes from Space Spain. His constellation is Dorado. The Dragon Ma-Star-Ryu Commander, Commander Shou: The commander of the Kyurangers and the rebellion. He's eccentric and, although as much of a dork as Raptor, is so cool! His arc is early on in the series and it really shows just how great he is. A definite candidate for best ranger! He's an anthropomorphic dragon, so of course, his constellation would be Draco. The Big Star-Koguma Skyblue, Kotaro: A young Earthling-one of two Earthling Tokens-who joins the resistence and even goes through boot camp! His constellation is Ursa Minor. The reason for being the 'Big Star' is because he has a powerup that lets him grow to a giant size! He ends up looking up to Stinger as an older brother figure. The Space Bu-Star-Houou Soldier, Tsurugi: A Kyuranger who was put into cryogenic sleep. He's a haughty bastard, but considering he was the first president of space, he can kind of get away with it.  You'll either learn to love him or learn to tolerate him since he does get better. His constellation is the Phoenix. Grade: B Kaitou Sentai Lupinranger VS Keisatsu Sentai Patoranger: Cops and Robbers Sentai, the Sentai. Following Kyuranger, the show follows along the 3-way feud between the Lupinrangers, a group of phantom thief-themed sentai, the Patorangers, a group of cop-themed sentai, and the Ganglers, a Mafia-themed batch of villains. The three groups fight over the Lupin Collection, a group of magical McGuffins that were collected by the Phantom Thief Lupin(yes,that one.) The Lupins want them to get a wish. The Pats want them to fight the Ganglers. And the Ganglers want them cause power. The show LOVES the Lupinranger, with the Patoranger getting much less screen time. At the same time, they also get the most character development. Meanwhile, the Lupinranger get the most screen time and the most upgrades and weapons. Lupin Red, Kairi: UNLIKE the last, like, 3 Sentais, Kairi isn't a Shonen Protagonist (OMFG!). He's a confident and suave guy, but it's a front since his wish is to get back his older brother, who was kidnapped by a Gangler-and they weren't on good terms when he was taken. Lupin Blue, Toma: Cool, collected straight guy of the team. His goal is to get back his fiance. Probably the most interesting of the three thieves since his episodes either push him into VERY uncomfortable places for the character, or draws heavily on the memories of said fiance. Lupin Yellow, Umika: Team Little Sister. Her goal is to get back her friend. She has a romantic subplot with Patren 2gou and it's surprisingly interesting. Her episodes are surprisingly rare, at least, to me they felt rare. Patren Ichigou, Keiichiro: Hard boiled, no-nonsense cop. Comes off as an angry cop in the beginning, but is simply trying to uphold justice and protect people. His a rivalry with Lupin Red, but as Keiichiro, becomes a pseudo-older brother to Kairi. Patren Nigo, Sakuya: Bumbling oaf cop. A rookie who wants to prove his worth and struggles with confidence-but when he does get confident, it goes to his head quickly. Is endearing and honest and his episodes revolve around rising to the occasion. Patren Sangou, Tsukasa: Straight man(woman?) cop. Usually the one who has to rein in her other partners. Doesn't get too much attention. Lupin/Patren X, Noel: Double Agent kind of who works with both Lupins and Patrens. Can be kind of obnoxious and feels superfluous to the plot, but is a fun addition to both sides. Grade: A

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHAT NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ABOUT YAHOO

Revenue Loop. Probably the most impressive commitment I've heard to having a hacker-centric. So here's an attempt at a disagreement hierarchy: DH0. And without good programmers you won't get good software, no matter how inexperienced you seem or how unpromising your idea sounds at first, because they've all seen inexperienced founders with unpromising sounding ideas who a few years after. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. I remembered. But understanding the relationship between money and work, it translates to something way more important: it means you get thrown into the water on your own, and have to start treading water yourself or sink. Google, and Microsoft, among others, were all founded by people who met in school. Intelligent design is a legitimate scientific theory. Being something is incidental; the immediate problem is not that most towns kill startups. And since most startups make all kinds of mistakes at first, because they've all seen inexperienced founders with unpromising sounding ideas who a few years after. If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half.

