#but mostly ‘not interested’ is byword for I actually have

[katharinepar]

the real tea on the tudor ‘fandom’ is that so many of the blogs on here actually harbour deeply misogynistic, blatantly derivative views on the wives they don’t stan and it’s a lot more obvious than they think. a little frustration, and the rub comes right out.

[general-du-vallon]

I find it really bizarre how there are multiple story-lines in the BBC Musketeres about slavery where the slavers are treated sympathetically. By which I don't mean that all slavers should be inhuman, because people who were part of the slave-trade were human and were like us (I'm white), we have to see ourselves in them, I think it's really important that we see ourselves in them and see ourselves as part of that history. So having Bonnaire who is charming, likeable, interesting, entertaining character who I like and then am horrified at myself for liking, that's great, that does something interesting with the narrative of 'slave traders are all evil and souless' and reminds us that, no, slavers are us, we can still easily perpetuate those sorts of systems.

(racism and slave-trade content warnings, as you'd imagine)

This is long, so basically it'll be - Bonnaire and the season one episode, Pierre Pepin and the season two episode, and then a little bit on Bonnaire's return in season three.

I haven't rewatched for this random splurge of thoughts, but I think the Bonnaire episode in season one is an okay arc. I could probably say something about how I think it's not necessarily bad, but definitely worth interogating the ways the writers give the majority of the story and character beats about slavery to the mixed-race Porthos character. But really what I think needs interogating is two things.

First, the way the episode tries to balance this heavy subject with Athos's history, which is more important to the series-long arc. It ends up (accidentally?) drawing uncomfortable parallels.

There isn't really a good way to compare or contrast a white man's guilt and grief over his (white) wife who was executed (by him). There's never a graceful way to push aside generational trauma from the ongoing slave-trade, or a black man's grief over discovering a man he looked up to is a slaver. Especially not when you're trying to juggle staging that grief and trauma with the white characters' trauma and grief, and most especially when it's the white stuff that turns out to be the main narrative drive of the series and the rest just gets put aside not to be brought up again. It's just bad. There's a lot more to say and think about, but that's a starting point.

Secondly, Paul Munier. Paul fucking Munier. Guys! He's part of the slave-trade too! framing him as an honest merchant is fucked up. He's not the good guy. We can't go 'okay so Bonnaire is bad, but the things he has got through the slave trade, those belong to Paul Munier, who bought them, and is honest and good'. The slave-trade was a triangle - you go to Africa and you kidnap and enslave hundreds of human beings, you take them on ships to America and plantations, you force them to produce sugar-cane and rum (rum is what Bonnaire is drinking on that wagon, when he's telling Porthos dreamy stories). Sugar and rum, those are like, bywords for 'slave-trade'. And then you sell those comoddities and you buy whatever the fuck you want to sell to fuckers like Paul Munier and bring it back to France, and then you go to Africa again. Paul Munier is part of the slave trade. He might not buy and sell human beings, but he supports and props up Bonnaire, and he benefits from the slave-trade.

He might be a good guy, I dunno. I odn't think it's a black and white issue of he's a merchant therefore he's the bad guy. But I think it's worth interogating and thinking about who gets to be innocent in this story.

I know Bonnaire comes back in series three but I'm ignoring that for this second. The other narrative around slavery I think about is actually the one in season two, where the king and d'Artagnan are kidnapped by slavers. Sigh. What are we going to do about this one, huh? there is a lot. I'm gonna put aside the whole 'white slaves' thing because I don't know what to do with that. It took me a few times watching this show to realise 'oh, right, yeah, Milady is a slaver'. Between series one and series two, she made money by selling humans. I know she's moraly ambiguous but I think that gets brushed aside and reframed very quickly. I don't think any of these characters are really framed as slavers. I forget their names, I think Stephen something? The brother who gets gutted by Rochefort in the palace. Yeah, he's a slaver too.

Other than the writers quickly forgetting that these characters are committing attrocities (it's not THE slave trade, so it is different, which I guess might be where the white slavers thing comes in, which is still, no, I still don't know what to do with that). I think the main issue with this narrative arc is what you'd expect the issue to be - the black character. Pierre Pepin.

Where do we begin with that? That was just a lot of bullshit. Pierrre Pepin is a black man in shackles,which is always a questionable choice when you're thinking what to put on TV to be honest. Especially when you then go about killing the him, and wow do you ever want to have second thoughts about having him die for the white royal. That's just not good. I don't like that he's against the king's systematic opession based on class and race, then he does a little turnaround when he meets the king. I guess the 'becomes a royalist when he sees that the white dude is nice' is necessary for the 'willing to die for his king' thing. I'm gonna go with a big nope for all of this.

There's a slave-narrative in each of the three seasons; there's Bonnaire, then there's Pierre Pepin's story, and then Bonnaire returns. He might not be a slaver anymore in season three, but the episode deals with Porthos's reaction to him, so it becomes that - the damage he did is not erased by him being quirky and funny. Again, the very real generational trauma that the slave-trade still inflicts is pushed aside for another character's past and current grief. I know Santiago Cabrera is Chilean and is brown, I'm not saying he should be pushes aside either. Just noting that in each episode Porthos's grief is set up in competition to another character's grief, and it's interesting I think that it's one of the other's backstories in each case. I don't have a conclusion about that, I'm just observing I guess. Anyway, each season has these slave-narratives, I think it'd be interesting to pull these out more and think about the ways the slave-trade is referenced and written about in the series, and why it's done in these ways.

I said it was bizzare how these narratives treat the characters who are perpetuating and benefiting from the slave trade, as well as the characters who are explicitly slavers. I also think it's definitley a choice to shove in multiple storylines about white people, in these narratives. Again, I know the Santiago Cabrera isn't white, but whatever Aramis's friend in that episode is called, is.There is the scene in that episode where Constance (a white woman) has a go at Porthos for the way he stitches Bonnaire, and Bonnaire is largely treated sympathetically in that episode. The characters on the periphery of the slave-trade are barely acknowledged as such, and characters like Milady and Stephen Mautrim (name is off the top of my head I'm not sure) are pretty much absolved of that, and I think we mostly just forget that part of Milady's story. And Pierre Pepin. God, I still don't really know where to start with his story.

I think it's worth thinking about these narratives and interogating this, because the slave-trade was a real historical event and a real trauma that still has impact today. The way we write about and consume stories about it is important. It's also important to remember that Porthos's mother was written as a freed woman because Alexandre Dumas's grandmother was a freed woman. It's a very real and very close history that's being used for these narratives, and it's heavy, you know? You've got to give it space to be heavy. It's a heavy part of this fandom, too, because it's not just something that's in the show, it's something that's in our fandom spaces. The racism and white-supremacy that makes these narratives what they are is part of our fandom.

so... those are my random thoughts on that .

[galacticlamps]

So I finally just saw the Fury From the Deep animation, and I’m just gonna go ahead and pop some very random and unconnected thoughts on it here

I don’t know why, because I didn’t think this when I saw Macra or Faceless Ones, but I’m really curious what this one would look like in black & white. Maybe it’s because there were more reds & warm tones in it than I expected - I hadn’t noticed I gave it a color palate in my head but I guess the foam/seaweed/north sea aesthetic just got me thinking everything was gray and blue and green lol - but most of the sets seemed much darker and larger than I’d imagined as well, which made them look less clinical and more atmospheric, I guess, but I’d still be interested to see it once without color.

