#but this vision was So Strong. and is honestly Such a way to parse each out.

[moe-broey]

Some. Sort of spectrum. From most likely to least likely.

And by kitten-pile I mean This

I'll put a transcript under cut for easier reading! 🫡

How Likely Are They to Kitten Pile?

__

Mirabilis: "are you tired..? do you need a break...? ohh we could take one together..."

If she likes/trusts you even a little, she wants to cuddle about it!!!

-

Sharena and Peony: "Okay! 💖 Yay! 💖"

Shari: The only thing stopping her is social conventions -- making her MORE likely to jump at the opportunity!

Peony: Learning social awareness as she goes, and is surprisingly good at it?

-

Triandra: "Aren't we a bit old for that...? But... even so..."

Embarrassed, conflicted, but feels strangely nostalgic at the notion...

-

Plumeria: "I'm not so petal-soft that I'd resort to such INDECENCY, I mean even if your intentions are Pure USE YOUR HEADS YOU FOOLS!! Girl, the IMPLICATIONS!!!"

Desperately wants to join the kitten-pile, but her Issues and Pride gets in the way.

-

Moe: "aw, so cutes!"

Generally touch adverse, extremely picky even with the people it likes/loves -- everything is entirely on its terms.

[inventors-fair]

Coming Across the Line: Vehicle Runners-Up ~

Our runners-up this week are @hypexion, @nine-effing-hells, and @real-aspen-hours!

@hypexion — Arcano-Blimp

I think the first thing I have to regrettably wish for in retrospect is I wish this card had its own kind of crew ability somehow. There's the restriction of casting, which is totally fine; having that casting allow for either the animation OR buff would've allowed this card a little more versatility. All the same, I thought about this in an eggs- or storm-style deck first and foremost. The desire to cast a lot of spells in a turn means that this wants cheap, reducible, draw-efficient cards to really go off.

Perhaps without keyword abilities, this card should've been uncommon as well. The more that I look at this card, the more I appreciate the mechanical possibilities and wish there was a little more power behind it. Conceptually this card is quite interesting, and the name's relation to having a purely spell-powered card is unique enough that I understand why the choices to not have it crew are there. Why not have the ability to exile additional cards to animate it as well, perhaps? Also, why not have a blimp gain flying? I wanted to put this card here to showcase its mechanical interest and how it captured me. I do wanna tinker with it a lot more.

@nine-effing-hells — Naglfar, the Keel of Dead Nails

Huh, and it just came to mind that there were two cards that had cards exiled with them in the runners-up. Interesting! Well, no matter—we have a nail-made ship here. Gross-teresting! We've seen creatures similar to this before, but not vehicles in this way, and I appreciate the commitment here. Black and blue haven't really seen each other with this ability-borrowing, surprisingly, not purely. That's fascinating but I mean, it also checks out that it makes sense together here.

There's the Kaldheim-ian aspects that matter and that's all good, with you so far there, even if the mythology isn't in my wheelhouse. The ships and vehicles of Kaldheim's world were cool to me. Did they have too many rare vehicles? I don't remember much having an impact. Regardless, I love the name, and I think while this card wouldn't make waves, it would be a great mythic to open in limited and someone would love to have it as a rule-0 commander. Keyword soup is always fun. I think that's about all we got, right? Good cards are good, haunting corpse-ships are haunting.

@real-aspen-hours — Phoenixflame Chariot

The only wording question I would say is that the second ability might need to say "Phoenixflame Chariot escapes as an artifact creature with a +1/+1 counter on it." Everything else is just a question of: what ORDER do these go in? The escape additions usually come after the escape, so that should be moved down, but where does the crew go? Keywords are first, so that's normal, but the crew cost is weird. Honestly, I think that the flavor text is a little...oddly parsing for me and squishes the text. This was a text submission so it's hard to see, but like, these are a LOT of abilities.

And they work well! This card is wildly powerful for red and needs to be dealt with immediately. I love how hard it would be to actually do so, and having it escape so powerfully is certainly phoenix-like. Whether or not this card would warp limited is a genuine question, but like, everything can be dealt with. I think this card has a lot going for it in terms of power level and I appreciate it a lot. It's a weird vision in the perfect kind of weird that this contest wanted. It's strong and world-based and just looks fun to play!

Commentary shall be worked on all the live-long day, and will be posted soon as I can get 'em done. @abelzumi

[azanavarette]

『ARIENNE MANDI ❙ CIS FEMALE』 ⟿ looks like AZADEH NAVARETTE is here for HER FIRST year as a INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS MASTERS student. SHE is 25 years old & known to be INQUISITIVE, THOUGHTFUL, ARGUMENTATIVE & CRITICAL. They’re living OFF CAMPUS, so if you’re there, watch out for them. ⬳ NIX. 23. EST. SHE/HER.

hi everyone! my name is nix and i’ll be playing azadeh navarette, or aza as she’s known by her family and (hopefully soon to be) friends. super excited to get back into writing, as i’ve been away from rp-ing for a little while, so forgive me for being a little rusty!! anyways, here’s a little (lol) info about azadeh:

personality/facts:

aza is incredibly focused, to the point of fixation. when she settles on something, she goes for it - whether it be the top grade, the person she’s interested in, or the family member who needs help. 

it can be to the detriment of her health because she can become so tunnel-visioned.

she’s incredible with languages, having grown up surrounded by so many different cultures. she spoke farsi with her mother’s family, spanish with her father’s family, swedish with the general public and learned english and german in school. 

this makes her accent incredibly... difficult to parse out where exactly she’s from. she sometimes has difficulty remembering certain words in other languages and will hop her way through languages (silently or otherwise) in order to reach the right meaning she’s looking for.

she will argue to the point of headache when she feels like it - if you’re not up for a debate, don’t get caught in her crosshairs with a strong opinion. argument, for aza, is enlightening; if anything argument endears her more to a person because (to aza) it means the other person is willing to engage with her deeper than a simple ‘hello, the weather’s lovely today.’ 

is quite musically inclined, but doesn’t speak publicly about it - mostly because she believes if she invests too much time into it she’ll lose the forward movement she’s got with her career path. in the two years she was taking care of her aunt she would write songs and play them to her. she’s never played live for anyone other than her family - someone would have to get very close to her to hear her play her one of her songs. 

she writes in farsi and spanish, and more recently has been translating/writing her songs into english.

did not have friends growing up - she never felt a sense of community anywhere. with the swedish, she always felt too much of a foreigner; with her chilean cousins, always too persian, and with her persian family always too chilean. 

even in london at university it was hard to find a community; at most times ava feels placeless - and to distract from that buries herself in her work.

