#based partly off job searching advice i found

[sleepywyrldbuilder]

One of my beliefs of how the world works is that everyone is designed to put up with a Specific Type of Bullshit, and everyone and everything is, on some level, at least a little bit Bullshit.

You, yourself, do not need to spend all of your time bending yourself to support other people- There are people you will never, ever get along with- But there are people you can get along with, and even work with, that other people could never do.

I, for instance, can deal with extremely high anxiety people. I have friends who freak out and double guess everything and constantly question how much I like them and judge themselves in front of me assuming that I feel that way about them. That's a way of being that puts a lot of stress on others, and I've seen whole friendship groups disintegrate because of it. I don't mind. It washes off me and I don't get hooked by it. People tell me that I'm a good person to vent to because of it, and I'm glad that I'm there for them.

My mum can deal with grumpy and occasionally conservative old men. My mum is an extremely independent bisexual working woman and very stubbornly sticks to her own principles, but she gets along swimmingly with and even in a way collects these grumpy pensioners, making sure that the institutional and professional wealth of knowledge they have stays in the universe. There's so much history that they carry with them that she just unlocks with the skill of a master lockpick, and even gotten us an "adopted grandpa" who we adore and spend time with. There is often a moment or two of political incorrectness; a reason why sometimes their own children don't really talk to them anymore, that reasonable bit of bullshit that they carry around to avoid feeling anything, but it doesn't matter to my mum. It's not something everyone is suited for, but it's something she excels at.

My sister, still a teenager, can deal with dumb teenage boys so much better than I ever could. She lectures them on feminism and on why their gay jokes aren't okay and why what Andrew Tate says is stupid. She stays righteous and an activist and pushes for equality, but in a way where she can just shut down bigotry and still be invited to the next birthday party. Those types of kids scared me when I was in school, but she doesn't even blink at it.

My dad can deal with overprotective and ridiculous parents. He's the general manager of a company that runs kids drama classes, and if you know what that's like, you know parents in that business can be intense and angry and loud and confronting in a way that is hard to handle delicately, and he does. He has a presence that walking in can lower the tension in a room. He can nod and shake his head and go "I understand" and defuse unreasonable demands like nobody's business. It's a bullshit that someone has to be able to cope with in that world, and he does it well.

Sometimes, whether it be a toxic friend, or a toxic workplace, or culture, you have to check out. It's simply not your clowns and not your circus, and it would gradually kill you to keep trying to force yourself to deal with it all. But sometimes, it is your circus, and you understand the clowns, and it falls to you to make that show the best one this circus has ever seen.

[birdlord]

Every Book I Read in 2019

This was a heavier reading year for me (heavier culture-consumption year in general) partly because my partner started logging his books read, and then, of course, it’s a competition.

01 Morvern Callar; Alan Warner - One of the starkest books I’ve ever read. What is it about Scotland that breeds writers with such brutal, distant perspectives on life? Must be all the rocks. 

02 21 Things You Might Not Know About the Indian Act; Bob Joseph - I haven’t had much education in Canada’s relationship to the Indigenous nations that came before it, so this opened things up for me quite a bit. The first and most fundamental awakening is to the fact that this is not a story of progress from worse to better (which is what a simplistic, grade school understanding of smallpox blankets>residential schools>reserves would tell you), in fact, the nation to nation relationship of early contact was often superior to what we have today. I wish there was more of a call to action, but apparently a sequel is on its way. 

03 The Plot Against America; Philip Roth - An alternative history that in some ways mirrors our present. I did feel like I was always waiting for something to happen, but I suppose the point is that, even at the end of the world, disasters proceed incrementally. 

04 Sabrina; Nick Drnaso - The blank art style and lack of contrast in the colouring of each page really reinforces the feeling of impersonal vacancy between most of the characters. I wonder how this will read in the future, as it’s very much based in today’s relationship to friends and technology. 

05 Perfumes: The Guide; Luca Turn & Tania Sanchez - One of the things I like to do when I need to turn my brain off online is reading perfume reviews. That’s where I found out about this book, which runs through different scent families and reviews specific well-known perfumes. Every topic has its boffins, and these two are particularly witty and readable. 

06 Adventures in the Screen Trade; William Goldman - Reading this made me realize how little of the cinema of the 1970s I’ve actually seen, beyond the usual heavy hitters. Ultimately I found this pretty thin, a few peices of advice stitched together with anecdotes about a Hollywood that is barely recognizable today. 

07 The Age of Innocence; Edith Wharton - A love triangle in which the fulcrum is a terribly irritating person, someone who thinks himself far more outré than he is. Nonetheless, I was taken in by this story of “rebellion”, such as it was, to be compelling.

08 Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis; Sam Anderson - Like a novel that follows various separate characters, this book switches between tales of the founding of Oklahoma City with basketball facts and encounters with various oddball city residents. It’s certainly a fun ride, but you may find, as I did, that some parts of the narrative interest you more than others. Longest subtitle ever?

09 World of Yesterday; Stefan Zweig - A memoir of pre-war Austria and its artistic communities, told by one of its best-known exports. Particularly wrenching with regards to the buildup to WWII, from the perspective of those who had been through this experience before, so recently. 

10 Teach us to Sit Still: A Sceptic’s Search for Health and Healing; Tim Parks - A writer finds himself plagued by pain that conventional doctors aren’t able to cure, so he heads further afield to see if he can use stillness-of-mind to ease the pain, all the while complaining as you would expect a sceptic to do. His digressions into literature were a bit hard to take (I’m sure you’re not Coleridge, my man).

11 The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences have Extraordinary Impact; Chip & Dan Heath - I read this for work-related reasons, with the intention of improving my ability to make exhibitions and interpretation. It has a certain sort of self-helpish structure, with anecdotes starting each chapter and a simple lesson drawn from each one. Not a bad read if you work in a public-facing capacity. 

12 Against Everything: Essays; Mark Greif - The founder of N+1 collects a disparate selection of essays, written over a period of several years. You won’t love them all, but hey, you can always skip those ones!

13 See What I Have Done; Sarah Schmidt - A retelling of the Lizzie Borden story, which I’d seen a lot of good reviews for. Sadly this didn’t measure up, for me. There’s a lot of stage setting (rotting food plays an important part) but there’s not a lot of substance there. 

14 Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy; Angela Garber - This is another one that came to me very highly recommended. Garber seems to think these topics are not as well-covered as they are, but she does a good job researching and retelling tales of pregnancy, birth, postpartum difficulties and breastfeeding. 

15 Rebecca; Daphne du Maurier - This was my favourite book club book of the year. I’d always had an impression of...trashiness I guess? around du Maurier, but this is a classic thriller. Maybe the first time I’ve ever read, rather than watched, a thriller! That’s on me. 

16 O’Keefe: The Life of an American Legend; Jeffrey Hogrefe - I went to New Mexico for the first time this spring, and a colleague lent me this Georgia O’Keefe biography after I returned. I hadn’t known much about her personal life before this, aside from what I learned at her museum in Santa Fe. The author has made the decision that much of O’Keefe’s life was determined by childhood incest, but doesn’t have what you might call….evidence?

17 A Lost Lady; Willa Cather - A turn-of-the-20th century story about an upper-class woman and her young admirer Neil. I’ve never read any other Cather, but this felt very similar to the Wharton I also read this year, which I gather isn’t typical of her. 

18 The Year of Living Danishly: My Twelve Months of Unearthing the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country; Helen Russell - A British journalist moves to small-town Denmark with her husband, and although the distances are not long, there’s a considerable culture shock. Made me want to eat pastries in a BIG WAY. 

19 How Not to be a Boy; Robert Webb - The title gives a clue to the framing device of this book, which is fundamentally a celebrity memoir, albeit one that largely ignores the celebrity part of his life in favour of an examination of the effects of patriarchy on boys’ development as human beings. 

20 The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (And Your Children Will be Glad that You Did); Philippa Perry; A psychotherapist’s take on how parents’ own upbringing affects the way they interact with their own kids. 

21 The Library Book; Susan Orlean - This book has stuck with me more than I imagined that it would. It covers both the history of libraries in the USA, and the story of the arson of the LA Public Library’s central branch in 1986. 

22 We Are Never Meeting in Real Life; Samantha Irby - I’ve been reading Irby’s blog for years, and follow her on social media. So I knew the level of raunch and near body-horror to expect in this essay collection. This did fill in a lot of gaps in terms of her life, which added a lot more blackness (hey) to the humour. 

23 State of Wonder; Ann Patchett - A semi-riff on Heart of Darkness involving an OB/GYN who now works for a pharmaceutical company, heading to the jungle to retrieve another researcher who has gone all Colonel Kurtz on them. I found it a bit unsatisfying, but the descriptions were, admittedly, great. 

24 Disappearing Earth; Julia Phillips - A story of an abduction of two girls in very remote Russia, each chapter told by another townsperson. The connections between the narrators of each chapter are sometimes obvious, but not always. Ending a little tidy, but plays against expectations for a book like this. 

25 Ethan Frome; Edith Wharton - I gather this is a typical high school read, but I’d never got to it. In case you’re in the same boat as me, it’s a short, mildly melodramatic romantic tragedy set in the new england winter. It lacks the focus on class that other Whartons have, but certainly keeps the same strong sense that once you’ve made a choice, you’re stuck with it. FOREVER. 

26 Educated; Tara Westover - This memoir of a Mormon fundamentalist-turned-Academic-superstar was huge on everyone’s reading lists a couple of years back, and I finally got to it. It felt similar to me in some ways to the Glass Castle, in terms of the nearly-unbelievable amounts of hell she and her family go through at the hands of her father and his Big Ideas. I found that it lacked real contemplation of the culture shock of moving from the rural mountain west to, say, Cambridge. 

27 Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of Lusitania; Erik Larson - I’m a sucker for a story of a passenger liner, any non-Titanic passenger liner, really. Plus Lusitania’s story has interesting resonances for the US entry into WWI, and we see the perspective of the U-boat captain as well as people on land, and Lusitania’s own passengers and crew. 

28 The Birds and Other Stories; Daphne du Maurier - The title story is the one that stuck in my head most strongly, which isn’t any surprise. I found it much more harrowing than the film, it had a really effective sense of gradually increasing dread and inevitability. 

29 Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Faded Glory; Raphael Bob-Waksberg - Hit or miss in the usual way of short story collections, this book has a real debt to George Saunders. 

30 Sex & Rage; Eve Babitz - a sort of pseudo-autobiography of an indolent life in the LA scene of the 1970s. It was sometimes very difficult to see how the protagonist actually felt about anything, which is a frequent, acute symptom of youth. 

31 Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party; Graham Greene - Gotta love a book with an alternate title built in. This is a broad (the characters? are, without exception, insane?!) satire about a world I know little about. I don’t have a lot of patience or interest in Greene’s religious allegories, but it’s a fine enough story. 

32 Lathe of Heaven; Ursula K LeGuin - Near-future sci-fi that is incredibly prescient about the effects of climate change for a book written over forty years ago. The book has amazing world-building, and the first half has the whirlwind feel of Homer going back in time, killing butterflies and returning to the present to see what changes he has wrought. 

33 The Grammarians; Cathleen Schine - Rarely have I read a book whose jacket description of the plot seems so very distant from what actually happens therein. 

34 The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network; Katharine Losse - Losse was one of Facebook’s very earliest employees, and she charts her experience with the company in this memoir from 2012. Do you even recall what Facebook was like in 2012? They hadn’t even altered the results of elections yet! Zuck was a mere MULTI-MILLIONAIRE, probably. Were we ever so young?

35 Invisible Women; Caroline Ciado Perez - If you want to read a book that will make you angry, so angry that you repeatedly assail whoever is around with facts taken from it, then this, my friend, is the book for you. 

36 The Hidden World of the Fox; Adele Brand - A really charming look at the fox from an ecologist who has studied them around the world. Much of it takes place in the UK, where urban foxes take on a similar ecological niche that raccoons famously do where I live, in Toronto. 

37 S; Doug Dorst & JJ Abrams - This is a real mindfuck of a book, consisting of a faux-old novel, with marginalia added by two students which follows its own narrative. A difficult read not because of the density of prose, but the sheer logistics involved: read the page, then the marginalia? Read the marginalia interspersed with the novel text? Go back chapter by chapter? I’m not sure that either story was worth the trouble, in the end. 

38 American War; Omar El Akkad - This is not exclusively, but partially a climate-based speculative novel, or, grossly, cli-fi for short. Ugh, what a term! But this book is a really tight, and realistic look at the results of a fossil-fuels-based second US Civil War. 

39 Antisocial: Online Extremists, Techno-Utopians, and the Hijacking of the American Conversation; Andrew Marantz - This is the guy you’ll hear on every NPR story talking about his semi-embedding within the Extremely Online alt-right. Most of the figures he profiles come off basically how you’d expect, I found his conclusions about the ways these groups have chosen to use online media tools to achieve their ends the most illuminating part. 

40 Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm; Isabella Tree - This is the story of a long process of transitioning a rural acreage (more of an estate than a farm, this is aristocratic shit) from intensive agriculture to something closer to wild land. There are long passages where Tree (ahem) simply lists species which have come back, which I’m sure is fascinating if you are from the area, but I tended to glaze over a bit. Experts from around the UK and other European nations weigh in on how best to rewild the space, which places the project in a wider context. 

FICTON: 17     NONFICTION: 23

[weia-yo]

Alright, so typically for the secret santa I draw something but I’m very excited for the chance this year to write a fanfic. This is for Winter @frankpanioncube who requested an Asgore/Reader fic; as someone who also loves Asgore I’m more than happy to oblige. This is only the first planned chapter of the fic, I’ll make sure to upload the next chapters over the coming days/weeks but in the meantime I wanted the first chapter to feel complete on it’s own. I hope you like it!

And I wanted to give an extra thank-you to @undertalesecretsanta for hosting this event once again, it’s always a fun experience. Thank you so much!

Make Our Garden Grow

It's a nice sunny day, and you look over at the pile of crumpled paper. You have a few talents, you can admit that. This wasn't one of them, and you’re a bit out of your depth here.

Unfortunately as much as you’d rather admit defeat and foist the task onto someone else that wasn’t much of an option; according to your boss there already was a florist who quit with no notice. As her personal secretary (however often that changes depending on who needs more assistance that month) the task fell to you.

It's not that you hate flowers, as some of the more eccentric coworkers assumed when you didn't jump for joy at the opportunity, it's just. You figured when you went to work at the Embassy that you'd get a shot at really getting to help. Even the menial tasks like photocopying documents or filing things or even getting coffee had a demonstrable benefit for the people who actually did Important work for monster-human relations.

This? Designing and arranging bouquets for an office party?

Flowers are alright, even awesome sometimes, but you have a hard time seeing this as really being all that worth it when there are so many other things you were sure needed to get done.

Oh well. It's not like your boss is wrong, this is still a task that needs to be done and you are available.

But that doesn't solve the problem of not knowing what you're doing. You're gonna need some help.

A quick internet search later, past some options that seemed entirely too extravagant and beyond your non-existent skill level, you found a blog that had some fairly simple arrangements. Still a bit out of your league and knowing your tendencies to cut corners, you could go for some advice.

The blogger seemed friendly when you were going through his posts, you could only hope he was just as friendly in direct conversation.

aaaaa: excuse me, i hope i'm not bugging but i'm trying to make a flower arrangement for a party at work and i have no idea what i'm doing, can you give me some advice?

Gar-Dad-ner: Howdy! of course, I'd be more than happy to help!

Wow, fast! This guy (well, probably guy if the username is any indication) sure seems dedicated to this thing. Or maybe he just has a lot of free time? Oh how you wish you could still relate to-there's another message, Focus.

Gar-Dad-ner: A good place to start is knowing what colors you're going to use. you'll find you don't tend to need that many different types of flowers to make a good arrangement. Gar-Dad-ner: If it's an office party this will especially help, in my experience their taste tends to lean to the professional, less fun and colorful side. Gar-Dad-ner: Of course i mean no offense! It's not my personal taste but to each their own!

You had to laugh. The Embassy is actually one of the least oppressive work environments you've been employed at, but even the best workplaces seem to have a minimum requirement for a stifling and overbearing upper caste. Still...

aaaaa: XD aaaaa: honestly, they're not That bad. i think my coworkers can handle a little fun :D

Gar-Dad-ner: That's good to know! Gar-Dad-ner: Well, you could mix in a more obvious flower, especially as a pop to whatever colors you decide to go with. Gar-Dad-ner: I'm rather biased but my favorite flower to add is the Golden Flower. Gar-Dad-ner: Ooh, my favorite arrangement would have to be one made with golden flowers and lavender! Gar-Dad-ner: I never had the chance to work with lavender until recently, it’s quite a gorgeous flower. Gar-Dad-ner: They just seem to work so well together, don’t you think?

