#but alas I have a complex of always thinking I have to post something MEANINGFUL BEFORE ANSWERING ASKS

[imagineshuitsukieveryday]

WOOOOOW VERY VERY PRETTY ART!!!!!!!

AAAAAAAA IM A BIT LATE TO ANSWER THIS BUT THANK YOU SO MUCH ;A; IT MAKES ME VERY HAPPY TO KNOW THAT PEOPLE LIKE MY ART ESP PEOPLE WHO HAVE BEEN FOLLOWING ME FOR QUITE A BIT ;A;

[cchilyoja]

THE POSITIVE & NEGATIVE; Mun & Muse - Meme.

fill out & repost ♥ This meme definitely favors canons more, but I hope OC’s still can make it somehow work with their own lore, and lil’ fandom of friends & mutuals. Multi-Muses pick the muse you are the most invested in atm.

tagged by:   tagged by the always wonderful @foxcharmed tagging:    anyone that follows me, sees this on their dash & wants to do it :)

MY MUSE IS:   canon / oc / au / slightly canon-divergent / fandomless / complicated.

IS YOUR CHARACTER POPULAR IN THE FANDOM?   YES / NO. Well, he is the main character of the show, but seeing as there’s only me & @legcndreportr that write character from the show, I’d say, the RP fandom for it is tiny, but I think a lot of people that watch dramas like the show & the characters.

IS YOUR CHARACTER CONSIDERED HOT™ IN THE FANDOM?   YES / NO / IDK. [ I mean, he’s played by Ji Chang Wook, I mean, obviously yes. Have you seen just how many fan JCW blogs there are on this site? Understandable. Honestly, and truly.  ]

IS YOUR CHARACTER CONSIDERED STRONG IN THE FANDOM?   YES / NO / IDK. [ I’d say he’s very skilled & flawed. There are many things that he can do, many things that he is good at, but the slew of both traumatic and just plain shitty things that had happened to him over the early years of his childhood, combined with HUGE abandonment issues that he has never really dealt with. All of that can make certain mundane things a lot harder than any 007 stuff that he sometimes does. ]

ARE THEY UNDERRATED?   YES / NO / IDK. [ I think, even though I love the character, obv been RPing him for years. I hate that people don’t STAN the other characters as much, especially the other main female characters that are just as interesting, complex and worth loving. But alas that is the world we live in. ]

WERE THEY RELEVANT FOR THE MAIN STORY?   YES / NO,he is the main story, if you know what I mean. But no, seriously, he is the main character. 

WERE THEY RELEVANT FOR THE MAIN CHARACTER?   YES / NO / THEY’RE THE PROTAG. [ Yeah, but tbh, I find it that in the show, the two main characters are equally sorted in the first place, Jung-hoo is nothing without Young-shin. There would be no development, no revelation about his life, childhood and interesting complex storytelling and showing without her.  ]

ARE THEY WIDELY KNOWN IN THEIR WORLD?   YES / NO. [ One would assume that I should put YES for this, buuuut, while HEALER is known to the criminal underbelly, police and those that would want or need to hire someone like him, the general public has no idea. Which is exactly what he wants, because attention isn’t really a useful thing in his line of work, or just the way he lives his life.  ]

HOW’S THEIR REPUTATION?   GOOD / BAD / NEUTRAL. [ Good when it comes to how skilful he is, but bad as a person. His character arc really goes a looong way from where he is in episode 1. Like the first thing we see is him playing a tennis VR game, complaining that he can’t pick the character he is playing against to have less clothes (that being a computer-generated character but still), which isn’t really all that interesting and for sure not someone I’d be all into writing. And also his lack of care when it comes to what he does, like the guy he was protecting also in ep 1. Ends up dead, and he’s annoyed bc the police think he killed him, the fact that he’s dead, he couldn’t care less. ]

HOW STRICTLY DO YOU FOLLOW CANON?   —   I’ve been writing him for over two years, and it’s just no fun to just follow the canon. He has developed overtime on his own, and besides that, I just never really like any CANON fully. When it comes to the show, bc there are only 16 eps, and as with most dramas there is only one season. So I’ve taken the liberty to expand on the canon and to create Jung-hoo as I think he’d be, away from the scenes we can see him in.

SELL YOUR MUSE! Aka try to list everything, which makes your muse interesting in your opinion to make them spicy for your mutuals.   —   For me personally, I really found it interesting that the mother that abandoned him, married someone else and had a whole new family, after his father died. Jung-hoo cares for her, meets with her, gives her money etc. He doesn’t hate or resent her, I think that shows a lot of compassion but also emotional intelligence. He has this me vs the world outlook, way of life, mentally, however you want to call it, but is in desperate need for someone to SEE him. Like acknowledge his existence, to stay, to love him. He is incredibly skilled & capable, everything you’ve seen 007 do, he does it better. Also I’ve made sure to include diverse verses so there is a way to explore pretty much anything under the sun that you could think of.