identifies as a lesbian, but is very much still in the closet to most people, especially her family. when she moved away to london for university she had the freedom to date as she wanted, but moving back to stockholm pushed her back into hiding. 

she hasn’t dated in two years and feels very self-conscious of that, especially at her age.  

history:

azadeh was born and raised in stockholm, sweden. 

she is the daughter of refugees from worlds apart who happened to land in scandanavia, of all places.

her father’s family is from santiago, chile - her father, his brothers and his mother fled from persecution in 1974 following the coup d’etat.

her mother’s family is from mashad, iran - her mother and mother’s sisters were sent abroad for school to protect them from the 1979 iranian revolution.

her parents met in upper secondary school - they were in the same international swedish classes and helped each other learn the language. 

they went on to university together (majoring in material sciences and engineering) and were married after completing their doctorate programs.

having a child was not a part of their plan - they were both incredibly career focused and uninterested in settling down - but when an accident became a reality they accepted the challenge and became parents.

their no-nonsense parenting made for a very strict upbringing for azadeh. she felt pressure to mature quickly at a very young age - her mother and father didn’t have time for a child who acted like a child. 

aza’s extended family (the ones living in sweden with her) provided some of the tenderness and understanding her parents weren’t always willing to give to her. 

her oldest aunt, faribah, on her mother’s side, would let her stay over for dinner and sleepovers at her house when her parents would be too late to cook or tuck aza into bed.

her grandmother (father’s mother) moved into azadeh’s and her parent’s home when aza was around 10 to more fully take care of her granddaughter while her parents were away.

aza excelled in school, particularly in classes for languages, social sciences, and debate. she enjoyed being outspoken and opinionated, having her voice be heard and listened to rather than silenced and ignored. 

she applied for a bachelor’s in the u.k. and studied cultural anthropology at the london school of economics.

graduating from university with honors, aza was preparing to move to the united states for a master’s degree when she received a call from her mother that her aunt had fallen down a flight of stairs and had seriously injured her back and neck. 

without hesitation aza moved back to stockholm to help take care of her aunt through her rehabilitation, to the upset of her parents who wanted her to continue her education unfettered.

she got a paid internship working for a department of analytical sociology at a nearby university to appease her parents while taking care of her aunt in the hospital.

after two years spent at home, her aunt (recovered from the fall but never to return to full health) sat aza down and told her she needed to continue on with her own life. aza refused at first, but with some prodding agreed to reapply to master’s programs and was accepted into radcliffe in its international relations masters program.

wanted connections:

new first friends - someone(s) that see through the weird accent, the compulsive need to argue, and the near manic level of focus to the thoughtful and caring woman azadeh is. she is incredibly loyal and contrary to popular belief is not a robot and can have a drink and a laugh just like everyone else! please give this sad woman a friend... she needs to talk to someone other than her family, they’ll drive her crazy.

gay friends - highlighting that this would be super cool and also super important!! aza would love a proverbial ‘gay guru’ to talk to and help her through all the stuff she should have had the space to explore when she was younger... 

crushes - just because aza doesn’t have that much experience/hasn’t dated in a long time doesn’t mean she doesn’t have eyes... honestly, if you are a woman/woman leaning and you smile at her she’s most likely to have some sort of a crush on you. 

unrequited crushes - as is the burden of a lesbian, when you’re young and inexperienced enough to learn that it is not chill to fall for your straight friend because that only ends awfully. 

roommates - azadeh lives off campus but definitely doesn’t have enough money to pay for a nice place all on her own, so she’s bound to have a flat share. maybe one or two people who also go to radcliffe (undergraduate or graduate, it doesn’t matter) so they can take the bus together :3

[heartslogos]

seas who could sing so deep and strong [91]

The doors to the data vault hiss open, and Judge glances back towards his Inaros. The warframe remains still and unperturbed by the opening of the doors. Judge squints and faintly feels-sees Kore’s outline in the Void before she drops back into the world with a faint glimmering gust of gold.

“I’ve got Grineer shooting up my Umbra two floors down,” Kore says, walking up to him, amp folded back along her arm, “I think he’s enjoying himself?”

Kore pauses, tilting her head. Judge can see the faintest glow of gold in her pupils, like embers, as she focuses on her bond with her warframe. “Yeah. He’s having fun. I haven’t found anything interesting, you?”

Judge shakes his head, turning back to the screens in front of him. “Nothing I didn’t already know. Is it a good idea to leave Umbra alone?”

“If Umbra could almost kill me I don’t see why he’d have any problem fighting some tube men,” Kore sneers. “I mean. They’re not even that much of a challenge for me when I’m using a dull blade and a particularly unstable frame. Like Vauban.”

Judge refrains from saying anything about Kore and her Vauban. He’s surprised that she still has the frame, honestly. He thought she would’ve disassembled it as soon as she got back from the Corpus holding cells. But here they are, almost a full year and a half later and she’s still got Vauban in storage. Unused, unwanted, and - in Kore’s arsenal - unnecessary.

That said, Kore also isn’t a quitter, once she starts something she won’t stop so he knows she’ll eventually figure out a way to use Vauban to her own personal sensibilities. Whether that’s any time this century or not is the question.

Kore leans against the edge of the console, arms crossed over her chest as she watches Judge type and scroll through data files, trying to parse out anything new or particularly interesting.

“You can go if you’re bored,” Judge says, “This might take a while.”

“Umbra’s got this,” Kore says, “I’d be more bored having to deal with the Grineer.”

Kore’s shoulder suddenly tense and her head whips around. “Shit. Patrols. Close out and hide.”

He closes out all of the files he was on - noting which ones to return to if he gets the chance - and looks around.

“Where are you going to hide? If you call Umbra you’ll definitely trip alarms, there’s nowhere for you to hide,” Judge hisses.

“Don’t worry about me, get to your sentinel,” Kore hisses.

Judge immediately returns to Inaros, his Shade activating and casting invisibility on him and his warframe.

His vision reorients in time for him to watch the Grineer guards walk past one of the tinted windows towards the door.

“Kore,” Judge hisses through their coms.

Kore looks around before going to a storage locker Judge had opened when he first came in and climbs inside, pulling it shut just as the Grineer patrol enters the vault.

Judge watches them walk past the locker Kore’s hidden herself in. He knows that they can’t hear him, but they might hear her and that makes him hold his breath. Inaros tenses, and it feels like stone grinding together to create faint dust, like grit, as he stares at the Grineer.

One of the Grineer leans against the locker next to Kore’s as he talks to his patrol partner and Judge feels his heart in his throat.

The two continue talking to each other - and Judge is so anxious that he can’t even focus enough to translate what they’re saying. The entire time they’re talking Judge swears he can feel the Nova in him, the energy the anxiety, the building and roiling mass of energy that demands an outlet to move and release and strike shaking him inside out and threatening to blow his cover. Kore’s cover.