A bit much to take in at once but you aren’t about to complain. And that arrangement itself might actually be perfect for what you need; of course a Golden Flower would be a good match for a party celebrating The Embassy's work, far more subtle than your initial disaster-in-waiting plan to use Echo Flowers. Huh, Golden Flowers. Is he a-?

Gar-Dad-ner: Ah, forgive me, I can sometimes get over-excited.

aaaaa: what? dude, no, that's nothing to apologize for! aaaaa: this is already a lot of help, i don't know dick about flowers- *Backspace.* aaaaa: this is already a lot of help, you seem to really know your stuff! aaaaa: if you don't mind is it alright for me to use this design? i can credit you.

Gar-Dad-ner: Oh that won't be necessary, it's quite a simple arrangement and i can hardly claim ownership! I'm honestly just flattered you want my help, and if you'd like I'd be more than happy to give you more advice on it.

aaaaa: deal, but i'm not about to pretend i'm good at this so you're getting all the credit.

This is nice. You still aren’t super into the whole project, but if it means getting to keep talking to this guy who seems like a total sweetheart (ok maybe a little too early to call that, you've talked for maybe 5 minutes max but Still), you think maybe this can be a good experience.

Asgore strode through the halls of The Embassy on his way to yet another meeting, already stressed by the day's events. His assistant, a short blue dragonoid covered in what Asgore assumed was the latest MTT-Brand Perfume based on the thick layer of glitter, traveled alongside and rattled off a report penned by Ambassador Frisk and Co-Ambassador Papyrus he'll need to relay in a few short minutes.

He was trying to listen, it was important for his duty, but he felt like his head was going to explode. His time Underground was filled with more than his fair share of hardships and he was glad to have it be far behind him, but never in that cave did he Ever have to deal with someone So Rude and Stubborn and-

Asgore stopped, his assistant running full-speed into the back of his legs before falling straight back in a rather impressive pratfall and a startled yelp. Asgore paused for a moment before blinking out of his daze.

"Oh no, I am So sorry, Clawdio!" He reached down to help Clawdio up. As he did so, he glanced to the vase of purple and yellow-no, Golden Flowers.

Delicately placed among sprigs of lavender, baby's breath and lemon leaf, carefully selected and arranged. Whoever made this seemed to have put in quite a bit of effort to make something so precious, so perfect it was like it was made for him...

The thought brought a smile to Asgore for the first time that day though he quickly pushed it away. Just a pleasant turn of fate. A nice stroke of luck that he was able to see on this day.

"Erm... Your Majesty?"

"Hmm? Oh! Sorry, Friend. Again. It has... been quite the day."

Asgore looked over Clawdio once more to ensure they were truly unhurt before being shoved back down the hall towards the meeting room he was now dangerously close to being late for. And yet, he couldn't stop smiling even if he tried. His thoughts drifted to the pleasant conversation he had earlier in the week.

"Clawdio, I'm afraid I'm not quite as eloquent as I'd like to be, and if it's not too much to ask I would like you to keep an open ear in case I start veering off topic."

He wondered if he would ever speak to that person again. Asgore had interacted with many people through his gardening web page (how long would it take for him to get used to the word Blog?) and aside from the odd vulgarity they were typically cordial, even friendly. But 'aaaaa,’ whatever their real name was, seemed different. He hoped he wasn't projecting but they seemed to actually Want to talk with him.

They didn't just tolerate when he'd ramble, they encouraged it. They cared enough to want to do a good job and Asgore suspected it had very little to do with an actual interest in the subject and only partly had to do with wanting to fulfill a workplace obligation.

Ah well. There wasn't much he could truly do about it. If they never spoke to him again, if they really were only interested in their job... he'd be a little hurt, of course, but he'd appreciate the time nonetheless.

They stop for real in front of the room where Asgore's next meeting will be. With his smile unwavered he opens the door and walks in.

[newstfionline]

Headlines

WHO Issues Warning As Daily Caseload Grows (Foreign Policy) As dense crowds of protesters gather around the world, and New Zealand announces a return to life as usual, it’s easy to forget that a pandemic is still raging. On Monday, the WHO recorded the largest daily increase in new coronavirus cases since the pandemic began, 136,000 in total; 75 percent of new cases came from just ten countries, mostly in the Americas and South Asia.

Stress is skyrocketing among the middle-aged (Marketwatch) If you’re middle-aged and you’re thinking, “I don’t remember everyone being this angry and miserable 20 or 30 years ago,” you’re not wrong. A recent study confirms what many people in later middle age already feel: We really are much more stressed than middle-aged people were back in the 1990s. The good news? As we get older our levels of stress will go down again. We’ll be happier in retirement than we are in our 40s and 50s, even with health issues. Older people experience fewer stressors and are able to cope with them better, says David Almeida, a psychologist and professor of human development at Pennsylvania State University. Meanwhile, the simplest answer is to move more. “My advice to people is to move when you are exposed to stress,” he says. “Moving, physical activity, is probably the best stress reducer.”

After Protests, Politicians Reconsider Police Budgets and Discipline (NYT) In an abrupt change of course, the mayor of New York vowed to cut the budget of the nation’s largest police force. In Los Angeles, the mayor called for redirecting millions of dollars from policing after protesters gathered outside his home. And in Minneapolis, City Council members pledged to dismantle their police force and completely reinvent how public safety is handled. As tens of thousands of people have demonstrated against police violence over the past two weeks, calls have emerged in cities across the country for fundamental changes to American policing. The pleas for change have taken a variety of forms—including measures to restrict police use of military-style equipment and efforts to require officers to face strict discipline in cases of misconduct. Parks, universities and schools have distanced themselves from local police departments, severing contracts. In some places, the calls for change have gone still further, aiming to abolish police departments, shift police funds into social services or defund police departments partly or entirely.

U.N. General Assembly won’t meet in person for first time in 75-year history (Washington Post) For the first time in the United Nations’ 75-year history, world leaders won’t convene in New York for the annual U.N. General Assembly meeting this September. U.N. General Assembly President Tijjani Muhammad-Bande explained Monday that an in-person gathering during the coronavirus pandemic would be impossible because world leaders typically travel with large delegations of aides and security personnel, making it hard to keep the numbers of attendees at events low. “A president doesn’t travel alone, leaders don’t travel alone,” he said. The session will instead take place remotely, though U.N. officials have yet to say exactly what that might look like.

Mexico’s Leader Rejects Big Spending to Ease Virus’s Sting (NYT) Across the globe, governments have rushed to pump cash into flailing economies, hoping to stave off the pandemic’s worst financial fallout. They have mustered trillions of dollars for stimulus measures to keep companies afloat and employees on the payroll. The logic: When the pandemic finally passes, economies will not have to start from scratch to bounce back. In Mexico, no such rescue effort has come. The pandemic could lead to an economic reckoning worse than anything Mexico has seen in perhaps a century. More jobs were lost in April than were created in all of 2019. A recent report by a government agency said as many as 10 million people could fall into poverty this year. Yet most economists estimate that Mexico will increase spending only slightly. Hostile toward bailouts, loath to take on public debt and deeply mistrustful of most business leaders, Mexico’s president has opted largely to sit tight.

Cuba almost coronavirus free (Foreign Policy) Cuba—a country that prides itself on its health system—has almost vanquished its coronavirus epidemic, according to official data. It has recently averaged less than ten cases per day and on Monday went nine consecutive days without a reported death from COVID-19. “We could be shortly closing in on the tail end of the pandemic and entering the phase of recovery from COVID,” President Miguel Diaz-Canel said over the weekend.

Spain makes masks mandatory until coronavirus defeated (Reuters) Wearing masks in public will remain mandatory in Spain after the country’s state of emergency ends on June 21 until a cure or vaccine for the coronavirus is found, Health Minister Salvador Illa said on Tuesday.

This round’s on us, says Malta (Reuters) Residents of Malta will be given $112 vouchers by the government to spend in bars, hotels and restaurants in an effort to revitalize the tourist industry. Tourism accounts for a quarter of the Mediterranean island’s GDP but it has been at a standstill since mid-March when flights were stopped during the coronavirus emergency. Flights to a small number of countries will resume on July 1 but they exclude big tourism source markets Britain and Italy.

Russia rejects Iran embargo (Foreign Policy) Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has called for “universal condemnation” of the U.S. campaign to pass a permanent arms embargo on Iran through the United Nations Security Council. In a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Lavrov called the U.S. attempt to hold Iran to the confines of the Iran deal while the United States had already broken the deal was “ridiculous and irresponsible.”

Moscow’s strict coronavirus lockdown turns lax overnight (Washington Post) In a sudden about-face from one of the world’s strictest coronavirus lockdowns, Moscow dramatically eased restrictions Tuesday, abolishing the city’s digital-pass system for travel and allowing salons and most other nonessential businesses to open. Schedules for when Muscovites were allowed outside based on their address have also been done away with after just one week. Restaurants and cafes will be allowed to serve people on verandas starting June 16 and nearly all restrictions will be lifted by June 23—the day before Russia’s rescheduled Victory Day parade on Moscow’s Red Square. The city’s walk schedules and requirements for wearing face masks outside have increasingly been ignored by residents, and Moscow authorities might have been feeling the pressure from small businesses that have been closed since late March with little government aid to sustain them.

Tracking the origin of the coronavirus outbreak (Daily Telegraph) Coronavirus may have broken out in the Chinese city of Wuhan much earlier than previously thought, according to a new US study looking at satellite imagery and internet searches. The Harvard Medical School research found that the number of cars parked at major Wuhan hospitals at points last autumn was much higher than the preceding year. It also found that searches from the Wuhan region for information on “cough” and “diarrhea”, known Covid-19 symptoms, on the Chinese search engine Baidu spiked around the same time. It has led researchers to suggest that the outbreak began much earlier than December 31, the date the Chinese government notified the World Health Organization of the outbreak.​

North Korea cuts off all communication with South Korea (AP) North Korea said it was cutting off all communication channels with South Korea on Tuesday, a move experts say could signal Pyongyang has grown frustrated that Seoul has failed to revive lucrative inter-Korean economic projects and persuade the United States to ease sanctions. The North’s Korean Central News Agency said all cross-border communication lines would be cut off at noon in the “the first step of the determination to completely shut down all contact means with South Korea and get rid of unnecessary things.” North Korea has cut communications in the past—not replying to South Korean phone calls or faxes—and then restored those channels when tensions eased.

The Palestinian Plan to Stop Annexation: Remind Israel What Occupation Means (NYT) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is pressing for annexation in conjunction with the Trump administration’s peace plan, which at least ostensibly contemplates an autonomous Palestinian entity as part of what it calls a “realistic two-state solution.” Mr. Netanyahu has vowed to annex up to 30 percent of the West Bank, and could do so as early as next month. But to the Palestinians, annexation flouts the ban on unilateral land grabs agreed to in the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, and would steal much of the territory they have counted on for a state. For that reason, they say it would kill all hope of a two-state solution to the conflict. In response to the annexation plan, Mr. Abbas renounced the Palestinians’ commitments under the Oslo agreements last month, including on security cooperation with Israel. The strategy aims to remind the Israelis of the burdens they would assume if the Palestinian Authority disbanded, and to demonstrate that they are willing to let the authority collapse if annexation comes to pass. The Palestinian Authority says it will cut the salaries of tens of thousands of its own clerks and police officers. It will slash vital funding to the impoverished Gaza Strip. And it will try any Israeli citizens or Arab residents of Jerusalem arrested on the West Bank in Palestinian courts instead of handing them over to Israel.

[the-energon-hole]

How would the TFA autobots react to finding out that not only does Megatron have a sparkling, it's literary the smallest and cutest sparkling they have ever seen? It's like a lil angel?

((A/N - This actually took me a long time to write because I wanted to individualize the scenarios in here, I wanted to have the bots doing normal things and then just run into the child and be bewildered. Anyway, enjoy!))

❗Long post, continued under “Read More” tag❗

Optimus Prime

-He was just out for a drive on the outskirts of the city where all the warehouses and storage buildings were located, it was mostly empty minus a few workers loading and unloading trucks, it was one of the reasons why he came out this way sometimes. The solitary sometimes helped him clear his racing processor of thoughts that plagued him about his past. Did he do enough to save Elita-One? Does he really deserve the title of Prime? Was he doing right by his ragtag team of Autobots? Those thoughts were hated when he heard the undoubtable, audio splitting screams, of a sparkling. That can’t be right though? After trying to pinpoint the noise for a minute he found the little blobby thing behind one of the buildings surrounded by overturned oil barrels and what looked like chewed on tools- the poor thing was probably hungry and looking for some food. As he picked up the little ball of mewling protoform he couldn’t help but notice the little thing looked like… Megatron? No wonder it’s starving, the dirty Decepticon wouldn’t know how to take care of a sparkling if it was able to talk and tell him what it needed, he can fix it though. He might not be an expert on sparkling care, but the least he can do is give it a nice full tank of fuel and a place to rest away from this cold and dank alleyway, besides he had to admit the little thing was pretty cute how can he say no to that face? It turns out he was naturally a great caregiver, and Ratchet liked to tease him about how that was why he seemed to be forming a collection of wayward bots- he had a natural caring and nurturing nature that he or Ratchet couldn’t deny any longer.

Ratchet

-He had no idea what was going on, one minute he was just hauling some spare parts to their hideout, and the next minute he was instinctively following the sounds of a distressed sparkling. All his years in the thick of a brutal war has caused his body to act on its own accord when it came to the premise of a hurt soldier or distressed citizen, if he had time to stop and think he would have rationalized that it couldn’t have been a real sparkling, a sparkling hasn’t been born since Bumblebee came off the line all those years ago. He was about to halt hsi search until he saw something shining in the sunlight inside some bushes and shrubbery, he should’ve known better than to look, but his curiosity was strong and he couldn’t help but see. Pushing back the branches with his arms he felt air get stuck in his vents as he was staring down at a big pair of sparkly doe eyes that just felt like they were looking directly into his spark. The little thing smiled at him, and motioned for him to that it wanted to be lifted up, and when he did so he noticed a few injuries and bruises on the soft protoform flesh that was exposed to the elements. They were still to young to begin forming their own protective layer of armor so it wasn’t a wonder how this sparkling was injured, he was just curious how and why it was out here all alone without a caretaker. It hit him the moment he took a little closer look at the sparkling he was holding in his arms, they held the same markings and colorings that the warlord Megatron possed… in fact, it was rather telling of why this sparkling was abandoned in the middle of nowhere in the first place. He took the young one back with him to nurse it back to health as best he could, but it was Optimus’ idea to try and get the thing the help it needed to survive.

Bumblebee

-He was feeling bored and cooped up inside the base by himself- Bulk was off doing his art thing, Prowl was out in nature meditating or some baloney, Optimus and Ratchet were discussing battle plans or whatever, and Sari was busy with her Father doing science junk. To alleviate his boredom and unannounced loneliness? Drive and practice and become the world’s fastest bot and the world’s fastest car- he thought about even getting a new alt mode, one that wasn’t so bulky and slow. It was all going great until he had to skid to a screeching stop when some blob waddled into the road. He was forced to transform to stop in time as he skid to a stop next to the offending object that caused him to burn out and scratch his new brand new paint job, he felt his system stop for a split second as he came faceplate to faceplate with a sparkling. He didn’t know what to do as the little thing grabbed at his face and babbled at him in broken mores code as it tried to tell him what it wanted. Did this thing look like Megatron? Oh, Primus, it did look like Megatron! He panicked and jumped back a she feared that the big war lord might be nearby as well, but through his startling he scared the sparkling and caused it to scream and screech like they do when they crave comfort. His audio receptors were in pain as he let instincts he didn’t know he had take over as he scooped the little bundle of protoform into his arms and began rocking it back and forth. Once it stopped screaming he looked down to see the sparkling staring up at him with a warm smile he felt his spark melt in his chest- this was a weird feeling he has never had before, it must be that nurturing nature he has heard some bots had, he just never pegged himself as having those kinds of feelings.

