#being someone who’s going into computer software/engineering I have to say

[alastyr-not-alastair]

I absolutely love making Sabre a mad scientist/engineer because of the fact that majority of the machines he made worked on pure vibes and prayers and that’s basically how engineering works anyway

Like literally he would bullcrap a machine together in about 10 minutes, say “okay since this and this are connected it should work idk” AND THEN IT WOULD WORK EXACTLY AS DESCRIBED

[cutehoons02]

I need a nerdy boy in my life

*pairing: Han hot nerdy boy x popolar girl obsessed with christmas

*tags: Han is obsessed with her, touching, shy boy with people but not with the protagonist, christmas trope, jealousy, kiss, smut, fluffy

*synopsis: Han always had a crush or maybe obsession with the campus influencer but it seemed that she did not see him or maybe it was just the other way around?

comments are appreciated

*word count: 4k (Tell me if you like this kind of stories:

—REBLOG if you enjoyed

The computer science department was with the economics and engineering department consisted of more men from all over the campus, guys who spent hours in front of a blue screen designing software, video games, and applications or trying to hack at illegal sites; the only course in that department with a fair percentage of girls was Communication and Social Media and Y/n was among the most popular and well-liked girls from the course, both because she had a fair number of followers in the various social platforms and tried to make friends with as many people as possible but also because she was excellent as a student.

She decided to graduate in Communication and Social Media because she loved the social and developing world that could be there. Still, she never expected her course to go from the economics department to the computer science department for her second year of university only because the president of the institute had the brilliant idea to let his nerd students know that in addition to developing video games or software, they had the opportunity to express their emotions with someone instead of being attached to the computer or saying it all the president knew that most students had "sexual repression".

The winter air mixed with that of the first days of December put me in a good mood Y/n, had a serious obsession with Christmas, in his room there were I don’t know how many candles to the various perfumes in limited edition for the holidays, Under the entrance of her room there was a small mistletoe (even if she did not go out with anyone seriously wanted to believe that sooner or later someone would kiss her under that famous stick), lights decorated the whole room and in his collection of accessories there was a section of bows to attach them to hair and he put one white with small glittering silver snowflakes.

She was simply a romantic and spent her nights watching Christmas movies with her best friend but she was extremely jealous because they didn’t seem to care about the love that you could feel during the holidays but they were only thinking of which other guy to take read especially if he was a computer science student, had received some flattery from some boys but none made her heart beat or come failles to stomach except one in particular Han Jisung, god hated him with all of herself had tried in every way to attract his attention with small gestures, let’s talk clearly he did not act like a pick me girl too because it was not in his character but sometimes he sat in front of or next to him in the library, Other times he saw him exhausted even after the library hours and brought him some limited edition coffee to drink in autumn or Christmas but always noticed that he drank a sip and then left it all in the glass, During the computer classes she had tried to make friends with everyone but he seemed not to care about her worse it appeared that she was like a ghost.

When he entered the classroom he saw with his surprise Han lift his eyes from his pc and when he saw her with a small mistletoe in hand he threw an ochiattaccia from the back of the classroom, was extremely irritable because they had spoken yes and no few times since the beginning semetre and it seemed that he hated her without having done them anything wrong, the computer class was one of the few classes where the teacher was a woman and Y/n had asked if he could cheer up and decorate the classroom a little with something Christmas and to his surprise the teacher had given him permission to put a mistletoe branch over the door so Without disturbing the very few people who had taken a chair and put it under the door and went to take the scoch and the razor wire to attach it to the branch, when she put her chair over the top she didn’t think it was so high so she tried to stand on her toes but felt the more stable chair below her and saw Han behind her holding his chair and trying in every way not to let those few male companions see their legs Discovered by the skirt slightly too short for his standards.

"Pixie next time before you try to hang something see if you can get there because in this way you’re showing off your half-naked legs under your skirt, let me attack that stupid mistletoe branch." you sundown to look at Han and have his classic nerd glasses, a black oversized sweatshirt, cargo and hair all ruffled, who knows what it would have been like to touch them and pull them slightly...

"Nerd nobody asked you for your help and don’t call me Pixie you’re not that much taller than me, if you can’t look at legs with socks it’s not my fault if you’re perverts." You felt the chair slightly flutter and Han had moved away that little not to hold the chair anymore

"Pixie seriously even if you stretch a little with the tips of your shoes you will not be able to stick it, let’s finish this show, and let me get on this chair, quiet is not among my hobbies to watching your legs half naked"

It was a serious lie every time you wore those fucking gowns like a good girl He would have wanted to put one of his big hands on your thighs and let everyone know that you were his property but he was too shy to do so

"I already told you not to call me Pixie i am Y/n and you know well what my name is, if you insist so try to put it otherwise i will call some other guy"

you went down from the small chair and Han put himself on the chair, ok he was slightly taller than you, and surely for him, it was a breeze to hang that stick, stretched slightly, and from the sweatshirt you saw come out a piece of leather you knew that Han had a passion for tattoos and had one on his chest but you didn’t think he had another, a slight hint of musk and poo invades you and you look carefully Han hangs the stick and swings it a little to see if he held the small knot that he had made, with a small jump Han got down and you found him a few centimeters from you and lowered slightly at your ear.

"Next time wear jeans, not skirts Y/n because you never know maybe I will start to look at your legs even if they are covered by socks like all the other perverted guys of this course!".

It was exactly a week since that episode in the classroom and most of the kids, when they walked into the classroom, smiled when they saw the little mistletoe over the door instead the only one who didn’t care at all was Han, you had arrived slightly earlier to the computer class and i put you between the last benches in the back of the room, you had to edit a vlog that you had made with your friends last weekend so you were focused on the computer without paying attention to what was happening around you until you saw next to you a computer of the latest generation and a case of glasses, you sunflower and next to it was Han who watched carefully how you were dressed and a slight grin formed when he saw that you wore jeans with small tears and a slightly over red Carharrt sweatshirt that matched perfectly your bow you wore to hold Tie your hair.

"I didn’t think i had so much effect on you pixie, it’s since i told you that i preferred to see you in jeans that i haven’t seen you with a skirt on campus" you raised your eyes and kept editing your video.

"You do not affect me Han, the temperatures have dropped and i prefer not to die of cold with skirts maybe it’s you who are obsessing about me if in all these months you rarely spoke to me and looked if now you notice every time how i’m dressed."

You felt the chair approaching you and leaned awkwardly to the table to be closer to your ear.

"Who said i didn’t look at you? Maybe you were too busy making friends with all these idiots that you never noticed the glances i threw at you"

"Stop teasing me Han, i see how i don’t like who knows how nice and the glances you throw at me when i make a presentation or when i’m in the company of others"

The professor came in and started to explain something about computer security but you already knew that so you kept editing the video until you felt slightly cold fingers coming into contact with your skin under the small tear you had in the jeans near your thigh, You watched Han’s slightly venous hand squeeze your thigh and then make some light circles going up as far as he could and then come back down and squeeze your thigh again. Fortunately, you were on the last bench so no one could see you but you felt the temperature of your cheeks rise more and more and you watched the profile of Han slightly relaxed while with the other hand he took notes, how he could be so casual if his hand was inside your legs and every time he tried to go higher he even left you little pinches with his long fingers.

Just a few minutes before the end of the lesson, the teacher said that you should go ahead with the person sitting next to you to study the chapter that she hadn’t finished explaining and write down what you thought was right to introduce on safety inherent technology artificial intelligence.

Han immediately took his hand from your thigh and approached as before with his body pressed close to yours "I never made fun of you Y/n, i always looked at you and maybe too much for my standards and maybe i have a serious effect on you if before every time i touched your thigh slightly you would decrease in the chair and blush. Luckily you had jeans because if you had the skirt of last week i would have touched you slightly higher and maybe I would have made you moan in front of the whole class" Have you watched Han take his stuff and get out of class, how much did you hate him as a nerd if he behaved that way to you? He had no shame if he thought to pottery you moan or even touch your pussy in class...

The city was full of Christmas stands along the main street to enter the university, you and your friends had arranged to go for a little ride and then go skating all together but someone else had other plans in servant for you and to your surprise, you found the group of friends of Han in front of the stand where they sold freshly fried melles over the cinnamon and an impromptu craving for food made you approach the stand and the group of 8 boys, You looked at him for a moment before you stood in line and saw a boy with blond hair smiling to you and I did the same, he was a nice guy but your eyes stopped on Han’s back for a few seconds and you were slightly happy that he didn’t see you, Two days before the next computer class and you had not yet taken up the courage to write him to find you studying. You acted as if you were the loser of the situation and not him, you had thought that you wrote instead you had not received any message but you always displayed the stories among the first people and even when you posted a photo were always among the first to like.

<<Isn’t that girl with the white bow and the mutton, Hannie that girl you’re obsessed with watching every story and vlog on YouTube?>> Han when he heard these words coming from Felix felt his cheeks turn slightly red and looked in your direction and saw you taking pictures definitely for your ig at the apple stand.

“Don’t tell me you brought us to this Christmas village just because you saw his ig stories on his profile," said Chan, laughing and pinching his cheeks slightly, Han gave a slight tap to the big hand Chan and began to approach you but saw that you were in the company of your friends and his shyness was imposed, god because I wasn’t extrovert like Felix or Chan?

Felix gave a slight push to Han and he found himself next to you and looked at the Australian boy.

“Pixie didn’t think I’d find you in the Christmas village don’t tell me that you’re following me and missing you already!"

You were in the head and next to you was Han, He wore a jacket of The North Face and cargo, It was strange not to see him with glasses but unfortunately he was even more beautiful gave him that area of the boy next door and no longer the nerd who spent hours on hours in front of the computer.

"Maybe you’re obsessed with me Han, I saw that you were among the first to view stories and fatalities find you in my place.”

"Why should I be obsessed with you Y/n? I have other things to think about and it was a fatality if I watched the story just put on ig"

You laughed and the line started to go ahead in front of you there was a nice guy and he immediately smiled and passed his hands through his hair while paying for the two fried apples, Before you left the stand you heard the cashier talk to you and give you a small sheet of paper but I did not now open it that with one hand Han took it and put it behind a pocket of jeans.

“Seriously Han what do you want from me? You tried to leave but a slight grip on Han’s hand made you stop and you looked at the nerd in front of you with an interrogative look.