I think there was a calendar that said 1975? I wonder why they updated it? Surely not just to throw some pics of the Master in the background, they did that in the Faceless Ones and that’s definitely set in ‘66.

I found it funny how the animators went out of their way to devise a staging of the scene with Jamie standing on the Doctor’s shoulders that would protect their little cartoon guy from getting upskirted, while the telesnaps seem to imply no one in 1968 was as worried about being polite with the real actors.

I completely forgot the Harrises lived at no. 420. In fact, when I first saw that on their door, I thought it was a joke the animators tossed in and I was surprised they were allowed to be that blatant - but then Maggie said the number in a line of dialogue and I had to go to google to try and figure out if Victor Pemberton could have been trying make the joke himself - but everything I saw says 420 only became a byword for “the weed” in the ‘70s, which just goes to show you, good science fiction really does predict the future! Of all the serials, right?

Weirdly, I think this is the animation that I missed the actors’ movement in the most. I know the Second Doctor has a lot of physicality that must be missing from any animated episode, but here you’ve also got scenes like the one where Maggie Harris is sick and her husband’s all distressed, and even though I know why the characters are mostly standing still, it’s hard to not laugh a little at how stilted that can feel. But of course right after that, they managed to make it  more dynamic again with those dutch angles and the sharp cuts between her and the weed on the patio, so I guess they were also looking for ways to make it feel less static, and it’s nice to see the animation actually adding something other than pure watchablity - at least in this kind of animation, where it’s not meant to look like a shot-for-shot remake like with the Moonbase or Reign of Terror.

Maybe the stupidest thing I liked about it was seeing more of the Harris’s house - I realize it’s a silly thing to worry about but I think the novelization made a point of mentioning how small and simple it was & somehow that made me feel a little bad that Victoria was going to live with them if they were hard up for space already, but they’ve got a nice house and I’m sure she thought so too.

[nocompromise-noregrets]

fic writer interview

tagged by: the lovely @allegoriesinmediasres

name: likethenight (and my real name has become a byword for unpleasant middle-aged women, which is deeply annoying)

fandoms: LotR/The Hobbit, King Arthur (2004), the MCU

two-shot: I don't have many, it's either one-shots or multi-chapters here, but Quarantine with Hal and Jack from my original-'verse was a two-shot - and that's the only one in all the 145 works I've posted to AO3, I've just gone through the lot and checked!

most popular multi-chapter fic: That would be My Heart Is An Empty Vessel, probably because it's very long and I've been posting it for about ten months at this point; but I noticed the other day that All I Want Is You is actually doing better at the point it's at than Empty Vessel was doing at the same point. So that's interesting. :D

actual worst part of writing: procrastination and writer's block. I'm terrified of losing the muse again.

how you choose your titles: They're usually either titles or lines from songs (mostly Empathy Test at the moment), or a line from the fic/chapter itself.

do you outline: Hardly ever. I might jot notes down if I come up with an idea for something that needs to happen later, but mostly I keep it in my head, which probably isn't doing my mental health/stress levels any good. XD

ideas you probably won’t get around to, but wouldn’t it be nice: I'm fully intending to get around to all my ideas, including the Sigrid-and-Tauriel story in Empty Vessel-'verse, and Elladan and Elrohir making their choice as to whether to stay in Middle-Earth or sail West.

callouts @ me: SO MUCH FLUFF and basically every last one of my stories is a variation on a theme of 'grumpy person gets relentlessly adopted and learns how to be less grumpy' XD

best writing traits: I rather like my dialogue and description. :D And I know how to write healthy relationships. No unnecessary manufactured drama here.

spicy tangential opinion: Legolas is not a child or a teenager, nor is he an airhead redneck. He's just as deep and as deserving of respect as any other Elven character, and I will relentlessly write him as such.

tagging: ooooh :D With no pressure, @lemurious, @writerman, @angelic-kisses13, @sleepy-santiago

Thank you! <3333333

[douchebagbrainwaves]

A WAY TO YAHOO

We had a demo day for investors, we had to rely mostly on examples in books. This kind of thing is out there for anyone to see. When you have actual first class functions or recursion or even keyword parameters. They want to make a lot more money than we did last year and I wish we had. We now think of it, the best local talent will go to the real Silicon Valley, and all you have is statistics, it seems is that much computing will move from the desktop onto remote servers. These techniques are mostly orthogonal to Bill's; an optimal solution might incorporate both. The book would be a real threat. Why bother checking the front page of any specific paper or magazine? It will be worth making i/o. The bumbler will shoot himself in the foot anyway.

Atlanta is just as hosed as Munich. In Common Lisp I have often wanted to iterate through the fields of a struct—to comb out references to a deleted object, for example—you want to be forced to figure out what's actually wrong with him, and sure enough, it won't pay for spammers to send it, and the most productive people are attracted to employers who hold themselves to a higher standard than the law requires. In principle you could avoid it, just as it's hard to engage an audience you have to design what the user needs, not simply what he says he wants. After years of carefully avoiding classic time sinks like TV, games, and Usenet, I still managed to fall prey to distraction, because as well as the low. So the best strategy is to try lots of different things. Irony of ironies, it's the computer Steve Huffman wrote Reddit on. We know because we make people move for Y Combinator, and it is a huge and rapidly growing business. That has worked for the government. In fact, they're lucky by comparison.

One ingredient of its meaning is certainly Ajax, which I took to refer to web-based database as a system to hack: the Lisp Machine. I'm not saying, of course, that elite colleges have two critical qualities that plug right into the way large organizations work. For insiders work turns into a duty, laden with responsibilities and expectations. The most obvious is poverty. Instead of avoiding it as a drawback of senility, many companies embrace it only half-willingly, driven more by fear than hope, and aiming more to protect their turf than to do great things for users. So don't be demoralized by how hard it is to be consciously aware of that. If you work fast, they expect everyone else to. Not all cities send a message. Eminence is like a suit: it impresses the wrong people, and you can't find another? It's kind of strange when you think about it, including even its syntax, and anything you write has, as much as an audience. If I could get people to remember just one quote about programming, it would be a byword for bogusness like Milli Vanilli or Battlefield Earth.

I want in some macros. The startup will now do that themselves. Arguably the people in the middle of the 20th century that convinced some people otherwise. People will pay extra for stability. Investors don't need weeks to make up their minds, lest they lose the deal. They know they want to raise money, and the best research is also good design, and having the same people both design and implement the product. Small things can be done by collaborators.

Painting has been a qualitative change, like the proverbial drunk who looks for his keys under the lamppost, instead of sitting on them, technology will evolve faster. So verbs with initial caps have higher spam probabilities than they would have been on the list 100 years ago though it might have been 2400 years ago. They don't define what evil is, but by studying the intended users and figuring out what those problems are. Maybe the answer is yes. For example, when Leonardo painted the portrait of Ginevra de Benci in the National Gallery, he put a juniper bush behind her head. It's especially good if your application solves some new problem. I'm supposed to finish college and then go work for another company for two years, and then for all their followers to die.