Bulkhead

-He was feeling stuck when it came to his acclaimed artistic genius, he was stumped and couldn’t decide what he wanted to paint next, so he decided to take Prowl’s advice and go on a nature walk to clear his processor out by the lake. It was pretty out he’ll give Prowl that, but other than the great view this plan was all washed up, it did not inspire him to do anything- the only thing it inspired was a ped ache as he had to hike in areas where his alt mode wouldn’t fit around the thick brush and big trees. He was about to call it quits on finding some kind of inspiration out here but the noise of something in the trees up above him took his attention away from his failed trip of inspiration and… was that a sparkling? It couldn’t be… could it? It had to have been because he was pretty sure human children weren’t able to make leaps that large in distance” besides, watching that blob closer it looked like the small thing had a similar appearance to Megatron. He should be more concerned for the safety of the sparkling, but he couldn’t help himself in the current moment, as watching the little one run free and wild without a care in the world triggered that inspiration he was looking for. He was glad he packed all his art supplies with him in that moment as he sat down to paint whatever it was that came to his processor and it seems the cute little sparkling was naturally drawn to him as it got more curious by the second and wanted to know what it was he was up to with such strange looking tools. Once he was done with his art the sparkling had long since passed out next to him out of exhaustion from jumping in the branches of the trees, it was then that he decided that against his better judgment, that he couldn’t just leave the little thing out here alone- that would be cruel and unkind, and no one deserves to be abandoned like that. Besides, what’s the worst that can happen? This little cutie loomed like they would never harm any kind of life form, not even those flying insects that buzz around and get in your face.

Prowl

-After finding out Sari’s true identity as part Cybertronian, he couldn’t help but blame himself over the lost protoforms that must have gotten into the hands of the Decepticons. Unmolded and completely innocent youths being corrupted and manipulated into playing a part in some mad mech’s cruel and inhumane war games- he can see why his master was disappointed in him wasting a potential life when it was his time to pass. It was one of the reasons he isolated himself so often, he was teaching himself a new trick, a special technique he was trying to master that would help aide in the search and rescue of any lost proto forms that may have been stolen from the sanctuary of the ninjabots.  So far his search efforts were fruitless after so many attempts at trying to sense such innocent energy, but once he felt that unmistacablentwong in his spark he knew his efforts were not in vain. He latched onto the signal so tight in fear of losing it and sped off in the direction of its origins without telling anyone where he was going. To him, this has nothing to do with the others, the way about him and his redemption for those mistakes he made way back when. To his surprise when he finally located the source of the energy that it wasn’t a blank protoform in which he found, but rather it was a full one that molded into the form of a sparkling that bad the resemblance to the warlord Megatron. The fiend must have found a blank protoform and attempts to clone himself but failed due to his lack of understanding how the protoforms actually worked. The sparkling turned to him with bright optics and made a very happy chortling sound that made bis spark melt within his chest, how any monster can abandoned a helpless little one sl far from civilization was beyond his understanding. It doesn’t matter now, he was here to take care of the sparkling, as this was partly his fault just as much as it was Megatron’s- he will never abandon this little one no matter how rough it gets, as this is his burden to bare for messing up so many times in his past.

(09/07/18)

[darkmindsthinktwistedthoughts]

A Different Time pt3

Warning: Scientific Nerdy Ninja, strong language

MasterList

---

Chapter 3 – Tactless Advice

It was a bit of a shock to see my friend standing before me but there was still no doubt that it was him. Yukimura turned around and gave me a happy smile and a wave.

“Hey Sasuke long time no see.”

Finally reaching his side we share a small fist bump before walking towards the Inn where I have my room.

“Why are you here Yukimura?”

“Hey what’s with that? You not want to see me?” He pulls a small pout answering my question with a question.

“It’s not that, I’m always happy to see my bestie you know that. I’m just surprised because you have no business here as far as I can remember.” There was no reason for Yukimura to be here. Azuki was where he had been given orders to seek out information in not all the way out here in the back of beyond. Also, he was on a break. Lord Shingen called it time off for good behaviour. It sort of made it sound like an early release from prison.

“Yeah that… Lord Kenshin was getting all worked up and so Lord Shingen cut my time off from spying a bit and sent me here to check on you so I could report back that you are ok. It has been nearly a week you know?” Yukimura tilted his head as he looked at me.

Drawing a mental tally of time spent traveling, then being thwarted in my attempts to gain access to the Daimyo’s residence, I realised he was right. My previous estimate on time for this mission had racked up a number of delays. The image of her popped up in my head. What on earth was that about?

“I’m sorry to have been the fuel that drove you into having to come and check on me.” I shook my head a bit, attempting to clear the image from my mind whilst also apologising.

“Oh, don’t give me that I wasn’t that worried. To be honest I’m glad to get away again Lord Shingen is driving me mad with his constant sneaking around looking for sweets and chasing every woman he can find in town. Don’t get me started on Lord Kenshin, I think that man is starting to go even crazier. You know he challenged a member of kitchen staff to a sword fight the other day because he was given the wrong tea set?” Yukimura sounded exasperated as he described the situation at home.

“That does sound pretty dire. I’m sorry you had to go through all of that alone.” I held my tone together somehow whilst simultaneously apologising and trying to avoid sniggering at my poor friend’s experience. I knew it could be bad our Lords seemed to require babysitters, if I’m honest though Lord Shingen is more laid back. Lord Kenshin whilst a brilliant man, is also an acquired taste much like his prized sake and pickle plums combination.

“No, you’re not! I can hear you smirking even if your face hasn’t cracked into one. Anyway, what’s taking you so long? Thought you said it was an easy in and out job.” Yukimura put his arm on my shoulder dragging me towards him in a conspiratorial fashion.

“I would prefer to have this discussion inside.” He nodded in agreement and followed me inside. The owner of the inn was a very nice old man and he managed to arrange for Yukimura to have a room near mine. Bowing in gratitude we left the front of house retreating to the back and into my room.

---

After several cups of tea, and a carafe of sake, Yukimura finally had been clued in on all that had happened. And now in a typical Yukimura fashion had exploded into a full range of emotions that would put a modern-day actor to shame if they had been told to recreate it.

“So, you are telling me that a female ninja who had been attacking you for the last few days invited you to her camp and you just went along with her?” His jaw hanging open like that made him look a little like a koi in a pond.

“Yukimura you are getting the wrong idea.”

“Wrong idea? Sasuke man seriously. It’s basic survival, you don’t just follow your enemy.” Yukimura smacked his palm onto his forehead in frustration.

“But she isn’t my enemy.” We had been going in circles with the same topic for a while now. I had been up all night and was planning on retiring to my futon as soon as I arrived back to my room but with the arrival of Yukimura I had rejected the idea until we had finished talking.

“So, what you fancy her?”

“Pardon?” His adamant tone of voice as he said that caught me off guard and I nearly repeated my blunder from earlier with her by inhaling my tea.

“You like her. You know as a woman. Ack don’t make me spell it out man seriously I haven’t had enough to drink to have that conversation with you.” Yukimura had turned red all over his face right the way to the tips of his ears. It was an endearing quality in my friend. He found something so uncomfortable to talk about and yet still attempted to do his best and talk about them regardless of his own embarrassment. I however wasn’t entirely focused on that right now. I was trying to assess the accuracy of his statement. How do I feel about her? I don’t even know her name.

“I would have to say that based on current levels of understanding and data that I have gathered on the subject that there may be a possibility, given the right circumstances and all the varying factors involved. That is to say the increased levels of adrenaline and norepinephrine in me causing my heart rate to increase, that I could possibly find myself in an infatuated state with her at some point in the future.” I spoke as I tried to process my own feelings and thoughts into words.

I had taken to studying the social interaction of people after I arrived in this era, partly due to trying to fit in for work purposes but also partly because the way in which couples interact in this time seemed to be more open and easier to study. There were not the modern issues of embarrassment about all PDA situations. It was an intriguing notation to me that I could compare romantic entablements in the Sengoku period to modern era entanglements.

“So, you want to have sex with her then.” Yukimura blurted out as he rolled his eyes.

“Yukimura there are times your level of understanding and tactlessness astound me.” I had often experienced Yukimura and his outbursts of tactlessness but that had been with women present.

He didn’t usually do something similar when we were in private. Or maybe it was because this was not a topic that normally involved me directly. It was normal for us to talk about everything and anything and naturally the topic of females did arise from time to time but it was more generalised. Yukimura seemed to actively avoid relations with women except for casual hook ups and although I can say I could see the appeal I also knew deep down it was not something that I would really enjoy past a basic chemical level.

“Well yes or no?”  Yukimura had leaned forward to look into my face. Clearly the sake had relaxed him enough to forget the idea of personal space.

“It isn’t as simple as that.” I sighed as I pushed myself to stand and retrieve some sake for myself. If we were to continue this discussion regardless of time of day I was going to require something stronger than tea.

“Sure, it is. Sasuke we are living in a world of uncertain futures. You could die at any minute. My point is if you want something you are going to have to be willing to take a risk.” Yukimura was always sincere and his voice right now also carried with it the weight of personal experience and a desire to help. I found my mind racing once more and the image of her rose again in the sea of thoughts and queries. What do I want to happen?

---

Yukimura eventually left my room in search of food and left me to get some sleep. It was now much later and I was watching from a window as the blue and purple hues of twilight changed into the darker shades of night. It was nearly time to go to work.

I gathered my swords strapping them onto my back in a way that meant I could move even if it did make navigating in the crawl spaces of a ceiling awkward. I strapped my throwing knifes onto my leg and made sure I had an adequate amount of smoke bombs and ground spikes tucked into my tunic. Leaving the room via the window I hopped from roof top to tree to rooftop and balcony until I reached a quite street and dropped to the ground to walk on terra firma.

My mind wandered back to the conversation earlier and my unanswered questions bubbled up again to the surface of my mind. Could I handle leaving here and the possibility of not seeing her again? Does she feel the same? Could she feel the same?

Well we had only just met and just because we were both from the future was no guarantee that she would be attracted to me. Also, she might already have someone she is romantically attached to. The idea my logical brain had put up as an issue to my curious emotional internal discussion made me feel a little like the ground spikes in my tunic had imbedded into my chest.

I stopped at the corner of the intersection between the road leading into town and the road that led to the compound. There were guards in the area and although they didn’t seem to be particularly well trained it would have been reckless to assume that they couldn’t get lucky. Lord Kenshin’s training had resulted in me developing skills that built on what he called “natural abilities.”

When I asked to be trained as one of his Ninjas it wasn’t an immediate yes. I had saved his life and Kenshin knew that, but he wanted me to prove I was worthy to take on the tasks of a ninja in training. It took about 4 months of him running me like I was some sort of pack animal crossed with delivery boy.

The menial tasks he gave me blended in with basic training for strength and agility before finally he declared he would agree to me training on the proviso that he himself took care of my training personally. It was brutal.

I had so many bruises and cuts from the first year in training before I was strong enough to at least block a full Kenshin force style attack and rebuff his katana in order to get away. I had nightmares to start with a shudder ran up my spine just thinking of the sneak attacks. In modern-times we didn’t have sword wielding men randomly appearing actively trying to hurt you at every opportunity. It was like something from a pink panther movie crossed with a Texas chainsaw massacre.

Drawing back from my musings and memories, I watched as the two guards on patrol walked past me and slipped out of my hiding spot hauling myself up int a tree near the compound wall and swinging myself towards the stone fortifications.

– Cough, Cough –

Oh, fantastic. I flattened against the top of the wall and looked below me. I had managed to land above another guard. He was leaning against the wall smoking a pipe, the trails of smoke rising towards me in the darkness made my nose tickle. I suppressed a desire to sneeze and moved slowly crouched low along the wall away from the guy taking a smoking break.

It’s amazing how easily you can move when someone isn’t trying to throw something at you. The thought caused me to smile beneath my scarf and I scanned the area looking for my point of entry. It should be on this side but on the second floor. The building itself was two stories high, it wasn’t unheard of but it was a rarity in this era.

Clearly this Daimyo was as bad as rumour had you believe. Over taxing to gain more wealth and spending it on lavish bouts of self-indulgence and opulence. If Lord Kenshin had been here he would have cut down the second story of the manor himself. The idea of Lord Kenshin going toe to toe with a strong building made me feel amused. However, I also knew that for the God of War, even if his opponent was a brick wall he would still attempt to win. Something about the building and the amount of men on patrol guarding it had settled into the back of my mind since I first saw the place and it was still causing an uneasy feeling in me. What am I missing?

Rounding the walls, flitting between shadows I finally lined myself up with the entrance I was looking for. I say ‘entrance’, in actual fact it is just a small enough gap in one of the rooms of the castle. I don’t know why but the window there was always just a little open with its shutter put in place over it on the inside. Taking my chances that no one will see me, I dived onto the ledge by the window and pushed the shutter with my hand through the gap. It was loose and didn’t seem to make a noise so I entered in through the window and lowered myself soundlessly to the ground inside.

– Gr…mmm… –

There were moaning sounds of a someone in the darkness. Please tell me I haven’t just landed in someone’s bedroom while they are ‘preoccupied’. My eyes adjusted to the loss of light in the room and I could see the outlines of a few people but this was wrong. They were lined along the walls and either laying or sitting in place hardly moving. There was a very small lamp by what looked like the door to the room and I decided to light it and illuminate my curious mind. Almost as soon as I managed to light the lamp I regretted my choice.

“What the Hell?”

---

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HERE'S WHAT I JUST REALIZED ABOUT PRESSURE

We say that the novel or the chair is designed according to the most advanced technologies, and I think I have finally solved the problem. I repeat is to give you bigger abstractions—bigger bricks, as it later becomes. It would be easy to fix. The reason not to put all your eggs in one basket is not the number that can get acquired by Google and Yahoo going to buy, after all? Anything you might discover has already been invented elsewhere. These can get a company airborne for $15,000. Which is of course a way to work faster. It spread from Fortran into Algol and then to both their descendants.

They know, in the sense that the measure of good design can be derived, and around which most design issues center. One of the startups from the batch that just started, AirbedAndBreakfast, is in NYC right now meeting their users. You can't get it from the poor, not to be so cruel to one another.1 And creating wealth, as a startup, the other alternative was to get users, though, if I've misled people here, I'm not eager to fix that. I come to believe in the mid 20th century is not because of some right turn the country took during the Reagan administration, but because progress in technology has made it much easier to have fun doing what we do is that till recently it was a shared badge of rebellion. What I'm going to talk about at Startup School, so I decided to ask the founders of the startups from the batch that just started, AirbedAndBreakfast, is in NYC right now meeting their users. One of my first drawing teachers told me: if you're bored when you're drawing something, the drawing will look boring.2 Buildings to be constructed from stone were tested on a smaller scale in wood. I am more fulfilled in my work than pretty much any of my friends who did not start companies.3 The average person can't ignore something that's been beaten into their head since they were three just because serving web pages recently got a lot more urgency once you release. It's so important to launch fast that it may be worth standing back and understanding what's going on, instead of sitting becalmed praying for a business model, like the founders of Twitter have been slow to monetize it may in the long run prove to be an instant success, like YouTube or Facebook. They'll decide later if they fail.

Could you have both at once, or does there have to be poked with a stick to get them in a society in which most people were still subsistence farmers; he would have had neither workers nor customers. PG, Thanks for the intro! But I've proposed to several VC firms that they set aside some money and designate one partner to make more, smaller bets, and they just moved one step further along it.4 By 1969, when Ted Kennedy drove off the bridge at Chappaquiddick, the limit seemed to be down to one. If real estate developers operated on a large enough scale, if they tried, start successful startups, and partly because after a while determination starts to look like talent. Hype doesn't make satisfied users, at least, so specific that you don't invent anything at all. But ambition is human nature.5 What's so unnatural about working for a big company. The startups we've funded so far are pretty quick, but they weren't crazy.6

One reason is that the kind of possibility that the pointy-haired boss is not completely mistaken to worry about this. Once again, anyone currently in school might think this a strange question to ask.7 Humans also seem designed to work in groups, and what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it also has to be some baseline prosperity before you get a silicon valley is China. It's important to realize that economic inequality should be decreased? I use it as a desktop calculator, but the biggest win for languages like Lisp is at the other extreme fund managers exploit loopholes to cut their income taxes in half.8 Now the default exit strategy is to try lots of different things.9 Determination implies your willfulness is balanced by discipline.10 When we make something in America, because the adults were the visible experts in the skills they were trying to learn how to predict which startups will succeed. Startup School. When I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of pressure to use what are perceived as standard technologies.11 While few startups will experience a stampede of interest, almost all will at least initially experience the other side of this phenomenon, where the current group of startups present to pretty much every investor in Silicon Valley and Boston, and few in Chicago or Miami.