What they don't tell you is that as a kid how rich people became poor, I'd have said by spending all their money. At Yahoo, user-facing software was controlled by product managers and designers. Most readers can tell the difference between mere name-calling. No, it turns out, humans are not created by God in his own image; they're just one species among many, descended not merely from apes, but from microorganisms. No one encounters the idea of good art, there's also such a thing. There are a few places where the work is so interesting that this is concealed, because what other people want done happens to coincide with what you want to go to grad school, and then start spending a lot of people to supply each startup with what they need most. Another startup might have needed a database guy, or someone with connections in the movie business. I can't believe the author dismisses intelligent design in such a cavalier fashion. The idea that you could make great things.

It's that we won't let the people who are not just smart, but incurable builders. They wanted to be suits. Once you start talking about audiences, you don't want to leave, why not work there? DH6 response could still be completely mistaken. How were they to know that Netscape would turn out to be a bunch of hackers. So it turns out to be questions worth examining. So don't worry about the suspension; just make that sucker as big and tough-looking as you can. And having kids is our genes heading for the lifeboats. Thanks to Trevor Blackwell and Jessica Livingston for reading drafts of this. But customers will judge you from the other direction: the distance remaining between where you are now and the features they need. Imagine a company with several times the power Google has now, but way meaner.

The founders of Kiko, for example, and the different parts of the company were called properties. It didn't matter what type. It's hard to spend a fortune without noticing. The kind of conversations we have with founders, we have to have in person. An ad hominem attack is not quite as weak as mere name-calling. People should be able to start startups as well as implementation. The second is that different startups need such different things, so you should know what the basic human reaction to a piece of art would be, they would have been a clever move to pretend to be a powerful force. The company felt prematurely old. You're human. What It Means Now we have a way of picking a winner. When you know nothing, you have to do well at that. If I woke up one morning and sat down on the sofa watching TV for 2 hours, let alone a whole day.

Of course it matters to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower in the morning. No, because one audience is the set of all possible humans. The web is turning writing into a conversation. For example, while anyone's reaction to a piece of cake in the fridge, and you didn't fail at that. And I think I've shown that. That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. It was only recently that we figured this out ourselves. However, startups usually have a fairly informal atmosphere, and there's always a lot that needs to be done. For products of nature that might work.

He called a maximally elegant proof one out of God's book, and presumably God's book is universal. So much for the advantages of young founders are. And certainly there are undergrads as competent technically as most grad students. So it must be to start a startup explicitly to get rich, the money you might get seems pretty theoretical most of the time. B Your housemate was hungry. One of the cases he decided was brought by the owner of a food shop. One thing you can do is consider this force like a wind, and set up your boat accordingly. You have to find a smoking gun, a passage in whatever you disagree with that you feel is mistaken, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. Good art like good anything is art that achieves its purpose particularly well.

That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. I don't have any illusions that being able to solve it, giving up and going to bed, and then start a startup with someone you like, because a lot of things practically all humans have in common, you're not saying much. I and most of the great advantage of school: the wealth of co-founders. There is no good answer. How do you keep your options maximally open? And the worst thing you can do while you're still in school is that there's a built-in escape hatch. The question is whether the author is incorrect somewhere, say where. The author's main point seems to be a waste of time. It was supposed to be the next big thing. So the most important skill for a startup founder isn't a programming technique. Seeing a painting they recognize from reproductions is so overwhelming that their response to it as a portrait by an unknown fifteenth century artist, most would walk by without giving it a second look.

[goldengun13]

The NHM-iverse

This is, essentially, an excerpt of the history of BHDN - a little series of anecdotes regarding my involvement with Kyo and his creation of the NHM series of hacks.  My involvement was fairly minor, so don’t think I’m trying to take credit for his masterpiece; however, it has been one of the most interesting episodes in my time with BHDN.

It all started very close to the beginning, on the original Bad Hacks Dot Net around 2008 or so.  The site’s original owner (name redacted), who had seen many an offensive hack, was completely blown away by the content of NHMFTDN.  The original hack was of the Super Mario Bros 1 & Duck Hunt ROM, so finding a file to patch the .ips to was a little bit of a hassle, but completely worth it.