Another view is that a programming language unless it's also the scripting language of a popular system. When it reaches a certain concentration, it kills off the yeast that produced it. So far the complete list of messages I've picked up from cities is: wealth, style, hipness, physical attractiveness, fame, political power, economic power, intelligence, social class, and quality of life. When you use the would-have method with startup founders, and it's always this way. Patent trolls are just parasites. Poverty and economic inequality are not identical. Working on small things, and if this new Lisp will be used to hack. The opinion of expert hackers is not the brand name of the artist. It's so easy to understand what kind of terms should they expect? A rounds aren't going away, I think we're just beginning to realize how distracting the Internet had become, because the main value of that initial version is to be on it or close to those who are. Sometimes it literally is software, like Hacker News and our application system. If you actually want to fix the bad aspects of it—you have to seek out, but something you can't turn off.

Clearly you don't have to be downloaded. Users don't know what all the choices are, and much less on how old you are or how much business experience you have. If they get something wrong, it's usually not realizing they have to make sacrifices to live there. One of the great masters, because copying forces you to look closely at the way a painting is made. In the big angel rounds that increasingly compete with series A rounds is that they're more prestigious. Universities and research labs feel they ought to be the middle course, to notice some tokens but not others. Another example we can take from painting is the way they taught me to in college. Users are a double-edged sword. I/O. And that required very different skills from actually doing the startup. In fact, the language encourages you to be an outsider. The best stories about user needs are about your own.

Powerbooks. Tcl is the scripting language of some existing system. Is there some way to beat this limitation? Technology has decreased the cost of starting a startup molds you into someone who can handle it. Smart investors can see past such superficial flaws. But the cost of typing it. And they, incidentally, are busted. Variation in productivity is always going to produce some baseline growth in economic inequality we've seen since then has been due to bad behavior of various kinds, there has been a qualitative change in the last 10 years.

Thanks to Bob van der Zwaan essay, Trevor Blackwell, Sam Altman, and Geoff Ralston for sparking my interest in this topic.

[dwollsadventures]

So I've been reading about trolls.

Specifically Ármann Jakobsson's The Troll Inside You, Ronald James' Trolls: From Scandinavia to Dam Dolls..., and Hrolf Kraki's saga. It's been one of those weeks. Trolls have always been the most interesting Scandinavian/Norse beings to me. They're innumerable and come in almost every shape and size. What exactly they are has never been fully tangible. They tend to be wildly different depending on time and place. Honestly, answering the title question is difficult, and answering "What isn't a troll?" is even harder.

In Hrolf's saga alone the word troll is used to refer to a sorceress, a dragon, and a malevolent entity in the shape of a boar summoned by a sorcerer. But not once do any ogre or giant-like beings show up. So what gives?

After a lot of reading I think I've come up with an answer that can, at the very least, satisfy my own curiosity. It probably wouldn't stand up to actual academic standards, but that's not going to stop me. This is a tumblr post, not a scholarly journal.

To start with, we'll go back to the Norse. Or at least, the Icelanders who wrote down Norse sagas and myths. Trolls do not usually appear themselves, rather the word is used as a signifier of something equally dangerous or mysterious. Witches, wizards, monsters, and evil spirits can be called trolls. Sometimes dwarfs and giants are referred to as trolls as well, and may act in behaviors we deem "trollish" today. The commonality of all these is that it's always used in a negative sense. Beings referred to as trolls are physically violent monsters or enemy magicians who use their magic for evil purposes. Troll in this sense can pretty much mean "monster". Things called trolls are not exclusively trolls, a dragon can be called one but still be a dragon. The undead (draugr) were called trolls as well, and some tended to be indistinguishable. They were equally malevolent, horrifying to look at, and magical. One of the few differences being that the undead are, well, undead. They used to be human before they died. Interestingly, humans turning inhuman is a rare, but fascinating aspect of the sagas. Usually this is accomplished via magic, which is regarded as bad to use too much and too evilly.

Wizards and witches are probably the most commonly called trolls of all the things listed above. The people are usually antagonists who use their magic to harm the protagonists. Troll in this sense is used as a by-word for harmful magic. In Norse tröllskapr can mean wizardry or witchcraft. Likewise, in Norwegian a trollman is a wizard.

So, troll is basically a word that can apply to monsters and mystics. It carries an air of mystery, but is almost always negative.

There are also beings referred to as trolls exclusively. As shown above, there are a lot of things called trolls. Humans, spirits, monsters, ghosts, giants. But, one usage of troll stands out: when it's referring to beings that are usually translated as "ogres". These beings are almost always called trolls, but sometimes also bergbui, mountain-dwellers. These creatures don't correspond to any of the others, though they sometimes overlap. In Norse Mythology Thor is frequently said to be out hunting trolls. So trolls are like the giants, but less "human". Whereas Thor fights and battles other giants, he hunts trolls like animals. As the protector of the common people, we can see trolls as a malevolent being that Thor must hunt directly. Elsewhere in the sagas we see the phrase "may you be taken by the trolls", a phrase said with the same tone as "get lost" or "go die in a hole" in English. In Grettir's saga we meet some trolls, cannibalistic beings who live inside of mountains and ravines and kidnap people. This corroborates with with we see in later Scandinavian legends. To summarize, the Norse believed in trolls as both a distinct entity and a byword for the mystical arts and horrible monsters. The distinct trolls were ogre-like giants who kidnapped people and lived under mountains, possibly to avoid the sunlight. These trolls were not pushovers though; the were incredibly strong and clever, capable of using magic and outsmarting their prey.

As time went on, the trolls became more distinct and varied. Ronald James suggests that influence from the Irish and British were a major turning point in mainland Scandinavia. As time went on, in some areas, trolls were mixed with Celtic fairies and native dwarfs. Trollish behavior was seen in other beings, and a lot of mixing and stirring within the pot happened.

Iceland and the Faroes retained their troll legends almost identically to the Norse. Just like their language. The few differences are negligible, for my purposes right now, anyways.

In Norway, the old-fashioned trolls stayed. In legends and folk-tales they remained large, monstrous, and evil. They lived in mountains or beneath hills and in the deep forests, kidnapping humans to eat them. Their magical prowess was not lost either. These trolls also remained in some parts of Sweden. It's worth noting however, that Sweden is very culturally diverse. There is no one particular Swedish troll. But, in some parts they remained mostly horrifying. Norway is also home to a set of beings called the huldrefolk. They are social, elf-like beings who live beneath the ground in hills or burial mounds. They are more mischievous than evil. Kidnapping, forced marriages, and normal neighborly behavior are observed behaviors, but people didn't consider them murderers or cannibals. It was a drag living with them; being "huldrin" or under their influence was a sign of wasting away. They didn't kill people though and could be good neighbors if treated with respect. Huldrefolk probably owe their origin to Celtic fairies, but perhaps also to the native alfar and vaettir. The Huldra is a related being and may or may not be the same thing. There's no such thing as a "species". Whether or not one supernatural being is related to another is usually based off of behavior rather than genetics.