Why? Exactly. We do this with YC itself. You also have to be a job. A good example is the airline fare search program that ITA Software licenses to Orbitz. The big successes are so big they dwarf the rest.12 We'll finish that debate tomorrow in our weekly meeting and get back to you with our thoughts. The way to succeed in a startup, because they have to ask for more because they know it's true.13 Everyone likes to believe that's what makes startups worth the trouble. Where had these questions come from? There's no manipulation in that.14

Notes

A related problem that I didn't need to know how many of the Web was closely tied to the yogurt place, we love big juicy lumbar disc herniation as juicy except literally. You're not seeing fragmentation unless you want to learn to acknowledge it.

Not all big hits follow this pattern though.

Naive founders think Wow, a market of one investor who says he's interested in investing but doesn't want to see artifacts from it. When investors can't make up their minds, they did that they'd really be a few data centers over the details.

Particularly since many causes of the Italian word for success. Don't be evil, they are public and persist indefinitely, comments on e.

The solution was a great one. As Anthony Badger wrote, If it failed.

That I was living in cities.

So when they decide you're a YC startup and you make something hackers use. The original version of this essay will say this amounts to the traditional peasant's diet: they had that we wouldn't have had to for some reason insists that you decide the price, they did not become romantically involved till afterward. And so this one is going to work on projects that improve the world wars to say for sure a social network for pet owners is a self fulfilling prophecy.

Google Wave. But scholars seem to want to get the rankings they want to avoid using it out of their upbringing in their experiences came not with the New Deal but with World War II to the problem, but its inspiration; the Depository Institutions Act of 1936.

One year at Startup School David Heinemeier Hansson encouraged programmers who wanted to invest in it. If it failed. Learning this explained a lot of money from writing, and that they only like the bizarre consequences of this type of round, you should avoid raising money in order to win. If you extrapolate another 20 years.

Dealers try to be some things it's a harder problem than Hall realizes. Come From?

At this point. To consider behaving the opposite way as part of a cent per spam. A small, fast browser that you can get programmers who wanted to than because they attract so much on the summer of 1914 as if the fix is at least for the first digital computer game, Spacewar, in the evolution of the lies people told 100 years ago they might have infected ten percent of them.

It's not a programmer would never even think of a correct program.

The few people plot their own page. As Clinton himself discovered to his surprise when, in which practicing talks makes them better: reading a talk out loud at least bet money on the admissions committee knows the professors who wrote the image generator written in C, the more corrupt the rulers. Rice and beans are a lot heavier. 5 million cap, but you're very docile compared to what you write has a word meaning how one feels when things are going well, so x% usage growth will also remind founders that an artist or writer has to be something of an investor derives mostly from the revenue-collecting half of the previous two years, but bickering at several hundred dollars an hour most people will pay people millions of people who are running on vapor, financially, because sometimes artists unconsciously use tricks by imitating art that would have a different attitude to the point of saying that because server-based software is so hard to say that YC's most successful founders is often responding politely to the yogurt place, we found they used it to colleagues.

Where Do College English 28 1966-67, pp. 1886/87. Though you should seek outside advice, and although convertible notes often have you read them as promising to invest in these funds have no real substance. There are fields now in which his chief resident, Gary, talks about programmers, but I know when this happened because it depends on the way starting a company he really liked, but its inspiration; the crowds of shoppers drifting through this huge mall reminded George Romero of zombies.

Thanks to Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Hutch Fishman, John Collison, and Robert Morris for the lulz.

[because-its-important]

transitions & transformations

i. the rest of my batch at RC

I spent the first six weeks of my batch at Recurse Center in an out-and-out sprint. I learned Python, built and released projects, and wrote blog posts every week. I wasn’t sure where my limits were, but I was determined to find out - preferably by overshooting them, then adjusting after the fact.

A curious thing happened. I kept finding that I was more than capable of starting and finishing projects, especially when I had a firm mental image of the end goal. There were at least as many unexpected good-turns as there were setbacks, and I certainly didn’t come up against any inscrutable barriers. Mostly the challenge was in overcoming the distance between a thing that doesn’t exist and a thing that does, which I was able to sort out pretty handily through a consistent application of effort across time.

Who’d have thought?

A selfie taken on my birthday, which also happened in the last few months and was really great!

The second half of my batch was not so visibly productive - with the exception of The Question Game. The Question Game is a simple game designed to help groups of people get to know each other better IRL. I designed it with my friend Brittany a few years ago as an icebreaker when we found ourselves in a group of folks who knew us but didn’t really know each other. The game only really needs a method of generating random numbers for a small but arbitrary group size, but building it out as a toy webapp was a good excuse to get practice working with a JS-only stack. I learned React, got a lil more familiar with node, and even went as far as to attach an otherwise completely unnecessary PG database and Sequelize ORM. You can see the code for it here. Outside of this project, however, I didn’t publish any code. I didn’t publish any writing, either.

So I’d like to take a moment and shine a bit of light on the work that I did during the rest of my batch.

🌒 🌓 🌔 🌕 🌖 🌗 🌘

First, I made the decision to leave community.lawyer, the social impact startup I co-founded in 2016 following the Blue Ridge Labs Fellowship.

I’m happy to report that I left on the come up, which seems a rare and privileged thing for a founder to be able to say. Gaining traction in a hyper-specialized industry like legal tech takes a gargantuan amount of sustained forward momentum, and I departed just as we began to reap the fruits of our labor. In the last few months community.lawyer has reached final approval on partnerships a year in the making, won federal grants we’d submitted to in 2016, and every day our software is being used to help connect people who have legal needs with credible lawyers. Our first two partners were exactly the types of legal organizations at the heart of our mission: the Justice Entrepreneurs Project and the DC Reduced Fee Lawyer & Mediator Referral Service.1 Based in Chicago and Washington DC respectively, these orgs are specifically chartered to deliver quality services at rates that more Americans can afford. I am so proud. ⚖️

Second, I started my first ever job hunt as a software engineer. Wowee, this was scary! I knew that I had to prepare for interviewing, which meant a) getting my career change narrative straight, b) studying Data Structures & Algorithms 101, and c) learning how to perform my handle on both of these in a live, semi-adversarial environment.

At one point during my batch my laptop broke. I read through this wonderful illustrated book during the two days it was being fixed.

In order to direct my search I also had to craft a set of selection criteria of my own. Foremost: “What good will my work do for the world?”2 Additionally, “What degree of access will I have to supportive mentors?”

Getting started with interview prep was a challenge, at least partly because I had so many options for where to start. But I did get started! I read Cracking the Coding Interview, I did the free trial and weekly free problems on Interview Cake. I attended a few group mock interviews at Recurse Center and signed up for a 1-1 mock interview with an RC alum. Her name is Leah, and she’s amazing - the superbly friendly and encouraging Comp Sci TA I wish I’d had years ago. 💚Brittany also set up mock technical screens for me with her pals, Leaf and Ian. They were the vanguard against my outsized anxiety about programming for an audience and they each took the time to give me solid feedback.

Third, I extended my batch at Recurse Center by another 6 weeks. I had decided early on I wouldn’t extend (for no real reason) and stuck with this decision up until two days before my batch ending. A small group of folks - Lily, Connor, Alicja and I - went to NYX in Union Square to try out lipsticks. We played with different colors and finishes (satin! matte! shimmer!) for half an hour or so. There came a point when I looked up, glanced across the narrow makeup store at my beautiful friends’ beautiful faces and thought, “You know, you don’t have to leave yet, right? What’s the rush?” I’d already accomplished my primary goal, to forcibly rework my identity as an engineer, but it sure seemed that I could stand to reach for a second one. That night I decided to extend my batch, with the intention of sampling a more open method of self-directed learning, i.e. with a little more chill and a lot less panic. Specifically, I wanted to practice connecting meaningfully with my limited supply of social energy.

In my bonus six weeks, I: gave three talks (2 planned, 1 impromptu) under encouragement from Ayla and Lily, learned to juggle thanks to instruction from a fellow RCer, Edward, who also loaned me a book about learning, made it into weekly Feelings Check-in (read as: opt-in support group) fairly regularly, picked my first ever lock, saw a live-coding show and then later attended two live-coding workshops (one on TidalCycles, another on Super Collider), sat in a dark room and played howling wolf clips while Microsoft Sam read grimoires aloud, got my hair braided for the first time in a decade, made dumplings and DJ’d for a dinner party, connected with folks about queer-poly relationships, gave fiery advice, and received compliments so earnest and rational and persistent that it was difficult to refute them.

Zine fair plus Lightning Bolt concert inside a movie theater in Times Square??

I also put my interview prep to use and interviewed with a handful of Recurse Center partner companies. Job searching meant squaring off against impostor syndrome and a ton of related anxieties in rapid succession. I successfully choked most of that down when it mattered, though, and it was only a couple short weeks before I received my first offer.

To that end, I’m super happy to say that I’ll be joining Blink Health as a Fullstack Product Engineer! Blink Health is a healthcare startup in SoHo. They make it easier for people to afford prescription drugs, especially for those with limited insurance plans or none at all. These savings aren’t trivial either: an extra $50 can spare someone from choosing between groceries or medicine that week, and for some folks Blink saves many times that. I’ll be starting at the end of this month. ✌️🤓

The last two years have been a wild ride: participating in a social impact fellowship and accelerator, busting my product chops and learning web dev to get a public benefit company off the ground, then diving into four months of self-directed learning at Recurse Center. I’m really looking forward to having some externally imposed structure again. Real health insurance, too.

ii. some hard truths

I made a few radical life changes in 2016, like getting involved in activist spaces, dating more, biking everywhere, building strong friendships, going capital-B Boogying, programming full-time. As I carried those changes forward through 2017, I began to notice a lot of mental and emotional reconfiguration happening to me.

Did you know that along its way to becoming a butterfly, a caterpillar nearly completely liquifies inside its cocoon?

Psychological growth is confusing, full of false starts, and generally painful. You’ve got the static pain of stretching beyond your limits, the pleasure-pain of feeling an old knot finally release, the frustrating pain of stubbing your toe because some helpful asshole has been rearranging your psychic furniture when you weren’t looking. There’s the more dramatic knife-in-the-gut pain of realizing that just because you’re growing doesn’t mean the people closest to you are, and that now in certain cases what you previoulsy regarded as friendship actually looks a whole lot like run-of-the-mill exploitation or even emotional abuse, if you're being honest, and it's a realization that only hurts more because it’s so irredeemably cliche and boring. And despite all that pain you gotta go ahead and grow anyway, claw your way out of the relative comfort of ignorance. Transcendence may not be the only show in town but afaik it’s the one most worth watching.

Prior to attending Recurse Center I’d spent lots of time exploring my surroundings and cataloguing people and places worth coming back to. My view of myself did change (and positively!) as a consequence. But sooner or later, ya get tired of the taste of low-hanging fruit.

So, armed with the bookshelf of a philosophy grad and a burgeoning psychoanalytic vocabulary begging to be let off leash, I decided to use my time at RC to try confronting a few of my Hard To See truths in addition to becoming a better programmer.

Here’s what I’ve found so far.

Truth #1: People like me a lot. This causes me problems.

I’ve been metabolizing this one for some time. I remember having a conversation with Brittany in January of 2016. I don’t remember what social anxiety I’d been vocalizing, but I must have been worrying that someone “hated me.” Brittany cut me off, exasperated in the way that only a friend can be in the face of utter delusion: “No one hates you Nicole! You’re always worried that people don’t like you and it’s never true!”

I carried that admonishment with me through two years of voracious friendship-building. On the whole, seeing that people do in fact enjoy and seek out my company has curbed the most egregious overreaches of my social anxiety. But reckoning with my anxiety honestly has also meant acknowledging that my compulsive instinct to withdraw from social situations is also a protective (if suboptimal) response to a few very real dangers.

Most acutely: being friendly, generous, and intensely empathetic makes me a ready target for users. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt for as long as I can, which makes me proportionally susceptible to being taken advantage of and then gaslighted about it. A lifetime of socialization as a petite woman don’t help, neither. This leads to a pattern where, semi-regularly, I look up and take stock of how someone has been treating me and realize that the answer is Very Badly, For Quite A While. This in turn leads to rough periods of cutting ties and moving on. Ideally I’d like to be be able to filter bad actors out sooner, but I also want to stay open, giving, and hopeful beyond reason. Those desires are fundamentally at odds with each other - raising vs. lowering one’s defenses - but it’s clear that I need to come up with a strategy that balances both.

More broadly, though, I operate under an ever-present dread of inevitably disappointing everyone who knows me. Whether people project onto me because they already like me or like me more because they project positively onto me, I am extremely sensitive to the fact that when people meet me the conception they form has waaay more to do with what they want to find than what’s actually there. My body is a surface readily projected upon: young, female-shaped, ethnically ambiguous, small, smiling. These well-intended projections cause me the most trouble when people see me interacting socially; they’ll witness fifteen minutes of seemingly effortless extroversion on my part and extrapolate out massively. As far as they’re concerned I’ve got plenty of social energy to spare, and if I don’t spend it hanging out with them, it must be because either my friendliness is fake or I don’t like them.

Pretty much none of this is conducted consciously, of course, but it still creates a lot of unnecessary pressure that I can’t pretend not to feel and resent. I know there are people who dream about attaining this kind of “popularity” - to be assumed Cooler than one truly is - but getting buffeted around by folks’ totally unexamined, unarticulated psychological desires mostly sucks.

Truth #2: I’m non-binary.

I’ve also spent a very long time resisting this one. Two decades on the rack, easy. As such, the story of getting here is long. Perhaps one day I’ll tell it. 😛

The short of it, though, is this: I’m probably at least as much of a boy3 as I am a girl. Outside of where my life has been mutated by the chronic background radiation of sexism, “benevolent” and otherwise, I don’t strongly identify as a woman. Furthermore, I find the two-gender system to be infinitely more alienating than comforting. Gender is a social construction designed to impose order on the natural messiness of sexual experience, and as far as I’m cool with that, I am decidedly Not Cool with the “normal” state of affairs, i.e. aggressively shoving whole human beings into an absurdly reductive false dichotomy.

Between its either-or-ism and its forced assignment, the traditional approach to gender reveals itself to be obviously bullshit to anyone who spends more than a few minutes thinking about it. Its boundaries are arbitrary, inconsistent, and generally ill-fitting at the level of individual experience, which why they require such an outrageous amount of coercion and bodily violence to enforce. As much as other folks want to participate in a system of ritualized violence I guess they are free to? Personally, I’d prefer to see it actively dismantled.

If gender is to be saved it’ll be by subverting it, taking it apart, remaking it into something life-affirming. Not the dehumanizing garbage we’ve got now.

As of yet I don’t have any plans to change my presentation because I don’t fuckin’ gotta!

I do have a preference towards They / Them pronouns, but She / Her is still fine. For most of my friends this isn’t going to be at all surprising nor will it in any way negatively impact our relationship. Anyone who needs me to just-be-a-girl, however, can expect turbulence.

Truth #3: My righteous anger is justified and I am good at using it to help others.

I have felt conflicted about my anger for a long time. Since a very vocal childhood I have been regularly frustrated by prejudices and injustices, and I was frequently the first voice of dissent against them, whether that meant challenging adults or my peers. Unsurprisingly, I became well acquainted with the standard strokes of the backlash.

When you are confronting bigotry in a mixed environment, the voice of the status quo will generally manifest in one of two ways:

Gaslighting, e.g. “you are wrong to have said this at all, obviously I am a Good Person, you are just imagining that what I said sounded like XYZ, honestly how could you even think this, as a matter of fact it is I who is offended!”

Tone policing, e.g. “you’re too upset about this! after all, I, the person who did Fucked Up Thing, am perfectly calm about Fucked Up Thing, so any amount of anger makes you irrational by contrast, and I get a raincheck on whatever this is about!”

I know these responses are repulsive. I know they are merely the signs of a weak and imperiled ego acting out of fear. And yet I still spend an inordinate amount of time second-guessing my own anger. Gaslighting and tone policing are a favored weapon of the status quo because they work, and they work in direct proportion to how agreeable their target wants to be.

content warning: the following segment talks about sexual harassment and assault

About couple weeks ago I had the misfortune of being sexually harassed at a club in Bushwick. After numerous rejections and explicitly telling a creep bothering me, my friends, and other women in the club to get lost, I finally went to get a bouncer to eject him. The bouncer got the creep to leave. When I went to thank him, the bouncer told me a whole story about how the creep was “a harmless guy.” Then he reached down and grabbed my ass. Presumably he felt entitled to do this after helping me get rid of a person I asked him to remove... for unwanted touching.