He’s almost startled into accidentally firing his gun when one of the Grineer’s radios goes off with a burst of static, gunshots, and yelling. Probably for assistance dealing with Kore’s Umbra, based on the angry tenno scum! he can hear.

The Grineer respond back to the requests for help - or the cursing - with their own curses, brandishing their weapons.

The guards mutter to each other, standing in front of the central console, looking around one last time, before running towards the exit on the opposite side of the room to join the rest of their people in fighting off Kore’s enthusiastic Umbra.

Judge waits until he can’t hear the sound of their feet on metal and then a few good breaths after that.

He steps out of his Inaros as his Shade releases its cloaking, letting out a tired whirring noise as it floats downwards to gently rest on his Inaros’ shoulder.

“Good job,” Judge says to it. Shade’s optic camera flashes a few times in response. “Kore?”

Kore kicks the locker open, and she looks incredibly irritated half crammed onto one of the shelves and contorted around to fit in the cylindrical half-doorway.

“I bet they knew I was here and were standing there just to piss me off,” Kore says, clambering out of the locker and stretching. “Take all of their data and put a virus in to make their computers play nothing but old clips of Punk beating them in Rathum.”

“As hilarious as that would be,” Judge says, taking his place in front of the console again, “I’m trying to make it look like I’m not here. So…no on that. Maybe next time.”

Kore lets out a long sigh, “Alright. Fine.”

She twists her torso around, stretching to one side and then the other. “But I want to leave something nasty for them here anyway. Not here in the data vault. Maybe at their reactor core?”

Judge hums, “Good idea. If we sabotage their reactor they probably won’t think to check their data for external influences. You go on ahead and do that, I’ll meet up with you after I finish checking some more of these files and sending them to Scylla for analysis.”

“I’m going to set the place on fire,” Kore says, “Just so you know.”

“Of course you are,” Judge says. “I’m looking forward to it. Hey, Kore?”

“Yes?” Kore asks, pausing as she flicks her amp out and into firing position.

“Save me a few Grineer?”

Kore grins, “Better hurry, then.”

“The fool will rush in,” Judge answers with a smile of his own, “Chasing spring as one does.”

[nsfmc]

A checklist for computer science undergrads

influenced by john regehr's 'basic toolbox' post about this topic, i thought i would throw my hat into the ring given that my experiences have been different than john's and seem to be at odds with what i have observed from working with many competent developers.

As i was leaving grad school, a friend of mine suggested to me that a winning strategy in Industrial Design had been to pick some medium that you worked well in and focus on doing all your work with that. The rationale here was that starting anew each project with a new medium invariably impacted the execution of the final deliverable distracting your prof/critic/peers from the high-level feedback you actually wanted on your work, creative vision, etc.

The advice there is to focus less on the tool and more on using a tool efficiently to communicate your ideas. In most cases it does not matter what the tool is as long as you can deploy it to solve problems in your domain.

Much of the tooling that exists in CS is directed at very specific users: working programmers. using these tools correctly as an undergrad is aspirational, but often their execution is distorted in academic contexts.

Every lab or workplace should expect to bootstrap new hires on internal tooling/workflows and almost none of them should assume prior knowledge. Depending on the aims, the only hard requirement should be ability to program in a language or framework similar to the one being used.

Core skills

A single programming language

You do not need to be ultimately proficient in every language, you just need to be able to sketch out and implement a solution to most problems you encounter in one language you enjoy working in. Which language you pick does not matter. If you are in john's classes, however, you should probably ensure that you know two languages: a compiled/systems-ey one (rust, go, c, java, swift, clojure, etc) and a scripting language (python, ruby, javascript, clojurescript, elm, mathematica, anything goes here as long as it has a repl or runtime that you can use to hammer out solutions to problems).

If you're not one of john's students, typically the scripting language will suffice (although it is generally rare to finish a cs program being exposed to only one language).

s/Text Editor/Touch Typing/i

The advice to be familiar with a text editor is largely a request from others who expect you to competently pair-program with them at their pace. The point of knowing an editor is much the same as knowing at least one language passably: it should not be something that gets in your way.

More essential than being comfortable with a specific editor (it honestly does not matter which one as long as you like using it and you are productive with it) is being comfortable touch typing. In the event that slack or other IM platforms have not made you a better touch typist, it is well worth investing time if only so that the act of writing anything is no longer a major time hinderance.

At some point, you may find yourself bored or in need of procrastination and decide you want to customize your editor: that is a perfect time to try something like sublime or atom or vi or emacs.

rough shell experience

you should be able to navigate around a filesystem, make directories, read directory listings and read the cli help documentation for most commands.

you absolutely do not need to know the details of your shell's preferences around glob expansion or how to write legible shell scripts. you can learn that, but after a certain point, all the obscure functionality ends up beng more "dev-ops" style knowledge that rarely pays any dividends except when developing commercial developer-facing internal tooling.

incidentally, getting students past the hurdle of commandline BS is almost certainly a job of an advisor (or postdoc). Ignoring it helps nobody and if a research project's documentation (q.v. below) is poor or nonexistent, the PI only has themselves to blame for this ongoing time commitment.

reading documentation

this is probably the weakest skill i have seen from folks coming out of undergrad. nobody expects you to know all of a language, all of its quirks, etc etc. what you are expected to know is how to find the answer to any reasonable question around your language or toolchain of choice.

A useful skill: you should be able to, given a stylized block of shell commands, paste those into your terminal one-by-one in order to bootstrap some project i.e. ./configure && make && make test. nobody should expect that you understand autoconf unless your research project is specifically devoted to it in some obscure way (i'm sorry if this is the case).