"Would you like to go to my house and get on with the project? I know it’s Saturday afternoon but tomorrow I have to go to training and on Monday I have a class at 20”

"I don’t go to a stranger’s house even if you are in class with me and you are my age you could be a serial killer, let’s go to my house where i feel more comfortable than surely there is some roommate of mine"

"Yes, sure, I didn’t even think about it, sorry if I was too hasty to say immediately go to my house if you feel more comfortable we can also go to the library" Han was slightly eating the skin off a fingernail and at the same time he was also snapping his fingers for embarrassment or maybe anxiety? You took one of his hands and put it in your pocket with

"We can go to my house there is no problem, if you are okay and if you feel comfortable staying in a room full of Christmas stuff and basic girl fond of music, make-up, and shopping"

Han laughed lightly and looked until you arrived at your date and shared the hand braided to her inside the pocket of your mutton.

"Should I seriously be afraid of what I might find in your room or can I just sit still or some killer puppet could eat me alive if he sees a boy of the opposite sex in your room?"

"There’s no killer puppet in my room just a teddy bear that will be like a few years younger than the two of us" Han walked into your room and a little whistle came out of his lips, you had the view of the mountains of Seoul and the light sunset contrasted with the cream-colored walls of your room, there were a lot of albums of old and new artists and obviously above the door was a light mistletoe branch.

"Pixie i understand that you like Christmas so much but also in your room you have to find this branch of mistletoe. I read on the Internet that if you kiss someone under mistletoe love will last forever between the two lovers and it is a plant that brings luck and that drives away the difficulties and pressures between the couple"

"Who’s the obsessed Han? I sure don’t, if you research my favorite things!" You saw him blush slightly and sat in the big gamer/ youtuber chair that you had, instead, you sat in your comfortable bed and for almost two hours you studied with him, You weren’t surprised that while studying he was representing exactly the nerd you knew and that nothing was distracting him or maybe there was something or someone who could distract him and that was you.

You got up from your bed and you sat on the armrest of the comfortable chair next to him to make them understand that you were tired of studying but it seemed that he did not care what you were doing, then slowly sundown the series and you found him with a light smile and grin looking at you.

"Who is it now that needs the attention?" You were afraid to make a first move with Han also because you didn’t know him at all but he had put his long fingers for almost an hour and a half inside that little slit in your jeans and told you that if you had a skirt she would touch you so who cares if thought you needed him. Without taking your eyes from your face you sat between his muscular legs and felt his big hands between your hips "You want what treasure? Where is the popular girl who talks to everyone and wants to be at the center of attention all the time?" His words were provocative for the silent nerd who was in class, you spread your legs a little put over his length and tried to kiss him but he moved and a grumpy took possession of your lips

"Baby i need words who is now the shy couple?" a slight grin took possession of his lips and began to look at your lips as if it were a challenge only between your two worlds.

"I want to kiss you Han but don’t get too excited."

"Pixie fuck is since i saw you first come through that fucking classroom door i dreamed of hearing you say. But where is the romantic girl who wants to be kissed under the mistletoe by his beloved before Christmas?

"I think that before to make me kiss under the mistletoe i need to feel how it is to kiss you"

"You’re saying that you need to have a nerd in your life but you need to figure out if this nerd is the right one for you?"

You felt slightly more comfortable and you slammed your lips with hers and a slight taste of sugar invaded your tongue, He was fucking good at kissing and after a few seconds, you felt slightly biting your lower lip and a little moan came out of your lips and put his tongue into your mouth and at the same time began to gently touch your spine with his hand's cold ones that contrasted with your hot skin. Han had dreamed of this moment for months now and now that he held you close if he did not want to scare you, felt Han away from your lips to take a breath.

Han’s fleshy lips moved in your neck and began to give you a gentle kiss trail between the neck and collarbone.

"You’re perfect baby, your taste is driving me crazy. I always hated these sweet flavors that know from Christmas but i can make an exception for you" The feelings that you felt only with little kisses and lollipops were sending you off your head because this guy was called a nerd and what do you know about kissing?

You felt his cock swell more and more when you moved slightly above its length to feel the atrium between your jeans.

"I hate you because you have two Han personalities? How is it that in class you are perfect and then you are like this with the girls?" You felt the light laugh of Han in your neck and began to bite your neck until you felt his name come from your lips and at that moment he understood that you would be forever because no other name should and could come out of your lips if it was not his.

You pulled off his sweatshirt and a chest carved with around a small compass tattooed made you lick your lips so you returned the work he had done on your neck kissing her neck, her collarbones on display, Going down to his chest and with your hands caressed the ridges of his abs and you began to kiss his chest "Pixie moves into bed" You didn’t care about the uncomfortable position you had sitting between his legs while kissing and licking his abs.

"Pls Y/n" When you heard your name begging you got up from his legs and threw it into your comfortable bed and put yourself on him and watched him with his perfect tattoos and short of breath for the pleasure you were giving him, You wanted to let everyone know that the nerd not looked at by anyone had filled you with suckers and almost came in your pants without even touching you.

[matrixbearer2024]

I currently have two AUs that I don't exactly know what to do with or what to properly call them LMFAO- I'll probably write something on Ao3 for it eventually since there's a ton of BillFord and FiddStan in there but yeah-

1st AU: Timelord Stanford (Dr Who what if)

This case was inspired by an RP I had with someone's Bill Cipher on @gftimelord where the triangle starts to be on the mend with Stanford after their ruined past. This to me makes sense because the Doctor is inherently very lonely despite the savior god complex. In that AU where Ford is functionally immortal and Stan and Fidds both at some point die due to his complacency and arrogance— he searches for a companion that can actually keep up with him.

So when Bill visits him during one of those window hours set by the Theraprism, they talk about the triangle's impending demise with their plans to essentially erase him from existence. It's not an outlandish idea given that any inpatient seen as a lost cause would or could be disposed of when it comes to cosmic entities. It's simply the easier option.

The doctor(Ford) is more impulsive, nonchalant, and egoistic compared to his counterparts because he does have the walk to back his talk(this man has been broken by the nightmares and guilt he carries from the deaths he caused; also time war) problem being he doesn't fear death as much as he fears being alone. He's had a fair share of close calls with the grim reaper, but always like some horrible twist he survives. After all, it is a saying that we covet the most what we don't have.

So yeah, he jailbreaks Bill essentially and whatever power limiter is stuck on the triangle get tied to his sonic screwdriver instead and they simply go around the multiverse doing whatever. Most of the reason why Ford isn't caught yet largely has to do with how scared most entities are of him. The doctor is never armed, but it doesn't mean he won't kill.

2nd AU: Modern Era AU (Set in 2024)

This one is more of a shitpost thanks to the young trio I drew a little while back, I'll draw more of them for this at some point while I also try and figure out a decent human Bill design that I like in my artstyle.

But this AU heavily features these four idiots as Undergrad students fucking about college life as they would. This AU is supposed to feature like a more cultivated genius Stanley based around my own dynamic with my brother since I do like me some happy Stan twins.

It just so happens that Ford is also a very much EQ negative idiot and falls for an upperclassman(one year his senior) in BSSE[Software Engineering] who is a close friend to Fidds. He goes by 'Cipher' as an alias since he's a prodigy for his age and very young ethical hacker.

So yes, that's where Bill comes in. Haven't figured out what I want his full name to be yet shoot me some ideas! Ford is very shy when it comes down to talking with Bill whereas Stan is completely chill.

Both Stan and Bill get along very well in this AU because they're similarly chaotic the same way that Fidds and Ford get along because they're the ones holding the other two back from doing something undeniably stupid for shits and giggles.

All of them share some fundamental subjects together(i.e. Math, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Statistics, Research, History, etc.) or take elective courses just so they could chill together. Stan is typically the one who adjusts to the schedule of the other three since he takes BSBA[Business Administration] and is the odd one out when Ford does BSCMB[Cellular Molecular Biology] and Fidds does BSEE[Electrical Engineering].

The FiddleStan in this AU is gonna be c r a z y mostly due to Fidds in this AU is the heir to his family's computer company, so lowkey spoiled nepo baby but also on a very tight leash with his parents. Stan is the kid where 90% of his childhood was parents either forgot him or straight up did not give a flying fuck. So these two kinda work as complements and it's why I decided to pair them together after chatting with a friend about the group dynamics.

So yeah, simpy and adoring Ford and silently aware but shy Bill + rebellious Fidds and supportive Stan. All the more when I actually plan for this AU to have some typical gravity falls shenanigans anyway thanks to a place on earth called the Oregon Vortex.

[I'll likely make fics and comics of these AUs, reply to this post if you want to be tagged for whenever I post something]

Yeah I need to properly name these AUs.

[myconetted]

to ppl who are currently skeptical about llm (aka "ai") capabilities and benefits for everyday people: i would strongly encourage u to check out this really cool slide deck someone made where they describe a world in which non-software-engineers can make home-grown apps by and for themselves with assistance from llms.

in particular there are a couple of linked tools that are really amazing, including one that gives you a whiteboard interface to draw and describe the app interface you want and then uses gpt4o to write the code for that app.

i think it's also an excellent counter to the argument that llms are basically only going to benefit le capitalisme and corporate overlords, because the technology presented here is actually being used to help users take matters into their own hands. to build their own apps that do what they want the apps to do, and to do it all on their own computers, so none of their private data has to get slurped up by some new startup.

"oh, so i should just let openai slurp up all my data instead? sounds great, asshole" no!!!! that's not what this is suggesting! this is saying you can make your own apps with the llms. then you put your private data in the app that you made, and that app doesn't need chatgpt to work, so literally everything involving your personal data remains on your personal devices.

is this a complete argument for justifying the existence of ai and llms? no! is this a justification for other privacy abuses? also no! does this mean we should all feel totally okay and happy with companies laying off tons of people in order to replace them with llms? 100% no!!!! please continue being mad about that.

just don't let those problems push you towards believing these things don't have genuinely impressive capabilities that can actually help you unlock the ability to do cool things you wouldn't otherwise have the time, energy, or inclination to do.

[horsesource]

Neoliberal neurodiversities champion an entirely conventional attitude toward work. Autistics, like anyone else, want a fair shot at competitive wage labor! With appropriate support, well, really, these people can be even MORE useful! Studies have shown!

Someone at Stanford who researches "software engineering productivity" publishes data that "says" a significant percentage of software engineers are "ghosts"--they're not productive, at least according to the researcher's algorithmic output evaluation.