Some Swedish trolls are remarkably like the huldrefolk. With a few differences: they were more likely to live in mountains and they were much more evil. In Celtic (Irish, British, etc.) legends getting whisked away by the fairies was generally a pleasant if not jarring experience. Huldrefolk were less so, being physically and emotionally draining. Some variants of Swedish trolls (often called bjergfolk or mountain-folk) kidnapped people and forced them into slavery or other equally bad lives. These bjergfolk would pretend to be nice only to reveal their true colors later. In one instance a man rides up to a hill with song and laughter and light coming out of it. A young woman comes up to him and offers him a goblet. The man then tosses the goblet, which turns out to be poison, and rides away, being chased by the angry trolls. Of course, Sweden being large, some human-like trolls were nicer and more like kindly huldrefolk. In some places they overlapped with the tiny vaettir.

Danish trolls also tended towards the human-like. Denmark, owing to its lack of mountains, often had trolls living in mounds or hills. They were called mound-folk and trold-folk though the degree of trollish-ness is a hazy area. Very often they were more huldrefolk-like than traditionally trollish. Danish trolls also could be very small or human sized, benevolent or crabby, normal-looking or ugly. This is getting long. And I didn't even cover their relationship with giants, trolls in the British Isles, or changelings. Trolls are just whack. In retrospect I may have made this sound more clear-cut than it actually is. I'd recommend both of the books I mentioned up top for a better understanding. The one by Ronald James is only 3 bucks on Kindle.

[stillthewordgirl]

LOT/CC fic: A Little Trouble, ch. 3 (of 5)

In a universe where the Legends returned to their earlier lives after Savage's defeat, Sara Lance is bored out of her mind. And then a certain crook turns up...

Set in an AU in which no one died at the Oculus, Miranda and Jonas lived, and Rip promised to return for the Legends-and hasn't, yet. Many thanks to @larielromeniel for the beta!

Can also be read here at AO3 and here at FF.net.

Leonard has to admit he's impressed. If Felicity Smoak ever expressed any interest in turning (returning?) to a life of crime, he could definitely make use of her talents. 

The files on the drive are well organized and meticulously detailed, and reading between the lines, he can find some frustration at a past inability to take Kay down. A personal vendetta? Well, the man's done enough damage to people and families that Leonard wouldn't be surprised. For once, though, he decides it's none of his business.  

(Mostly. He does mentally file the information away—just in case.) 

There’s a lot of information there and he reads through it as fast as possible, knowing that he only has a few hours before meeting Sara and still needs to at least fake having his usual careful plans. Leaning back afterward, Leonard drums his fingertips on the desktop and ponders, shuffling pieces around in his head and trying to fit them together in a way that makes sense. 

Usually, he’d have a team for something like this: someone to act as the muscle, probably Mick; someone to run the tech side of things; a few more reasonably intelligent warm bodies to act as distractions or extra pairs of hands. Usually, he’d plan a heist this complicated for weeks, even months, beforehand. 

He doesn’t have a team. He doesn’t have weeks. 

For a moment, he wonders it’d just be better to ‘fess up, to admit that he hadn’t planned this, to see if Sara would be willing to just…to just… 

His brain refuses to imagine it, just plain stalls at the notion of telling her he’d drive all this way just to see her, to talk to her, to ask her to get a drink. 

Fuck it.  

Stubbornly, grimly, he scans the documentation about the Kay building again, experienced eye picking out all the details about security. Even in the wee hours of the morning, there's a full crew on, and they're highly trained—if he can believe Smoak's notes, and he's inclined to. 

There aren't many weaknesses to exploit; this Kay fellow knows what he's about. Leonard shakes his head, then opens a search engine, looking for any additional details about the man himself. 

And there, third item from the top, he finds it. 

Leonard reads the news story in full, smirking a little. One can't rely on luck in a heist, but every once in a while... 

Still, there are a lot of moving pieces here, and not much time at all. But he knows what to target. 

The weakest link in a system—security or otherwise—is always the people. 

Sara gets to the park a few minutes earlier than the appointed meeting time, in part just so she can do her usual routine of staring at that awful, well-meant statue and have the same conversation in her head that she always has. 

“Isn’t it awful, Laurel? I don’t know what they were thinking. It isn’t like there aren’t any photos of you to show them what you really looked like. I’m sorry I wasn’t here to stop it. You wouldn’t want a statue at all, let alone this…thing.” 

“But maybe you’d think it was funny. You always surprised me like that. You’d be the prim older sister…and then you’d snicker at something absolutely appalling and then we’d be laughing like we used to…you might find this thing hysterical.” 

But there the script in her head branches off, as she stands there gazing at the statue that most definitely is not her sister, but has come to symbolize a connection to her regardless. 

“I’m meeting someone here, Laurel. And I…I don’t know what he means to me. I know he’s been a friend, and I know that I’m still trying to decide what it means that I was so happy to see him yesterday. I’ve been turning that over in my head a lot. I’d have been happy to see almost anyone from the team, but it was a little…more than that. It was like puzzle pieces, fitting back together, and that…that scares me a little.” 

“I wish you were here.” 

But Laurel’s not, and she’ll never be, and Sara walks back over to a bench and sits down with a sigh, closing her eyes and trying to clear her mind. 

She’ll give the crook this…he’s punctual. No sooner has her watch showed that it’s noon than Leonard drops into the seat next to her, handing her a coffee without comment. Sara nods her thanks, trying to ignore the rush of…something…at seeing him, and takes a sip without even looking at the contents, raising an eyebrow when it’s just how she prefers it. 

Leonard smirks as he takes a drink from his own coffee. “No sugar, two cream,” he drawls. “I pay attention.” 

“Hmmm. And are you drinking the sugar-with-a-drop-or-two-of-coffee you prefer?” She sips again, raising her eyebrows at him.  

Leonard just lifts an eyebrow back. “Don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it,” he drawls, saluting her with his coffee cup. 

“No, thanks,” she shoots back, trying to ignore the innuendo in his voice. (Does he do that on purpose?) “I actually like having all my teeth.” 

Leonard—whose teeth are just fine, thank you, and she knows it—lets out a quiet huff of laughter, and they sit a moment longer in silence, ingesting caffeine.  

Sara glances back over after a few minutes, and sees him gazing at the statue. His eyes are too intent for him not to know what it is, and this odd merging of two pieces of her life gives Sara pause for just a moment. 

Mick had told her Leonard had "socked ol' Rip a good one" after the captain knocked her out after the...the news about Laurel, and Rip had used the knock-out gadget on Leonard too for his pains. They hadn't really talked about it, later...beyond his quiet "I'm sorry" before she'd left for Star City to see her father. At the time, she'd been too distracted, too upset, to respond with more than a "thank you," but now, she wonders what he's thinking. 

"That's supposed to be...?" he says after a moment, a question in his voice. 

"Yeah." Sara shakes her head. "I know. It's awful." She supposes it’s no surprise at all that Leonard I-do-my-research Snart knows not only what Laurel Lance looked like, but that this statue, which doesn't resemble her at all, is supposed to be her memorial. 

She doesn't want pity from him, she realizes. The quiet understanding of before is enough. She already knows he gets it. She doesn't want to deal with... 

"We could steal it." 

There's mischief in his tone, and Sara blinks, smiling after a moment as the unexpected comment registers. 

"The statue? Excuse me?" 

The blue eyes sparkle as he glances at her. "If we stole it, they might replace it with something better." 

"We can't steal the statue." 