Specifically, you do not need to know how to parse an excel-formatted csv, but you should know where to look (or be able to find a solution) in order to do that in a reasonable amount of time. You do not need to know what an ideal runtime serialization format is for your language, you only need to call back on the terms you learned in your cs classes: marshalling, serialization, persistence, writing data, etc. although it can be useful at the extremes, be skeptical of the amount and quality of programming language trivia you know offhand.

writing documentation

no, this is not technical writing. this simply means you should be able to write a plain text file for each project that outlines

how to build some program

what its implicit dependencies are

what its arguments are

what the exposed/public api is

aside from being useful to others, in roughly six weeks or half a semester, this will invariably be of use to future-you as well.

a good acid test here is pointing a friend to the project and asking if they can build it and understand how they might use it. at some point you will embed this knowledge into a Makefile, shell script, or some other dsl, but until then it is infinitely more useful to write down the steps.

html

unless this is your job (or you intend it to be) you only need to know how to make an academic-level webpage which requires only the most basic knowledge of semantic html: h1, h2, ul/ol li, p, a, img, pre, strong, em (optionally hr, dl dd & dt). avoid css. if anyone gives you shit, you can invoke "Default Systems" giving you a perfectly valid excuse to stop devoting any more attention to design after you have mastered those tags.

reproducing errors

it is unclear when you are an undergrad or novice if you have encountered a truly exceptional case or if you simply have no idea what you're doing. Make a habit of reproducing and then writing down steps to reproduce edge cases you encounter and share them with people you ask for help from.

above and beyond, if you can identify the specific step (or code or whatever) that you invoke that (seemingly) causes the error, you will have an easier time teasing apart the nature of bug as you are telling someone else about it.

the most basic of data visualization skills

all this means is that nobody is actually good at doing this and everyone thinks that two hours peeking at ggplot2 has made them wizards at communicating the complexity of some dataset or results. it hasn't.

in many cases it suffices to be able to graph something from mathematica, R, d3, mathplotlib, or google sheets / excel. again, nobody cares how you do it as long as you do it and it doesn't take you all day. if your lab or workplace has some in-house style for doing this, they will need to train you how to do that anyway.

nonlinear spider-sense

the single reason "big o" notation is taught in school is so that at some point you can look at a performance regression and say "ha, that almost looks like a parab—o.m.g." the ability to recognize code or performance that appears nonlinear (or pathologically exponential) is probably one of the core things that i think undergrads should try to hone because during almost no other time will you be asked repeatedly, and at length, to explain the space/time complexity of arbitrary blocks of code.

computers are fast enough that you can usually be blasé about performance but eventually you'll start looking. being able to recognize something that is accidentally quadratic is often the most practical day-to-day application of cs theory—hone this spider sense.

Nice to haves

Version Control

there is a large chasm between "git for one" and "using git as a team" and that harsh valley is almost certainly due to the large amount of human communication and coordination required to work on a project as a team. Most people stress learning git, but this is largely useless advice because most of git or hg's corner cases and weirdness only come up when you're trying to integrate your work successfully among your teammates. It is good advice to perhaps become vaguely competent using git or mercurial or rcs, that experience will almost certainly pale in comparison to the massive flail when you are trying to set up multiple worktrees to create integration branches that contain the contents of multiple prs (each likely with their own rebase/merge/squash quirks).

to that end, you should learn to, say, create a commit and push your work, but everything else beyond that is almost certainly guaranteed to be complicated by whatever your team's workflow is (github prs, phabricator, gerrit, etc). i have rarely met people outside of professional or open source contexts that are capable of producing sensible chained commits or sane pull requests, it is simply not a skill that is required outside of contributing to open source or working on a commercial application. When people ask for git experience they secretly crave this flavor of professionalism that it took months to acquire at each of their prior jobs or internships.

A Presentation Tool

the baseline here is very low, you only need to be able to make a presentation and in all likelihood if you are still an undergrad, you easily have ten-plus years of doing this already. worry about fonts/design/transitions/etc once your content is solid.

most people produce terrible presentations making the needed baseline here quite low—it is more important that you know how to practice giving a presentation than it is to actually create the slides for it.

debugger knowledge

i have met many successful professional working programmers that have little to no idea how their language's debugging tools work. if you are a gdb wizard this sounds shocking on its face but lots of developers make do just fine without them. This is not to say that you should be willfully ignorant of debuggers or eschew them (especially if this is part of your curriculum), but nobody should look down on you if you learn (or are taught this) On The Job.

many of these tools are technically robust but have a ui only moderately less hostile than an opaque box of loose razorblades and chocolates. much like git, most developers internalize some form of stockholm affection for these tools despite their poor design, nonexistent editor integration, and often incomplete terminal support.

you should understand roughly what a debugger is and what it can (and can't) do, but it's almost certain that you won't need to have mastered debugger internals straight out of college.

build systems

this is honestly a "top of maslow" need. This is great knowledge if you are planning to distribute code or need it to build dependably/reliably on others' computers, it is absolutely inessential for an undergrad to understand to do this level of orchestration except as documentation for others to evaluate that your project actually builds etc etc. if your advisor or boss asks you to learn something like make or whatever, then by all means.

You should know what a make tool is for and when it is necessary, but you should not expect that to apply to the lion's share of work you do in school.

working for a period of time before asking for help

although this should be a core skill many adults are incapable of doing this effectively. there is a tradeoff between "i'm learning" and "i'm being unproductive." In an academic lab, arguably much of your experience will appear to be some quantum state that simultaneously inhabits both extremes but your goal should be attempting to independently arrive at a solution and after some time cut-off (which you should negotiate with your advisor/postdoc/pi/whatever) you should say "i tried $A, $B, and $C to accomplish $GOAL and was unable to make any progress because $ERR_A, $ERR_B, and $ERR_C."

even the act of noting down "what i am trying to accomplish, how i tried, what went wrong" may in itself lead you to a correct solution, but without having done that due dilligence and outlined those aspects, it will be difficult to receive good feedback from somebody that is trying to help you.

unit/integrated/etc testing

if you find that something like TDD is useful for you as a productivity or refactoring tool, keep doing that! most working software people cannot even agree on what the point of testing is, so it feels unfair to burden undergrads with this. in a professional context, you will be in a codebase with some established testing norms, you need only mimic those until you have determined what works for you.

there are lots of sane and sensible resources for writing tests or thinking about tests. understand that everyone does testing slightly differently so your best bet will be to figure out how testing plays a part wherever you go. in most cases, that codebase will have a specific incantation to invoke tests, your best bet is to ask how they do things there are just go from there if the setup is not obvious.

understanding scope

most academic projects are poorly managed because they have inconsistent pressure to be profitable beyond whatever funding inspired them. simultaneously, many academic advisors are not trained well to manage or lead a team (remember, most were hired to write grants and produce research papers (or possibly to teach)). management is something an advisor is literally picking up "on the job".

If you are unsure what exactly you are supposed to do, you should clarify as soon as possible what deliverable is expected and when it is due. This seems obvious, but because communication is complicated you may end up assuming you need to, for instance, resolve outstanding cli argument parsing bugs rather than only needing to add support for a new one. Understanding the scope of a project you've been assigned prevents you from doing redundant work or opening prs that will never get merged.

language idioms

If you are cozy with a programming language, the natural evolution here is to begin learning what idiomatic programming is like for it: what are common libraries, do people tend to program it functionally or imperatively, for or map?, what patterns are awkward or hard to read, what are common tools in its toolchain, how do people use it to write web services, how do people use it to avoid shell scripting, what are its peformance pathologies, etc. this is the extension to knowing how to read the documentation: it is developing intuition about the language to avoid doing counterproductive work in the future.