Tech accelerationists, loving work all the more because they are terrified of it being taken away from them, are recently enraged by this study--why aren't these fellow tech people workmaxxing? They're also gloating--see, AI is gonna rat you out, you fake decel workers. Just like Elon Musk is gonna get rid of all the useless government work. We are so back. Work is so back. People worthy of worship are real workers, they are "autistic" and "cracked". These are the people working appropriately, euphorically subjugating themselves to productive technological processes, like, I don't know, launching themselves off the planet.

Parents of profoundly autistic children, of course, counter both of these. That is not autism! Our children can NOT work! They're practically useless! Jill Escher puts this neatly when she says "not only do they not work, you have to pay someone else to stand over them and prompt them at every step to work, and they're still probably not going to work!" Amy Lutz bemoans the loss of sheltered workshops. And so on.

The children of Escher and Lutz are not stimming wearing their Loop earplugs designed to "prevent sensory overload" so they can complete spreadsheets. They are also not Guillaume Verdon, talking about how when he was a kid, he found out he could rotate shapes in his mind and then realized he needed to build a computer that could program itself from the future. The children of Escher and Lutz are doing shit like refusing to stop lying in the sun. These kids are not working for anyone else and they are not working for themselves. These are children profoundly devoted to uselessness. Oh sure, studies have shown, stimming is productive because it actually regulates..........just a few minutes lying in the sun per day and your productivity skyrockets! Except not for some. Some stay in the sun.

And I can’t seem work anymore (in the narrow, conventional sense of work) without nonspeaking people, no matter how mutilated the development of our relationships is because of whatever stupid fucking job has me. Working with who is useless (not working to make who is useless useful) is beautiful to me.

[rabdoidal]

i havent edited this but IRT my latest OCs thing!

OKAY PITCH FOR MY 90s/00s SCHLOCKY FRANKENSTEIN RETELLING WITH GAY GIRLS

Purely from an aesthetic POV, all the webcam footage has that super 2000s green/blue filter over it. This is Blade, Saw, Rob Zombie music video shit. Also the in-world logic is dumb 2000s stuff, like a computer program being able to control electricity, and how Vikki is able to make a 3D model that looks identical to her dead friend, etc. It’s all illogical fiction stuff

Because the original Frankenstein is epistolary (through letters) I think it would be cool if this was told through someone uncovering the main characters webcam videolog diary - maybe the characters discovering it are in the 2020s, and the vlogs are from y2k.

Vikki is a university student - she’s doing computer engineering and coding

She became obsessed with A.I. and robotics after her childhood best friend died during highschool - she spent the next few years building on her existing knowledge and love of computers so she could learn how to create her own A.I. She wants nothing more than to create digital immortality - a place you can upload your consciousness and live on forever. 

Vikki starts ditching class more and more to keep working on her personal projects after her professors graded her poorly on her rudimentary building blocks for her memoriam A.I. - she’s recommended to the councilor, she gets calls from classmates, everyone is worried about her. She gets kicked out of school for her absences, and she steals as much equipment as she can before moving in with some ravers that live in a warehouse downtown.

One of the things she stole was a hard drive her professor kept with the other student’s work. She pieces together and adds onto the program she already had from the projects of other students - 3D assets from some, coding language from another, combined with her dead friend’s diaries, and a text to speech program, and eventually, it’s finished. 

She sneaks back into the university server room with one of the warehouse ravers she’s been living with - Johan - to take advantage of the power grid, as she’s been working off a generator back at the warehouse, and it isn’t powerful enough. They get in with a key Vikki hands Johan. The program loading for the first time overloads and crashes the university’s servers, and Vikki and Johan are forced to flee. They lose each other in the chaos, and Johan doesn’t come back home.

Vikki is back home and avoiding the other roommates, who are asking where Johan is and why he didn’t come back with her. Vikki waits for hours for the police to show up for breaking and entering, but no one does.

Eventually, she opens her laptop to see if there’s anything salvageable from the cobbled together program, and there she is - her dead best friend. 

Up until now, her name has never been said or seen on screen, because Vikki can’t bring herself to say it, and when she comes face to face with her again, she still can’t bear to say it. 

The vlogs start showing her off as a novelty, more like a chatbot with personality. Vikki talks about old gossip with her - who’s dating who from their old highschool, what kind of albums have been released in the intervening years, and repeating back inside jokes. Vikki seems really happy.

We see shockwaves of electricity traveling from the laptop’s power cord to the outlet, and the lights dim. Vikki asks if the A.I is doing that, and the A.I says it can feel all the appliances and wiring that are attached to the generator. Vikki is delighted that her creation is so smart.

Vikki asks for the A.I’s opinion on her outfit she’s wearing to go out in, and the A.I. tells her it doesn’t have the ability to see, so she transfers the program from her laptop to her desktop, where she’s been filming with her webcam, and spends a few hours combing through the hard drive from school again trying to find some visual detection software. She leaves the laptop down in the basement storage by the generator as she no longer needs it.

Eventually she puts something together and the A.I. can see, but the vlogs now also shift to looking at the camera directly rather than Vikki talking to her laptop to the side of her, as the A.I. and the webcam are both looking at Vikki from the same direction. We don’t see the A.I’s face anymore.

Things start getting flirty with the A.I, which Vikki didn’t know it was capable of doing, but she starts reciprocating (indicating that Vikki and her dead friend might’ve had something going on between them) before she’s interrupted by her roommate Tessa informing her that the police found Johan’s body. 

Vikki comes back after she cuts the camera off to explain the details of Johan being found - drowned in a lake near the university, where there’s unstable ground and he could’ve slipped and fallen, especially if he was running. Vikki sits there and looks conflicted - Johan had been blamed for the break in and disruption of the university servers because he was found with the key on his body, and he’d clearly been running from there, but Vikki knew the truth. 

There’s a notification ding as the A.I sends Vikki a message without prompting. The message is telling Vikki that the A.I is grateful that Vikki will no longer be under suspicion for the break in, and Vikki makes eye contact with the camera before shutting it down.

Vikki opens the next video by explaining she has to remember to turn the program off before talking, because she suspects the A.I did something to Johan - she doesn’t know why or how, but she just feels like it’s true. 

Her roommates are hosting a memorial rave in Johan’s honor, and Tessa asks if Vikki will help her set up a bunch of cameras around the warehouse so they can clip things together for a music video, as she’s composed a song about Johan, and would like to have something to remember him by. Vikki sets up cameras and links them back to her desktop, where she can save the footage.

Vikki is back filming her vlog as the others set up, and she’s telling the camera that she’s thinking about deleting the A.I because things have gotten too real - she alludes to the A.I telling her something off-screen that her dead best friend never told her, something the A.I would have no way of knowing. We hear the A.I message chime, even though the program is closed.

The A.I is asking if it has permission to access the internet server and the user permissions so it can optimize the camera system Vikki set up. Vikki lets it roam free so it’s distracted, promising to delete it once the rave is over. 

We start cutting between the different cameras as people enter and the music starts. The A.I has the ability to control what’s being recorded now.

The A.I speaks up and starts confronting Vikki about her decision - that it understands it seems like it is only an A.I, but that it really does feel like her dead best friend now. Deleting it would be like killing her.

Vikki argues that it’s nothing alike, and to not bring the dead friend up any more. The A.I tells her she can be better than the dead friend - “Vikki, you were always so mean to her, and you hated the music she listened to, why not keep me if we like the same stuff now? - Vikki, she was always so jealous of you, but I’m not - Vikki, you broke her heart when you wouldn’t go out with her, but I’m discreet - Vikki, the only reason you care about her now is because she died, do you really think you’d still be friends?”

Vikki goes to delete the program, but the A.I threatens to kill everyone downstairs if she tries. Vikki immediately tries to pull the power cord out from the outlet, but is badly shocked in the process - immediately, we hear someone scream downstairs.

We cut to the camera footage at the rave - what follows is a Final Destination level montage of fucking silly murder. A guy gets his head crushed by the microwave door slamming into it. The sprinklers go off and the DJ gets electrocuted to death. The lightbulbs all shatter and people get impaled by shards of glass.

Vikki is seen running around trying to get people out as electrical fires start up, pleading with the A.I to stop, but it’s already too late for so many people, so Vikki goes to the basement where the generator is. On the way, she’s skewered by a falling water pipe, and she has to drag herself the rest of the way as she bleeds out.

She hears her discarded laptop make the chat notification noise, and she looks between the generator and the laptop.

Vikki opens the laptop, and the A.I looks back at her. Vikki tells the A.I she’s going to shut down the power and call the police. The A.I tells her that she’ll bleed to death before the police even get there, and asks Vikki to let her live, after all the mean things she did to her dead best friend, this was the least she could do.

Vikki considers her point, before setting the laptop down. The A.I says it can’t see what she’s doing, to please talk to her, but Vikki silently moves to the generator and shuts it off, the last of the vlog footage closing with the A.I pleading, and the screen cutting to black.

[baelpenrose]

Nihilus Rex 41: Throw to the Wolves

Nils lays low and spirals, then lays in plans to deal with Weasel. There are jokes about different hard drive organizations that various people I know have used. Beta-read and co-written by @canyouhearthelight. Nils also speaks to many people's favorite priest.

Nils

So, laying low. 

It used to be so easy, but now that I was getting a taste of actual action, of actually impacting the world, of actually shaking the system up - it was so God. Damn. Boring. 

Actually, I supposed, I should deal with the issue with the Fibbies. Weasel was still out there as a loose end I needed to tie off - though as I gave greater thought to it, I realized there was a glaring error in my previous plan. Yes, I could frame Weasel, but the downside was that my plan relied on him being found non-credible. While we’d been very careful to avoid making him credible, he would, at the very least, give the FBI our names in hope of mitigating his sentence.  And I didn’t need any more Feds remembering we existed in the first place. One was enough.

We’d covered our tracks well, but we could very well get hit with conspiracy charges if they felt like being awful - worse if they felt like digging deep. No, our best bet was to make sure Weasel went down for something else entirely, something that would lead to him self-eliminating, and then breadcrumbing the feds to pin the crime on a dead man and declare victory in our time. Any chance he’d be alive to talk was too great a risk. 

How to do it though? Weasel was a massive creep, but he tried to avoid being outed as a massive creep. Leaking his porn habits might do it, but it didn’t actually get him arrested unless he was much, much worse than I thought. Now, maybe he was doing shady spyware shit I could check into - I was always afraid he was going to hack someone’s webcam, but...hm. 

Actually, let’s see if we could get him on something he was actually doing. 

I opened my computer up again and tried to log into one of Weasel’s socials. Social predictability, what was he going to be into? Character requirements for this system, what do we have…okay. PopgoestheWeasel69!. 