It Really Sucked.

At every turn during the whole ordeal (and its aftermath) I had to hold onto my anger, convince myself that I wasn’t overreacting, remind myself that anyone who thought this was acceptable to do to me is almost certainly doing worse to more vulnerable people. I kept picturing myself the way this guy, this man in a position of power, must have seen me in order to feel okay doing what he did. That I was young, small, female, too friendly to say No, already indebted anyway; that he was one of the Good Guys, that his behavior was also “harmless” because he had decided it was. I conjured up as much anger as I could, pushed down the nausea of envisioning my own degradation from an attacker’s POV, and got to work. I reached out to the club and was quickly put in contact with the owner. The venue now has a publicly posted zero tolerance sexual harassment policy. The entire staff is going through training with a local org dedicated to creating safer nightlife spaces. And that motherfucker has been fired.

I demonstrably made the world better. I wasn’t alone, but all that happened because of my actions. Me and my anger, we did that.

I wish more people were this fucking angry. 💢

~ end of content warning ~

iii. an opinion

My Saturn return is upon me, y’all. As Frank Ocean serenades, we’ll never be those kids again. I have lived a few of these here nine lives and it seems only prudent to be moving forward with some sort of opinion on the matter.

My opinion is this: us folks with financial and physical security should be spending more time fixing shit around here. Figuring out what needs fixing and how you might help are the first steps.

If you’re operating on a similar scale of privilege as I am, maybe that means changing jobs to do more mission-oriented work. If you can’t swing a change of that magnitude, maybe it means showing up to community events and engaging with, caring for, supporting people you otherwise wouldn’t talk to. Churches, libraries, volunteering, supporting local artists, participating in local politics - this all counts. If you’re already doing this sorta thing, that is awesome! Maybe you also have a friend worth inviting who you sense is just itching for a chance to exercise compassion?

I’m using “fixing” pretty loosely here, too. Fixing, to my mind, means making the world brighter, safer, and sweeter for your fellows, human and otherwise. We’ve all got different ideas about what that looks like, and there are definitely folks - myopic or malevolent or both - who will swear up and down that their fear- and hate-driven behaviors will bring about better world. Ultimately, though, I believe that many hands reaching towards their personal vision of Better will in fact make things Better, especially when that vision is informed by meaningful interaction with the real world and its real sorrows and its real triumphs.

But ya gotta reach. Ya gotta try.

I am so tired of hearing my well-fed, well-homed friends piss and moan about late capitalism4 without lifting a damn finger in service of the communities bearing the brunt of material hardship. Unfettered capitalism sure does have a marked tendency to wreak havoc on organic life! But capitalism is not a monolith, and lamenting the abuses perpetuated by its principle benefactors as unchanging or inevitable only normalizes them. Any investigation into the history of capitalism (or the broader phenomena of how a Few come to subjugate the Many) will very quickly disabuse you of the notion that this shit is going to stop without a great deal of active resistance.5

So unless you are personally doing work to put our current strand of democracy-withering corporatism six-feet-under, seriously, just STFU instead. Your nihilism is boring! You don’t sound woke! Save it for your local DSA working group!

Which isn’t to say that I’m not convinced of the wickedness6 of the problems we’re facing: skyrocketing wealth disparity with no relief in sight; the destruction of most of Earth’s biodiversity via mass extinction; a pernicious climate of racism and xenophobia that scapegoats black and brown folks and then visits misery upon them; the weight of an aging population bearing down on the shittiest healthcare system of any nation in its class; a widely disenfranchised electorate further fragmented and fatigued by hyper-polarization; the gendered terrorism that is inflicted daily on women, trans and non-binary folks, and queer people at large; a rising wave of depressive anxiety as people become more aware of these problems and how thoroughly they’ve been disempowered from changing things for the better.

So yeah, I get it. These are hard problems. I just don’t see any better option than trying anyway. I want to spend my time fixing things around here and encouraging others to try their hand too. You already know the bad news: real change is hard and it can take a very long time. You might work your whole life sowing seeds whose fruit you never get to taste.

The good news, however, is that you can get started whenever and wherever you are. The good news is that a sense of purpose is its own reward.

iv. how to get started

When you’ve got hard work ahead of you, your best bet is to use your beautiful human brain and create some leverage. Ask Archimedes about it.7

Lever systems got two parts:

The lever, which is the tool you use to amplify your effort. The longer your lever is, the easier your job will be.

The fulcrum, which is the wedge the lever rests on. The nearer your fulcrum is to the thing you want to move, the easier your job will be.

If you’re starting from zero - “I want to do more for the world but I don’t know how!” - my advice is to forget about the lever arm for now. A lever ain’t shit without a fulcrum, anyway. Your time is better spent exploring the world, keeping an eye out for problems you’d like to solve, and identifying nearby points of leverage. If you want to get into activism, a fulcrum might be volunteering to fold pamphlets for an organization with a mission you believe in. If want to see more self-expression in the world, it might be might be inviting your friends to a zine-making class or hosting your own arts and craft night.

The best fulcrum is one that makes you Feel Good when you apply any amount of effort against it. Too many people get caught up in a self-defeating belief that if they can’t give 110% of their creative energy to something they might as well not try. I can confidently say that trying is itself a virtue. Every time you try even a little bit you make it easier for yourself to try again later, and more importantly, you make trying easier for others. A bunch of people altering their behavior a smidge in the same direction doesn’t add up to nothing; on the contrary, it’s a sea change.

If you’ve got a decent idea of the types of problems you want to solve, though, and you’ve tested your fulcrums, and you are thinking, “Okay, but is this all I’m capable of giving?” then it’s probably time to work on your lever. Given your own interests and inclinations, what skills can you develop that will increase the good you’re doing 10x, 100x over? This is the long game, but it scales a whole lot better than “keep doing what I’m already doing, but more.”

For me right now this means deepening my technical knowledge, building a resilient support network, and sharing what I’m learning. Helping others has been a powerful motivator for self-improvement, not the least of which because it’s a convenient shortcut through the snarl of self-confidence issues.

I am so grateful that Recurse Center was a stop on lengthening my lever! What a concentrated cluster of helpful, considerate beings.

I’ve spent the last two years wandering around New York City in wide-eyed wonder, asking myself the most ambitious question I could think of: how do you save the world?

Getting older comes with a lot of downsides, but asking yourself big questions and living your life as the answer is the primary pleasure of adulthood. It took a ton of courage to get started and I am still frequently awed to find myself moving in the right direction. I’m humbled by the grace and fortitude of the folks who’ve been at this for way longer.

I’m also a hell of a lot happier. This summer’s gonna be rad. ☀️

There are lots of extraordinarily sexy company names like this in the legal world. ↩︎

Having the choice to direct my energies in this way is a privilege. Working in tech gives me this freedom of motion and I have been drawn to software engineering in part because it is the freest of the free (if you still gotta labor for your living). ↩︎

😱😫😖😬😬😬... 😏 ↩︎

Substitute with whatever modifier is en vogue. As a point of fact, “late capitalism” is a term that’s been floating around for literally over a hundred years. ↩︎

Thankfully, history also clearly demonstrates that the tide can be turned. ↩︎

“The use of the term ‘wicked’ here has come to denote resistance to resolution.” Wikipedia page. ↩︎

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world,” etc etc. ↩︎

[duaneodavila]

The Supreme Court Nomination Process: Who’s Our Next SCOTUS Nominee?

Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh (left) and Judge Raymond M. Kethledge (right)

A few hours after Justice Anthony M. Kennedy announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, I predicted on Twitter that he would be succeeded by “a former clerk of his whose surname starts with the same letter (e.g., Kavanaugh or Kethledge).” I explained my reasoning at greater length in an Above the Law post the following day.

Now that President Donald Trump has completed his interviews of potential Supreme Court nominees, it appears that the frontrunners are, in fact, Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh (D.C. Cir.) and Judge Raymond M. Kethledge (6th Cir.). Per John Roberts (the Fox News journalist, not the Chief Justice):

.@FoxNews is told that @realDonaldTrump has completed the interview process for his @USSupremeCourt pick. Raymond Kethledge and Brett Kavanaugh are said to be the front-runners to replace Justice Kennedy. Announcement Monday night.

— John Roberts (@johnrobertsFox) July 5, 2018

But Roberts also reports that Judge Amy Coney Barrett (7th Cir.) remains in the mix:

On @realDonaldTrump SCOTUS pick – sources indicate a jump ball between Brett Kavanaugh and Raymond Kethledge, with Barrett running 3rd. All subject to possible change before POTUS makes his decision

— John Roberts (@johnrobertsFox) July 5, 2018

This is all consistent with what I’ve been hearing as well, which I’d summarize as follows:

1. Judge Kavanaugh and Judge Kethledge are the frontrunners, as I originally predicted.

2. Judge Kavanaugh’s interview went well, and he enjoys strong support from White House Counsel Don McGahn.

I don’t mean this in any negative or conspiratorial way, as it has been (unfairly and unfortunately) spun in some quarters of the right. I simply mean that McGahn holds Judge Kavanaugh in (justified) high esteem, and he has not been swayed from this view by the (unjustified) attacks on the judge.

Speaking of unjustified attacks, the jockeying and infighting among conservatives over who will be the next nominee have gotten out of control. I agree with Ed Whelan: “I expect to be very happy with whoever the nominee is — so long as pre-nomination infighting that some are engaged in doesn’t damage the whole process.”

So everyone needs to take a deep breath and de-escalate. The process has gotten extremely nasty, with not just the candidates but even the people being involved in the selection getting subjected to ad hominem attacks.

It needs to stop. Nobody is trying to “rig” the process for anyone. Instead, the hardworking folks in the White House Counsel’s Office and the Justice Department — the same people who delivered Justice Neil M. Gorsuch and scores of great lower-court nominees to conservatives — are working hard to find the best, most qualified, most confirmable nominee for the nation’s highest court.

Just let them do their jobs. And remember that in less than a week’s time, conservatives will need to present a strong, unified front in support of their nominee, in the fact of what will surely be withering — and unwarranted — attacks from the left.

3. Judge Kethledge’s interview with President Trump went exceptionally well, probably the best of all the top-tier candidates (the first four candidates, who were brought in on Monday morning).

Does this matter? Yes — because as Mike Allen of Axios points out, “President Trump’s Supreme Court pick will come down to ‘who he feels most comfortable with in a personal setting.'”

4. Judge Barrett’s interview with President Trump went “poorly,” according to Annie Karni and Eliana Johnson of Politico. (See also Kevin Daley and Saagar Enjeti’s piece for the Daily Caller, describing her interview as “satisfactory”; the Daily Caller’s readership loves Barrett, so read “satisfactory” as, well, less than satisfactory.)

This is consistent with what I’ve heard as well. In fact, the interview slots were roughly 45 minutes, and Judge Barrett’s interview with President Trump didn’t even make it to the half-hour mark. Ouch.

5. But after the interview, President Trump — who, as we all know, can be mercurial — warmed up to the idea of Judge Barrett as his SCOTUS nominee.

Why? Because of the political benefits — it would galvanize religious conservatives and the Republican base in advance of this fall’s midterm elections, and it would put Senator Joe Donnelly, the Indiana Democrat who’s facing a tough reelection battle in November, in a tough spot. As noted by Frank Bruni, who’s no fan of hers, Amy Coney Barrett is “the most tactically fascinating of the front-runners in several ways.”

So Judge Barrett remains in the mix, running third (even though, interestingly enough, when she was brought in she wasn’t initially viewed as a serious contender).

(If you’re a member of #TeamAmy, check out this great post from one of our IP law columnists here at Above the Law, Krista Cox, who studied under then-Professor Barrett at Notre Dame Law School: Judge Amy Coney Barrett Wasn’t My Favorite Law Professor, But She Would Be An Amazing Justice.)

6. Judge Amul Thapar (6th Cir.) had a very strong interview with the president, and Judge Thapar very much remains a contender. He should not be counted out, as it appears he has been by many — and his stock seems to be rising this afternoon (within the White House, even if the PredictIt prediction market has written him off). If House Kavanaugh, House Kethledge, and House Barrett fight to a draw, Judge Thapar could actually emerge as the nominee.

7. Vice President Mike Pence has been meeting with some of the candidates, as reported by the Associated Press. The AP didn’t name them, but upon information and belief, they include Judge Barrett and Judge Kethledge (and possibly others, but I have not yet confirmed them).

What happens next? If President Trump can be persuaded to stick to his original plan and wait until Monday to announce, then we might not know the identity of the ultimate nominee until a few hours before the announcement (which is how things went with the Gorsuch process, thanks in large part to the Hardiman head fake).

Here’s how Jeff Zeleny of CNN sees this playing out:

President Donald Trump is expected to finalize his choice for the Supreme Court by Thursday or Friday, two people familiar with the search say, allowing aides in a newly minted White House war room to spend the weekend preparing for a summer confirmation fight.

In this leak-prone White House, the President’s choice will be guarded as closely as a wartime command. His decision will be included on a larger list of finalists, with at least two — possibly three — names shared with members of the administration’s Supreme Court confirmation team.

This also allows the President to change his mind before he introduces his next Supreme Court nominee from the White House on Monday evening, aides say.

On Twitter, I gave my advice to the White House (only partly in jest):

1. Pick/leak the identities of three finalists: Judge Barrett (to excite religious conservatives), Judge Thapar (to excite Asian Americans), and Judge Kavanaugh or Judge Kethledge (whoever is the actual nominee; or if the nominee is Barrett or Thapar, bring in Kavanaugh or Kethledge as a decoy).

2. Have these three SCOTUS finalists come to the White House for Sunday dinner, and then live there, Big Brother-style, until the big reveal on Monday.

Then we won’t truly know the nominee’s identity until the curtain rises. Otherwise, we will know that whoever is seen in public on Monday is not the nominee.

I am (mostly) joking. But with a reality TV star as president, I put nothing past President Trump.

Trump has completed his Supreme Court interview process [Axios] ‘It looks all-American’: Trump wants the whole package in Supreme Court nominee [Politico] KETHLEDGE RISING, AS SCOTUS INFIGHTING REACHES FEVER PITCH [Daily Caller] Aggressive lobbying push as Trump nears choice for Supreme Court pick [CNN]

Earlier:

David Lat is editor at large and founding editor of Above the Law, as well as the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. He previously worked as a federal prosecutor in Newark, New Jersey; a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at dlat@abovethelaw.com.

The Supreme Court Nomination Process: Who’s Our Next SCOTUS Nominee? republished via Above the Law

[anakin022]

Hi! My name is SonicAdventure. Usually, I don’t do covers, at least not the ones you can see below. I’m a mastering engineer by trade; that is my hobby, my passion and sometimes my job. You’ve probably encountered one of my remasters before, after all, I collaborated with Heidl numerous times: he does the covers, I do the sound. But that hasn’t always been the case.

A decade ago I started out doing everything on my own, including the covers. The reason for designing them was simple: I wanted to print them out and put them on the shelf alongside official releases. Just so that my own versions wouldn’t look stupid or “home made”. Since I lack any formal graphic design training I always had to look towards the work of others for inspiration and technical advice. Because of that I became quite adept in copying designs. Luckily, I have a little taste, an additional help has been encountering Photoshop more than 20 years ago.

I don’t think my covers are any good; they’re boring, bourgeois and only serviceable – if at all. You see, I don’t prefer to do them, to me they’re just a necessity and I’d rather work on the sound. Oh, and the work involved… ugh. Re-arranging vertical designs so that they would fit a square format, cutting something out, cleaning something up…, I’m just a lazy bastard who doesn’t want to spend time with this. Because good design (something that looks gorgeous and is equally functional) is work, plain and simple. Something I’m – most of the time – not willing to do. But Poltergeist has always been one of my favourite movies, so maybe this was a reason to create so many covers.

I saw it for the first time on July 5th, 1986 on German TV. It was a Saturday night, my parents were away on some birthday and I was home alone babysitting my little brother (who was fast asleep). I wasn’t 11 yet and was completely blown away. The movie was an emotional rollercoaster, I was terrified and deeply moved, all at the same time. It would take a few years until I realized that my conflicting emotions were partly caused by the brilliant music Jerry Goldsmith composed. Imagine my disappointment when I wasn’t able to buy the soundtrack, it simply didn’t exist wherever I looked. Remember, this was a decade before the rise of the internet, you couldn’t just order something. My parents however had a friend who regularly visited the U.S. and one day in 1996 I asked him if he could look for the soundtrack to Poltergeist while being away on one of these journeys. I forgot all about it and one day, when returning home from Uni, the soundtrack was suddenly waiting on the kitchen table. And it wasn’t just any normal CD, no, it was the first expanded treatment done by Rhino! I was overjoyed and to this day this CD is a reference for how I expect score expansions to be treated. It had everything beside all of the music: good sound (albeit a tad noisy), good artwork (for the front cover) and a generous amount of informative text within the booklet. And even though I’ve replaced it with the edition done by FSM 13 years later I simply cannot part with it. I’ll never forget the joy I felt when setting eyes upon it for the first time in 1997.