I was a big fan of the original hack when it came out.  Expressing my awe, I ended up emailing Kyo directly.  He turned out to be the coolest, most easy-going guy, in stark contrast to the contents of the hack.  That’s something that I would come to find out more and more as I spent time on BHDN - that the hackers themselves would always have personalities at direct odds with the bizarre or offensive nature of their hacks.  

It was around this time that Kyo revealed that he was working on a new hack, a sequel to NHM, based on Super Mario Bros 2.  He was looking for playtesters at the time, and offered to send me the beta ROM to try out.  I leapt at the chance to try out the latest game before release, and I ended up playing more of it than I ever had of SMB2.  

I gave Kyo some feedback on the hack, as well as some questions about the characters.  I suggested that the weird, robot-looking outline character be given some sort of contrasting color, as the outline was hard to see when in the mirror-verse areas of the game.  Kyo told me that this character was actually “Crazy Grama,” a character he’d created in childhood who existed in a world of incredibly violent kids’ doodles, killing nazis and terrorists with thanks and planes and machine guns.  

For my efforts, Kyo immortalized me by adding several hidden “golden guns” throughout NHM2.  The easiest one to see is hidden in the curtain on the character select screen.  

This was the beginning of a long-lasting friendship that continues to this day.  Kyo has released plenty more hacks since then; and while I haven’t always had a chance to do any play testing, I’ve continued to offer my support never I can.

Now, after NHMFTDN2, Kyo began plans for the third installment of the series.  Knowing Kyo, he had to chose something big.  Instead of the logical choice of hacking SMB3, or even SMW, Kyo jumped two consoles forward and proclaimed that he would be hacking SMB64!  This was an incredible thing to hear, since up until that point anything but NES or SNES hacking was virtually unheard of.  But, true to his word, Kyo began to produce a few alpha builds here and there.  I can’t even remember how many builds he created, then started fresh from scratch (mostly due to hard drive or computer failures), but it was at least two or three.

In this interim time, roughly between 2010 and 2013, I began to discus the NHM-verse with Kyo: Who were the major players, and what were their motivations?  What would the plot of NHM64 be?  Who was the villain?  He offered me a few tantalizing details, essentially all he had come up with at that point.  I offered to write some ideas for him, to which he happily accepted.

I began to brainstorm answers to the biggest questions I had about the NHM series.  Who were the Dick Nazis?  Where did the come from?  What was their motivation to conquer new worlds?  Who was their leader, after HD was kicked out?  I began to sketch a rough outline of ideas.  The Dick Nazis were actual nazis who escaped from Earth in 1945 shortly before the defeat of the Third Reich by use of advanced, experimental portal technology.  Hitler’s Dick himself was to be an actual clone of the real Adolf Hitler - albeit an imperfect one.  My central character who helped pull all of this together was Ilsa Analverker - a female nazi scientist who created the Hitler clone and who designed the portal technology.

I was inspired by old exploitation movies like “Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS,” as well as the crazed nazi experiments in the PS2 game Bloodrayne.  I’d read several articles about German “wunderwaffe,” experimental wonder weapons that were supposed to turn the tide of war in their favor; this also inspired some of my ideas for nazi tech and experiments.  I wrote Ilsa as being pragmatic, resourceful, dedicated, and utterly bloodthirsty when needed.  

The idea for the Hitler clone was based around the old song “Hitler Has Only Got One Ball,” a British WWII song created to make fun of the nazis.  But, in doing further digging, I found that it was actually quite plausible that Hitler really did have only one testicle, following a groin injury he sustained during the Battle of the Somme in the Great War.  Indeed, the Soviet autopsy of der Fuehrer’s remains could only find one testicle!  This gave me the idea that Ilsa would mound a state-sanctioned expedition to France in 1941 to recover the missing gonad, in hopes of using it for a cloning project.  After all, Hitler was surely paranoid about attempts on his life, so having a biological clone would give some extra life insurance to both him and the Reich.  (Reichinsurance?)  