Now the OPPOSITE, list everything why your muse could not be so interesting (even if you may not agree, what does the fandom perhaps think?).   —  I think he can’t really move past the whole I hate everyone & I need someone. So he goes back and forth, it is difficult to create a meaningful connection. I’ve been lucky to do that but that’s also bc I’ve written with some people here for years. 

WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO RP YOUR MUSE?   —   I had taken a few years break from RP, which used to be like one of my main interests, writing in general. And then I was getting into just watching Kdramas, watched HEALER, and I was instantly like I HAVE TO WRITE HIM, and never looked back really. 

WHAT KEEPS YOUR INSPIRATION GOING?   —   Auditory stimuli, be it music or just sounds. For example, when I write I tend to use programs or websites where you can put different sounds in the background like thunder, rain, wind, chatter etc. Watching yt clips, seeing people on my dash tbh, like people that I follow also inspire me bc they make me go I WANNA WRITE WITH ALL OF THEM.

Some more personal questions for the mun.

Give your mutuals some insight about the way you are in some matters, which could lead them to get more comfortable with you or perhaps not.

DO YOU THINK YOU GIVE YOUR CHARACTER JUSTICE?   YES / NO / I SINCERELY HOPE I DO? [ I think I tend to have all of these feelings, sometimes I’m like, yeah, this is Jung-hoo, this is exactly what I wanted, sometimes I’m like who am I writing? But I just focus more on me enjoying writing him, than thinking if people think I write him as they think I should.]

DO YOU FREQUENTLY WRITE HEADCANONS?   YES / NO / SORT OF? [I have a bunch of headcanons about like the smallest of things, like the fact that I don’t think he likes wearing socks is one of them, but,  I don’t write them or post them on here. I’m not sure why, I guess I prefer to sort of just sprinkle them in the threads??? ]

DO YOU SOMETIMES WRITE DRABBLES?   YES / NO [ Kinda. I also write fanfiction & I had started this original one with sort of Jung-hoo in mind but not really him. I realized I really like writing starters, I think that’s probably like an unpopular opinion or way of thinking but I really enjoy starting the thread, and I kinda sometimes think starters are like drabbles, I’m not making sense. ]

DO YOU THINK A LOT ABOUT YOUR MUSE DURING THE DAY?   YES / NO

ARE YOU CONFIDENT IN YOUR PORTRAYAL?   YES / NO / SORT OF? [ Depends on my mental state. Like sometimes 100% and then other times it’s like what am I even doing?? ]

ARE YOU CONFIDENT IN YOUR WRITING?   YES / NO / A LITTLE BIT. [ I enjoy how I write, if that makes sense. I’d like to think that I can switch it up now and again, keep it fresh, I def know that I’ve evolved over the course of the years I’ve been RPing ]

ARE YOU A SENSITIVE PERSON?   YES / NO. / SORTA.

DO YOU ACCEPT CRITICISM WELL ABOUT YOUR PORTRAYAL?   —   Sure. I’m fine with that. I just think that the INTERNET does not know how to compute that, or people on the internet. It’s either, you can do no wrong or you should die a horrible death. It’s like either STAN or HATE. And it’s also somehow part of the rp community here on Tumblr. Where there’s just either fake praise or just unnecessary hate. And then there is a bit in the middle where like you can talk and exchange ideas and thoughts. But it is not the main focus by any means. If anyone wants to tell me to change something, or to do something diff, sure, let me hear you out, you might inspire me to improve. But that rarely happens. 

DO YOU LIKE QUESTIONS, WHICH HELP YOU TO EXPLORE YOUR CHARACTER?   — Of course, I think a lot of people are like this. Talking about my character gives me muse for the character. Like we could be talking how he’d eat a salad and I’d be like, okay now I have to write a novella about this other thing I’m inspired about. 

IF SOMEONE DISAGREES TO A HEADCANON OF YOURS, DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY?  —  That’s weird to me just bc I feel like when I read someones headcanon, this is how they, and them uniquely see the character, so I can’t really disagree with that, I can have an opinion for sure. But that’s like someone being I like this band, and you say, no you don’t, it just doesn’t make sense to me.

IF SOMEONE DISAGREES WITH YOUR PORTRAYAL, HOW WOULD YOU TAKE IT?   —  Same with the previous one. Like I often find blogs where they are writing a character that I either love from a show, move, book whatever, or it’s a canon type character that I find really interesting, like the idea behind it, but then I read their writing and then I go, aaaah okay nooo, no NO. And it’s never personal, it’s like, we ain’t gonna mesh, which is fine. And if someone is like that with my writing, fully understandable, just don’t be a dick about it, and we’ll be cool.