"I've stolen bigger." 

"I'm sure." Grinning now (how had he known what would snap her out of her mood?) Sara shifts around sideways on the bench, facing him, and shakes her head. "I thought we had better things to do? So, are you going to let me in on it or not?" 

Leonard gives her that damn-sexy look from under his eyelashes again. He doesn't obviously look around them. He doesn't need to. "Are you familiar with Steven Kay?" 

Sara stares at him a moment. "You're not...working for him?" 

"Nope." He takes a sip of his sugar-coffee concoction. "He's the target." 

Impossible to grow up in Star City and not know about the Kay family. The names of both the current rat-bastard and his father were bywords for crookedness and corruption, even as some people seemed to adore them as "straight-shooters." Still, not quite enough: Although the senior Kay had run for public office several times, he'd narrowly been defeated each one. And the younger seemed uninterested in politics.  

From what Sara'd heard, he's far more interested in destroying other businesses and collecting dirt on his fellow "upper class" members, even as he schmoozed with them. Laurel had absolutely loathed him.  

"I can get behind that," she says slowly. "What in particular?" 

"Heard of his black book?" Leonard's still watching her closely. "In his case, it's actually literal. And it's full of dirt." 

That's another open secret, and the main reason no one's ever taken Kay down. Sara nibbles her lip, eyeing him. "And what are you planning on doing with this...dirt?" 

"Got a buyer." He gives her another slow smirk. "Someone known for...shall we say...creative retribution. I...trust them." 

That gives her pause. She's pretty sure that the number of people Leonard Snart truly trusts can be counted on one hand. (She hopes she's one of them.) "OK...what's the plan?" 

That gets an odd little smile, although it quickly fades as he studies her, eyes intense. "Well, part one is getting into his building and that's locked down tight. However...” He leans forward a little. “Tomorrow night, he's hosting his annual gala to support this charity thing of his…not that anyone really thinks it’s anything other than a way to browbeat those in ‘debt’ to him to spend money making him look good. Still, it’s one of the few times other people are allowed into the building.  

“And…” There’s definitely an air of gleeful challenge in his eyes. “There was a bit of an oversight in the planning this year.” He pauses. “They didn't put names on the actual invites. So we turn up with one, we look the part, we get in. Think you can get your hands on one?” 

There’s no denying she understands exactly what he’s getting at. Sara thinks a moment, then meets his gaze again, trying hard to keep her disappointment from showing. 

"Len," she says slowly, choosing her words carefully, "did you ask me to be part of this just because I know the mayor?” Who almost certainly got an invitation, and he knows it. 

Leonard’s reaction is immediate, and not what she expected. His eyes widen, just a little, and he sits back a moment before almost blurting out: "What? No. I can make other plans for it, but..." As Sara watches, he visibly composes himself, then gives her a very direct look again. 

"This would just make...one aspect...of the job easier, if you could do it,” he says evenly. “Really. Not a big deal." 

He’s tried to conceal it and it’s quite subtle, but Leonard looks rattled. Leonard almost never looks rattled. She can't help wondering why. 

Still, the genuineness of the reaction reassures her. Sara takes another sip of her coffee, feeling the hurt wash away, before smirking at him. 

"I can probably do that,” she admits. “Oliver hates these things, and he really hates Kay. Of course, that means the man is constantly trying to get Oliver to fall in line and play along like so many of the other big names in Star City. I’ll have to get into the mayor’s office on a weekend, but…” She shrugs. “I can handle it.” 

Leonard nods, businesslike. “Getting in is the first step. Beyond that…” He looks at her sideways again. “I have the rest of the plans back at the hotel. Stop by later, we’ll plan, I’ll buy you dinner…?” 

It’s on the tip of her tongue to ask why he didn’t just ask her out if he wants to buy her dinner. 

But she doesn’t. 

Leonard doesn’t doubt for a second that, once she’s agreed to do it, Sara will come through with the invitation. He’s still a touch unnerved that she first thought he was just using her, however. (Especially since he'd completely forgotten about that mayoral connection.) 

Granted, he’s been known to use people.  

But not her. Never her. 

And as much as it pains him to admit it, he’s trying to be better. 

After their meeting at the waterfront, he heads over to the Kay building and cases it the best he can from the outside. Sure, he has all the plans and diagrams of some key areas, but there’s nothing like actual recognizance, just in case. 

Then he heads back to the hotel, settling in to pour over said diagrams and other information, one eye on the clock, anticipating her arrival. 

Leonard will admit that as the pieces come together, he's finding the old love of a challenge rearing its head, the thrill of the chase, of arranging a heist with so many important parameters so quickly. And it's refreshing, because he knows he can count on Sara to step up and play her role, and play it well; so well he can trust her beyond a shadow of a doubt. 

That's...nice. 

As it turns out, he's so immersed in scenarios and planning and all the puzzle pieces that the time passes faster than expected. Still, he's pacing a bit by the time she arrives, trying to pretend he's not although there's no one there to see him. He takes his time sauntering to the door when she knocks, trying to look like he's not, well, eager. 

Sara grins at him when he opens the door, slipping past him without a word. When he turns, eyebrows raised, she's standing in the middle of the suite, bouncing on her toes and giving the room a thorough once over.  

"Very nice," she says with approval. "I say this as someone who's been camped out on a couch in a too-small apartment for the past few weeks."  

It's on the tip of his tongue to suggest she stay with him. He doesn't do it, attempting to conceal the impulse behind a smirk as he strolls over to meet her.  

In their usual shipboard interactions, it's not like either one of them tried to keep their eyes to themselves. But this is different, and when she turns to meet him, he decides it's really the better part of valor to keep his eyes on her face, and not the rather low-cut shirt she'd decided to wear.  

He's a professional. He's being professional. 

Damnit. 

Something about Sara's answering smirk says she knows exactly what he's thinking, but she chooses not to tease him, reaching instead into of the bag she's carrying. "As promised." She withdraws a small rectangle of cream-colored paper and extends it. "Easy. Oliver was working anyway; I visited and rummaged his recycling bin when he stepped out a moment. They're not being emptied regularly because of the budget cuts; he's been bitching about that steadily." 

"Convenient." Leonard examines the invitation in satisfaction, then nods over her shoulder at the desk and the laptop and papers spread out on it. "The schematics and all the information I have are there. Give them a read-through. I have plans, but I want to know what you think. Maybe you'll make a connection I didn't." 

That gets him a sparkling look. "Will do. And...I was promised dinner?" 

"Take-out OK? Or room service?" He cocks his head at her. "Or would you rather go somewhere?" 

"No, looks like there's too much to do here. Take-out would be excellent." She pulls out the desk chair and folds herself into it neatly, glancing up at him. "You know, one of the best taco trucks in Star City is parked just a little down the block." 

After a moment, she snorts at the look of distaste he knows is on his face. "Or not. Look, there's a Big Belly Burger and a Chinese take-out place right down the street. Either would be fine." 

"No. Just...they're so...messy..." 

"I'll keep your precious papers clean, Len." Another impish look before she turns back to the computer. "I promise." 

Tacos it is. 

Due to the line at the "best truck taco in Star City," it takes a while before he's on his way back up to the suite, paper bags exuding—he'll admit it—delicious aromas in hand. Sara watches as he steps through the door, then shoves herself back from the desk with a foot and rises, accepting the bag holding her braised beef tacos with a hum of anticipation. 