Many developers learn one language and become fluent in its quirks then proceed to apply those to every language they see later on. if you encounter this as a novice, it may appear that they are simply Better Programmers and not, instead, people who are speaking a pidgin-python with a heavy haskell accent.

To recap

It is something of a mistake to hope that a cs student will have the gradually developed and refined skills of a professional tradesperson. Graduating cs students often do not have strong professional software development experience (this is what internships are meant to accomplish) but are good at thinking about design/architecture. if, at the very minimum, as an undergrad you can churn out some ruby and have the runtime execute it, you're usually in great shape.

most cs programs do not train students to develop tightly crafted applications with industry-tested documentation/syntax/structure/workflows etc. bootcamps, however, do stress this sort of thing, which causes a confusing periodic wave of "college is dead, long live bootcamps."

when looking at job descriptions or other checklists, it's useful to try to gaze back at the abyss and ask "why was this listed here?"

John's research is compiler-focused, deals with undefined behavior, and often invokes llvm, c, and other "low level" toolchains. a strong undergrad cs student will be able to intern with john productively because the core of his research focus is mostly general to computer science: correctness, compiler behavior, etc. someone with deep knowledge of C, llvm, compiler design/internals, etc is almost certainly in a position to become one of his graduate students or postdocs. I think john's list is interesting, but i think it emphasizes details that are often foreign to developers at all skill levels.

finally this list is biased itself, so take it with a grain of salt: all my work experience is in design and frontend/backend web development and the skills listed here represent the qualities i've observed from successful interns and developers i have interviewed and worked with in the past ~ eight years. my experience is clearly n=1, but among the things i've noticed is that it's easy to get people to learn git, but it's hard to get somebody to internalize recursion, nonlinear growth, or canonical architecture patterns within the same time period. i'm not saying it's impossible, but if you're a cs student, this is 100% what the point of most cs programs is.

[biofunmy]

What if Being a YouTube Celebrity Is Actually Backbreaking Work?

Emma Chamberlain, 18, is the funniest person on YouTube. What does she do? So far the content of her videos has not been the point: She makes cupcakes, or tries her hand at sewing. Like Phoebe Waller-Bridge of “Fleabag,” an artist close to twice her age, she interrupts the proceedings constantly to speak to her audience. That’s where her videos actually happen.

Watch a video from 2018 called “MY BIRTHDAY IS RUINED.” It has no introduction, just Chamberlain, talking, pointing to the recipe pages she has taped to a cabinet. “Can you believe I literally printed out the recipe, like we’re in literally like the Middle Ages, using a printer?” she says. She claps her hands, apparently hurting herself. The video freezes and text appears: “clapped too hard :/”

・．✩・。

Chamberlain was born in San Bruno, Calif., on May 22, 2001. An only child, her parents divorced when she was 5. She began watching YouTube when she was 6 “to connect with other people and see what they were up to,” she said. “And weirdly enough, it felt like I had friends that were cool, and it was people that I maybe admired.”

Growing up now means that you watch a lot of videos, and make them as well. Chamberlain filmed videos for school — in religion and math classes, videos were required — and for fun.

During her sophomore year of high school, a few of Chamberlain’s friends began combing SoundCloud for trap rap remixes of Christmas music. They would find the funniest song they could and make up a jokey dance routine for it and film it. Chamberlain would edit videos during fourth period and post them on a private Instagram.

Her instinctual editing style involved zooming, adding text to the screen and pausing to point out the best parts. “I felt like that made my friends and I laugh a lot more when I was emphasizing these things,” she said. “Rather than us just having to catch it while watching and then it doesn’t really land as much because most people aren’t going to notice the funny little things that I would notice.”

・．✩・。

One of the early videos Chamberlain posted on her private friends-and-family Instagram — her finsta — was her reaction to a take-home chemistry test. She was one of the younger students in a very rigorous class. They were assigned an online test. Chamberlain spent three hours on it, but when she pressed submit, the website glitched and her completed test was lost. She found out later that everybody else in her class had found an answer key online.

She started filming herself right when she learned that the test had been deleted. She was sobbing. She said it was one of the worst moments of her life. She reacted by turning a camera on.

“When something’s really significant, whether it’s good, bad, ugly, I like being able to look back at a moment in time that was high-emotion,” she said. “Whenever I’m crying I like, weirdly, to document it. Every time I cry I always take one photo of myself afterwards because I like to look back and think ‘Remember when I was so upset about X, Y and Z? Look at me now — I don’t care about that anymore!’”

・．✩・。

Chamberlain stopped enjoying high school toward the end of her sophomore year in 2017. She had been working unceasingly, with college in mind. Socially, she said, her values didn’t align with some students at her school, who seemed to take things for granted. “Not only things like money, but also, like, morals,” she said.

Her father, Michael John Chamberlain, drove out to the San Francisco Bay for a talk. They talked for an hour and, he said that he told her, “I was like basically, you know what, you’ve got to find something outside of school that you’re excited about.”

“Less than a week later, she was like, ‘I want to start a YouTube channel,’” he said.

・．✩・。

It’s been two years. Chamberlain now has 8 million YouTube followers. She brought in the editing tricks that first set her friends and family rolling on the floor, but now they take longer to perfect.

Chamberlain edits each video she makes for between 20 and 30 hours, often at stretches of 10 or 15 hours at a time. Her goal is to be funny, to keep people watching. It’s as if the comic value of each video is inversely proportional to how little humor she experiences while making it. During her marathon editing sessions, she said, she laughs for “maybe, maybe 10 seconds max.”

“It’s almost like when you’re doing your homework, you’re halfway through a math work sheet, you’re really in it right there. You can’t hear anything, you can’t see anything,” she said. “Or if you’re watching a movie and you’re so zoned in you don’t even remember what real life is. You just think you’re in the movie. That’s exactly how it is, but times five. I’m so zoned in. I have this weird mind-set where it’s me quickly analyzing every five seconds, ‘Is this boring, is this stupid, can I cut this? Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No.’”

Like other professional social media users, the work has taken a physical toll on her. (She releases roughly one video a week.) She used to edit at a desktop, but she developed back pain. Now she works from her bed. She keeps blue mood lighting on, but her vision has deteriorated. She wears reading glasses “like I’m 85 years old, because my eyes do actually get really strained.”

She’s training herself for long-distance editing. “I’ve actually gotten to a point now where I feel like I’m really, really mentally strong and I don’t really lose my marbles as often,” she said.

In May of 2020, she will turn 19.