IF SOMEONE REALLY HATES YOUR CHARACTER, HOW DO YOU TAKE IT?  —  Couldn’t really give less of a shit really. RP to me is this little bubble where I am this fictional person that can do and try everything. It is in no way connected to any other aspect of actual reality or my life. The only connection is if I have to take a hiatus or smth, but like even if I write OOC things, it’s about IC stuff. I have other social medial for real life, this is just my RP bubble. So if someone is wasting their time hating a fictional character, they have bigger fish to fry. 

ARE YOU OKAY WITH PEOPLE POINTING OUT YOUR GRAMMATICAL ERRORS?   —   Sure, English isn't my first language so mistakes happen. If I see someone make a mistake and the write with me, I just change it when I reply to them, but I don’t point it out bc you never know, someone people could be okay cool thanks, and someone else could really feel down on themselves, which would be bad, and I wouldn’t want that to happen.

DO YOU THINK YOU ARE EASY GOING AS A MUN?  —  I’d like to think so, especially that I’m easy to approach and talk to. I don’t take many things seriously, not just on here but like in life. So I’m always open to any idea anyone might have. I’ve been lucky with the people that I’ve been following & those that have followed me, a huge percentage is just really dope people, nice to read their writing, nice to talk to, great to write with. And I hope that it stays that way, so we can also have this as some kind of mental break from life :) 

[stacksetfacts]

I got a hold of an ARC for this most excellent book at ALA Midwinter this January, and was excited to read it -- especially after sitting in on a panel hosted by @penguinteen’s new imprint Kokila, that focuses on presenting works by folks on the margins. 

And after finishing it this morning, I decided to do something I haven’t done before: write a review of it. I originally posted it at the link above, but here it is in its full text glory. 

I’m not sure where to start with this because there’s so much about Patron Saints of Nothing to love: do I mention how authentically-but-not-tropely teenager-like Jay, the protagonist, feels? Should I talk about how the book makes a real-world event, happening right now, become meaningful and accessible to readers across the ocean in ways that journalism can’t? What about the fact that every person in this story (it feels weird for me to call them characters at this point) gets an opportunity to live and tell a story that is as much their own as it is the story of millions of people? Selfishly, the queer in me wants to talk about the representation, but I think it might be best to start somewhere else.

Randy Ribay wrote a book that is a lot of things: loving, illuminating, excellent — but the word I keep circling back to is important. I think that’s why it’s hard to decide where to start – there’s no single thing about the book that makes it important; it’s the book in its entirety, and how all the different elements I mentioned above – and more – feed off of and into each other.

The story is about the aforementioned Jay (short for Jason) Reguero, a teenaged Filipino-American boy who lives in Michigan with his Filipino dad and his white mom. From the outset, you feel like you already know Jay: he’s the one brown kid who you know of from school but who you don’t really know. This is partly because you’ve noticed him for what makes him different, and without realizing it you decide you know something about him because of that; but it’s also partly because he’s mastered the skill of fitting in just enough to stay out of the general consciousness as a way to deal with the other-ness he feels, and to stay safe in his school.

Mind you, the secret that nearly every teenager learns, but only once they’re well past their teens, is that everyone in high school has that same sense of desperation in wanting not to be noticed, because different is dangerous. But Jay shows readers another part of that, that a lot of us miss if we aren’t visibly a minority ourselves: white readers get a taste of what it’s like to want to fit in, but to have something about you that is overtly and immutably different. Jay can wear the same clothes, speak the same language, aspire to the same image of adult success, but he’ll still, always, be (and be seen as) Filipino-American – for better or worse, depending on who you ask.

This kind of otherness is powerful and permeating, and the way Ribay tackles it in Nothing is kind but also unflinching. There’s an interaction early on between Jay and his best friend that highlights the pain of it – when his friend starts a conversation with the dreaded, “promise me you won’t get offended,” the conversation goes exactly where you expect it to. But it all has to be said, and said in a way that is as explicit as it can be, especially for a novel that’s written for young readers: there’s a problem with whiteness being the default, and there’s a problem with assuming that things that differ from the norm is bad, and while someone can be as well-meaning as the day is long, sometimes people are perfectly justified in their anger at what you thought was a compliment. But it also shows that people can forgive, even if that forgiveness doesn’t come in that moment, or that day, or even that week. This interaction, for all its cringeworthiness, is also genuine and human and important.

This exploration of otherness gets explored from the other side of Jay’s identity as well when he travels to the Philippines to investigate his cousin’s death (the central plot of the book). I want to acknowledge here that this particular plot point is probably the only aspect of the book that I was skeptical of before I started reading Nothing. There’s a tendency I’ve found in YA lit to give the protagonists “diet superpowers,” that is, to make them remarkable in ways that are just past what one could realistically expect from a character their age. And while I don’t think that’s a problem – if it inspires young people to be more than they can, good! – it also feels a little cheap. So when reading the synopsis for Nothing, I felt a little skeptical reading that a seventeen-year-old was going to the Philippines to investigate his cousin’s death.