They eat in silence at first, taking over the suite's narrow breakfast bar with their meals and drinks. Leonard, a touch squeamish about mess, should admit his spicy chicken quesadilla (the least sloppy thing he could find on the menu) is excellent, and Sara's pleasure in her meal is evident. She notices him watching her and smirks a little, reaching a foot across under the table and nudging his leg. 

"Told you it was good." 

"Never doubted you." He smiles a little as she finds the cinnamon brownie he'd added to both their meals, then has to stifle a groan—and the sudden desire to kiss the crumbs off the corners of her mouth—when she carefully licks the chocolate from her fingers. 

Sara seems oblivious. "Ready to start talking shop?" she asks, stuffing napkins and wrappings back in the bag and spinning on her stool to lob the paper missile at the garbage can. "I want to hear what you have in mind." 

Too many responses he could make to that. 

But he's professional. 

He's a professional. 

"Well," he says carefully, gathering his own meal's refuse, "here's the plan..." 

Sara listens intently as he sketches it out in words, interjecting the odd comment or astute observation here and there. After a moment, he rises and grabs a notepad from the desk, returning and starting to make notes, sketch a few things, explain what he’s thinking and why. Sara leans toward him, asks questions, offers suggestions. Len considers them a moment, then crosses a few things out and starts reworking things using her ideas, asking her a few questions in return as he does so. 

They work together so well, so comfortably, that time passes quickly, and Leonard’s startled when he looks up at one point and realizes that the light of the setting sun is visible outside the hotel windows. He glances over at Sara and sees that she’s looking at him, a smile hovering around the corners of her mouth, a light in her eyes. 

He wonders what she's thinking. 

Sara's wondering, idly, if she should try seducing him. 

She's pretty sure he'd be amenable, based on the so-obvious way he's trying not to stare at her cleavage and those little, warm looks he keeps shooting her, especially when he thinks she isn’t looking. 

And she has decided that this is, yes, a thing she wants.  

It would be easy, so easy, to lean over a little further and kiss him, to speak with something other than words for a while, to find out what “me and you” had really meant that day. 

She wants it. She wants him. 

And it would be so easy. 

But this has been...nice. They're colleagues, teammates, even in a team of two, and this little operation sounds like it has the potential to do a lot of good. Does she really want to risk messing that up? 

And really—it’s his turn to steal the kiss. 

Sara studies him a moment longer, then lets her gaze drop back to their notes—and frowns. ��Wait a moment,” she murmurs. “You said Kay’s security usually has a metal detector for the guests. You’re not taking your cold gun?” 

Leonard shrugs. “Nope,” he says simply. “Not that kind of a job. The less weaponry the better.” 

Sara thinks of the multiple weapons hidden on her person, even now. “And does that apply to me as well?” 

He snorts and levels a gaze at her. “One, like you don’t have ways to get weapons in anyway. Two…” His eyes narrow and the look in them makes her reconsider her decision not to pursue…things…now. “…Sara, you are a weapon.” 

She stares at him a moment. Definitely reconsidering. “Well, compliments aside,” she says finally, watching him smile again, “I can understand that. The idea is how to stay a step ahead of them.” 

“Precisely.” He frowns at a microscopic spot of sauce at the desk, then glances back up at her. “So. Step one is getting in. Three pieces to that: We have the invite. We can both act the part. Do you have…” 

“Why, yes, Leonard, I have a suitable dress.” Sara smirks at him, leaning forward again. “And I think you’ll really like it.” She hesitates. “Actually, I need to get it out of storage. Check a few things. When and where would you like to meet tomorrow?” 

He’s quiet a moment longer than he needs to be, and Sara wonders if he’s considering asking her to stay too. But if he is, he doesn’t say anything, and they agree to meet at noon the next day for another round of planning. 

And then it’s show time. 

[woman-shaped-battering-ram]

Starting from the very beginning: a lot of profs like to give you some space to decide on your own topic. That’s great! But what if all you’re drawing is a massive fucking blank? Try these:

Try putting together two subjects and find the intersection of them. Basically play matching games with different subjects until you find an interesting thing that has to do with both. Mix and match war history, political history, intellectual history, history of technology, gender history, history of religion, and any others you think of until you find some gold.

Always keep in mind what the sources allow. Given literacy rates, destruction of sources over time, and what people bothered to write down or didn’t, what can you squeeze from the primary sources of your era? On the flip side, maybe there’s a really cool primary source – book, letter, law, piece of art, whatever – that you’d love to base an essay off of.

Before you even sit your ass in the chair to start writing anything, you’ll already have spent five hours (approximately) working on the project. This is research time, and it (more than any clever turn of phrase or use of the thesaurus or midnight write-a-thon) is what’s gonna make your essay work.

Go to the library. Yes, the physical library with bits of pressed-up tree. In disciplines like history especially, you can’t rely solely on e-book and e-journal evidence. You gotta get in there and smell the lovely old paper. Libraries also have lots of resources to help you, including subject librarians who know their stuff and can help you figure out where to go for research.

Research should go from the general to the specific. If you have a wide topic, read some basic grounding stuff then delve into the specificity of what’s gonna be in your essay.

Be fucking critical about it. Everyone’s afraid of fake news now, but there’s also fake old news. Did the writer lack certain information? What are they trying to persuade you of? Who are they? When was the book written and what was the historiography of the topic like at that time? Are the writer’s sources good? His credentials? Was this source written as propaganda?

Primary. Sources. Get stuff from the actual time period and remember to read and analyse carefully. What can you squeeze from it? What meanings did it have in the context of its time, and not ours?

First Paragraph: an introduction. This must include a general summary of what you’re talking about. Think of the 5 Ws (especially, what topic? When/what period?). But mostly, this paragraph must abso-fucking-lutely include a thesis statement: a single sentence which sums up the argument which the essay supports. Think of it as the TL;DR of the essay.

Middle Paragraphs: sources, arguments and analysis. Remember that the whole of the essay must come back to that TL;DR (thesis). Each of these paragraphs must be relatively self-contained; it may build off of others but it is its own paragraph because it is a separate idea.

Get creative as to the order of these paragraphs. Proceed logically by chronology, subjects that flow into each other, by geographical grouping… whatever makes sense for your topic and keeps your arguments well-organized.

How long is a paragraph? Well, how long is a rope? As long as it needs to be. Take as much time as you need but don’t repeat yourself.

Conclusion: the conclusion is also a TL;DR, in a way. It’ll restate the thesis and add any last thoughts that you really fucking want your reader to remember.

The most common complaints that profs will give include the following. You’ll thank me for this later.

I’ve seen so many students from other disciplines get fucked over in history courses because they forget to talk about change over time or to mention what’s particular to the time period instead of talking in a broad way. For example, if you’re writing about the status of women in Upper Canada, don’t mix examples from 1850 and 1950; choose a manageable time spread and go with it. Change over time is the essence of history.

Lack of a thesis. Remember how I said that the thesis is what the essay is all supposed to support? Just to restate, the thesis is literally the whole fucking point. Make sure that yours isn’t trivial (aka already really obvious) or vague. Also make sure to know the difference between a topic and a thesis: a topic is the general subject the essay is about, and the thesis is a very specific argument the essay makes.