・．✩・。

Over these two years, Chamberlain invented the way people talk on YouTube now, particularly the way they communicate authenticity. Her editing tricks and her mannerisms are ubiquitous. There is an entire subgenre of videos that mimic her style, and a host of YouTubers who talk, or edit, just like her. The Atlantic recently noted this and declared she is “the most important YouTuber” working today.

“It messed with my head a little bit when people started to imitate what I was doing,” Chamberlain said. “Although I was flattered, absolutely flattered. And also, the way I film and edit, it’s really fun and so I’m glad that other people have found inspiration in that and have taken that and done what they can with it. I think that that’s great. But at times it can be kind of uninspiring and that’s no one’s fault but my own.”

When someone introduces a new vocabulary to a medium, they don’t have much say in who uses it and who doesn’t.

“I always fed off the fact that I was in uncharted territory and I liked that,” she said. “And then it got to a point where I wasn’t in uncharted territory anymore and people were calling me unoriginal. Which was a huge blow to me in my head! Because I was like, I created this kind of style that was super cool to me and super exciting for me, and now that other people are doing it, now all of a sudden I’m unoriginal, which is something that I’ve always really tried to be. That’s what makes me feel good creatively. So when people started to say that, I kind of had a full, you know, not like mental breakdown, but we could also say that. Not a mental breakdown! But I definitely freaked out.”

・．✩・。

“I didn’t honestly have any perspective on YouTube or the popular YouTubers until I took her to Playlist Live and I was like, ‘Holy crap,’” said Sophia Pinetree Chamberlain, Emma’s mother, of attending the 2018 convention of YouTubers. “My life is never going to be the same. This is crazy. Because I didn’t know how popular she was. I would just go to the little Marriott store to get a little cold brew coffee and fans were wanting to take pictures with me, and I was like, ‘How do you even know who I am?’”

Chamberlain’s parents have supported her unconventional choices, like dropping out of school in the beginning of her junior year and moving to Los Angeles to live by herself while still a teenager. She says that they were and are her best friends.

Both of them worry about her working too hard.

“I just want her to be healthy and happy,” her father said. “Her mom and I are not dance parents. My feeling is, and I tell her this often, you can walk away from this at any time. If it’s not good for you and it’s not healthy for you, it’s not worth it.”

・．✩・。

In June 2018, Chamberlain left the Bay Area to live alone in L.A. and fully immerse herself in YouTubeland.

Professional YouTubers are the children of reality television. The dramas of their videos are often inextricable from their lives. When Jake Paul and Tana Mongeau, two famous YouTubers, said they were engaged last month, it was impossible for fans to parse whether they were telling the truth. It barely mattered. This is what celebrities are now, when they’re not the dinosaurs left over from what used to be called the monoculture.

YouTubers tend to bond and/or feud with one another constantly, because this is social media as much as it is performance art. They recreate the overheated dynamics of the high school environment that Chamberlain wanted to escape.

“It’s weird because I left high school to get out of that B.S. and now here we are in L.A., where it’s almost worse,” she said.

Viewers try to enact drama on her. They speculate about which YouTuber she’s dating, or which friends she’s on the outs with. They worry about or criticize how she looks. Some declare her fake, because she’s been doing content with advertisers.

・．✩・。

“It breaks me to bits when I see the backlash because her hair and makeup is this way or that way,” her mother said. “That’s what worries me. It makes her sad and hurts her feelings like any human being. Now it’s not just two girls in high school, we’re talking thousands of people on social media.”

It also differs from high school in socially advantageous ways. For one thing, now she has the ability to remove herself, respectfully, from situations, or friendships, that are dramatic or unpleasant.

“If somebody has a bad reputation on the internet or if they have a really good reputation on the internet, I don’t care. I want to meet said person and make up my mind for myself, and then go from there,” she said.

Chamberlain also makes good money. SocialBlade, a social media analytics firm, estimates that from her videos alone she makes at least $120,000 a year, and perhaps as much as $2 million. Sponsor deals with Hollister and Louis Vuitton are another revenue stream.

Chamberlain’s most popular videos tend to be collaborations, which tap the strength of multiple audiences like any crossover event. She has appeared several times with Ethan and Grayson Dolan, two well-known YouTuber twins. Gossip has followed.

In one video from June, Chamberlain and the Dolans pretended to be studying for high school finals, playing with the stereotype of YouTubers as stupid slackers and praising students who might be studying for real.

“For me personally, I just don’t have anything to prove anymore,” she said. “I know exactly who I am, I know that I’m intelligent and acting dumb or acting like whatever. If that’s funny to me because I know it’s false then so be it.”

・．✩・。

Chamberlain has now decided upon a new approach. “I’m just going to not stick to one thing so strictly,” she said.

Her recent videos are less jittery, less edited. She has been trying to let her narrative and her scripts speak, with fewer interruptions than before.

Recently, she has tried anthologies and also stunts, like spending 24 hours on the balcony of her house. She thinks those videos have been different, and that she has, to some degree, broken out of the box she made for herself.

The balcony stunt, for instance, she said, was one of the more emotionally challenging things she had ever done for video. She said that the more she puts into what she makes, the less she has to do to make the video work in the edit.

“I’m trying to make the stuff that I’m filming more dynamic so that when I’m editing there’s less pressure on me to kind of create something that’s not there,” she said. “I’m starting to realize that editing is very personal, and 90 percent of the editing is just so that I’m not bored. So I don’t have to overdo it. I’m trying to find that balance right now, so that I don’t overwork myself.”

Sahred From Source link Fashion and Style

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[webittech]

This wild, AI-produced film is the subsequent stage in "entire motion picture puppetry" Results are honestly constrained due to a 48-hour crunch—yet allude to a wild future.

Two years back, Ars Technica facilitated the online debut of a bizarre short film called Sunspring, which was generally momentous on the grounds that its whole content was made by an AI. The movie's human thrown giggled at odd, PC produced exchange and stage bearing before playing out the outcomes in especially sincere form.

That movie's generation team, Director Oscar Sharp and AI analyst Ross Goodwin, have come back with another AI-driven examination that, all over, looks quite more terrible. Hazy faces, PC created discourse, and unbalanced scene changes round out the current year's Zone Out, a film made as a section in the Sci-Fi-London 48-Hour Challenge—which means, much the same as last time, it must be delivered in 48 hours and stick to certain particular prompts.

That 48-hour restrict merits disapproving, on the grounds that Sharp and Goodwin went one greater this time: they let their AI framework, which they call Benjamin, handle the film's whole creation pipeline.

The Benjamin that wouldn't bite the dust

Much the same as in 2016, the couple was given a progression of necessities for their short film. (Their 2018 prerequisites are appeared over.) This time, they needed Benjamin to take that information and keep running with it.