Fortunately, I was reassured early into the novel (and then very very nervous for him given the task he was tackling) (oh no my sweet Jay what are you getting yourself into) to find out that Jay’s… well, he’s very much a realistic seventeen-year-old, with no preternatural sleuthing skills to speak of. His time in the Philippines plays out realistically, and Ribay is kind enough to the reader and to Jay to make sure that he is looked after by a cast of characters who are believably competent, which gives Jay the space he needs to grow up quickly but authentically, given the circumstances. Disbelief happily not suspended!

During his time in the Philippines, the reader is given a chance to understand how painful being the other can be, which is so in line with Ribay’s dedication of the book: for the hyphenated. Although it’s touched on during his time home, once Jay lands in Manila the reader gets to see him grapple with the cost that he’s paid to try and fit in back home. Perhaps the biggest: Jay doesn’t speak Tagalog, one of the two national languages of the Philippines, and an overt marker to nearly everyone he comes in contact with that something about his identity doesn’t fit. We see how this recognition of his otherness plays out in his interactions variously with a customs agent, his family, and the folks he meets along the way, and I couldn’t help but wince for and with him each time someone else pointed at it. I think this is something that folks from mixed backgrounds intrinsically get, but is less obvious to others, and should be a core take-away for readers:

For the folks who exist on the margins – folks who straddle nationalities, or color lines, or various other identities, there’s immense pressure from both sides to fit into one identity or the other.

For some folks, I think the result is that one never gets to feel fully anything, and that can feel incredibly lonely. I hope that readers of Nothing pick that message up, and realize that they can be kind, and understanding, and try to hold space for the whole complexity of a person.

That last bit – recognizing that people are not simple things where a single label, or even two, can substitute for the whole-ness of their beings – is probably the biggest take-away of this book for me, and Ribay gets it across beautifully. The entire book lets the reader follow Jay’s journey from not just understanding himself as more than just a young man who’s going off to college because that’s what expected of him, but to understanding that the same thing applies to everyone around him. Every character, it seems, is introduced simply (justifiably so – Jay’s the narrator), but over the course of the book you learn that they are so much more than the handful of identity markers they get in the start.

That’s how people are in real life, and perhaps that’s why I think Patron Saints of Nothing is, above all, important. It’s important for others in the margins to read and see themselves reflected in art and the media – it lets them know they aren’t alone, they are worth telling stories about, and that someone else cares enough about them to put forth the effort. It’s also important for everyone else, because it gives anyone who reads it permission to feel and see aspects of themselves reflected in people they might not otherwise click with. The world always needs more empathy, but especially nowadays, it seems like we could go for a double helping.

Patron Saints of Nothing, by Randy Ribay, is slated for release in June 2019 by Kokila, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

[animatevibration-blog]

Mad Titan, Or Last Man

Please note that this is an incomplete assessment of motivations simply because comic book characters will never have an end to their story. I am also not informed on Thanos’ current exploits in the comics since I have not read Marvel, or any comics for a number of years. The focus will be on an older iteration of Thanos and his fascination with death that I believe derived from him growing up in a utopia of immortals essentially. Also, this is not an explanation of the Hollywood version of Thanos since his motivations make no sense and is clearly just political propaganda from writers that don’t know anything about population trends. This is not a super in-depth analysis either, I’ve merely looked at his motivations through the lens of the Nietzschean last man, as well as the underground man from Dostoevsky's works.

I had difficulty understanding it at first, mostly because I personalized concepts too much that I shouldn’t have, namely Lady Death. Which in turn, made Thanos’ motivations look like an outburst of an angsty teenage boy. You can’t fully personalize a concept in a story otherwise you miss the point, Lady Death is still death itself, the only real reason it was given form is because that’s seems to be the easiest way to relate to values expressed in stories; it makes it easier to embody them through secondary personalization, which is a term coined by the psychologist Eric Neumann. Secondary personalization is an act from which the more something is understood, the more it is refined in the consciousness until it’s anthropomorphised completely, creating almost a god image within the individual. It’s essentially the same as the image of Helen of Troy discovered by Faust when he travels to the realm of the mothers, she was the spirit of unbridled creative generation and freedom that he longed for. Lady Death is the anthropomorphised value of what Thanos desires most, and he expresses it as female because he is male, because it’s that which he lacks, the other part of his reality. That is partly a Jungian notion from which the male takes an inward journey to discover the Anima within, or his inner feminine that is tied to his highest value, making the attaining of that value an almost sexual act of union between being and image, something like that.

“But wait” you may say, “then why is Death a woman to all within the Marvel universe?” Good question, that is because the concept of death has always been a feminine one throughout history; it is the consumptive element of nature that consumes the life that came before so that successive generations may come into being. The easiest picture to express this in is the Ouroboros, the serpent that eats its tail. It is the sphere that contains existence from which death, or consumption is the precursor to new life. Other faces of death are the Babylonian Tiamat, the Malekusian Le-Hev-Hev which translates to “she who draws us in with a smile so she may consume us.” There is also Nut from Egyptian myth, the mother sky who embraces all in death, which you can see her image placed on sarcophagi, and Ta-Urt who is the bestial guardian of the underworld. Death is Feminine because it is part of nature, or the great mother earth, so it’s not surprising that we will portray it as a woman... Most of the time.