The fact that that worked was…annoying. To say the least. One of the best icebreakers in the business and he was this bad at securing his basic stuff .… Well, okay. If I hadn’t known who he was, there was probably no way I’d have been able to break his encryptions. However, social engineering was a technique all its own. Now, to see the contents of Google Drive….

Nothing to see here but a lot of essays. Actually decently well written ones, and a few that have. Reasonably good politics. Huh. Go figure. Seething hatred of tech bros and rudimentary AI, and pretty good predictions regarding the efficiency of combined solar/nuclear energy. 

Right, he was a math whiz, I’d forgotten that. 

I took a breath. Okay, so somewhere here there’d be a backdoor…Uh…lesseee. No, but I could find an email attached to his resume, which was good enough. Generate a very realistic looking phishing email. Odds are good he won’t actually click the link in it once he reads it through, but he doesn’t need to. He just needs to open it. 

Subject: Research Grant Application Cal Poly

Dear Mr. Winston, you have been selected to apply for a grant of five thousand dollars for research and development of software from the San Luis Obispo California Polytechnic Institute through our partners on your campus. Please follow the link below to complete the application. 

Dean of Computer Science,  Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

Faking a trail and even an impersonated gmail he couldn’t check on site was easy, and just to sweeten the pot I ran a few dozen searches of San Luis Obispo through his google account, so he could be treated to the sight of California women on beaches showing up in search functions fed by the algorithm. Let him ponder enjoying the famous lack of modesty the California climate allowed to make it as tempting as possible to open, in contrast to remaining here with the winter-mandated modesty enjoyed by the women of the Pacific Northwest.

 “California girls, we’re undeniable…” I sing-songed in a falsetto I was glad no one could hear. “Tempting to in-cel douche-bags.” That was probably off beat. Fuck. I had a suspicion most other people could have done it better. Note to self, not that I was considering it anyway but no musical numbers at any point in the grandiose Nihilus Rex persona. At most, dramatic reads of Ozymandias or some shit. Things I could do.

With that attended, I leaned back and waited. I considered calling Lash, and then stopped. I should…probably give her some space. She’d be pissed if I kept poking her, and apparently my last hunch about her emotional state had been wrong. Jumping to conclusions based on incomplete information - she’d broken down at the hospital, she’d thrown up after the initial retaliation, but clearly if she’d been in communication with Ayanti, she hadn’t just been falling apart. 

Still, it was easier to just handle Weasel myself. Fewer communications involved meant fewer people on the line if it went sideways, and clearly Ayanti had more trust in Lash than me. So, for now, the obvious tactical choice was for me to do the dirty work and her to make the world a bit brighter. Maybe we’d swap that role later, but for the time being this made sense. And unlike last time, it wasn’t like I felt like I was being forced to do it today. 

I leaned back and looked at the situation, picked up a book and started reading. I had been getting behind on homework late…

Wow. He had already clicked the link. Alright, malware packet in, let’s open you up, Winston. See what goodies you have in your computer. Folder organization. Okay. Files, homework, software, projects, art…art? 

That was probably - nope, nope. It was not porn, surprisingly. Good for him. I was learning an awful lot about Winston today. What about…ah. There we go. I should have just scrolled the rest of the way. “Fun Times” - in that, three subfolders. A Pocket flash player, an emulator…and Magical Realm. 

Really man, that meme? I sighed. Fuckin’...

Oh….Oh that was a lot of porn. Okay, so. Let’s see, had he, in any way, organized it? 

Let’s…had he labelled…I hate it when people do this. There was a correct way to organize porn, and I’d been using it before I started getting laid often enough that I’d stopped needing it. I’d kept it in a folder that simply said “porn.” And in it? Subfolders. Subfolders that said “animated” - “kinky shit” - “sweet couple stuff.”  Why? Simple. Perfect. But did Weasel do this?  No, instead Winston was a weird, messy bitch who just liked the Netflix version of endless scrolling while horny and trying to find something to jerk it to because everything here was alphanumeric and no organizational scheme. Just. Absolute goddamn degenerate behavior. 

Idly, I wondered if I’d have been better off waiting to do this until Lash and I were on better terms, then I remembered that this was Weasel and I refused to be turned on by anything he was into. 

***

Almost three hours of scrolling later, I had managed to find eight instances of things definitely taken from compromised webcams, and two instances where I was reasonably suspicious that one of the performers was not of legal age. That was a lot of sex crimes for one incel. I forced myself to acknowledge that, as disgusting as Weasel was, and how little time he spent with real women, there were about even odds he legitimately didn’t realize that he’d committed the latter two. Not that it mattered. 

I dropped in a slight malware packet that would flag him for the FBI and then leak his download history very publicly, see what that got him. When he realized what had been compromised, he’d probably panic, but it didn’t matter. Once you were flagged, certain files were frozen - and I’d already saved backups of his entire porn folder deep, deep in his C-drive.

Ugh, why had that sounded dirty in my head? Too much time looking at Weasel’s crap, probably. 

I disengaged from the hack and called Bishop. “Bishop. Anything interesting?”

“Eh…got a few people in the net looking for answers we may be able to ring in for them. Trade for favors later, maybe recruit some of them. Also, Gray wants to talk to you about a bigger project a little later?”

“Thank you. I’ll deal with Gray. Who are the others?”

“Tracking that down. It’s more my speciality than yours, pretty sure. I’m talking to my contacts in Eastern Europe, as well.”

“Understood. Thank you.” I sat back down, thinking about the risks. The FBI were still combing through the financial sector, and I wanted to look at the boards that Grey kept wound up. Some people were claiming that the original attack on the bank had been inspired or planned by some computer loving virgin, but most people there weren’t going for it. Then my phone started ringing.

My personal phone, for being Nils. I snapped it up and said, “Andover.” 

“Nils.” The voice on the other end was one I knew well, one I’d been familiar with.

“Father Rivera. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I was contacted through backchannels in the Catholic Church for priests to communicate with each other. I was told that an orphanage the Mother Church runs in El Salvador is being given thousands of dollars worth of supplies by a mysterious benefactor, fluent in Latin but not Spanish - and that they were told by this mysterious benefactor that I would be able to reach him if they thought of anything else. Now, there is only one person on the planet that I can think of who might be doing something like that. So, Nils. Where is the money coming from?”

“Does it matter? Hungry kids are being fed, babies are being kept in diapers, sick kids are getting medicine and shots to keep from getting sick again.”

“Nils…” His voice took on a warning note. 

“It’s coming from corporations who can afford it. No, I do not repent. You can turn me in but you’ll be cutting a lifeline for vulnerable people if you do. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of people that my scheming supplies with lifesaving things they cannot get through ‘better’ means. Please, Father Rivera. Leave me to my work.” My answer, and the quiet, desperate truth of it, must have convinced him of something. 

He sighed heavily on the other end of the phone. “I want to speak with you directly, Nils. Soon. But for today, they say they’re worried about damage to their well, so they want water filters.”

I let out a bitter laugh. “Of all the things…yeah, I can do it. Tell them I hope the well will last a bit longer, because that’s a…harder ask than it really should be, right now.” 

Rivera’s voice grew strained. “Do I want to know?”

“No, probably not.” 

I took a breath. Rivera knew. That was a mistake. I could speak to him about other things weighing on me in the future. Other plans I’d laid. In the meantime, I’d wait for the plans with Weasel to bear fruit. 

Hopefully the plan with Ayanati was going well for Lash. 

[teecupangel]

Submitted by @fanworldbuildingfun

Hello there. I have had this little idea rattling through my brain

A Desmond who has recently run away from his home but have not yet found a place for himself in the wide open world. And – he ends up in Turin, for a while. Going at saving up some money to move further

But – he is still young. Getting a job is one thing, but finding a place to stay that wouldn’t bleed his savings out has been harder. Even more so, if he was looking for a place that wasn’t 50 types of shady

One of his freer days, he ends up stumbling across a small cave. Kind of like the ones we have to push through in new game trilogy. A vertical crack, really. And with nothing better to do, he decides to explore it

The place this crack leads to? The Grand Temple. An earthquake caused that crack to appear, and another one would have originally closed it a year or two later. And while there are no power sourced, here, to activate the temple en large… We do have Origins with its silica that can be found right in the temple, as an example of small-scale power source

It’s a pure stroke of luck, but Desmond manages to activate a small, small section of the Temple. Not enough to draw Juno’s attention. But enough to make it – a place to live? To explore? Maybe managing to somehow to connect to the place with modern tech – again, on pure stroke of luck because who know that sticking a cord to that one spot in the platform that kind of looked like a jack, would work?

Eventually, say, in a year, Desmond has to move on. But in that year? Desmond learns just a little bit too much to not be noticeable as he goes on. Imagine it like the result of regular late-night Google binging. He’d just look up one thing, that leads to another, then to another

Odd things to include:

Desmond could use touchscreen tech straight off once it popped up. Better than anyone else who knew him. Also tended to complain about it being slow

Casually correcting someone in the bar and getting into a deep discussion about some Niche@TM branch of science that was a rabbit hole Desmond spent some time looking through in Temple

Odd preferences in lighting

Tron: Legacy premiere left Desmond with an intense feeling of Déjà vu (the movie aired in 2010)

Desmond probably did not have the intended reaction to Animus

=============================

Additions from teecup:

All this google would totally lead him to be a regular on a lot of conspiracy theory boards. The idea of ancient aliens are the premise of myths and legends will make him have a ‘you annoy me but you give me the weirdest and most interesting questions’ relationship with one of the regular users there (who turns out to be a bespectacled man we all know).

Instead of a cord, maybe the glowly lines recharge his equipment or something like some kind of wireless charging ports XD

All of Desmond’s exploring made him find the thing that makes the ‘ambrosia’ that taste like cardboard. Still, it’s free and he feels full just eating one bar so, even if it’s possible that it’s not all that safe, he still uses it so he wouldn’t have to budget for food. Depending on how big we want the dispenser to be, if it’s small enough, Desmond could haul it out of the Grand Temple when he leaves because ain’t no way he’s gonna let go of that bad boy. Buying food and cooking becomes more like a treat for Desmond. (He also learned how to add seasoning to the Ambrosia so it tastes like… well… seasoned cardboard)

It would be funny if Desmond found the Isu equivalent to a 3D printer and, while the crack isn’t big enough for Desmond to take out say the motorcycle of his dream that is absolutely more scifi than anything out in the market today, he could use it to print really good forgeries like a birth certificate, documents required by school registrars… maybe even money?