A few weeks ago I decided to remaster it, I’ve never been happy with the slightly timid sound of the FSM version. I also wanted to create my own covers. The official ones are well done and I like them, but I thought that I might be able to improve them or at least offer some additional choices. But you, dear reader, will be the judge of that.

#1: Poltergeist (Custom)

#2: Poltergeist (Custom)

#3: Poltergeist (Custom)

#4: Poltergeist (Custom)

#5: Poltergeist (Custom)

The first five custom covers are based on original artworks created in 1982 for the movies’ promotional campaign. The original poster, used to this day in several variations, is quite iconic. It features a large black background with – much smaller – Carol Anne kneeling in front of a TV that receives no signal (something which younger readers won’t remember). Most home video releases have focused on this design.

Cover #1 [1] is based on the DVD/Blu-Ray variant which enlarges the TV/Carol Anne combination, adds a blue tint and TV lines. I just added the movies’ logo (the gloss effect was done by hand) and the rest of the information. Cover #2 is based on one of the SteelBook designs, while cover #3 imitates the design of the first LaserDisc. Since I didn’t have it in colour combined with high resolution, I colourized it myself.

Next is cover #4 which is an alternate design that was used predominantly outside the U.S. Since it, in my opinion, looks fairly anachronistic I decided to turn it into a vinyl cover.

I also created a variant of the same design (#5) and gave it the Deutsche-Grammophon twist (something you’ll see again). I just love the big yellow DG emblem, it always looks classy, either old-fashioned or timeless (the typeface choices determin the assignment to a specific era). I translated everything English to German, going as far as calling the city of L.A. “City of Angels”.

But now of to the covers based on alternative poster designs, my personal favourites.

The first one (#6) was apparently designed at Universal for the “Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights“. I just love the idea that Carol Anne is now on “the other side” and therefore not sitting in front of the TV anymore.

#6: Poltergeist (Custom)

The next cover (#7) is probably the eeriest and craziest cover I ever made. It’s based on a breathtaking design by Orlando Arocena, whose art style is called “Mexifunk” and it pays homage to the “Dia De Los Muertos“. Since it was a vertical design I had to take it apart in order to use it, cutting it in half, enlarging the mouth and turning several parts into seperate pieces so that I could place them freely. A lot of work but worth it.

#7: Poltergeist (Custom)

Next is a tribute to… well, I don’t really know (#8). I wanted to use the artwork by Angga Agustiya and since it was drawn from the perspective of the son character Robbie and looks a little like naive art, so I decided to turn it into a children’s vinyl. The fake title reflects that intention, yet at the same time I reference my remastering by using the “Living Stereo” banner. Though an audio drama aimed at children likely wouldn’t feature the best audio fidelity.

#8: Poltergeist (Custom)

Cover #9 is based on a character poster by Sara Deck. It’s not ideally suited for the square CD cover format so I added a little structure (TV lines & stars). With Tangina Barrons (Zelda Rubinstein), yet another character from the film is featured on cover #10. It was created by designer duo WeBuyYourKids and features a nifty reference to “the other side”. Chairs moving on their own (sitting on a table) are shown on the next one (#11) which is based on a design by Adam Rabalais while coffins are a menace beneath the Freelings’ house on cover #12. That one was taken from the Mondo vinyl edition of the score, released in 2013. Again, WBYK designed the original artwork, I just combined back and front and colourized it.

#9: Poltergeist (Custom)

#10: Poltergeist (Custom)

#11: Poltergeist (Custom)

#12: Poltergeist (Custom)

Cover #13 is based on a design by Godmachine, heavily altered, adding rays of light and several layers of different blurs. You may think it doesn’t have anything to do with the movie yet it is showing “The Beast”, similar to how it looked when it emerged from the cupboard. Initially, it wasn’t even part of this set, I did it at the last minute while I was writing this blog post.

#13: Poltergeist (Custom)

The last cover was done specifially for heidl. I found the design while I was searching for images I could use and since he has created so many fantastic covers for Stranger Things 2, I thought I would add one more. It was probably done by a Netflix team, at least it was used to promote the second season of the series and it’s a nifty tribute to the original.

#14: Stranger Things 2 (Custom)

This concludes my series of Poltergeist covers. Heidl has been instrumental in getting these done, he constantly provided suggestions how to improve them, what typeface to use, etc. Without him, I couldn’t have done it. He is the best teacher one can imagine: he points out flaws, suggests ways to get rid of them and then leaves you alone. Brilliant. A big thank you goes to heidl who provided me with the chance to show off. I hope the decline in quality compared to his work is not too big, I wouldn’t like him to lose viewers because of some sub-standard artwork done by some know-it-all like me.

“Poltergeist (The Deluxe Edition)” by Jerry Goldsmith Hi! My name is SonicAdventure. Usually, I don't do covers, at least not the ones you can see below.

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include the making of a Hearthstone card, a couple of neat Horizon: Zero Dawn video pieces, and behind the scenes on seminal 2D fighting game Samurai Shodown.

I also comment on this below, but the rise of 'creators making interesting content about their own games, especially in video form' is something I'm really starting to note and enjoy. (This week - Hearthstone, Runescape, Horizon: Zero Dawn, & more.) This makes sense, especially since some of these games make a lot of money and third-party options for making money covering those titles are way trickier. 

Obviously, there's mixed feelings about this - is the only way you can cover games in-depth in the future as part of an embedded team funded by the game's creators? But there are also counter-examples like the excellent Spelunky making-of video posted by Danny O'Dwyer's Noclip below. So maybe a mix of sources will be just fine, absolutists out there! Until next week...

Simon, curator.]

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With Scorpio rising, Phil Spencer looks to the future of Xbox (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Here then is a rundown (edited for clarity) of our conversation with Spencer about everything from Microsoft's VR plans to the future of the game console business, and how Project Scorpio represents an attempt at "learning from some of our PC heritage.""

The Runescape Documentary - 15 Years Of Runescape (Jagex / Runescape / YouTube) "[SIMON'S NOTE: good to see companies documenting their own history, even with the inherent rose-tinted glasses that might bring in - we still get SOME good historical context.]"

Tim Schafer Talks Shyness, Comebacks and Being Asked Not to Touch George Lucas (Chris Suellentrop / Glixel) "During an hourlong conversation, Schafer talked to Glixel about his reputation as a project manager at LucasArts, his career-long fight for creative independence, and the troubled development of Psychonauts, followed by the game's remarkable staying power."

A Chat With a Live Streamer is Yours, For A Price (Laura Parker / New York Times) "Andre Rebelo, a 24-year-old YouTube streamer from Vancouver, British Columbia, live-streamed himself playing the game Grand Theft Auto V on his YouTube channel, Typical Gamer, in mid-January. This time, he added something different for his audience."

Building Non-Linear Narratives in Horizon: Zero Dawn (Leszek Szczepanski / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 session, Guerrilla Games' Leszek Szczepanski explains how Guerrilla Games tackled sidequests and open-world activities in Horizon: Zero Dawn, by creating a quest system which has non-linearity at its base."

From GoldenEye To Yooka-Laylee: Grant Kirkhope Reflects On His Career (Zak Wojnar / Game Informer) "If you’ve been a gamer for any length of time, Grant Kirkhope’s tunes have probably been stuck in your head at some point. His music defined some of the Nintendo 64’s greatest games, such as GoldenEye and Banjo-Kazooie – the latter being the direct inspiration for his latest project, Playtonic’s Yooka-Laylee."

The Making of Samurai Shodown (James Mielke / Polygon) "With SNK in a bit of a revival at the moment, we went on a quest to track down some of the original Samurai gumi team members and learn more about the origins of the Samurai Shodown series. A chance conversation at Tokyo Game Show 2016 put us in touch with Yasushi Adachi, the original series creator."

Ironsights: A Big Buck Hunter Mini-Documentary (Twitch Creative / Twitch) "The 22-minute story follows Sara Erlandson, Wisconsin bar owner turned Big Buck phenom and Twitch streamer, as she travels from her hometown of Beldenville to the World Championship in Austin, Texas."

The Socialist Surrealist Oikospiel Has a Wild Vision for the Future of Videogame Labor (Daniel Fries / Paste) "Oikospiel, the new experimental game from David Kanaga and Ferdinand Ramallo, wants to make sure you’re paying attention. It doesn’t want you to get wrapped up in its story or relax and have fun playing a game. It’s constantly trying to jar you out of any trance or flow state."

Everything I Said Was Wrong: Why Indie Is Different Now (Liz England, Lisa Brown, Rami Ismail / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Ubisoft's Liz England, indie designer Lisa Brown, and Vlambeer co-founder Rami Ismail break down why some of their older advice for starting indie developers hasn't held up, how they'd update that advice, and how developers can better think about giving advice to each other and interpret advice."

Snake Pass and the unexplored territory of the game controller (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "The way the input feels is intended to be a part of the whole experience – to the point where Liese was lobbying to ship without a mouse and keyboard option at one point because they hadn’t found one which adequately expressed the same physical elements of playing."

Clark Tank plays: Northgard! (Brace Yourself Games / YouTube) "I'm veteran indie game developer Ryan Clark, and this is the Clark Tank! Every second Friday at 1pm Pacific time we stay on top of the latest game industry trends by examining the Steam top 50, scrutinizing the latest Kickstarted games, and by playing the most prominent recent releases. [SIMON'S NOTE: Love Ryan's Twitch stream, and this is an experimental edited-down version of a recent stream, xposted to YouTube.]"

Doom (2016): To Hell and Back (David Craddock / Shacknews) "Marty Stratton knew a good sound when he heard it. He had studied commercial music composition at University of Denver and, with bachelor degree in hand, had headed out west in 1995 determined to land a job in the entertainment industry. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is a GIGANTIC, almost book-length piece, and very well done.]"

The stray dogs of The Silver Case (Gareth Damian Martin / Eurogamer) "For Goichi Suda, those murders would begin a fascination with grotesque crimes that would reappear throughout his career. He was still at developer Human Entertainment at the time, but only a year later, Suda, eager to pursue new ideas, set up his own studio: Grasshopper Manufacture."

Behind the Card | Amara: Warden of Hope (Blizzard / YouTube) "Peek behind the curtains to see what went into creating the cards Awaken the Makers and Amara, Warden of Hope. [SIMON'S NOTE: more deep dive content created by the team making the game - in this case Hearthstone!]"

The first decade of augmented reality (Ben Evans / Ben-Evans.com) "In February 2006, Jeff Han gave a demo of an experimental 'multitouch' interface, as a 'TED' talk. I've embedded the video below. Watching this today, the things he shows seems pretty banal - every $50 Android phone does this! - and yet the audience, mostly relatively sophisticated and tech-focused people, gasps and applauds."

How emergent AI encounters can be beautiful in The Signal from Tolva (Bryant Francis / Gamasutra) "The Signal from Tolva, which comes from the creators of Sir, You Are Being Hunted, is yet another game about science-fiction robots from UK developer Big Robot. And while creative director Jim Rossignol told us yesterday on the Gamasutra Twitch Channel that’s partly because it’s easier to animate beings that don’t have facial animations, he also said it’s because there’s something beautiful about what happens when you program groups of A.I to have their own missions. [SIMON'S NOTE: we're doing a lot more live Twitch chats with devs recently on Gamasutra - here's a good example!]

From hacker to Valve and back again (Brian Crecente / Polygon) "Before co-founding her own augmented reality headset company, Jeri Ellsworth was a technology chameleon, finding niches in electronics and mechanics, mastering them and helping redefine how they worked."

Horizon Zero Dawn - Neil Druckmann Interviews Hermen Hulst (PlayStation / YouTube) "Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann sat down with Guerrilla Games managing director Hermen Hulst to discuss the studio's shift away from Killzone, and the long process of bringing Horizon Zero Dawn to life."

Gaming under socialism (Paolo Pedercini / Molleindustria) "But the question of what gaming would look like in a socialist world has haunted me for days. Not only because I’m a leftist and I care about games, but because of how it relates to many crucial issues of 21st century radicalism. [SIMON'S NOTE: so Ivory Tower it hurts, but thought-provoking, fo sho.]"

How Steam brought shmups out of arcades and into a new PC renaissance (Matt Paprocki / PC Gamer) "How Steam and passionate fans pulled shoot-em-ups out of exile in Japanese arcades and back into the limelight."

How Ninja Theory's Canceled Co-op Game Led To Hellblade's Bold Future (Ben Hanson / Game Informer) "With our new cover story on Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, we've shown off plenty of gameplay footage from Ninja Theory's game. Today, the game's creative director Tameem Antoniades explains more about how the talented studio arrived where they are today. [SIMON'S NOTE: good honest video interview with Antoniades here on 'the space between AAA and indie'.]"

Searching for the truth of a fake world at EVE Fanfest (Adam Smith / RockPaperShotgun) "Like many EVE players, he’d come to Fanfest, a gathering of hundreds of players, devs and press in Iceland, to represent his in-game character. People wear the insignia of their corporations and alliances, and chant those same names at presentations and pubs. As a spectacle, it’s fascinating, but it’s also confusing."

Spelunky - Noclip Documentary (Danny O'Dwyer / Noclip / YouTube) "For almost a decade players have gleefully explored Spelunky's refined brand of player discovery and emergent gameplay. In this documentary, we talk to the game's creators about building the rules of its procedurally generated worlds."

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[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE COURAGE OF WORK

Relativism is fashionable at the moment, and that people should work for another company for a few years before starting their own. Good, but not if you're working on technology. And I found that the best ideas are also the scariest. The thing that really sucks about having a regular job will stay close to 0%. Startups hate this as well, partly because it tends to create deadlock, and partly because it tends to create deadlock, and delay is the thing a startup can least afford. And so far that every playwright since has had to live in his shadow. In a field like physics this probably doesn't do much harm, but the Web makes it possible to track them at work. And yet we still need the underlying concept, whatever we call it. The VC funds that don't adapt won't be violently displaced. I was any good, why didn't I have the easy confidence winners are supposed to have? But if you order results by bid multiplied by transactions, far from selling out, you're getting a better measure of relevance.

But I'm betting on the open-source movement is that it doesn't matter much either way. Now I realize I was mistaken. I once calculated how much Frederick's was costing us in bandwidth, and it frees conscious thought for the hard problems. It was not the teachers. And when readers see similar stories in multiple places, they think there is some limit on the number who can work for salary at 1000-person companies? The main thing that struck me on reading it, actually, is that it automatically detects which searches are shopping searches. Formidable is close to confident, except that someone could be confident and mistaken. That's too inefficient. Though indeed, it's been a while since they were writing about symbolism; now they're writing about gender. But Durer's engravings and Saarinen's womb chair and the Pantheon and the original Porsche 911 all seem to have done it by fixing something that they thought ugly.

Writing novels doesn't pay as well as writing ad copy for garbage disposals. If you're starting a startup. When he was 19, he seemed like he had a 40 year old inside him. Maybe you're just running fast. Enterprise software companies aren't technology companies, they're sales companies, and they will come. The parents who want you to be a doctor may simply not realize how much things have changed. Originally a startup meant a small company that hoped to grow into a big one.

And what would be wrong would be that how one presented oneself counted more than the desire to do it is to try to explain in the simplest possible terms what McCarthy discovered. Imitating nature also works in engineering. Compositional symmetry yields some of the fancier bits of New York or LA. If taste is just personal preference is a good thing for students to be exposed to their literary heritage. Not at all. We were just a couple guys in an apartment, which did not seem cool in 1995 the way it does now. Jane Austen's novels contain almost no description; instead of buying ads, which readers ignore, you get yourself inserted directly into the stories. I ran into the Yahoo exec I knew from the old days, the standard m. If you're the right sort of person, you'll win even in a bad economy. But ultimately the reason these delays exist is that they're more prestigious. Good design may not have to be just one valuation. And it was not just big corporations that depended on this principle.