For this assessment though, I want to focus on Lady Death as a very singular expression of his “highest art” so to speak, which arised from the stagnancy of Utopianism. So, let’s begin.

What would a man(or eternal) strive for when perfection was already attained? I really needed to think about that for a second because when you think about utopia, the interesting bits are always the struggle to achieve it. That’s where the meat is in such a value system, that’s where all the action is, and that’s when I had an idea. So, what would a man(eternal) strive for when perfection was already attained? Perhaps he would strive for struggle itself. Perhaps when given eternity, what then would be more desirable than the finite? What could you desire more after you are given the universe through society, than to have it all taken away? It sounds crazy doesn’t it, who would ever destroy perfection merely to struggle? Well, a human would... Even in the face of eternal happiness and comfort, simply to achieve one semblance (if even for a moment) of the meaning that comes only from the finite and imperfect, a person would dash it all away.

That is the purpose of Thanos, he craves the one thing that was taken from him by his parents, and the society that believed it knew better, namely death. Honestly, what meaning could you ever possibly find in a world where people have already conquered the most meaningful aspect of it? Things have to die, things have to wear down, they need to decay because the universe isn’t a structured space of rules and laws. It bends, it curves, it’s constantly changing, it’s a flow of perpetual becoming. The speed of light itself is constantly changing, and that is the speed of causality itself, which is the frame from which events can even happen in reality. Laws, structures, immortality are all societal concepts born from consciousness, more precisely the consciousness of the left hemisphere; especially the concept of immortality. Things are always changing, we just cant perceive most of it, and you, are not really you. Everything you are now is the current complexity of a a cosmic lineage that dates back to the very beginning of existence. All the material that makes up your being came from the death of something before you. Whether it be the nutrients you ingest from animals and plants, or the elements of you refined in the cores of long dead stars. You are a process, not an end, and to extricate yourself from that process is to produce a fate far worse than death could ever be, an immortal Utopia.

I had to ask myself, is that really the goal of life, just to transcend it? If like the eternals that happens, what other outcome could you have but a utopia of eternal happiness and complacency? Why would you even want that when what is taken is so much? What other options could you ever have than sacrificing everything that made you human; to place it all at the alter of godhood, so that you could simply keep existing and going through the motions like a machine. There’s a reason why vampires are portrayed as impulsive nihilists most of the time, because what the hell else can you do with eternity once you have it. Of course there is a universe full of possibility within the universe, but it will never be achieved by the eternals because they are no longer part of that process and the only kind progress they can achieve is scientific analytical processes which is very indicative of western culture now, because that’s all they value. Which in turn will probably only lead to them becoming like Celestials, ethereal nothings that don’t exist in reality, that don’t understand the underlying complexity and importance of emotion, and merely act like computers.

That entire society and Thanos himself is a microcosm, most likely of the projected anxiety of a post-industrialized society that puts far too much (to an almost pathological degree) value in a singular system of linear analytical cognitive progress. My god ladies and gentlemen, if eternity was sitting in a lab continually making it easier for people to live for the eternity they have anyway, where all that’s left are mere intellectual and habitual procreative pursuits, I would also think death and destruction would be a far more preferable option, it could even become an ideal. Jesus, just try it for a hundred years and get back to me on how you feel about it. I don’t blame Thanos for pining after it, lusting after it, making it his muse, his companion, the Galatea to his Pygmalion, his reason for being. It’s meaning that matters, not more life, not happiness, not perfection, It’s the meaning in the struggle for more life, it’s the meaning you derive from struggling for happiness, it’s the meaning in life that you derive from struggling for perfection that gives depth to existence. It’s not the result, it’s the process. Death matters because it makes everything beautiful, everything meaningful, everything is something you will never see again, something that will never be again. Struggle matters because it makes you more than what you were, it allows you to change. Now let me talk about struggle more.

To struggle is to be human, to suffer is to truly live. Humans are the only beings that can say life is suffering and have a smile on their face. And humans are the only beings in the known universe that will willfully suffer in full understanding of it. Each person has a vast ocean of dormant potential in them just waiting to be realized. I don’t say that in a metaphorical way, though that’s the best way to describe it. You have a plethora of dormant genes in you that wait for the right environmental factors to be activated and embodied as new modes of being, because humans are action oriented, not cognitive oriented. It’s the notion of wishing upon the stars, each one represents a potentiality of what you could be, and you have a choice, you can pick a star and struggle for it. But if you don’t have to struggle anymore, if you have forever and everything provided for you, you won’t do it, you won’t experience it, because you don’t have to. I say this because Thanos is human, strikingly human, perhaps even the greatest of what humanity could be, essentially he is the underground man in a world of last men.