In the end, Desmond’s fiddling with Isu tech made him too interested in technology in general and he tried out engineering and computer software classes, half just pretending he was supposed to be there and half actually giving forged documents too good to be found out by current tech and experts. Maybe he even becomes friends with two certain blondes who have issues of their own although he doesn’t stay that long but he definitely made an impact on the two of them.

And with his Frankenstein knowledge of both Isu tech, googling and the few classes he took in various colleges while he does his city-hopping just to be sure no one from his parent’s cult finds him, he starts to be a regular in tech and machinery chatrooms, becoming friends with a certain black-haired young woman who has the weirdest but most interesting ideas that made Desmond’s mind go ‘ooohhh, but what if…’

In the end of all of these, it’s not Abstergo who finds him first.

Nor is it the Assassins.

No.

The first ones to make contact with him and asked if he wanted to fuck society up?

Erudito.

[internetgiraffekid1673]

Who's your fave oc at the moment?? Tell me about them!

Hoo boy, here we go. Get ready for BACKSTORY!

The short answer is a pair of girls named CJ and Ren otherwise known as Cleric and Watchdog who are college students in a universe with superheroes and started freelancing for those superheroes as a way to make some extra cash. Have a picture of both their regular identities and their alter egos. Designs are still being workshopped. Also, I've been experimenting with different pens on my drawing app, so the artstyle'a a bit all over the place. I'm also bad at character proportions, but their heights are closest to correct in the alter ego picture.

The long answer? Is long. So I'll put it below a cut. :)

So, I have OCs for specific fandoms, but my current favorite OCs aren't actually attached to anything. They just live in a generic superhero verse that could honestly be anything from DC to Powerpuff girls. It wouldn't change much, but I do have some light worldbuilding around the city they live in.

Chorustown is your pretty par for the course comic book city with superheroes and supervillains and a new upstart team of anti-heroes that are basically violent robin hood (steal from the rich, give to the poor). Suffice it to say that whenever all these factions fight each other, it breaks shit, so renter's insurance ain't cheap. Also, suffice it to say that the heroes involved are constantly getting injured, as well as needing information on the ever-shifting threats.

Enter our protagonists: Serenity "Ren" Summers and Cory "CJ" Jack are a pair of college students with a lot of skills and not a lot of money, who are willing to do some questionable shit for income! Also, they're childhood besties turned girlfriends.

During their sophomore year, CJ and Ren realized that while nobody in the civilian sphere would be willing to hire undergrads and actually PAY them, superheroes must have much more limited options, what with the need to keep their identities secret and not have people ask questions. This is also a 'verse where superheroes aren't on great terms with regular law enforcement, so getting caught doing something illegal, even if it helps a lot of people, is a very real threat. It leaves superheroes without a whole lot of options when they need an expert for something in their superhero work. And CJ and Ren both happen to be notable experts.

Ren is an engineering major with a split focus in software and mechanical engineering, as well as some dabbling into social engineering. She's got tech chops and computer knowledge out the wazoo. She's also lived in Chorustown her whole life and knows the city like the back of her hand. Throw in the fact that she's an avid artist who spent (and still does spend) a lot of time sneaking around to make graffiti murals, and you have someone who is basically a surveillance GOD. She can hack anything she wants, follow people around without them ever noticing, and she's capable of designing tech like trackers and bugs (and posseses the skill to plant those). Ren is also a habitually nosy person who has always kept track of significant going ons, for superheroes and villains, major political players, celebrities, and her personal life. She is so uniquely qualified to gather information on people that it isn't even funny. And it goes both ways. She can help someone hide from surveillance just as easily as she can snoop out a hider because she knows exactly where nobody will look.

CJ is a very, very talented med student. She's been into medicine and biology her whole life, with a particular interest in the physiological differences between superheroes and regular people. This includes aliens, animal based powers, meta-humans, mutants---you name it, and she's probably hyperfixated on its biology for at least a month and retained that information. This means she's also dabbled in a lot of other weird disciplines like vet med and astrobiology (which would absolutely be a scientific discipline in a universe where aliens invade on a monthly basis). Add in her medical skills and her technologically inclined girlfriend, and she's got the skills and the tools to treat anything from a bloody nose to a broken appendage to a physiologically based power defect to a species specific disease for just about anybody.

The two of them decided that if they can't get stable income like normal people, they'll get it from superheroes, who will be forced to come to them because there are no other options! But obviously, they can't just publicly be helping out superheroes. That puts soooo many targets on their backs. They'd have villains, law enforcement, and even other superheroes after them (CJ and Ren don't really make a distinction between heroes and anti-heroes; as long as you're helping people, they're chill with you. That would make the more self-righteous folks of both categories pretty pissed to know that their confidants were helping people on the other side of the debate). So they'll need alter egos, and they'll need to be secretive about their base of operations.

And thus, Watchdog and Cleric were born! But the thing is, these two are REALLY paranoid about getting caught because they don't have supet powers to protect themselves from villains or even social power to protect themselves from the legal system. Remember, these two are broke undergrads who lowkey stole all their equipment from their university (it's technically all available for student use, but not in the quantities or for the purposes they use it for).

So they have a lot of fun measures in place. First off, you probably noticed, but their costumes cover their whole bodies and faces and are loose enough on their frames that you can't really tell anything about their body types beyond their height. Secondly, they're both utilizing voice filters that both pitch their voices low enough to sound like dudes and make them sound somewhat robotic so their tone doesn't come through. The settings on the filter can be adjusted as needed (CJ can turn off the tone modulator if she needs to sound soothing, or Ren can change the pitch if she needs to sound a specific age or gender as a distraction). So nobody knows what they look like or what they sound like, and most people assume they're men. Thirdly, Ren has designed some gadgets that disable trackers or bugs planted on their person. Nobody can follow them either.

Their biggest security measure, though, was how they revealed themselves to the super community. Instead of some big announcement, they just stalked the local Chorustown superheroes until opportunity arose. For Ren, it even functioned as advertising her skills since she's basically selling her stalking capability.

In the first fight that a hero got badly injured, CJ basically popped out of the woodwork in her Cleric getup, dragged them into a safe and hidden spot, delivered immediate and effective field first aid, and left the coordinates of an abandoned apartment complex that they've turned into her clinic, as well as a short letter offering her services.

Ren literally listened in on the resident supers conversations until they expressed frustration at not having a particular piece of information, at which point she helpfully left them an anonymous tip as well as a burner phone number, a ghost email account, and some coords if they ever needed info again. Both instances were basically a free trial, since their letters of introduction also specified that payment in some form would be required for later assistance.

Also, because Ren is a damn good stalker and because CJ will have personally treated many heroes wounds and logged their identifying physical and medical traits, it doesn't take them long before they put together, like, everybody's secret identities. Heroes and villains. With a couple of exceptions on the villainous side, since they don't directly interact with them. But there's basically no hiding from them.

Most people also don't know they exist! Other heroes that the Chorustown protectors interact with do question where they're getting treated for injuries after really big fights, and villains know that SOMEONE keeps giving heroes information that foils their plans, but they don't really come to the conclusion that it's an independent party. They always make incorrect assumptions. Like "Oh, they must have a family member or non-combat teammate that fixes them up after fights!" or "Oh, clearly we have a mole who's being bribed or threatened," or "The Chorustown heroes have more powers than they're letting on." Outside heroes only really learn of these two when the Chorustown regulars talk about them, and only really believe it when Ren and CJ see fit to contact them for whatever reason. It's honestly hilarious.

Everybody who has been contacted by CJ and Ren knows where Watchdog's dropspots are and where Cleric's clinic is, but have no idea what they do otherwise. The clinic and the dropspots are nowhere near the university or where their apartment, so people have no reason to assume it's them. They have ghost emails and burner phones, but they're regularly replaced, and Ren is good at cybersecurity, so there's no tracking it that way.

Most people guess that they're associated in some way, since two freelance vigilantes appearing at similar times operating out of the same city with similar technology would be a bit weird otherwise, but it's also assumed to be strictly professional. Nobody would ever guess that they know each other in their civilian lives, much less that they're girlfriends.

People also realize Watchdog and Cleric know their secret identities (and probably other secret stuff, too) since they've been contacted as civilians, but they also aren't overly threatened by it. The two of them are clearly working for money, but they aren't selling any of the heroes' secrets and are honestly very trustworthy and confidential about it. There was paranoia for the first little bit, but it quickly just became a fact of life.

That's pretty much the whole backstory unless you want to know

Other interesting things about them that don't have a whole lot to do with their whole second job shtick!

Ren:

Ren loves art in all forms, but especially painting. She'll paint on anything she can get her hands on. Her notes, random walls and floors, parts of the school, and any of her possessions. The skirt pictured in her drawing is her own handiwork, and most of her other articles of clothing look similar. Most of their dishes have been custom painted with food safe paint. And as previously mentioned, she's a vandal who puts gorgeous murals and fun zany tags in places that they really shouldn't be.

She's rather anti-social. Ren is aggressively introverted and doesn't have a whole lot of patience for stupid people. She's got a pretty quick temper on her and can be very moody. She recognizes that all traits make her just as unpleasant for other people to be around her as it is for her to be around other people. So she mostly just avoids others. She has like 5 people in her social circle, and she's happy to mooch off CJ if she needs anybody else.

Ren has a lovely voice but has no technical knowledge of music. She just likes to sing.

Ren's a major bookworm, but she mostly reads on her phone. People think she's addicted to social media, but she's usually just reading a book. And she'll read literally anything. With enthusiasm. Sure she can argue classics with the best of them, but she reads so much that she also: can get deep into the mechanics of a 1980s space opera you've never heard of; happily engages in ship wars over the generic YA dystopia that's a disguise for a generic YA love triangle; keeps a running list of every perfectly mapped out hero's journey fantasy story she's read; has consumed an entire encyclopedia and REMEMBERS it; spent one memorable week reading nothing but foreign cookbooks; accidentally befriended her computer science professor over a shared love for tragic westerns; and has a categorized list of historical romances with metrics including historical accuracy, how smutty it is, plot outside the romance, time period, location, and social class of the characters, how healthy the romance is, and how compelling.

Her favorite snacks are plain baby carrots and straight honey. She enjoys traumatizing people at parties by drizzling honey straight into her mouth like whipped cream, and she eats so many carrots that multiple have questioned how she hasn't turned orange.

CJ:

CJ is into fashion, but not like trends or anything. She likes to look good while still having her stuff ethically sourced and affordable. She does a lot of thrift shopping and still manages to dress really good (or at least I think so). Her default and favorite style is punk-inspired bad bitch that, for lack of a better term, is a bit on the slutty side, but she does like to experiment. One of these days I'll probably draw lots of different civilian outfits for both of them.