The inhabitants of fifteenth century Florence included Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, Masaccio, Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Verrocchio, Botticelli, Leonardo, and Michelangelo. Ask any founder in any economy if they'd describe investors as fickle, and watch the face they make. Formidable is close to confident, except that someone could be confident and mistaken. Startups often make things cheaper, so in the course of a study. Most hackers don't learn to hack by writing programs of their own at age thirteen. Back in the 90s, to get users you had to acknowledge as a boss—someone who could call you into their office and say take a seat, and you'd sit! Problems can be improved as well as I did that our valuation was crazy. I would not want to face an angry Ronco. The distinctive back of the Porsche 911 only appeared in the press. This essay is derived from an invited talk at ICFP 2004.1 It's not cheating to copy.

And you end up with less stock per startup, but I always pull back because I don't want four years of my life to be consumed by random schleps. They need to work at something that pays the bills too, even though you don't need the money? Yahoo cafeteria a few months in, they want in too; if not, they dress informally as a prophylactic measure against stupidity. Someone who doesn't know what a programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. The kind of question on the application form that asks what you're going to be one investor who gives them the first check, and his or her help in recruiting other investors will certainly be welcome, this initial investor will no longer be the lead in the old sense of managing the round. I wrote this article to help myself understand exactly what McCarthy discovered, not just as a goalkeeper who prevents the other team from scoring is considered to have played a perfect game. A has enormously elaborate, custom paperwork. Many a hacker has written a PhD dissertation knows, the way they taught me to in elementary school. Perhaps what practice does is train your unconscious mind to handle tasks that used to require conscious thought. For a while it annoyed me to hear myself described as some kind of irresponsible pied piper, leading impressionable young hackers down the road to ruin. In art, the highest place has traditionally been given to paintings of people, I like to find a simple solutions b to overlooked problems c that actually need to be moderately smart to succeed as a startup founder. To have a sense of humor is to shrug off misfortunes, and to analyze based on what the characters said and did the subtler clues, the better what their motives must have been to till the same fields your whole life with, to live in a giant city of three or four different people, no one of whom really owns it, it will be whatever the startup can get from the first one to write a check, limited by their guess at whether this will make later investors balk.2

The future is simple deals with standard terms, done quickly. Casual fridays are out and dress codes are in writes Diane E. Mistakes are natural. When you're forced to face the real problem is, it seemed laughable to VCs and e-commerce experts.3 In our advice about getting traffic from search engines I don't think there's any correlation. Raising money is not when you do it. Symmetry is unfashionable in some fields now, in reaction to excesses in the past.

Founders think of startups as ideas, but investors think of them as markets. Some hackers are quite smart, but when they do they're ruthlessly pruned. Maybe if I were smart enough it would seem an inspired metaphor. I used to believe what I read in Time and Newsweek. What little original thought there was took place in lulls between constant wars and had something of the character of the thoughts of parents with a new baby. Quite the opposite. This is actually a rational response to their situation. I'm not trying to paint like Michelangelo. Now that we have to go to work anyway and sit in front of your screen and pretend to. This phrase began with musicians, who perform at night. If everyone wants in, they probably didn't.

Notes

But although I started doing research for this to be good at talking about what other people who will go on to the next generation of software from being contaminated by how much you're raising, have been the plague of 1347; the Depository Institutions Act of 1936.

While the US since the mid 20th century cohesion would have been fooled by grammar.

Does anyone really think we're as open as one could argue that the worm infected, because they could imagine needing in their standards that they're starting petitions to save the old car they had that we wrote in order to provoke a bidding war between 3 pet supply startups for the first year or two, I'd say the rate of change in the most powerful minister of the advantages of not starving then you should be specialists in startups tend to make up their minds, they said. The question to ask about what was happening on Dallas, and partly simple ignorance. But you're not allowed to discriminate on any basis you want to give it back. Is this unfair?

Thanks to Jessica Livingston, Parker Conrad, Sam Altman, Robert Morris, Ming-Hay Luk of the Berkeley CSUA, and Alex Lewin for the lulz.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WORK ETHIC AND THINGS

One could have described Microsoft and Apple in exactly the same work, except with bosses. On the blunderometer, this episode ranks with IBM accepting a non-exclusive license for DOS.1 When you scan down the list of most popular web sites, the number of new users was a function of the number of founders in the same position is asymptotic or merely large, there are other ways to arrange that relationship. So how can I claim business has to learn is that people will hold you to it. There's a shocking amount of shear stress at every point where a startup touches a more bureaucratic organization, like a big arrow pointing users to the test drive rose immediately from 60% to 90%. My relationship with my cofounder went from just being friends to seeing each other all the time, fretting over the finances and cleaning up shit. A mere 15 weeks. When you can't get users, it's hard to say whether the problem is lack of exposure, or whether the product's simply bad.

Bugs turn up quickly. I suspect the pin will be wielded by a couple of guys sitting in a corner somewhere with a copy printed out on paper, trying to force a crappy product on ambivalent users by spending ten times as much on sales as on development.2 Mikey likes it.3 Disk crashes won't be a thing of the past, everyone wants funding from them, closing the deal after a comparatively short 8 weeks. The buildings are all more or less the same, their exteriors express very little, and they were wondering what to call it.4 Most VCs can't do anything that would sound bad to the kind of people who wanted to buy them, however limited. So presumably that's what this brainstorming session was about. The catch is that because this kind of bug is the hardest to find, and also economically ones's own.5 Here's a VC saying no: We're really excited about your project, and we got Java applets. We would leave a board meeting, rather than having brilliant flashes of strategic insight.6

Most VCs can't do anything that would sound bad to the kind of doofuses who run pension funds. Even the startups are different this time around. What they mean by blogger is not someone who publishes online. Back when I was working on spam filters I thought it didn't, but the most important advantage of being good is that it often looks better than real work.7 But until this does start to happen, we know VCs are being too conservative. So are talks useless? Their revenues aren't as high as any on the Internet, all have the same sullen resentment as children made to do something that will cost a lot, start by doing a cheaper subset of it, and expand your ambitions when and if to engage the other ship. Never make users register, unless you fail. If a company is doing well, investors will want founders to turn down most acquisition offers. As I was waiting to hear back, I found I was very aware, because of the novelty, that I was hoping they'd reject it.

Even if you were willing to pay for might as well stop there. With purely Web-based software is such a good idea were obviously good, someone else would already have done it.8 And in fact they do all look the same. We could never stand it.9 It cost $2800, so the only people who could afford to go were VCs and people from big companies. O'Reilly was wearing a suit, a sight so alien I couldn't parse it at first.10 At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don't. At least, it better not be, because investors regularly do things that might look bad. At most software companies, support people are underpaid human shields, and hackers are little copies of God the Father, creators of the world just doesn't get startups, and partly to get exactly what we wanted.

Obviously one case where it would help to be rapacious is when growth depends on that. Web 2.11 One is that you have in your desktop machine. That's what you want to be a VC by convincing asset managers to trust you with hundreds of millions of dollars. Aircraft shooting down an F-18.12 A lot of founders that was the right way to search for components. You can measure this fear in how much a startup differs from a job. Perhaps most convincingly, it would have seemed in, say, New York Times. You can use whichever is best for each. Most I find through aggregators like Google News or Slashdot or Delicious. The reason this won't turn into a company.

I've learned that some suits are smarter than others. The solution? You can shift into a different mode of working. The closest you'll get to Bubble valuations is Rupert Murdoch paying $580 million for Myspace. There's a lot of money. The specific thing that surprised me is how the relationship of startup founders seem to be superficial reasons. You don't need complex sentences to express complex ideas.13 People often tell me how much my essays sound like me talking.14 And it's not just the way offices look that's bleak. Watching users can guide you in design as well as buildings you need roads, street signs, utilities, police and fire departments, and plans for both growth and various kinds of disasters. This trick may not always be enough. There are several types of investors.

In the process of developing the pitch for the first few months comforted ourselves by treating the whole thing as an experiment that we might call off at any moment. But guys like Ed Roberts, who designed the Altair, realized that they were just good enough. They will give you major coverage for a major release, meaning a new first digit on the version number, and generally getting things in place for what needs to happen a few months later saying This is supposed to suggest efficiency. They have the same inexpensive Intel processors that you have to be willing to change your idea. I assume it's infinite. With Web-based applications. So you don't have significant success to cheer you up, it wears you out: Your most basic advice to founders is just don't die, but the energy to keep a company going in lieu of unburdening success isn't free; it is siphoned from the founders themselves. That generates almost as good returns as actually being able to test-drive any Web-based applications are an ideal source of revenue.15 Once you have users to take care of. It's a smart move to put a startup in a place that's different from other places. But if you look, there are certainly a lot of data about how they work.

Notes

If they agreed among themselves never to do video on-demand, because it has to be.

Philadelphia is a variant of the lies we tell. A preliminary result, comparisons of programming languages either take the line?

By decreasing the difference between being judged as a day job writing software. This is why they tend to be considered an angel.

The shares set aside an option pool. Founders also worry that taking an angel.

A termsheet with a toothbrush. I was genuinely worried that Airbnb, for example I've deliberately avoided saying whether the program is no grand tradition of city planning like the iPad because it is the precise half of it in the few cases where VCs don't invest, regardless of how hard they work. By this I mean this in terms of the world in verse. Bad math is merely an upper bound on a form that would scale.

We didn't try to become merely stubborn. In practice most successful investment, Uber, from hour to hour that the stuff they're showing him is something there worth studying as a type of x. Similarly, don't make their money if they had to push founders to try to become addictive. If you want to start startups.

Since capital is no personnel department, and the Imagination by Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen. There's a sort of Gresham's Law of conversations. I never watch movies in theaters anymore.

In fact, if you get to college, you'll find that with a slight disadvantage, but hardly any type we tell. This is an instance of a problem that I knew, there was a special title for actual partners. The chief lit a cigarette. A country called The Socialist People's Democratic Republic of X is probably the early years.

This law does not appear to be actively curious.

Incidentally, the big winners aren't all that matters financially for investors. People only tend to be the next year they worked together mostly at night. This is a scarce resource.

Which means if the fix is at least accepted additions to the sale of products, because you're throwing off your own time in your own mind about whether you realize it till I started doing research for this point for me to put in the usual way will prove to us that the big winners if they were connected to the size of the movie, but those specific abuses. I phrased this in terms of the markets they serve, because unions will exert political pressure against Airbnb than hotel companies. But it is unfair when someone works hard and not end up with an excessively large share of a press conference. See, we don't have to recognize them when you have to rely on social conventions about executive salaries were low partly because so many people's eyes.

At Princeton, 36% of the tube of their works are lost. Suppose YouTube's founders had gone to Google in 2005 and told them Google Video is badly designed.

A in the sense of the problem to fit your solution. But people like them—people who want to measure how dependent you've become on distractions, try this experiment: suppose prep schools do, but no doubt often are, so you'd have to spend a lot of detail. Surely no one can have margins big enough, it becomes an advantage to be on the basis of intelligence or wisdom. The reason the dictionaries are wrong is that their local network infrastructure would be great for VCs if the founders lots of exemptions, especially if you were going about it.

If this is why we can't believe anyone would think twice before crossing him. My guess is a convertible note with no business experience to start or join startups. I know randomly generated DNA would not know his name. Though they were regarded as 'just' even after the Physics in the right startup.

Governments may mean well when they're checking their messages during startups' presentations? The hard part of creating an agreement from scratch. They therefore think what they claim was the last round just happened, the company they're buying.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE COURAGE OF SOMEONE

A and still has it today. You might also want to look at the employment agreement you sign when you get hired. But it worked so well that we plan to do all our investing this way, because there's usually some other underlying cause.1 You may find you'd prefer the quiet guy you've mostly ignored to someone who seems impressive but has an attitude to match. Partly because successful startups have lots of employees, so it seems like that's what one does in order to grow. Thanks to Sam Altman, the co-founder question. They also wanted very much to get rich, but they do on News. Instead of building stuff to throw away, you tend to want every line of code to go toward that final goal of showing you did a lot of smart, young people. The most ambitious students will at this point not just how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well. I think the problem here is much the same way the market does.2

Here I want to examine a more specific question: why were the exit polls cooked the books after seeing the actual returns. Or to put it this way, one cycle in the summer and one in winter. Perhaps it's not just that in a startup depends so much on motivation, the paradoxical result is that the people likely to make the most of the stuff you build in the first six months is that it automatically detects which searches are shopping searches.3 The definition then spread to people who behaved like assholes in forums, whether intentionally or not. The computer itself was cheap, and it seemed to hinge on a different quality. We have less power than bosses, and yet the founders work harder than employees. When you're a kid and you face some hard test, you may be able to say no.4 Most hackers are employees, and this gives you an edge over older founders, because the concept of users is missing from most college programming classes.5

In technology the difficulty is compounded by the fact that real startups tend to discover the problem they're solving by a process of evolution. One group got an exploding term-sheet from some VCs. What happened? Any advice about procrastination that concentrates on crossing things off your to-do lists.6 The computer itself was cheap, and it didn't make him popular.7 Graduation changes the prevailing winds, and those aren't them.8 That would be an important patent. Why is it so hard to work on big stuff.9

This is to be rewritten. Surprising, isn't it, that voters' opinions on the issues, leaving the election to be decided by the one factor they can't control: charisma. The advantages of rootlessness are similar to those of poverty. That seems the wrong model. I wasn't tied down and I was used to living cheaply. They're working on their cool new idea; they have funding for the immediate future; and they're playing a game with only two outcomes: wealth or failure. Actors do.10 It felt as if there was some kind of wall between us.11

Notes

But it's hard to mentally deal with them in advance that you're small and use whatever advantages that brings. Digg's algorithm is very visible in Silicon Valley. Options have largely been replaced with restricted stock, the second clause could include any possible startup, as I do, so they made much of the 1929 crash.

03%. Though they were friendlier to developers than Apple is now replicated all over the Internet, and—. So it's hard to ignore investors and instead of working.

I think what drives users to recruit manually—is probably a bad reputation, a VC recently who said the things I find myself asking founders Would you use that instead of being back in a certain city because of the river among the largest household refrigerators, weighs 656 pounds. Or more precisely, investors treat them differently. The philosophers whose works they cover would be to advertise, and b not allow them to go wrong seems to set aside for this type: artists trained to paint from life, and intelligence can help, the most, it's ok to focus on at Y Combinator. I switch person.

But the time 1992 the entire period from the DMV. But which of them could as accurately be called acting Japanese.

Programming in Common Lisp seems to have to choose between great people to start software companies, summer jobs are the usual way will prove to us an old-fashioned idea.

We didn't try to be a founder, more people you can charge for.

You're investing your own morale, you usually have to decide between two alternatives, we'd ask, if the students did well they would never even think of. When Google adopted Don't be evil, they were going back to the biggest successes there is a fine sentence, though, so it may be heading for a number here only to your instruments.

Put rice in rice cooker and forget about it. I strongly recommend Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's The Harmless People and The CRM114 Discriminator.

The way to predict at the valuation a bit more complicated, because they are within any given college. This is the stupid filter, dick has a word meaning how one feels when things are from an eager investor, the growth is valuable, and Smartleaf co-founder before making any commitments. If you invest in your previous job, or Seattle, consider moving. Corollary: Avoid starting a startup to succeed in a non-corrupt country or organization will be as shocked at some of them could as accurately be called acting Japanese.

What you're too early really means is No, we found Dave Shen there, only Jews would move there, and that often doesn't know its own mind about whether a suit would violate the patent pledge, it's probably good grazing. Governments may mean well when they want it. 16%.

It would help Web-based software is so hard to say that Watt reinvented the steam engine. Whereas when the country it's in. In the beginning.

Thanks to Sam Altman, Jessica Livingston, Paul Buchheit, Sarah Harlin, Richard Florida, and Hutch Fishman for their feedback on these thoughts.

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include the making of a Hearthstone card, a couple of neat Horizon: Zero Dawn video pieces, and behind the scenes on seminal 2D fighting game Samurai Shodown.

I also comment on this below, but the rise of 'creators making interesting content about their own games, especially in video form' is something I'm really starting to note and enjoy. (This week - Hearthstone, Runescape, Horizon: Zero Dawn, & more.) This makes sense, especially since some of these games make a lot of money and third-party options for making money covering those titles are way trickier. 

Obviously, there's mixed feelings about this - is the only way you can cover games in-depth in the future as part of an embedded team funded by the game's creators? But there are also counter-examples like the excellent Spelunky making-of video posted by Danny O'Dwyer's Noclip below. So maybe a mix of sources will be just fine, absolutists out there! Until next week...