“I tell you: one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star. Alas! There comes a time when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas! There comes a time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself. Behold! I show you the last man, ‘What is love? What is longing? What is a star?’ So asks the last man and he blinks. The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man who makes everything small.”

“His species is ineradicable like that of a flea; the last man lives the longest. ‘We have invented happiness’ says the last man, and blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live for one needs warmth. Becoming sick and being suspicious are sinful to them: One proceeds carefully. He is a fool who still stumbles over stones or human beings!”-Thus Spoke Zarathustra p.13

Of course, it would be very rational to want such an existence, and everyone on his world is very rational, but rational isn’t reasonable, and reasonable isn’t meaningful. People are contradictions unto themselves. They almost never want what they need, or need what they want, or even want what they want. The easy paradisaical life is a beautiful dream full of splendor and joy... Only so long as it stays a dream. If man were to make his dream a reality I believe, well, I know that the moment after he would spit on the very ground he toiled so arduously to build and content himself with its absolute destruction,  just so something interesting could happen in his utopia. That is the folly of it, and that’s what I believe Thanos saw, even if he didn’t understand it himself. That is essentially Dostoevsky's notion of utopia and the values of enlightenment which is basically the society the eternals had made. 

“There are continually turning up in life moral and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity to make it their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as possible, to be, so to speak, a light to their neighbors simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this world. And yet we all know that sooner or later those people have been false to themselves, playing some queer trick, often a most unseemly one. Now I ask you? What can be expected of man since he is being endowed with such strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man will play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all of this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself(as though it were so necessary) that men are still men and not keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that is not all: even if man were nothing but a piano key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive suffering of all sorts, only to gain his point! He will launch a curse upon the world, and as only man can curse (it is his privilege, the primary distinction between him and other animals), may be by this curse alone he will attain his object- that is, convince himself he is a man and not a piano key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated chaos darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point!” -Notes From Underground p.230-231

The point I’m expressing is that people are inherently chaotic, and that they love it too, it’s the source of our greatest freedom, the dancing star. We would also destroy all that was good for us merely to keep it. That chaos is lethal to utopianism and eternity. Thanos killed his people and worshiped death because perfection had a flaw, it was meaningless. They sacrificed everything for it, and in turn missed the sole notion powerful enough even to propel one to remake the whole universe and succeed... death. But, that’s just some guys opinion. 

[catandcowwrite]

Truth is

 Dear English teacher,

At the start of the year, when my sister told me how much she enjoyed your class, I rolled my eyes at her, sardonically declaring English as the one class that could never be enjoyed: a confining room where students are taught how to analyze literature to death, how to formulate essays to sound “good” while in reality filling the paper with a load of BS, and how to scribble and highlight texts so that the teacher can visualize our “thoughts”. I complained to her that any books we read in class automatically became a distasteful and burdensome task and that reading, a hobby I used to thrive in, had been transformed into something that thoroughly tested my patience and hurt my eyeballs. 

She shook her head and told me to give English another chance, to avoid thinking the same way as others.

Who could’ve ever guessed? Your class slowly grew on me as the year progressed. You grew on me as the year progressed. And so here I am, writing a letter to you: a statement encompassing my reflection of 159 days sitting in your classroom, hopefully full of accurate grammar usage I’ve accumulated through the years.

You’re not going to want to hear my apologies and pleas for forgiveness, but I’m going to do it anyway. Forgive me for not displaying my ardent love of poetry in class - most of my classmates wouldn’t understand anyway - and instead meeting your eyes with a deceivingly blank stare during discussions. Some poems I didn’t like so much (especially the one about a poor innocent frog getting mauled by a lawnmower) but many days I sat there simply marveling at the way authors were able to string different words together to create a work of art. Some days, English class was just the right tonic I needed to uplift my dwindling spirit after being battered by life day after day. 

I don’t know how I underwent such a change - going from frequently complaining about how mundane Jane Eyre was in the fall with my peers to defending your class in the spring when my friends would complain about essays and proclaim their disgust in reading poetry. Don’t get me wrong - there were still parts of class I couldn’t stand, such as the slow trek through Heart of Darkness while all our minds were floating far beyond high school already. 

It took me a while, but I gradually realized, much to my surprise: I actually liked in class essays, to some extent (certainly much more than book tests). 

Thus was my eye-opening experience during senior year of English class - I only wished this epiphany came to me sooner, realizing I actually enjoyed the subject, rather than the end of my high school career. I could’ve written many more poems, short stories about my experiences through the bumpy rollercoaster of the life I lived. 

I tried again in college. Literature class. Children’s literature, to be exact. Now here’s the plot twist. Another epiphany: you cannot force yourself to love things that you aren’t truly passionate about. While I loved some aspects of English, especially being able to express my own ideas without restriction through creative writing, sitting in that class the first day for an hour and a half while having discussion over a controversial critical reading passage on the hidden, darker side of fairy tales..I found myself counting down the minutes till the class was over. 