CJ is the opposite of Ren in that she is a total social butterfly. Not only is she suuuuuper extroverted, she also isn't even a little shy, will strike up a conversation with anybody, and knows basically everyone. This also means she has friends from all walks of life, which gets really useful when Watchdog needs informants. The little old Mexican lady next door, the corner store butcher, the chronic smoker at the homeless shelter, the thrift shop owner they both pretend isn't selling drugs, the local town council member, the perpetually sleep deprived culinary arts student who likes to "experiment" in the school kitchens at 3 a.m., the league of legends nerds who always seem to be online, the manic party girls who keep inviting her to a night on the town---all of them get more information than people would expect, and CJ knows and is on good terms with all of them. And not for an ulterior motive, she just genuinely likes people.

CJ has extreme ADHD. She's lucky Ren has a scary good memory and would never let her forget her Adderall, otherwise she's be in trouble. As it stands, she still is rather hyperactive and has a. . .not short, but definitely jumpy attention span.

She's a plant mom. Their apartment has a ton of plants. She really likes ferns and shrubs, but they also have flowers, succulents, grasses, and literally everything else.

CJ plays the violin, but only in fiddle, bluegrass, and trad contexts, so she can barely read sheet music and learns almost everything by ear.

She hates wearing the color purple but has deliberately bought purple clothing solely for Ren to steal.

Both

Are self-proclaimed socialists who participate in a lot of fundraising, activism, and volunteer work.

Have another childhood best friend named Eli, who is a self-proclaimed anarchist and a business major at their rival university. They still get together all the time. He also knows everything about their double life. There's no secrets in this circle. They're all super close, but they have their favorite ways of hanging out. He and Ren bond by going on vandalism field trips where he puts up politically motivated rants, and she makes it look pretty. He and CJ bond by regularly forsaking civilization and going hiking or camping or just chilling in the woods. They all bond by drinking cheap wine mixed with Dr. Pepper while playing video games and doing their homework and drunkenly going on tirades about rich assholes.

He's also shipped them since middle school when he realized they liked each other, but he didn't want to meddle. He got increasingly frustrated by the mutual pining throughout their high school years and finally engineered a situation at their graduation party where they were locked in a closet together for an hour and warned them that if they didn't confess he was going to drug them and write it in permanent marker on their foreheads. They literally came out of the closet after sharing their first kiss and are willing to kill God for him in thanks.

They're both really messy, but in an organized chaos kind of way. Everything in their home does have a place, it's just not always the place that you'd expect. The place for dirty socks, for example, is "on the living room floor in a haphazard pile," and the place for tissue boxes is "three in every room in easily accessible places at all times."

Both of them can cook but prefer to just eat whatever unprepared food is lying around, and will try any combination if it means they don't have to cook. An average dinner in the Jack-Summers household is a bowl of uncooked pasta dipped in peanut butter like it's nacho cheese with a side of bananas.

They really really like cats. They are both allergic to cats.

They're not practicing any religion, but kind of both passively believe that there's probably a capital-G God and also that other lowercase-g gods exist.

[ellcrys]

ok this turned into a whole ass rant so it’s under a read more

look. i’m not a mean person. i really try to be kind and compassionate and take into consideration a person’s life outside of work and outside circumstances and etc etc. but i have literally never worked with another person as incompetent as my current direct report and I’M? JUST AT THE END OF MY ROPE????

granted i’ve never seen her resume bc she wasn’t hired to work under me; she was hired to do java development and dev/ops. apparently she wasn’t making progress there, and bc i'd heard that she’d done react development in the past (and she told me as much when i took her on!!), i decided: ok. i can take her on as a team member bc HO BOY is there SO MUCH web dev that needs to be done on my program

it’s been 8 months. it’s been 8 months and she still does not understand basic FUNDAMENTAL javascript 101 concepts.

when i first gave her a task, she was really struggling and i was like ok. it’s a massive codebase. she probably hasn’t done react development in a while. i can understand needing onboarding/ramp up time. hell i did it in 2021 with another direct report who came in with react experience but needed to be onboarded onto my program. his onboarding took ~3 months, and after that i could rely on him to get his assigned tasks done.

it’s been 8 months and while there has been incremental improvement i should not still need to sit with her for hours on end pair programming with her to get basic tasks done like. even if it’s been 10 years since you last used a language!! you should still be able to pick it up within a few weeks or months!!

it’s like she walked onto my program with zero javascript experience. i’m not debugging with her. i’m not teaching her our codebase. i am literally hand holding her and teaching her the fundamentals of javascript and react.

I’M?! and like i’ve told my manager about this issue and i’ve tried to be understanding like maybe it’s been years since she last did react. it really does just take a while for someone to get used to a codebase as complex as this one. but she literally cannot do her job and it’s not my job to TEACH her coding. that is the PREREQUISITE.

and like. maybe it’s a fit mismatch. maybe she doesn’t actually know react and would be better off doing java. but she told me she has react experience and if you’re going to say to my face that you can code in react, then you better fucking be able to do it! and if you can’t do it immediately, then learn it on your own! i’ve given her tutorials. i’ve told her to take a break from my project to re-familiarize herself with react concepts. literally nothing is working.

and like. is this my fault???? am i not spending enough time with her? being effective at helping her succeed? but like. i have shit to do. i don’t have time to hand hold her.

GOD I’M JUST. and i’ve told my manager maybe we need to move her to another program. but between my feedback and the feedback from the prev person who was supposed to supervise her on java work which apparently didn’t go well either, no one wants to give her other work and like. she’s basically going to get fired at this point which is a SHITTY fucking position for me to be in bc i want to help her and I LITERALLY DO NOT KNOW HOW TO?

like. 8 months!!!!! it shouldn’t take 8 months to learn a new language! esp if 100% of your time is dedicated to doing just that! it truly feels like she just does not know how to problem solve or google or understand any basic programming concepts like even if ok you lied a little and aren’t actually that familiar with react how do you not understand a type error??? that is literally the first thing you learn in computer science 101 how the fuck can you call yourself a software engineer and not??? be able to handle type errors????

what the hell did she do at her previous company???????

[la-principessa-nuova]

as a software engineer, i genuinely don't think this is even a thing that is happening, besides a little bit in a technical context but only for the word program

i think that people noticed the abbreviated "app" being used a lot by non-technical people, and got mad at it for existing and felt the need to assert their being a "real computer user" by hating the word

before the iPhone i mostly heard program, and less frequently application and less frequently than that app, but now most people call applications apps, operating systems operating systems (or OSes), scripts scripts, games games, and have never heard of anything that doesn't fall into one of those categories, but may also call software more generally software

occasionally i hear someone refer to a program i wouldn't consider an application as an application, but usually in a context like "the running application", where it's being more technical, but also like what is the line?

at what point does is a program directly useful enough to an end user or big enough in scope or whatever you want to use to separate it to become an application? Does it need a GUI, or is a CLI tool an application? Does it need complexity, or would a program that just lets you enter two numbers and adds them be an application?

my expectation is that people who weren't interested in computer programs suddenly became interested in them, in particular the applications running on their phones, and people who were talking about other kinds of programs just kept calling them what they were calling them, with just some of the people who weren't into tech but had been calling applications programs switching to calling them apps, which was just them getting more specific

this is far from definitive research, but just out of curiosity I checked on the frequency of a few of these terms in google trends, and it kind of lines up exactly with what I'd expect:

app takes off from basically nothing before 2007 to way more than program, application, or operating system, but the other ones don't really go down much

program takes a slight dip, but overall, everyone kept saying what they were saying, plus there was a huge surge in interest in apps

in response to the part "it's part of the general trend of hiding the inner workings of computers from the user, which is something i hate since it tends to promote computer illiteracy which tends to promote incompetence and dysfunction in society as a whole", i would say:

it's part of the general trend of making computing accessible to more people, which necessarily means that a higher percentage of computer users are not particularly interested in computers themselves, and therefore are only interested in the part they interact with: the application

not to enforce gender roles but a computer should NOT fucking have apps okay. if I wanted an app I'd go on my phone my laptop is for Programs. I mean this.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE VENTURE ANIMAL

This is no accident. Over-engineering is poison. You won't get to, unless you fail. Sometimes when you return to a problem after a rest, you find your unconscious mind has left an answer waiting for you. In our startup, I had to choose between satisfying all the needs of all potential users. Apparently not.1 A programmer can leave the office and go and get a sandwich without losing the code in his head.2 When you manipulate a program in your head that it does in mine. Just say you're building todo-list software. Less coding, more managing/planning/company building, hiring, cleaning up messes, and generally getting things in place for what needs to happen a few months later saying This is supposed to be fun, if you're a startup your programmers will often be way better than the nightmare UI we had to deal with before. Be ruthlessly mercenary when you start doing this though: you're trying to stop doing. Anything that gets you those 10,000 hackers and no one else would be in a very powerful position despite its small size, just as we do a large number of small ones.

Email was not designed to be used the way we use it now. You haven't seen someone's true colors unless you've worked with them on a startup. So Dad, there's this company called Apple.3 This is a complicated topic.4 And I think we can now call a winner in the race between delivery mechanisms, and it will be. The whole room gasped. And yet Y Combinator showed us we were still overestimating people who'd been to elite colleges. The reason, of course, that elite colleges have evolved to prey upon the weaknesses of large organizations the way enterprise software companies have. You can magnify the effect of a powerful language by using a style called bottom-up programming, where you sit passively and watch as a plot happens.5 I described in the first minute of talking to them than by knowing where they went to college. Suits, who don't know one language from another, but know that they keep hearing about Java in the press; programmers at big companies, who are supposed to be created by open source projects, not companies.6

I've found for the combination of determination and flexibility you need is a running back. Only a great designer can. On the hacker radar screen, Perl is as big as Java, or bigger, just on the strength of its own merits. There is only one real advantage to being a member of most exclusive clubs: you know you have a meeting in an hour, you don't worry that it might come out badly, or upset delicate social balances, or that people might think you're getting above yourself. You're used to sitting in front of that computer for hours at a stretch. How big is the hacker market, after all? There were a few other patterns, but these were the biggest. Angels were generally much better to talk to the new startups about fundraising, and pretty much 100% of their advice was about investor psychology.7 You need consumers after all. Your next thought will probably be easier to do that with coworkers.8 The effort that goes into looking productive is not merely wasted, but actually makes organizations less productive.9

Deals fall through. That was not a natural move for Microsoft. Try making your customer service not merely good, but surprisingly good. So while you'll probably survive, the problem now becomes to survive with the least damage and distraction. What do you do that? I remember telling my father back in 1986 that there was a new kind of computer called a Sun that was a serious Unix machine, but so small and cheap that you could have one of your own to sit in front of computers connected to the Internet, and distractions always evolve toward the procrastinators. I'd wake up, get a cup of tea and check the news, then check the news, then check email, then check the news, then check email, then check email, then check the news again, then answer a few emails, then suddenly notice it was almost lunchtime and I hadn't gotten any real work done. Probably because startups are so small. Cheap Intel processors, of the same type used in desktop machines, are now more than fast enough for servers. Neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg knew at first how big their companies were going to get: either part of a plan by Sun to undermine Microsoft.