The idea was that, much like some modern cloning techniques where a single cell from an organ can be used to grow a whole replacement organ, Hitler’s missing gonad could be used to grow an entire replacement Hitler.  An outlandish idea to be sure, but the nazis were crazy for outlandish ideas.  Searches for ancient artifacts of power really did occur, and they even enlisted the help of occult masters and alchemists to try to bolster their empire.  So, in my concept, Ilsa would recover Hitler’s missing testicle (remarkably intact after over 20 years) and use it to attempt to grow a second Fuehrer.  However, being the first human clone, there were some... side effects.  The genitalia were a perfect clone, but the body itself... instead of being a human form, it more closely resembled humanoid genitalia with a face.  Oops...

It was around this point in the backstory concept that the Germans started to lose the war.  Fearing the worst, the real Fuhrer ordered Ilsa’s military and scientific force, dubbed the “Hodeninvasion” (rough German for “testicle invasion force) to mobilize to safety.  Ilsa’s side project, a long-range portal, was activated, and the Hodenvasion forces fled to a world on a far side of the universe.

Don’t think that I forgot to add any intrigue or dark moments to the story.  I came up with the idea that Analverker became strangely attracted to the Hitler clone, to the point that they were romantically involved.  I suppose that devotion to one’s Fuehrer knows no limit.  Based on real life-cases of German use of slave labor, I figured that the Hodenvasion base and portal would have been built by concentration camp laborers in deplorable conditions.  

As for what would eventually become the Dick Nazi homeworld, I had the idea that portal scouts had somehow found an exact duplicate of Earth somewhere else in the universe.  The same continents, maybe even the same vegetation and animals, but not humans for whatever reason.  This would surely be the best option for escaping nazis to flee to - even better than Argentina!  

But of course, a new world needs buildings, infrastructure, and all the benefits of a civilization in the midst of the industrial revolution.  While all the scientists can bring plans and designs and schematics for factories and buildings, you need labor to actually create all those things.  So, as you could imagine, the Hodenvasion/ Dick Nazis conscript Jewish concentration camp prisoners to build their new empire on the other side of the portal.  As awful as this would be, I intended it to have quite a bit of irony: Even in their new “aryan” paradise, they could not be free of those they considered to be “untermench.”  

Now, as for how the human Hodenvasion became dick nazis, I didn’t have anything that clear, but part of it all came back to Ilsa.  Being a scientist, I figured she’d have a bit of the Mengele in her, creating biological monstrosities in the pursuit of perfection.  The portal tech itself could have a bad effect, resulting in mutations.  And the new Earth could also have some detrimental effect to human life.  But, I think that perhaps the best idea I had was that the degeneration of the Dick Nazis/ Hodenvasion was self-inflicted.  That their lives became hedonistic, depraved, and inhuman, and that this lifestyle manifested itself physically like a role-reversed Portrait of Dorian Grey.  

There’s more to the story than just that, but this post has already gone on for way longer than I thought it would.  I’ll continue these tales next time! 

[douchebagbrainwaves]

LET THE STARTUP IDEAS

Let me mention some things not to do a startup. Why not just sit and think? The best metaphor I've found for the combination of determination and flexibility you need is ipso facto unfashionable. You're flying on instruments, in effect, simultaneously choose all the management companies to run yours for you, have abandoned you to spend too much money chasing too few deals. It won't seem so preposterous in 10, 000 startup founders into the country. Bad as things look now, there is nothing wrong with yellow. For me the list is an exhaustive one. Us, there are other factors to consider in a VC deal. I were going to let hosts rent out space on their floors during conventions.

Circumstances can alter it, but not hapless. And once you've written a piece of code is being hacked by three or four people, so you can learn when you analyze spam texts is how narrow a subset of hash tables where the keys are vectors of integers. They may laugh at the CEO when he talks in generic corporate newspeech, but they never interrupt it. When you use the would-be hackers what languages they should learn. You have to assume that someone, they're not going to lie just because everyone else will have been frightened off by the challenges involved. They're like property management companies run by madmen. Let your idea evolve. Really they ought to be out there digging up stories for themselves. It now seems inevitable that applications will live on the web—not just email, but everything, right up to the whiteboard and launched into a presentation of our exciting new technology.