Simon, curator.]

-------------------

With Scorpio rising, Phil Spencer looks to the future of Xbox (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Here then is a rundown (edited for clarity) of our conversation with Spencer about everything from Microsoft's VR plans to the future of the game console business, and how Project Scorpio represents an attempt at "learning from some of our PC heritage.""

The Runescape Documentary - 15 Years Of Runescape (Jagex / Runescape / YouTube) "[SIMON'S NOTE: good to see companies documenting their own history, even with the inherent rose-tinted glasses that might bring in - we still get SOME good historical context.]"

Tim Schafer Talks Shyness, Comebacks and Being Asked Not to Touch George Lucas (Chris Suellentrop / Glixel) "During an hourlong conversation, Schafer talked to Glixel about his reputation as a project manager at LucasArts, his career-long fight for creative independence, and the troubled development of Psychonauts, followed by the game's remarkable staying power."

A Chat With a Live Streamer is Yours, For A Price (Laura Parker / New York Times) "Andre Rebelo, a 24-year-old YouTube streamer from Vancouver, British Columbia, live-streamed himself playing the game Grand Theft Auto V on his YouTube channel, Typical Gamer, in mid-January. This time, he added something different for his audience."

Building Non-Linear Narratives in Horizon: Zero Dawn (Leszek Szczepanski / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 session, Guerrilla Games' Leszek Szczepanski explains how Guerrilla Games tackled sidequests and open-world activities in Horizon: Zero Dawn, by creating a quest system which has non-linearity at its base."

From GoldenEye To Yooka-Laylee: Grant Kirkhope Reflects On His Career (Zak Wojnar / Game Informer) "If you’ve been a gamer for any length of time, Grant Kirkhope’s tunes have probably been stuck in your head at some point. His music defined some of the Nintendo 64’s greatest games, such as GoldenEye and Banjo-Kazooie – the latter being the direct inspiration for his latest project, Playtonic’s Yooka-Laylee."

The Making of Samurai Shodown (James Mielke / Polygon) "With SNK in a bit of a revival at the moment, we went on a quest to track down some of the original Samurai gumi team members and learn more about the origins of the Samurai Shodown series. A chance conversation at Tokyo Game Show 2016 put us in touch with Yasushi Adachi, the original series creator."

Ironsights: A Big Buck Hunter Mini-Documentary (Twitch Creative / Twitch) "The 22-minute story follows Sara Erlandson, Wisconsin bar owner turned Big Buck phenom and Twitch streamer, as she travels from her hometown of Beldenville to the World Championship in Austin, Texas."

The Socialist Surrealist Oikospiel Has a Wild Vision for the Future of Videogame Labor (Daniel Fries / Paste) "Oikospiel, the new experimental game from David Kanaga and Ferdinand Ramallo, wants to make sure you’re paying attention. It doesn’t want you to get wrapped up in its story or relax and have fun playing a game. It’s constantly trying to jar you out of any trance or flow state."

Everything I Said Was Wrong: Why Indie Is Different Now (Liz England, Lisa Brown, Rami Ismail / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Ubisoft's Liz England, indie designer Lisa Brown, and Vlambeer co-founder Rami Ismail break down why some of their older advice for starting indie developers hasn't held up, how they'd update that advice, and how developers can better think about giving advice to each other and interpret advice."

Snake Pass and the unexplored territory of the game controller (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "The way the input feels is intended to be a part of the whole experience – to the point where Liese was lobbying to ship without a mouse and keyboard option at one point because they hadn’t found one which adequately expressed the same physical elements of playing."

Clark Tank plays: Northgard! (Brace Yourself Games / YouTube) "I'm veteran indie game developer Ryan Clark, and this is the Clark Tank! Every second Friday at 1pm Pacific time we stay on top of the latest game industry trends by examining the Steam top 50, scrutinizing the latest Kickstarted games, and by playing the most prominent recent releases. [SIMON'S NOTE: Love Ryan's Twitch stream, and this is an experimental edited-down version of a recent stream, xposted to YouTube.]"

Doom (2016): To Hell and Back (David Craddock / Shacknews) "Marty Stratton knew a good sound when he heard it. He had studied commercial music composition at University of Denver and, with bachelor degree in hand, had headed out west in 1995 determined to land a job in the entertainment industry. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is a GIGANTIC, almost book-length piece, and very well done.]"

The stray dogs of The Silver Case (Gareth Damian Martin / Eurogamer) "For Goichi Suda, those murders would begin a fascination with grotesque crimes that would reappear throughout his career. He was still at developer Human Entertainment at the time, but only a year later, Suda, eager to pursue new ideas, set up his own studio: Grasshopper Manufacture."

Behind the Card | Amara: Warden of Hope (Blizzard / YouTube) "Peek behind the curtains to see what went into creating the cards Awaken the Makers and Amara, Warden of Hope. [SIMON'S NOTE: more deep dive content created by the team making the game - in this case Hearthstone!]"

The first decade of augmented reality (Ben Evans / Ben-Evans.com) "In February 2006, Jeff Han gave a demo of an experimental 'multitouch' interface, as a 'TED' talk. I've embedded the video below. Watching this today, the things he shows seems pretty banal - every $50 Android phone does this! - and yet the audience, mostly relatively sophisticated and tech-focused people, gasps and applauds."

How emergent AI encounters can be beautiful in The Signal from Tolva (Bryant Francis / Gamasutra) "The Signal from Tolva, which comes from the creators of Sir, You Are Being Hunted, is yet another game about science-fiction robots from UK developer Big Robot. And while creative director Jim Rossignol told us yesterday on the Gamasutra Twitch Channel that’s partly because it’s easier to animate beings that don’t have facial animations, he also said it’s because there’s something beautiful about what happens when you program groups of A.I to have their own missions. [SIMON'S NOTE: we're doing a lot more live Twitch chats with devs recently on Gamasutra - here's a good example!]

From hacker to Valve and back again (Brian Crecente / Polygon) "Before co-founding her own augmented reality headset company, Jeri Ellsworth was a technology chameleon, finding niches in electronics and mechanics, mastering them and helping redefine how they worked."

Horizon Zero Dawn - Neil Druckmann Interviews Hermen Hulst (PlayStation / YouTube) "Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann sat down with Guerrilla Games managing director Hermen Hulst to discuss the studio's shift away from Killzone, and the long process of bringing Horizon Zero Dawn to life."

Gaming under socialism (Paolo Pedercini / Molleindustria) "But the question of what gaming would look like in a socialist world has haunted me for days. Not only because I’m a leftist and I care about games, but because of how it relates to many crucial issues of 21st century radicalism. [SIMON'S NOTE: so Ivory Tower it hurts, but thought-provoking, fo sho.]"

How Steam brought shmups out of arcades and into a new PC renaissance (Matt Paprocki / PC Gamer) "How Steam and passionate fans pulled shoot-em-ups out of exile in Japanese arcades and back into the limelight."

How Ninja Theory's Canceled Co-op Game Led To Hellblade's Bold Future (Ben Hanson / Game Informer) "With our new cover story on Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, we've shown off plenty of gameplay footage from Ninja Theory's game. Today, the game's creative director Tameem Antoniades explains more about how the talented studio arrived where they are today. [SIMON'S NOTE: good honest video interview with Antoniades here on 'the space between AAA and indie'.]"

Searching for the truth of a fake world at EVE Fanfest (Adam Smith / RockPaperShotgun) "Like many EVE players, he’d come to Fanfest, a gathering of hundreds of players, devs and press in Iceland, to represent his in-game character. People wear the insignia of their corporations and alliances, and chant those same names at presentations and pubs. As a spectacle, it’s fascinating, but it’s also confusing."

Spelunky - Noclip Documentary (Danny O'Dwyer / Noclip / YouTube) "For almost a decade players have gleefully explored Spelunky's refined brand of player discovery and emergent gameplay. In this documentary, we talk to the game's creators about building the rules of its procedurally generated worlds."

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include the making of a Hearthstone card, a couple of neat Horizon: Zero Dawn video pieces, and behind the scenes on seminal 2D fighting game Samurai Shodown.

I also comment on this below, but the rise of 'creators making interesting content about their own games, especially in video form' is something I'm really starting to note and enjoy. (This week - Hearthstone, Runescape, Horizon: Zero Dawn, & more.) This makes sense, especially since some of these games make a lot of money and third-party options for making money covering those titles are way trickier. 

Obviously, there's mixed feelings about this - is the only way you can cover games in-depth in the future as part of an embedded team funded by the game's creators? But there are also counter-examples like the excellent Spelunky making-of video posted by Danny O'Dwyer's Noclip below. So maybe a mix of sources will be just fine, absolutists out there! Until next week...

Simon, curator.]

-------------------

With Scorpio rising, Phil Spencer looks to the future of Xbox (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Here then is a rundown (edited for clarity) of our conversation with Spencer about everything from Microsoft's VR plans to the future of the game console business, and how Project Scorpio represents an attempt at "learning from some of our PC heritage.""

The Runescape Documentary - 15 Years Of Runescape (Jagex / Runescape / YouTube) "[SIMON'S NOTE: good to see companies documenting their own history, even with the inherent rose-tinted glasses that might bring in - we still get SOME good historical context.]"

Tim Schafer Talks Shyness, Comebacks and Being Asked Not to Touch George Lucas (Chris Suellentrop / Glixel) "During an hourlong conversation, Schafer talked to Glixel about his reputation as a project manager at LucasArts, his career-long fight for creative independence, and the troubled development of Psychonauts, followed by the game's remarkable staying power."

A Chat With a Live Streamer is Yours, For A Price (Laura Parker / New York Times) "Andre Rebelo, a 24-year-old YouTube streamer from Vancouver, British Columbia, live-streamed himself playing the game Grand Theft Auto V on his YouTube channel, Typical Gamer, in mid-January. This time, he added something different for his audience."

Building Non-Linear Narratives in Horizon: Zero Dawn (Leszek Szczepanski / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 session, Guerrilla Games' Leszek Szczepanski explains how Guerrilla Games tackled sidequests and open-world activities in Horizon: Zero Dawn, by creating a quest system which has non-linearity at its base."

From GoldenEye To Yooka-Laylee: Grant Kirkhope Reflects On His Career (Zak Wojnar / Game Informer) "If you’ve been a gamer for any length of time, Grant Kirkhope’s tunes have probably been stuck in your head at some point. His music defined some of the Nintendo 64’s greatest games, such as GoldenEye and Banjo-Kazooie – the latter being the direct inspiration for his latest project, Playtonic’s Yooka-Laylee."

The Making of Samurai Shodown (James Mielke / Polygon) "With SNK in a bit of a revival at the moment, we went on a quest to track down some of the original Samurai gumi team members and learn more about the origins of the Samurai Shodown series. A chance conversation at Tokyo Game Show 2016 put us in touch with Yasushi Adachi, the original series creator."

Ironsights: A Big Buck Hunter Mini-Documentary (Twitch Creative / Twitch) "The 22-minute story follows Sara Erlandson, Wisconsin bar owner turned Big Buck phenom and Twitch streamer, as she travels from her hometown of Beldenville to the World Championship in Austin, Texas."

The Socialist Surrealist Oikospiel Has a Wild Vision for the Future of Videogame Labor (Daniel Fries / Paste) "Oikospiel, the new experimental game from David Kanaga and Ferdinand Ramallo, wants to make sure you’re paying attention. It doesn’t want you to get wrapped up in its story or relax and have fun playing a game. It’s constantly trying to jar you out of any trance or flow state."

Everything I Said Was Wrong: Why Indie Is Different Now (Liz England, Lisa Brown, Rami Ismail / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, Ubisoft's Liz England, indie designer Lisa Brown, and Vlambeer co-founder Rami Ismail break down why some of their older advice for starting indie developers hasn't held up, how they'd update that advice, and how developers can better think about giving advice to each other and interpret advice."

Snake Pass and the unexplored territory of the game controller (Philippa Warr / RockPaperShotgun) "The way the input feels is intended to be a part of the whole experience – to the point where Liese was lobbying to ship without a mouse and keyboard option at one point because they hadn’t found one which adequately expressed the same physical elements of playing."

Clark Tank plays: Northgard! (Brace Yourself Games / YouTube) "I'm veteran indie game developer Ryan Clark, and this is the Clark Tank! Every second Friday at 1pm Pacific time we stay on top of the latest game industry trends by examining the Steam top 50, scrutinizing the latest Kickstarted games, and by playing the most prominent recent releases. [SIMON'S NOTE: Love Ryan's Twitch stream, and this is an experimental edited-down version of a recent stream, xposted to YouTube.]"

Doom (2016): To Hell and Back (David Craddock / Shacknews) "Marty Stratton knew a good sound when he heard it. He had studied commercial music composition at University of Denver and, with bachelor degree in hand, had headed out west in 1995 determined to land a job in the entertainment industry. [SIMON'S NOTE: this is a GIGANTIC, almost book-length piece, and very well done.]"

The stray dogs of The Silver Case (Gareth Damian Martin / Eurogamer) "For Goichi Suda, those murders would begin a fascination with grotesque crimes that would reappear throughout his career. He was still at developer Human Entertainment at the time, but only a year later, Suda, eager to pursue new ideas, set up his own studio: Grasshopper Manufacture."

Behind the Card | Amara: Warden of Hope (Blizzard / YouTube) "Peek behind the curtains to see what went into creating the cards Awaken the Makers and Amara, Warden of Hope. [SIMON'S NOTE: more deep dive content created by the team making the game - in this case Hearthstone!]"

The first decade of augmented reality (Ben Evans / Ben-Evans.com) "In February 2006, Jeff Han gave a demo of an experimental 'multitouch' interface, as a 'TED' talk. I've embedded the video below. Watching this today, the things he shows seems pretty banal - every $50 Android phone does this! - and yet the audience, mostly relatively sophisticated and tech-focused people, gasps and applauds."

How emergent AI encounters can be beautiful in The Signal from Tolva (Bryant Francis / Gamasutra) "The Signal from Tolva, which comes from the creators of Sir, You Are Being Hunted, is yet another game about science-fiction robots from UK developer Big Robot. And while creative director Jim Rossignol told us yesterday on the Gamasutra Twitch Channel that’s partly because it’s easier to animate beings that don’t have facial animations, he also said it’s because there’s something beautiful about what happens when you program groups of A.I to have their own missions. [SIMON'S NOTE: we're doing a lot more live Twitch chats with devs recently on Gamasutra - here's a good example!]

From hacker to Valve and back again (Brian Crecente / Polygon) "Before co-founding her own augmented reality headset company, Jeri Ellsworth was a technology chameleon, finding niches in electronics and mechanics, mastering them and helping redefine how they worked."

Horizon Zero Dawn - Neil Druckmann Interviews Hermen Hulst (PlayStation / YouTube) "Naughty Dog's Neil Druckmann sat down with Guerrilla Games managing director Hermen Hulst to discuss the studio's shift away from Killzone, and the long process of bringing Horizon Zero Dawn to life."

Gaming under socialism (Paolo Pedercini / Molleindustria) "But the question of what gaming would look like in a socialist world has haunted me for days. Not only because I’m a leftist and I care about games, but because of how it relates to many crucial issues of 21st century radicalism. [SIMON'S NOTE: so Ivory Tower it hurts, but thought-provoking, fo sho.]"

How Steam brought shmups out of arcades and into a new PC renaissance (Matt Paprocki / PC Gamer) "How Steam and passionate fans pulled shoot-em-ups out of exile in Japanese arcades and back into the limelight."

How Ninja Theory's Canceled Co-op Game Led To Hellblade's Bold Future (Ben Hanson / Game Informer) "With our new cover story on Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, we've shown off plenty of gameplay footage from Ninja Theory's game. Today, the game's creative director Tameem Antoniades explains more about how the talented studio arrived where they are today. [SIMON'S NOTE: good honest video interview with Antoniades here on 'the space between AAA and indie'.]"

Searching for the truth of a fake world at EVE Fanfest (Adam Smith / RockPaperShotgun) "Like many EVE players, he’d come to Fanfest, a gathering of hundreds of players, devs and press in Iceland, to represent his in-game character. People wear the insignia of their corporations and alliances, and chant those same names at presentations and pubs. As a spectacle, it’s fascinating, but it’s also confusing."

Spelunky - Noclip Documentary (Danny O'Dwyer / Noclip / YouTube) "For almost a decade players have gleefully explored Spelunky's refined brand of player discovery and emergent gameplay. In this documentary, we talk to the game's creators about building the rules of its procedurally generated worlds."

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]