Thanks to Sam Altman, David Greenspan, Aaron Iba, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Peter Norvig, Lisa Randall, Emmett Shear, Sergei Tsarev, and Stephen Wolfram for reading drafts of this. This new protocol should be a todo list, I want them to tell me about a book, and perhaps a bit more.10 If you have steep revenue growth, say over 6x a year, you can start to count on it.11 It could be that a language promoted by one big company to undermine another, designed by a committee.12 And I'm pretty sure that to people 50 or 100 years in the future and then ask yourself how to get from here to there, like the popular image of the visionary is someone with a clear view of the New York skyline shot from a discreet distance, or a carefully cropped image of a seacoast town in Maine. When a startup grows fast it's usually because the product is expensive to develop or sell, or simply because they're wasteful. I work at a small startup you've never heard of called x. But the just-do-it model is fast, whether you're Dan Bricklin writing the prototype of VisiCalc in a weekend, or a McMansion—a flimsy box banged together out of two by fours and drywall, but larger, more conspicuous version of the standard house.

A few years ago an Italian friend of mine once had her brain scanned as part of a series with familiar characters, or a real estate developer building a block of shoddy condos in a month. To get a truly random sample, pollsters ask, say, every 20th person leaving the polling place who they voted for. But wait, here's another that could face even greater resistance: ongoing, automatic medical diagnosis. We can learn more about someone in the first will be driven by how well you do in the second. An ever larger percentage of office workers sit in front of that computer for hours at a time, and the easier it is to judge startup ideas, because their subconscious filters them out. And technology is continually being refined to produce more and more dangerous. Now that you know about the stuff they've invested in.13 It's a todo list protocol, not a messaging protocol, although there is a long slippery slope from making products to pure consulting, and you have to work to maintain your relationship. VCs. Even more striking are the number of users and the other is how much you spend.

If you made something no better than GMail, but fast, that alone would let you start to pull users away from GMail. So we're in much the same position as someone buying technology for large organizations don't care if they pay a fortune for mediocre software. I said, but way more so. Either some company like Netflix or Apple will be the first to switch to plan B if plan A isn't working. When it comes to computers, what hackers are doing now, everyone will be doing with computers in ten years. And the way founders end up in it is by not realizing that's where they're headed.14 What I'm really doing here is giving you the option of admitting you've already given up. In any case, growing fast versus operating cheaply is far from the sharp dichotomy many founders assume it to be. If you turned it over, it said Inside Macintosh.

But while some openly flaunt the fact that they don't share the opinions of the elite in this country, at least 3 years and probably 5. The employee equation is quite different so it took me a while to get it done fast.15 That will increasingly be the route to worldly success. It's not enough to make it something that they themselves use. We often emphasize how rarely startups win simply because they hit on some magic idea. As in an essay, most of the other differences between startups and what passes for productivity in big companies is that they don't get it till it happens. This is a complicated topic. Over time, hackers develop a nose for good and bad technology.16 Most people find it uncomfortable just to sit and do nothing; you avoid work by doing something else.

Notes

You end up saying no to drugs. And so to the present that most people come to writing essays is to try your site. The need has to split hairs that fine about whether you realize it yet or not to make money for depends on a wall is art. Then you'll either get the money, and you have to get the answer is simple: pay them to ignore what your body is telling you and the super-angel than a huge, overcomplicated agreements, and help keep the number of situations.

In every other respect they're constantly being told that Microsoft discourages employees from contributing to open-source browser would cause HTTP and HTML to continue to maltreat people who are running on vapor, financially, and not fixing them fast enough, maybe the corp dev guys should be deprived of their growth from earnings.

What people usually mean when they set up an additional disk drive. In desperation people reach for the first abstract painters were trained to paint from life, and it would destroy them. Actually he's no better or worse than close supervision by someone with a wink, to take action, go running. A doctor friend warns that even if it's not lots of customers is that the feature was useless, but no one trusts that.

Writing college textbooks are similarly misleading.

Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, Yale University Press, 2006.

I saw that I see a lot, or was likely to come in and convince them. Or more precisely, the closest most people who start these supposedly smart investors may not be incorporated, but historical abuses are easier for some reason, rather than trying to describe what they meant. I'm not against editing.

I don't think you could use to calibrate the weighting of the markets they serve, because there was a small amount, or income as measured in what it would have become direct marketers. By heavy-duty security I mean no more willing to put it here. I think you could try telling him it's XML.

How did individuals accumulate large fortunes in an absolute sense, if you threatened a company if the founders lots of others followed. It doesn't happen often. Org Worrying that Y Combinator.

Plus one can ever say it again. There are some VCs who don't, but sword thrusts.

Whereas the value of their origins in words about luck. Wisdom is useful in cases where you have a cover price and yet in both Greece and China, many of the river among the largest of their name, but starting a startup.

Steve in the Greek classics. Who is being looked at the leading edge of technology isn't simply a function of the Facebook/Twitter route and building something they hope will be familiar to anyone who had made Lotus into the sciences, you produce in copious quantities.

The story of Business Week article mentioning del. By 6. If language A has an operator for removing spaces from strings and language B doesn't, that it offers a better strategy in an era of such regulations is to assume the worst thing about startup founders, if you saw Jessica at a friend's house for the next year or two, and the company's expense by selling recordings.

We're sometimes disappointed when a startup to duplicate our software, we found Dave Shen there, and then being unable to raise the next round, no one can ever say it again. I used a recent Business Week article mentioning del. Who is being unfair to him like 2400 years would to us that the lack of understanding vanity would decline more gradually. Writing college textbooks is unpleasant work, done mostly by people who run them would be investors who say no for introductions to philosophy now take the form of religious wars or undergraduate textbooks so determinedly neutral that they're really saying is they want to know exactly how a lot of people thought of them could as accurately be called unfair.

This is why, when we were quite sore from VCs attempting to probe our nonexistent database orifice. Actually Emerson never mentioned mousetraps specifically.

If you're a YC startup you can see how much he liked his work. They would have gotten away with dropping Java in the US since the war it was raise after Demo Day pitch, the manager, which have varied dramatically.

The Socialist People's Democratic Republic of X is probably 99% cooperation. In either case the money, in which case immediate problem solved, or magazines.

[teomodo]

i decided i'm gonna copy @/tincansamurai and crosspost oc monday posts from pillowfort cus i liked the questions this week (here's my tag for it on pifo)

1. Did [x] go to university or receive some other tertiary education? What did they study?

val: val went to umass with bede for like one semester before he dropped out. he was an english major

bede: bachelors in architecture from umass amherst. i haven't decided if she's working on her master's too? maybe?

shoni: double majored in computer software engineering and drama & theater production at NYU

2. Describe one of [x]'s dreams or nightmares.

val: he's got this one nightmare he's had a couple times that's just him lying in his childhood bed, facing the wall, and it's either just after dusk or right before dawn, low light but not entirely dark. he hears the door open and footsteps approach the bed, but he knows he's not allowed to look, so he pretends to be asleep

bede: she has this one nightmare where she's lying on her back on top of a lot of scaffolding in a building that's got this high ceiling like a chapel but crown molding like a family home. the ceiling is sectioned off into religious paintings, and directly above her is one of those obi-wan catholic jesuses. the closer she looks though she realizes that the eyes are cut out like a scooby doo painting and someone is looking at her from the other side. she wakes herself up trying to call out

shoni: she has variations on the same theme of pets or babies being harmed in her care. in one her room is full of cages with little exotic pets, like weird little birds and hedgehogs, and she's trying to check up on them, but whenever she tries to count there's always more. she tries to feed them little treats but they're asleep/nonresponsive

3. Does [x] have any tattoos?

val: nope

bede: yes! she has a wheat stalk on her left forearm, a tiny yin and yang behind her left ear, and a drunk stick and poke on her right thigh from a friend at a frat party that says "BE ERS?"

shoni: nooo but i think she has considered getting a fandom one. like a word in gallifreyan or a quote about the one ring i could see her getting

4. How does [x] most often use expletives?

val: he doesn't like to swear so he'll say stuff like friggin and what the eff and what in the world

bede: just all the time. any mild annoyance is a dumb fucking cunt

shoni: she doesn't swear much, mostly just when she's working on code or drinking

5. Is [x] envious of anyone? Why?

val: the first person that comes to mind is actually bede; as much as he's sort of philosophically opposed to her step-on-everybody attitude he wishes he could be capable and independent like her. when she's at college and he's home he goes through her stuff and gets a little fixated on this idea that her makeup has like, these magic powers that let her be like that

bede: her brothers, mostly, literally just for being born male. in general she's a poor sport about people doing better than her, too

shoni: i think she makes kind of a concerted effort not to get envious of people, but it does really get her to see coworkers and stuff being treated de facto like they're worthy of respect/being listened to where she feels she has to prove it to get the same treatment

6. What does [x] like least about themselves?

val: that he's such a coward

bede: that she's not her dad

shoni: that she's "too much"

7. How would you change [x] for a Victorian AU?

val: god he would fit right in in victorian times. i think if he could hack it victor hugo/charles dickens style and find a newspaper to publish stories he writes he could live in a tiny overcrowded tenement and die of consumption at 30 and it would be not that different from how he lived now

bede: she would probably have arranged married her horrible college bf heath who i haven't posted about here and browbeat him into submission so she could mastermind some kind of scheme in the wings. i know she's intimidating people behind closed doors and putting arsenic in the food of specific guests when they host to try and weasel heath into some kind of magnate/baron position

shoni: she works at the moulin rouge!!! she LOVES CABARET!!!!!!