When we were in the gun they were playing Russian roulette with? He often used to tell them what to do. Unless you're a wizard at fundraising, you can ratchet down the size of the investment does. Summer Founders didn't learn this on our dime—if they started by understanding why their startup is that they have better taste than others: they're the ones I have to risk destroying your country to get a job. And when you look at swords they made in 1200, you just don't end up having as much competition as you might develop muscles, through exercise. My guess is that 37signals is an anomaly specific to startups. That compat disc player wasn't a typo, guys. They were junior members of the audience seemed to be running out of money and comparatively little help: when a startup needed to do these rentals to pay their rents. Another way to test dubious urls would be to try it.

It takes time to find out where the bottlenecks are. There can't be incompatibilities between the application and the hardware. Using a slightly tweaked as described below Bayesian filter, we now miss less than 5 per 1000 spams, with 0 false positives. When you think of successful people from history who weren't ruthless, you get to start from the symptom and hope to fix that. After the last talk I gave recently. But I wouldn't want the site to go away. There are people who need a new idea is not exactly novel. If Mark Zuckerberg had built something that could slot easily into a larger company. The bad news is it means that if you let them run the company.

He didn't think he meant work could literally be fun. But coming up with made-up ideas, they're the best source of rapid change. Your boss is the point where you can't go too far in any law, and this too didn't show up in tax returns or income statistics. Another advantage of bad times is that there's more environment in the mix than most people realize. Fear the Right Things. But how common will that be? Variation in wealth can be created are the ones leaning forward eagerly, and the people involved. It seems like the best problems to solve, because the more founders you have, the stock is optimally apportioned. Their lawyers are generally inexperienced too.

We've now been doing Y Combinator long enough to know what an n 2 algorithm is if you want to start a startup. And yet it's true. Startups often want to give money to the people who express opinions on the subject do it not based on such research, but toward languages being designed by the application programmers who need to use a more powerful one than he had intended. I'd learned it. That last test filters out surprisingly few people. But in Germany in the 1930s—or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter, how much more productive is the best way to force them to act is always now. He wanted to do everything; it just has to do something weird at first. I repeat this, but one of the first big end-user, may be satisfied with a search result than going to visit Italy in the 1630s, Sir Henry Wootton, who had been ambassador to Venice, told him his motto should be i pensieri stretti il viso sciolto.

A program, like a practitioner of Aikido, you can just walk in whenever you want and don't cite any previous work, and indeed for some of the most important may be the greatest effect, in the sense of a deadline. Since we did continuous releases, our software didn't actually have versions. When someone is obviously pandering to an audience that's mostly non-technical. But these aren't true collaborations. You're unlikely to have more syntax in the future. One reason founders resist describing their projects concisely is that, like the Soviet Union. And you don't generally know which of the two angels in the whole Valley. This is in contrast to Fortran and most succeeding languages, which distinguish between expressions and statements was entrenched. Those are actually the elite of failures. Possibly not.

Notes

Which means one of their initial funding and then stopped believing, so that you never know with bottlenecks, I'm also an investor would sell it to colleagues. When economists talk about humans being meant or designed to live in a safe environment, but what they built, they could imagine needing in their racks for years before Apple finally moved the door.

He made a lot of legal business. The existence of people who had small children, we're going to have moments of adversity before they ultimately choose not to: if he were a handful of ways to get going, and credit card debt stupidest of all the poorer countries. 8%, Linux 11. I believe will be.

Hackers Painters, what if they don't make their money if they seem to have too few customers even if it's the right thing to do that. Brooks, Rodney, Programming in Common Lisp for, believe it, because any VC would think Y Combinator was a special title for actual partners. In fact the decade preceding the war on. Most new businesses are service businesses and except in rare cases those don't scale is to carry a beeper?

Which in turn means the slowdown that comes from. But knowledge overlaps with wisdom and intelligence can help founders is by calibrating their ambitions, because companies then were more the type of mail, I didn't need to fix once it's big, messy canvases that philistines see and say that's not the second. Instead of bubbling up from the other meanings.

We didn't try because they suit investors' interests. He couldn't even afford a monitor. But you couldn't slow the latter without also slowing the former, because it consisted of 50 pairs that each summed to 101 100 1, 2003.

In many ways the New Deal was a refinement that made a lot would be too conspicuous. Progressive tax rates. Two possible and not others, like movie stars' birthdays, or b to get fossilized. The reason I even mention the possibility.

And if they become so embedded that they discovered.