Keeping in mind the end goal to accomplish their objective of having Benjamin "compose, coordinate, perform and score" this short film inside 48 hours, with no human mediation, the pair started pre-getting ready for the celebration by building up a work process, Sharp said in an Ars meet. That implied adding extra assignments to Benjamin's workload. Their arrangement expected Benjamin to do the accompanying: cobble together film from open area films, confront swap the twosome's database of human on-screen characters into that recording, embed talked voices to peruse Benjamin's content, and score the film.

This was all over composing the screenplay, a procedure that has been refined since Benjamin's last 2016 sprinkle. The AI keeps on depending on a LSTM (long here and now memory) repetitive neural system, which Ars' Annalee Newitz portrayed beforehand:

To prepare Benjamin, Goodwin encouraged the AI with a corpus of many science fiction screenplays he discovered on the web—for the most part motion pictures from the 1980s and '90s. Benjamin analyzed them down to the letter, figuring out how to anticipate which letters had a tendency to take after each other and from that point which words and expressions had a tendency to happen together. The benefit of a LSTM calculation over a Markov chain is that it can test any longer series of letters, so it's better at foreseeing entire passages instead of only a couple of words. It's additionally great at producing unique sentences as opposed to reordering sentences together from its corpus. After some time, Benjamin figured out how to copy the structure of a screenplay, delivering stage headings and very much designed character lines.

Daydream's content, much the same as Sunspring's, wavers on the edge of folly and feeling—which, truly, puts it up there with the best of the science fiction ordinance. (An exchange case taken straightforwardly from the film, which nearly seems like Benjamin's feedback of his lords: "Why not reveal to me what... you say is valid that the individual will have the capacity to reenforce the devastation of a person?") This time, the content's odd, not-exactly human outcomes are just intensified by having such a significant number of other film-generation errands mechanized by AI.

Tangles emerged amid generation as the couple attempted to discover open area film that they could securely use in their own possibly business endeavor. The test wasn't just about copyright; the recording needed to contain a noteworthy number of shots with sole performers confronting specifically toward the camera, which Benjamin could all the more effectively cut and embed into whatever it created. Between their profound jump into an open space film database and discussions with a legal advisor, Goodwin and Sharp settled on two movies: The Last Man on Earth and The Brain That Wouldn't Die.

"Gravely dubbed"... for the time being

The most striking piece of the film is its dependence on confront swapping innovations to adjust existing movies to Benjamin's will. Face-swapping has turned into an entirely intriguing issue in popular culture, especially after a changed video of President Barack Obama became a web sensation in 2017 (and a followup take, with chief/comic Jordan Peele filling in as an impersonator, revived the viral fire in April). All things considered, the innovation's confinements are very obvious, particularly when time limits factor into any creation. An April endeavor to embed performing artist John Cho into prominent movies outlined the huge measure of computational time expected to refine a face swap, and Zone Out's generation group kept running into comparable issues while having Benjamin parse pre-recorded film of on-screen characters Thomas Middleditch, Elisabeth Gray, and Humphrey Ker.

The effect of the time crunch is very evident in the last item, and Sharp concedes that computational cutoff points hamstrung the group's vision of a better than average looking and sounding item. An open source adaptation of Tacotron was at first considered to orchestrate discourse utilizing the twosome's own particular human-recorded exchange and tests; human performing artists talked reams of discourse that Benjamin would have consequently embedded where suitable. In any case, this demonstrated too computationally costly for as far as possible, so the team fell back on manufactured voice age.

Comparable issues emerged with confront swap and face-puppeteering frameworks set up. "We in the long run needed to acknowledge that the film would simply look 'gravely named,'" Sharp stated, as instruments, for example, a generative antagonistic system and an open source form of face2face could just marshal "first-draft" confront rendering brings about the time apportioned.

To the group's credit, one of the couple's unique designs worked out pretty swimmingly: a totally robo-formed score, in view of the Jukedeck stage, that "broke down the enthusiastic substance of the screenplay," Sharp said. The outcome is an inadequate yet strong piano soundtrack that occupies from Zone Out's odd voice combination.

"An objective for next time"

The greatest disappointment in the robotization procedure originated from an endeavor to have an alternate AI framework, a convolutional neural system, computerize the way toward choosing film from the general population area movies to be altered by Benjamin. "There were neither adequate protest descriptors in the screenplay nor adequate quantities of one of a kind questions in the shots," Sharp stated, which implied the auto-altering framework didn't have enough information to fasten onto. Sharp and Goodwin were watchful now to basically comply with the AI's choices as an "executive" and pick film scenes, shot lengths, and throwing assignments that cut to Benjamin's obvious masterful vision.

"Supervisor Jono Chanin and I worked under the assumption this was the story Benjamin was endeavoring to tell and altered in like manner, while likewise keeping verbatim to Benjamin's screenplay," Sharp said. "So here, some human translation at last broke in, in spite of my would like to cleanse it totally from this emphasis of the Benjamin adventure. That remaining parts an objective for next time."

In reality, while the subsequent film (and its dependence on below average voice amalgamation) is peculiar, it incorporates a decent amount of considerably passionate minutes, especially when Benjamin's content lines up with open space film of a standoff between a misery couple. More prominent computational proficiency and refined information parsing instruments might just make this sort of 48-hour PC mash of filmmaking a genuine probability later on.

What's more, Sharp plainly isn't finished attempting. "In the days since this trial, Ross has officially revealed some new advances he supposes could lead us to completely mechanized altering—and something unique we're nicknaming 'entire motion picture puppetry,'" he said to Ars. "Energizing stuff."

[sund0wnkid]

Fear

young man

I told her that I was a god. She asked me where was my prophet. I told her I was a king. She asked me where was my kingdom. I told her I was a leader. She asked me where are my followers. I told her I was a man. She asked what made that so. I told her that I do not know.

Goddamn, I don’t know. Not knowing is what frustrates me the most. I would willingly resign to accept a fate that would have me pinned to the bottom of the barrel if and only if I could know that was indeed my future. Not to say that I would make such a deal but, if my life truly was destined to be crappy—I would like to know. Not out of some self-pitying way—no. I would like to know because I would want to know where to place my energies.

If I knew that I would never escape poverty (fingers crossed that that is not the case) then I would look elsewhere to fulfill myself rather than desperately toiling hours-on-end to find a clear path to financial stability amongst the plethora of dead-end jobs and voracious bill collectors. If, the heavens cracked open, and an archangel came down from the ruptured sky amidst bright permeating flashes of white light whilst a thousand cherubs played an all-brass fanfare hailing his descent to plop a fortune cookie slip in my lap; and that slip were to say, “you will never find the means to live a luxurious life”, I’d be ok with that.