40 minutes left. 30. 15. 10. The teacher now had an assignment for us: Write about a meaningful work of children’s literature and how it impacted our life back in the day when we read it first as a wee small child. Easy. I wrote about A Little Princess by Hodgson Burnett. What a phenomenal read about the power of a young child’s imagination. 

Yet another plot twist. Well maybe not for you, but for that particular literature professor. I included a small note at the end, apologizing for what I was about to do (drop the class the moment I high-tailed myself out of there). I didn’t rush out only because I despised the class, but I had a dance class i had to show up on time for that was located all the way back on the ground floor of my dormitory (which I’m enjoying very much now, if you would like to know).

Well, this piece took a little too long to write. Alas, it has finally reached completion after perhaps about a years time since I began it. What a year it has been. 

I’m thankful for this writing blog. Of course, I could always manually delete posts and perhaps even hide the whole blog from the public eye’s view. But I won’t. And until I decide to, frozen pieces of myself from different points in time will forever remain documented on this simplistic webpage filled with complex words.

Yours truly,

Your student

[frankmiller1]

Want to Code as an Engineering Manager? Time to Find a Unicorn

Coding as an engineering manager is an exercise in cognitive dissonance.

If you’ve just become a manager, you’ve likely been measuring success by the quantity and quality of the code you ship as an individual contributor (IC). Suddenly, you have new metrics for success and your day-to-day work looks wildly different. One mentor tells you that coding as a manager is futile. Another tells you to stay in the code or risk dulling your technical skills. Some companies encourage engineering managers to conduct IC work as part of their culture, even codifying this behavior in promotion criteria. Others penalize managers for the exact same behavior. It’s confusing and stressful!

Since I started managing, I’ve tried to deliver IC work at least once a quarter (some quarters more successfully than others). In this post, I share some of what I’ve learned: the challenges of coding as an engineering manager1, the benefits, and the ways to identify well-scoped unicorn projects to work on.

Ruby star rainbow sparkle via SVG SILH

While there is no I in Team, there is both a U and an IC in unicorn, just sayin’.

Coding as a manager is hard

Doing IC work as an engineering manager boils down to two challenges: constantly shifting contexts and priorities.

Management requires a lot of context shifting. One meeting you’re coming up with a strategy for headcount, another you’re listening to someone grapple with giving tough feedback, and in yet another you’re leading a kanban meeting. By contrast, coding requires deep work, with an uninterrupted sense of focus for several hours. If you’ve ever tried to code in the half-hour between meetings, you know it looks something like this:

import numpy as np import pandas as pd # pull data here If n in list(TODO): # look this up, used to know how to do this

As a leader, your job is to prioritize supporting your teammates. That means having career conversations, providing feedback, and helping them deliver innovative and impactful work. While this often takes place in one-on-ones, there are follow-up meetings and check-ins with relevant collaborators, too. As you increase the size of your team, it becomes harder and harder to find any breathing room in a 40-hour work week, let alone the several hours needed to code even a small project from beginning to end. 

Why you should consider coding anyway2

First, coding an IC project can help build empathy for your teammates, the tools that they use, and the challenges they encounter. For instance, I worked on a project with a teammate and learned firsthand about several services around Indeed and their challenges. As a result, in later meetings I was able to speak more specifically and with greater confidence about them. I submitted requests to the maintaining teams and, consequently, got updates prioritized that greatly helped my team. 

Second, coding (sometimes for the first time in weeks or even months) means you’ll need to ask your teammates for help. Recently, I was trying to solve a data wrangling problem that ended up with not one, not two, but three nested for loops. My teammates joked that it put the “OH NO” in Big O Notation. I humbly asked for help and together we figured out a way to solve the problem with much less complexity (and had a good laugh). In my experience, people like feeling helpful, and there’s something special about helping your boss when they’re struggling. We want our teammates to ask others for help. Being vulnerable and asking for help as a leader helps you model that behavior for your teammates, too. 

Finally, and most important to your mental health as a manager: shipping code can make you feel good. Management rarely lends itself to that feeling of “doneness” and is often riddled with self-doubt. Doing IC work, by contrast, is usually a discrete task. You can build something, point at it, and say, “Look! I built that. Sweet.”

How to code as a manager

Broadly speaking, doing IC work as a manager looks something like this: 

Make sure nothing is on fire.

Find a narrowly scoped unicorn project.

Block off time for deep work. 

Start with delegation in mind. 

I’ll walk through each of these in the sections below. 

Make sure nothing is on fire

Coding while someone on your team is struggling with something urgent is like fiddling while Rome burns. It also means that you’re not doing the core functions of your job, i.e., helping your teammates. So, before you even think about scoping an IC project, make sure things on your team feel relatively stable. 

Find a narrowly scoped unicorn project

Let me show you what scoping the right projects doesn’t look like. 