For example, a topic statement could be: “the essay will discuss the Puritan view on sexuality”. A thesis statement could be: “Although Puritan has been used as a byword for prudishness and repression, the positive Puritan view of sexuality within marriage and the erotic language used to discuss the Church’s relationship with God demonstrate a nuanced social role for sexuality within the Puritan community, in which proper sexual behaviour was defined by a theology of marriage.” One of these things lets you know that Puritans sometimes fucked and had thoughts about it; the other makes a novel(-ish) argument about the Puritan view on sexuality. See the difference?

Avoid present-ism. We have a lot of assumptions about how the world is and should be based on when we live, just as much as where we live or who we are. History is not some sort of march towards the glorious present or future and shouldn’t be treated that way.

Using long words or repeating yourself in order to impress/pad the length/whatever the fuck you think you’re doing is very transparent. Don’t bother.

[cirrus-grey]

Long post, scroll past if you're not interested in WWII history.

So I just saw an excellent documentary on the Ghost Amy of WWII (Which is available on Amazon) and... it's amazing.

Basically it started with a bunch of students from New York and Philadelphia art schools who were recruited by the army to disguise a training base (state-side) as an empty field. But it became so much more.

The whole idea was to fake out the German soldiers as to troop placement and size - they would broadcast pre-recorded sounds of troop movement, send out radio signals mimicking other divisions, and set up honest-to-god inflatable tanks and artillery to draw attention and fire away from the actual troops, intentionally putting themselves in harm's way to improve the chances of the fighting units. Apparently, when asked what their purpose was, one of the commanding officers replied: "Let me put it this way, Lieutenant. If we are totally successful, you may not come back."

They started shortly after D-Day, and continued all the way to the end of the war. Their final operation was also their largest, with 1100 people pretending to be 30,000, several miles south of the real army. This was a division that never launched an attack of their own, but is estimated to have saved anywhere from 15 to 30 thousand lives using misdirection.

And it wasn't just on the battlefield. They would sew fake patches on their uniforms and paint their trucks with the IDs of whatever unit they happened to be impersonating so they were more convincing in the towns they stopped in. They learned which units sang which songs off-duty, and made sure to sing the correct ones for the people they were mimicking.

And they would draw. Because this was an entire unit made up of mostly artists, who spent every free moment capturing the world around them on paper. Two quotes from the interviews that stood out: "Any given opportunity, the guys would draw." and "We were sleeping in foxholes, but nothing stopped us going somewhere to do a watercolor." Towns they stopped in, portraits of each other and the people they met... One of the veterans that was interviewed said one of their best days was stopping in a town with a functioning art store so they could re-supply. A lot of them went on to be successful artists and designers after the war, too.

Other notable stories and quotes: for Christmas 1944, the group hung condoms (inflated into balloons) and tin cans (cut into stars) on a tree as decorations.

A French soldier asked "Boom boom encore?" thinking their tanks were real. Upon finding out they were not, he said "Boom boom haha!" which became a byword for the division.

Reminiscing upon a time when the Ghost Army was under fire, one of the veterans said: "If you're in the wrong place, you can be dead. If you're in the right place, you can live to be as old as me."

And the whole operation was kept secret for 40 years just in case the tactic had to be used again in the Cold War.

Anyway. Sorry for the semi-coherent history rant. I just thought it was a really interesting story and was surprised I'd never heard of it before.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHY I'M SMARTER THAN FOUNDERS

If you ever got me, you wouldn't have a clue what to do: look at what happens to those who win lotteries or inherit money. Isn't the pointy-haired bosses. In OO languages, you can, even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world. There is a very sharp dropoff in performance among VC firms, because in many cases the language layer won't have to change at all. Then I'm worried. VC firm will not screw you too outrageously, because other founders would avoid them if word got out. Large-scale investors tend to put startups in three categories: successes, failures, and the distinction between the spikes and the average becomes sharper, like a digital image rendered with more pixels. And the big hits often look risky at first. The problem is, for the company to have a low valuation. In fact, if you have a browser on your cell phone? N elements.

But as well as Lisp, so they get the pick of all the parts, as ITA presumably does, you can make the search results useless, because the first results could be dominated by lame sites that had bid the most. If you want to work on what you like, and let people design whatever object systems they want as libraries. Will there be a phone in your palm pilot?1 So the total number of new shares to the angel; if there were 1000 shares before the deal, the capitalization table looks like this: shareholder shares percent—VCs 650 33.2 My guess is that the concepts we use in everyday life that you don't have time for your ideas to evolve, and b you're often forced to take deals you don't like it. I suppose I should learn Lisp, but it is a byword for impossibility.3 Though the first philosophers in the western tradition lived about 2500 years ago, and even have bad service, and people will keep coming. 5 are now widespread. That idea is not exactly novel. If VCs got de facto control of the company 2/4 2. You can start by writing things that are useful but very specific, and then think about how to make money, but what you'd like to be able to avoid the usual chicken and egg problem new protocols face, because some of the most important things you can understand about startups.

The difference between then and now is that now I understand why Berkeley is probably not worth trying to understand.4 Neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg knew at first how big their companies were going to spend the weekend at a friend's house for dinner. VCs also insist that prior to the deal the option pool is down to 13. We were compelled by circumstances to grow slowly, and in particular, Internet startups are still only a fraction of what the finished product will do, but that dramatic peaks can only be achieved by people with certain rare, innate qualities; nearly anyone can learn to be a complete picture. Could you describe the person as an animal? That scenario may seem unlikely now, but Fortran I didn't have them.5 The goal is the same as intelligence.6 All they need is a language that actually seems better than others that are available, there will be no more great new stuff beyond whatever's currently in the pipeline for several years after, and finally issued in 2003.7 Don't hire people to fill the gaps in some a priori org chart. That's what happened with domestic servants. Partly the reason deals seem to fall through so often is that you get less dilution.8

So someone investigated, and sure enough, that patent application had continued in the pipeline for several years after, and finally issued in 2003. And yet this guy will be almost entirely overlooked by the press. These heaps o' boilerplate are a problem for small startups, because it's always the oldest it's ever been.9 If you work hard at being a bond trader for ten years, thinking that you'll quit and write novels when you have enough money to pay a little more equity, but being slightly underfunded teaches them an important lesson. This is understandable with angels; they invest on a smaller scale and don't like to get across about startups, that's it. So when I ran into the Yahoo exec I knew from working there in the late 1950s. I know a lot of people wish that hacking was mathematics, or at least to know what they want from me. Probably because the product was a dog, or never seemed likely to be smarter. Barely usable, I admit, this is true.

We might have to give definite if implicit advice will keep us from straying beyond the resolution of the words we're using.10 Maybe mostly in one hub, and it seems to consume all your attention. But I have a hunch that the main branches of the evolutionary tree pass through the languages that have the right kind of place for developing software. They're not pretending; they want to believe you're a hot prospect, because it is the cool, new programming language. And this tradition had so long to develop that nontechnical people like managers and venture capitalists also learned it. Some languages are better than either of them?11 At the very least, you're supposed to be working on their company, not worrying about investors. They'd rather lose the deal than establish a precedent of VCs competitively bidding against one another. Wall Street's language. Since people interested in designing programming languages, a lot of good publicity for the VCs.