Of course, I would be distraught and beside myself for quite some time as I processed the magnitude of how much time and energy that I’ve invested in pursuing a dream that will never come to fruition. But after the tears have dried and the tsunami waves of existential dread have given way to ripples, I feel that I could find a fresh pursuit in life. Understanding that my efforts toward living life like a member of the American upper-middle class are for naught, I would seek out something that does not compel me to endure the grating pain of giving my whole life in return for scraps.

Quite honestly, with all this being said, I don’t know if I should drop this potentially futile endeavor, of grinding through college, collecting credentials, locating a career, competing for a job position, and retaining a job long enough to no longer be poor, for something that is more likely to show me love. I’m not saying that something would be fresh baked cookies and sunshine all the time but, I would expect, I would hope, that I get in what I put out.

**********

“Peace in yearning/Floating on desperation” – “Paradise” The Caged Bird Writes by Julian Marshall

peace in yearning

Those who truly understand will have endured years under an endless hurricane; will have clawed through the churning oceans of misfortune; will have been tossed and turned as sharks tore off pounds of flesh as penance for their existence; and salt will have washed their wounds with callous indifference as they yearned for peace but only found peace in yearning.

Suppose a divine messenger does not stop me on my journey to live a minimally stressed life. Suppose I continue to trudge onward with no indication whatsoever that I should stop. Perhaps trudging onward is too glib of a phrase to accurately convey the allure of staying on this path. Presently, I see multiple well-worn paths, their respective destinations would ostensibly offer peace of mind as I would have the means to provide a stable life for myself and for others. Oh, I sense a big “but” coming along and we shall take a look at it right after I briefly address why a stable life is so appealing.

First, a life that is mostly good, a life in which I am not struggling tremendously and frequently is desirable to me. Desirable simply because it is comfortable, I needn’t worry about sustenance nor safety. My concerns would revolve around living the most bourgeois life of moderate decadence and white-picket-fencedness that I could attain which leads me to the other side of what makes a stable life appealing.

Second, pickney (heh heh, I just like the word) is a chief concern of mine, for mostly selfish reasons of having my name and receding-hairline-genetics carried on, (just kidding, I haven’t quite parsed out why I want kids but I know that I would want to raise some). With this in mind, I believe that it is the duty of parents to be able to provide a stable life for their pickney’s first two decades of life. Thus, a stable life is appealing because it would enable me to raise pickney, hopefully to my satisfaction.

See, brief. I can further expand and expound upon those two points in another essay, I do not believe that I have conveyed, with complete fidelity, the appeal of a bourgeois life. The image (honestly, more like a hastily drawn stick-figure sketch) that I have drawn up does not completely capture my aspirations, but it does enough to outline my desires that would be satisfied by walking along the worn paths of those who came before me and that is all I need for this piece.

Considering this shortcoming I can imagine that the only folks who can flesh out the skeleton that I have half-assembled are those who have floated on desperation for years. For such individuals attaining peace, peace of mind, is THE ultimate goal, anything beyond this seemingly simplistic peace could be considered frivolous—understandably so. When one recalls the times when all that they had besides nothing was pain, attaining peace whether by way of a bourgeois life or other methods is a blessing that assuages and soothes the throbbing scars of life. However, before we go on any further let us give our attention to that big “but”.

Ahem.

A stable life in which I can be mostly comfortable and raise my pickney in a stable environment is indeed appealing, appealing precisely because it is peaceful, but I must wonder who would find something more appealing than a mostly bourgeois life accompanied by pickney, something more appealing than peace of mind with a dollop of socially acceptable extravagance on top. I wonder because I have envisioned my peaceful life with my pickney and in those visions I saw that my pickney would not have the pain of cosmic misfortune imprinted on their memories and as such would have naively nursed ambitions beyond a peaceful life, blind to the misfortunes that lie beyond a peaceful life. Thus, we have our answer, perhaps it is only the blind who would search for treasures beyond peace. Perhaps it’s a part of a tragic cycle for parents to produce blind pickney and for those pickney to stumble into the storm of life. Perhaps only those who can stay out of the storm were meant to achieve peace.

Or.

Perhaps, my imaginary pickney are not blind. Perhaps, because they do not have pain imprinted on their memories, perhaps because they do not have trauma tattooed into their skin, perhaps because they have never feared the pain of life they can freely pursue their ambitions. It would be fair to speculate that perhaps their ambitions will shrivel up and die upon first contact with strife however, that is not what I would like to examine. Let me turn your attention to a clear yet overlooked contrast that I have made between I and my pickney: Fear and the absence of Fear.

Pain is a universally experienced sensation (I promise that I’ll keep this portion of my pontification brief). It can be experienced in the briefest of moments or over the course of the longest lifetimes and it can cause paralysis of equally varying lengths. I, myself, have experienced pain in waves, some waves rocking the boat, others capsizing my life, each one leaving its own indelible scar and each scar violently flooding my body with paralysis at each recollection, waterboarding my mind with the memories of irredeemable mistakes and powerlessness more potently felt than a bottle of Jamaican rum. The fear of pain and powerlessness props me up as I navigate my way to a place where I believe I will have no need of fear.

I would imagine that such a place would insulate my pickney from similar pain and thus allow them to pursue soaring aspirations that I would not dare entertain. If this low fidelity rendering is not clear enough to convey my vision then consider the archetypical immigrant parents from a country that is economically disadvantaged and have seen poverty in its ugliest and most heartbreaking form. Imagine their pickney who has never seen the true bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid telling them that they want to be something other than a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or businessperson. If you’re imagining what I imagine then all Hell would break loose as soon as the words “I don’t want to be…” left the unsuspecting pickney’s mouth. The resulting confusion, anger, and anxiety would have something to do, at least in part, with the parents’ experience with the unequivocally unattractive alternatives to the well-worn predetermined routes leading to a comfortable life.

Now at this point in my shamelessly pretentious and needlessly bloated essay you must be wondering (as am I) what is the point that I am getting at. Well to wrap this up quickly, it seems to me that the only individuals who can have a desire beyond living a comfortable life are those who do not fear the pain of living a life that is less than comfortable after failing in their respective endeavors. In the case of my pickney their fearlessness would come out of youthful naivete whereas my fearlessness would have to come out of something else. I am not completely sure of what that “something else” might be but I have a strong reckoning that it is faith, faith in myself, faith that I am stronger than the storm of life. This strong reckoning leads me to my dilemma, I am torn between faith in myself and fear that I am not strong enough to weather the storm, fear that I would be sacrificing a comfortable life for more pain.

Perhaps there is a promised land for me just beyond the hurricane yet all I see are the massive waves underneath the brewing clouds ready to swallow me whole and I don’t know whether I’ll be able to taste something beyond the peace I that yearn or be left broken and battered floating on desperation.