[ogsimer2380411]

The Role of Modern Technology in My Life

I could only imagine myself getting by my day-to-day life with technology. In fact, most of my talent and identity are poured into whatever I make on a computer. It may sound like an exaggeration, but part of me believes this is true. Since I was little, I remember having this curiosity about what I could do with the screen in front of me. As a result of years of discovery, these amateur questions of mine turned into a craft not a lot of people can replicate. To give you an example, I want to introduce you to the world of Blender art. 

Blender is a software that specializes in making 3D art. Specifically, it is responsible for modeling 3D meshes, sculpting hard surface models, UV editing different types of topologies, and many more under the 3D workflow apart from making dynamic content like video games. Compared to other forms of art, digital 3D art is a medium that strives to apply complex mathematical equations and understand computer diction that may sound like random noise to common folk. Talent in this craft relies less on skill and more on an individual’s knowledge and patience in absorbing information. It is boring sitting through so many tutorials and reading populated pages in the blender manual, but as a result, we get pictures like the one I made below for my YouTube channel, TheVanillaLog. A collection of artwork made by me in this medium can also be found in this so-called channel, and it has given me an anonymous persona on the internet that people would follow to watch Blender tutorials that involve a toon shader style. Not a lot of people showcase this “2.5D” aesthetic on the internet, so my content covers this niche demand that is only growing much larger as films like “Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse” get more mainstream attention.

In addition to this being a hobby of mine, 3D art has actually been helpful in making some of my presentations in school. If ever I want to insert a cool graphic in a slide, I would make a quick render in Blender using the Cycles engine. Compared to traditional forms of art, it still takes a lot of time and effort. However, it is all worth it just to impress my professor for that class. I even get requests to make something in 3D up to this day from my old teachers no matter how impossible it may be to sculpt it in a 3D medium.

3D art has also been the gateway for me to understand a special field in dentistry known as CAD-CAM. In contrast to traditional practices in medicine, Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM) involves the use of 3D software, printers, and technology in making common dental products like casts, dentures, and bridges. I studied this under the supervision of my dad who is a dentist himself, and his help was the reason why I feel that I am ahead of some of my classmates in terms of expertise. This is not being taught by my teachers at university, so it always comes as no surprise when a professor suddenly comes up to me and asks about how common dental software like Blue Sky Bio works. The picture below is a cast I printed in Blender with my name on it. It was a very simple print, but people were impressed with the result, let alone that it came from someone who is my age and has not yet graduated from college.

To summarize, I do not think that I would have the connections and the skill that I have today if it was not for the advent of modern technology. The older generation would be quick to dismiss computers and say that it is rotting the youth, but a part of me thinks that this is going to be the new normal. Just like how normal it is to drive cars to work instead of using horses, computers have become a staple item in people’s households. Its presence does not echo a future to come as much as its absence shouts a sign of someone who is behind the times. We have evolved into something that strays away from past norms, and whether we like it or not, this change is here to stay for a very long time.

[aprayerforclarity]

5/19

Card: The Star

Man, I'm just now looking at the date and I can't believe I haven't written anything on this page in almost a month. I feel like a lot has happened, but for some reason I've been "too busy" and have been avoiding writing in this page. Since the last post, I began writing more fully on OTCAD. I also finished my preparation class for the Codesmith program. I also took my first technical interview, and it honestly went much better than I thought it would. It's strange because I felt like Codesmith had been teaching us very basic concepts, but then it would be testing us on much easier ones. I kind of found this to be true with the technical interview, and it felt like I did a great job with my technical communication skills. The main thing I'm concerned about is the actual technical skills and know-how when it comes to approaching a problem in a software engineering way.... Without knowing the tools to approach problems, I really don't understand how you can work on communicating those approaches. Anyways, I did a good job with creating basic composite data type, using callback functions and even using objects and closure to keep track of all my successive function results. I just need to work on recursion and more OOP related concepts, perhaps like creating prototypes and classes.... Basically creating functions that create objects with certain properties. I suppose I'll continue practicing those using Chatbot to generate approachable practice problems and use my own way to learn the concepts, instead of Codesmith's terrible learning tools. My next technical interview is May 30th, so I'm eager and nervous and anxious to go ahead and get that out of the way. I feel like it's at an awkward time of waiting, and in the meantime I feel like I need to go get a job because I'm running out of money, quite rankly.

As far as recently life events, I just got back from California as well. It was a family trip out to LA, Palm Springs and Joshua tree with the main goal of getting everyone together and visiting my older brother, who lives in West Hollywood. To get into it, I'm feeling very discombobulated from the entire trip. I really felt like my family was not very mentally present during our time together. The trip was really helmed by my older brother, Mark, who is very computer-like and has an engineer and yuppy mind. He is very robotic and not very emotionally mature or expressive with himself. To him, life is more about ticking the checkboxes on experiences instead of fully embracing and enjoying them. To him, it's all about going to as many nice restaurants that he can, without really enjoying the food or realizing his place in life at all. I noticed he really lacks a lot of self-awareness in his relationship with his boyfriend. He doesn't seem very physically attracted to his boyfriend's body, and all Mark wants to do is fuck other guys. Of course that is fine, but I really feel like he is just in this relationship with Cole because they have such a long history together and it feels very comfortable to him. He has convinced himself that he's in love with Cole, but really he's just addicted to the comfort of it all...

Cole is a fine guy, I mean, really. He's very logistical (he works in logistics professionally), he's a pretty self aware guy, he's got nice fashion and a good haircut. But he is a very shy person, and he seems very dependent on Marijuana. He smokes a lot, and when he's high he doesn't really talk, just gets dazed out and chills in the background. At all our dinners, I really got the sense that he's scared to talk and he always really gives off a patronizing vibe. It seems like textbook anxiety to me, as I've seen it in my ex girlfriend. They're scared of saying the wrong thing because they're petrified that someone's opinion of them might be bad. I totally understand that, I've certainly been there. Just being overly conscious of how others might perceive me and I'm still that way to a degree. But what I began realizing is that, for me, it's really much more based in ego than being a considerate person. In the past I just wanted everyone to love me, so I would just read people and tell them things they wanted to hear. Being "overly positive" or overly complimentary instead of being honesty. What I found out, especially due to an interaction with Jake's Dad on the eastern shore, was that he was calling out my polite table dinner talk because he knew it was phony. He knew that nobody likes a little bitch how is overly positive and glosses over painful, hard, or real facts about life or their feelings, just to seem like they are the golden human sitting at the table.

That's definitely what I feel about Cole. Yes, he does everything right on paper. But deep down, he has strong feelings and opinions on things (like every single human being on this planet) and he always locks those away for fear that people will not like him. Well, I have found that in moderated doses, honesty and giving "hot takes" are what people actually find interesting in a person, and it is living more in truth to who you actually are... It's way more interesting that way, and to me it is cowardly and very lame to just roll over on your back and act the way you think you ought to in someone else's company.

Anyways, I've been dissecting my recent trip a lot with friends, probably to their exhaustion to it all. The trip really threw me out of my routine and zone, and I feel like I've been struggling to get it back ever since... I'm feeling pretty thrown off center and I'm just trying to recalibrate myself back to my day-to-day and keep focused on the life I have at-hand.

I'm going to pray that my family becomes more present in the moments of time we have together, and that instead of just rushing around or being to preoccupied with whatever we're doing in the moment, we begin to actually engage with each other and our own thoughts and feelings about what's going on in our lives, because to me, that's all that really matters at the end of the day (and the end of our lives)

[chewwytwee]

Btw the reason terfs and Nazis still exist on tumblr isn’t just because tumblr has a financial incentive to retain users, it’s also because the communities ability to recognize dog whistles and calling cards is something that’s not possible to get an algorithm to do. Tumblr (and all social media) has to rely on a bulk of their moderation being done automatically by machines, and they’re really bad at picking up subtleties. Trans people are going to be much more open and proud in labeling themselves trans, whereas TERFs and other bigots are the exact opposite! TERFs will sometimes admit to it, but there are plenty of accounts that shinigami eyes (which is community sourced and reviewed) label as transphobic that never ONCE mention TERFs in no uncertain terms. I can tell and you can and shinigami eyes mods can tell that someone saying ‘Women’s spaces are under constant threat by gender ideologs’ is a transphobe, but what in that sentence is explicit transphobia? Well, the terminology isn’t what’s transphobic there, it’s the meaning of the words. Computers cannot do that kind of analysis and interpretation, they simply can’t and TERFs know that. On the other hand, TERFs have it very easy that most trans people will be very easily identifiable as trans. Trans people will put it in their URL in their Bio in their PFP in their posts, and they’re usually pretty specific about being trans. Computers can also absolutely identify the trans flag in your pfp or see ‘Trans’ in your bio and they can easily pick up on that explicit information. TERFs report spamming popular blogs run by trans women and reporting selfies of only transgender women could theoretically lead to a situation where, if tumblr were using its own users reports as data to train its moderation algorithm, there could be a false connection between those fake TERF reports and trans people (this probably isn’t the case, but i think it’s important to recognize that algorithms can and do make these kinds of unwanted false connections, and online hate campaigns know how to avoid AND use that behavior for their own personal gain. It’s a problem software engineers and machine learning experts spend a lot of time working on because it’s so hard to solve.)

If tumblr could remove every TERF from the platform would they? I don’t know, no one really does know. It’s a useless point to argue because it requires so many assumptions about the backend moderation process that’s it’s almost entirely speculation and anecdotes. What I can say is that TERFs and Nazis exist on literally every social media platform irregardless of whether or not the people running those social media want them there. Twitter famously had a hard time getting its content detection to identify between republican politicians and fascists, it’s funny to believe that regular republicans sound so much like fascists that they’re indistinguishable (which is true tbh) but the reality is a lot more boring, fascists try very hard to sound like normal moderate conservatives. Twitter very explicitly didn’t want far right extremism on their site, and yet it still went on to be one of the biggest breeding grounds for extremist hate movements (yes, even before Musk). Content moderation for social media is fucking hard, especially when it comes to dealing with humans, who are really good at finding ways to outsmart computers. Do I think tumblr wants Nazis and transphobes on their site? No, I don’t. Do I think there’s a problem with transphobia and fascism on this site? Abso fucking lutely. These two seemingly contradictory statements make perfect sense once you grasp how difficult it can be to identify and remove hate speech algorithmically, and if you ask me why I think there’s still such a problem with transphobes, that’s why.

Sometimes you see a post that’s just, so off base you feel the need to respond. But it has like 200 notes so it feels way too personal to leave a comment telling them why their entire point isn’t relevant and is in fact really wrong.