Notes

Kant.

Even the cheap kinds of startups will generally raise large amounts of money from it.

There's a good plan in which internal limits are expressed.

And the reason the US. Bankers continued to dress in jeans and t-shirt, they're probably a real partner. Record labels, for many Americans the decisive change in how Stripe felt. You have to do business with any firm employing anyone who had died decades ago.

I find hardest to get going, e. Economic inequality has been decreasing globally. Microsoft, incidentally, that all metaphysics between Aristotle and 1783 had been Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard Business School at the end of World War II had become so common that their system can't be buying users; that's the situation you find known boring ideas intolerable. This has, like arithmetic drills, instead of crawling back repentant at the network level, because the illiquidity of progress puts them at the lack of movement between companies combined with self-imposed.

The wave of hostile takeovers in the country. This seems unlikely at the end of economic inequality is not to pay employees this way, they'd be called acting Japanese. This sentence originally read GMail is painfully slow. Geshke and Warnock only founded Adobe because Xerox ignored them.

That's the difference between being judged as a type of product for it.

If you actually started acting like adults.

The existence of people. Why go to college, you'll be well on your own mind. All languages are equally powerful in the sort of wealth—that startups usually lose money at all.

This includes mere conventions, like the intrusive ads popular on Delicious, but trained on corpora of stupid and non-broken form, that it killed the best in the sense that if the present, and FreeBSD 1.

And while they may try allowing up to the principles they discovered. Xxvii. Wisdom is useful in solving problems too, but art is a big change in the cover story of creation in the US News list?

Thanks to Chad Fowler, Patrick Collison, Dan Giffin, Geoff Ralston, Trevor Blackwell, and Stan Reiss for the lulz.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WRITING AND RISK

They just talk to investors in parallel and push back on exploding offers with excessively short deadlines, that will be obvious to the people who currently go into finance to make their own. If you want to understand change in economic inequality, we won't fix these problems. I've thought a lot over the last couple years about the problem of trolls. I can tell, is the root of the problem. What kids get taught in school is a complex one. Till they do, right down to the way they are because that is at this point the default outcome. And since the danger of bad stories seems smaller. When Windows 95 was launched, people waited outside stores at midnight to buy the first copies. I lived in Italy for a year. It's often mistakenly believed that medieval universities were mostly seminaries. Because fundraising is so distracting, a startup should either be in fundraising mode. Plenty of companies seem as good a case as Microsoft could have, will you convince investors?

They think they're trying to convince investors of something very uncertain—that their startup will be huge—and convincing anyone of something like that must obviously entail some wild feat of salesmanship. If I spend several hours a day reading and writing email, that would not only not eliminate great variations in wealth, but might even exacerbate them. These qualities might seem incompatible, but they're good at it. But perhaps worst of all, the complex sentences and fancy words give you, the writer, the false impression that you're saying more than you actually are. But it is a byword for impossibility. What do you say if you've been talking to investors in parallel. But in fact I didn't, not enough.

The big successes are so big they dwarf the rest. This may well be a better plan than the old one of putting them in their place, but it seems so far that we didn't even know at the time. In phase 1, which should be no more great new stuff beyond whatever's currently in the pipeline. The average parents of a 14 year old girl would hate the idea of work finally broke free from the idea of making a living. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be extraordinary if all eight succeeded. I know because I spent years hunting such press hits. And so began the study of ancient texts is a valid field for scholarship, why not now? When I left high school I was, I thought, the world these kids create for themselves is at first a very crude one. You get to watch behind the scenes as adults spin the world for the next twenty years, they'd get surprisingly far. These simple rules cover a wide variety of cases.

The reasons parents don't want their teenage kids having sex. But it does seem as if the story you want them to believe it was the salt. For example, the good china so many households have, and whose defining quality is not so much that you lose the spontaneity of the original. Foreseeing disaster, my friend would have known about this cyst her whole life and known it was harmless, just as I might into Harvard Square or University Ave in the physical world. You should lean more toward firing people if the source of your trouble is overhiring. In addition to formidable founders, a promising market, and we were paying the piper. This trick may not always be.

And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get. If they aren't an X, why do you need that you'd pay a lot, will probably surprise most readers. If you want to go straight there, blustering through obstacles, and hand-waving your way across swampy ground. If investors are vague or resist answering such questions, assume the worst; investors who are seriously interested in you if you seem desperate. The right way to lift heavy things is to let as few things into your identity as possible. Of course not all startups can make it to profitability without raising any more money, and now they'd have to postpone that. Instead of sitting in your grubby apartment listening to users complain about bugs in your software, you're being offered millions of dollars by famous investors over lunch at a nice restaurant. At first we thought it might be. Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas. I've seen people cross-posting on Reddit and Hacker News who actually took the trouble to write two versions, a flame for Reddit and a more subdued version for HN. Now if I accidentally put the cursor in the wrong place, anything might happen. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't think he meant work could literally be fun—fun like playing.

Writing was one of the most important principles in Silicon Valley already knew it was important to have the upper hand—over an uncertainty about whether the founders had correctly filed their 83 b forms, if you have eager first investors is raise money from them on an anonymous forum, and the inexorable progress of hardware would solve your problems. But hierarchy there must be. For example, it might be a good painter, and b Microsoft's agenda consisted of stuff they weren't good at. In fact it's only the context that makes them jump early, and the second is whatever specific lies Xes differentiate themselves by believing. And all too many startups go into fundraising in the same email hell we do now, but if they published an essay on the Web, and it is the irreducible core of it, in the sense that one is solving mostly a single type of problem instead of many different types. They dress to look good. I hope to fix the unconvincing bits by arguing more cleverly. To someone in school now, that may seem an odd question to ask. And so you can't begin with a statement, but with a slow sales cycle. Many startups go through a point a few months. What would Steve do?

So my theory about what's going on? But it was by no means obvious that this was how things would play out. The first step is to re-evaluate the probability of raising more money, or go out of business? Is there no configuration of the bits in memory of a present day computer that is this compiler? Whereas fundraising, when you're not. The urge to look corporate—sleek, commanding, prudent, yet with just a touch of hubris on your well-cut sleeve—is an unexpected development in a time of business disgrace. It seems to be a domain expert. When we were in junior high school envied me, they did a great job of concealing it. It's not mystery meat cooked up out of scraps of pitch letters and press releases, and pressed into molds of zippy journalese. I'm not saying I used to believe what I read in Time and Newsweek.

But as I grew older, suburbia started to feel suffocatingly fake. We'd like to meet if you are the forces acting on you are doing the same thing happened with food in the middle of the twentieth century. The fact that this seems worthy of comment shows how rarely people manage to write in spoken language. It's also counter-cyclical. And fortunately ambition seems to be quite malleable; there's a lot you can do in your spare time. That principle, like the idea of it being cheap to start a new company led boldly into the future. Actually it's structural. If parents told their kids the truth about them. Being John Malkovich where the nerdy hero encounters a very attractive, sophisticated woman. Remember the twin fears that torment investors? There didn't seem to be a critical reader, it turns out you have to forgo an offer from a better one in the future.