One time, in my eagerness to help a new product team, I took on running several A/B tests that we wanted to roll out by the end of the quarter. The A/B tests were simple enough to keep an eye on until I needed to spin other managerial plates. Meanwhile, my product manager had to pick up the slack. In the end, we delegated the tests to someone else who ran them to completion. It wasn’t a good feeling knowing I was letting my PM down. 

By contrast, a well-scoped IC project for managers: 

is not time-sensitive 

is fairly small

does not have any dependencies 

is a "nice-to-have" or quality-of-life improvement that won’t get prioritized by your teammates and might have some nice impact

plays to your strengths 

That is, a unicorn. Unicorn IC projects are not going to come up all the time. You can’t find them at all if you don’t know what to look for, though. 

For instance, I was in a design jam a few years back, where some UX teammates said to one another, “Yeah, we don’t always know X about Y queries. It would be nice if we had a tool that could do that.” What they were asking for was fairly small. Before they even knew it, a couple hours later I had built an Ishbook that they still use to help them understand user behaviors on the site. 

Alas, ye have yeself a unicorn! 

It’s also important that your IC project plays to your strengths. It’s already going to be easy to fall into the trap of feeling bad about your coding skills because they will likely be rusty and you’ll code more slowly than you used to. Consequently, you probably won’t keep feeling motivated to do more IC work and this blog post and I will have failed you. 

My IC projects usually are some kind of analysis of survey or measurement bias, helping A/B testing, or building well-designed graphs. Why? Because I like these things, I’m good at them, and they give me energy. When you choose an IC project that feels the same way, you’ll be able to get it done more quickly and at a higher quality. 

Block off time for deep work

Half an hour here and there is usually not enough to get meaningful deep work done. Since becoming a manager, I have blocked off several hours in the morning to do deep work every week, whether that’s coding or reading the latest in my field. This encourages others to message me first before booking over my deep work block. Sometimes I need to join the meeting anyway, but more often than not, I avoid meeting during my peak coding hours. Google Calendar’s new Out of Office feature makes this even more aggressive, by auto-declining meetings booked over your block. 

Some weeks, I can’t prioritize deep work as much, other weeks I have more time than usual. I’ve seen managers beat themselves up about not having time to do IC work every week. Stop. It’s not a realistic goal. In his discussion of coding as a manager, Ben Edmunds writes, “Redefine what success looks like for yourself […] understand that day-to-day tasks aren’t set in stone. As a manager you need to be fluid.” Amen. 

Start with delegation in mind

Coding as a manager means that you’re going to need to spin your other managerial plates again fairly quickly. You won’t have a ton of time to code projects, so whatever you build will likely need to be a prototype of some kind. When coding an IC project as a manager, figure out what a delegatable minimum viable product (MVP) might look like. Hint: it likely includes well-commented code and pair programming. Keep that MVP as your end goal. 

One of the tools I built as a manager helped our job search product run multivariate A/B tests more rigorously. I knew it was janky (heck, it pulled in data from a Google spreadsheet), but it could get the job done for the team and was better than nothing. I was then able to delegate it to my teammate. 

This was great for two reasons. First, it gave my teammate the chance to learn from my expertise. She got to deepen her understanding of measuring statistical significance in multivariate A/B tests. Second, she took what I had originally built and made it way better. While my prototype effectively shipped with Comic Sans as its font, her version had these beautiful, easily digestible graphs and an even more rigorous statistical approach. Her V.1 of the tool is a much better finished project that’s still in use today. 

To sum up

Engineering managers get a lot of conflicting messages about whether they should code. Coding can help you build empathy and trust with your teammates, thereby making you a more effective leader. You set yourself up for failure, though, if you take on the same kinds of projects you had as an IC and try to stuff in coding between meetings. Instead, reframe the kinds of code you ship. Carve out dedicated time for deep work. And keep an eye out for small, non-urgent, delegatable unicorn projects that play to your strengths and can bring value to the team. 

Notes

By the way, when I refer to “engineering,” I don’t just mean software engineers: I also include data scientists, QA, i.e., those whose IC work involves some degree of coding. (back to top)

Probably. The field of engineering management is still in its infancy—up until recently, very few books were published on the subject. A lot of the evidence presented here is anecdotal, so your mileage may vary. For instance, one hypothesis I’ve heard about coding as a manager is that it helps you build "street cred." I honestly don’t know if I’ve helped my cred or I just made myself look foolish in the Git repository here at work, so I chose not to touch on this point in this article, but I’m curious about others�� experiences with this. The scientist in me wants more rigorously collected qualitative and quantitative data around the benefits and drawbacks of doing IC work in the fields of software engineering and data science. So, reach out to me if you’re interested. I have some ideas. (back to top)

Cross-posted on Medium.

 

from Engineering https://engineering.indeedblog.com/blog/2020/08/eng-managers-want-to-code/