#how to become a python developer

[deepak-garhwal]

Stream episode Roadmap To Become A Python Developer- 2023 by Deepak Garhwal 

If you are aspiring to learn Python programming but don’t know where to start. today’s podcast episode is dedicated to a step-by-step roadmap to becoming a Python developer. 

[data-panda]

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The term Agile is used to describe a general framework for handling software development. The different Agile methods focus on teamwork, customer collaboration, and the ability to respond to change quickly. On the other hand, Scrum is one of many Agile processes. It is a framework that is used to implement Agile development.

If you want to recognize the principles of Agile practices, its tools, techniques, and various methodologies, signing up for Agile and Scrum training courses online is right for you.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

What kind of bubble is AI?

My latest column for Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices.

Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It, too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.

Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar.

AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an "AI" startup, many of which are not even using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That's amazing, considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is.

So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left behind, or will it go away altogether? To be sure, there's a legion of technologists who are learning Tensorflow and Pytorch. These nominally open source tools are bound, respectively, to Google and Facebook's AI environments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

But if those environments go away, those programming skills become a lot less useful. Live, large-scale Big Tech AI projects are shockingly expensive to run. Some of their costs are fixed – collecting, labeling and processing training data – but the running costs for each query are prodigious. There's a massive primary energy bill for the servers, a nearly as large energy bill for the chillers, and a titanic wage bill for the specialized technical staff involved.

Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? AI applications can be plotted on a 2X2 grid whose axes are "value" (how much customers will pay for them) and "risk tolerance" (how perfect the product needs to be).

Charging teenaged D&D players $10 month for an image generator that creates epic illustrations of their characters fighting monsters is low value and very risk tolerant (teenagers aren't overly worried about six-fingered swordspeople with three pupils in each eye). Charging scammy spamfarms $500/month for a text generator that spits out dull, search-algorithm-pleasing narratives to appear over recipes is likewise low-value and highly risk tolerant (your customer doesn't care if the text is nonsense). Charging visually impaired people $100 month for an app that plays a text-to-speech description of anything they point their cameras at is low-value and moderately risk tolerant ("that's your blue shirt" when it's green is not a big deal, while "the street is safe to cross" when it's not is a much bigger one).

Morganstanley doesn't talk about the trillions the AI industry will be worth some day because of these applications. These are just spinoffs from the main event, a collection of extremely high-value applications. Think of self-driving cars or radiology bots that analyze chest x-rays and characterize masses as cancerous or noncancerous.

These are high value – but only if they are also risk-tolerant. The pitch for self-driving cars is "fire most drivers and replace them with 'humans in the loop' who intervene at critical junctures." That's the risk-tolerant version of self-driving cars, and it's a failure. More than $100b has been incinerated chasing self-driving cars, and cars are nowhere near driving themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Quite the reverse, in fact. Cruise was just forced to quit the field after one of their cars maimed a woman – a pedestrian who had not opted into being part of a high-risk AI experiment – and dragged her body 20 feet through the streets of San Francisco. Afterwards, it emerged that Cruise had replaced the single low-waged driver who would normally be paid to operate a taxi with 1.5 high-waged skilled technicians who remotely oversaw each of its vehicles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html

The self-driving pitch isn't that your car will correct your own human errors (like an alarm that sounds when you activate your turn signal while someone is in your blind-spot). Self-driving isn't about using automation to augment human skill – it's about replacing humans. There's no business case for spending hundreds of billions on better safety systems for cars (there's a human case for it, though!). The only way the price-tag justifies itself is if paid drivers can be fired and replaced with software that costs less than their wages.

What about radiologists? Radiologists certainly make mistakes from time to time, and if there's a computer vision system that makes different mistakes than the sort that humans make, they could be a cheap way of generating second opinions that trigger re-examination by a human radiologist. But no AI investor thinks their return will come from selling hospitals that reduce the number of X-rays each radiologist processes every day, as a second-opinion-generating system would. Rather, the value of AI radiologists comes from firing most of your human radiologists and replacing them with software whose judgments are cursorily double-checked by a human whose "automation blindness" will turn them into an OK-button-mashing automaton:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

The profit-generating pitch for high-value AI applications lies in creating "reverse centaurs": humans who serve as appendages for automation that operates at a speed and scale that is unrelated to the capacity or needs of the worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

But unless these high-value applications are intrinsically risk-tolerant, they are poor candidates for automation. Cruise was able to nonconsensually enlist the population of San Francisco in an experimental murderbot development program thanks to the vast sums of money sloshing around the industry. Some of this money funds the inevitabilist narrative that self-driving cars are coming, it's only a matter of when, not if, and so SF had better get in the autonomous vehicle or get run over by the forces of history.

Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise. The odds are stacked against the long-term survival of high-value, risk-intolerant AI applications.

The problem for AI is that while there are a lot of risk-tolerant applications, they're almost all low-value; while nearly all the high-value applications are risk-intolerant. Once AI has to be profitable – once investors withdraw their subsidies from money-losing ventures – the risk-tolerant applications need to be sufficient to run those tremendously expensive servers in those brutally expensive data-centers tended by exceptionally expensive technical workers.

If they aren't, then the business case for running those servers goes away, and so do the servers – and so do all those risk-tolerant, low-value applications. It doesn't matter if helping blind people make sense of their surroundings is socially beneficial. It doesn't matter if teenaged gamers love their epic character art. It doesn't even matter how horny scammers are for generating AI nonsense SEO websites:

https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509

These applications are all riding on the coattails of the big AI models that are being built and operated at a loss in order to be profitable. If they remain unprofitable long enough, the private sector will no longer pay to operate them.

Now, there are smaller models, models that stand alone and run on commodity hardware. These would persist even after the AI bubble bursts, because most of their costs are setup costs that have already been borne by the well-funded companies who created them. These models are limited, of course, though the communities that have formed around them have pushed those limits in surprising ways, far beyond their original manufacturers' beliefs about their capacity. These communities will continue to push those limits for as long as they find the models useful.

These standalone, "toy" models are derived from the big models, though. When the AI bubble bursts and the private sector no longer subsidizes mass-scale model creation, it will cease to spin out more sophisticated models that run on commodity hardware (it's possible that Federated learning and other techniques for spreading out the work of making large-scale models will fill the gap).

So what kind of bubble is the AI bubble? What will we salvage from its wreckage? Perhaps the communities who've invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques.

But there will also be a lot of unsalvageable wreckage. As big AI models get integrated into the processes of the productive economy, AI becomes a source of systemic risk. The only thing worse than having an automated process that is rendered dangerous or erratic based on AI integration is to have that process fail entirely because the AI suddenly disappeared, a collapse that is too precipitous for former AI customers to engineer a soft landing for their systems.

This is a blind spot in our policymakers debates about AI. The smart policymakers are asking questions about fairness, algorithmic bias, and fraud. The foolish policymakers are ensnared in fantasies about "AI safety," AKA "Will the chatbot become a superintelligence that turns the whole human race into paperclips?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

But no one is asking, "What will we do if" – when – "the AI bubble pops and most of this stuff disappears overnight?"

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

tom_bullock (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tombullock/25173469495/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[lordprettyflackotara]

Chapter Ten || Hitchhiker || The Proxies

tw: mental decline, depression discussed, toby’s a real creep in this one sorry, stabbing, blood, brief descriptions of gore, murder

<— previous chapter

It was not hard to see you were distraught. You stayed curled in your comforter, the safety of your bedroom the only source of comfort you could truly find. The boys tried to provide as much warmth and care as possible, going as far as to take shifts watching you sleep. Even with their watchful eyes guarding you, it didn’t make the nightmares go away. It didn’t make the static go away. It didn’t make the paranoia go away. Anywhere and everywhere you felt like you were being watched. You had disappeared off of the face of the planet, ignoring your job and Nova. The only two other people that cared about you.

You refrained from leaving the apartment, the fear of running into The Operator making you into a recluse. Toby knew there was no stopping it. The damage had already been done. The Operator had a fixation on you, there was no doubt about it. He toyed with the idea of how exactly he would come find you, with you living in a crowded apartment and all. The more Toby thought about it, he tried to put himself in his shoes. If he couldn’t get you out, what else would he do? As Toby’s gaze circled around your bedroom it hit him. He would lure you out.

There was no debate Toby didn’t like Nova. There wasn’t a tiny piece of him that felt any different. But he knew that The Operator would use her as a pawn in his game of chess. He slid off of your bed, his fingertips pushing some stray hairs out of your face. “I’m going to fix this. I-I’m going to fix you,” Toby whispered. You were fast asleep, your slumber only guaranteed for maybe another couple of hours. The insomnia you began to develop was becoming as bad as Tim’s. Toby slid out of your bedroom, tapping Brian awake from his slumber in your recliner. The blonde stood up, yawning briefly. “Where are you going kid?” He asked curiously. Toby grabbed his axe, slinging it over his shoulder.

“I’m g-going to fix this. Like I s-s-should’ve done a long time ago.”

Toby wasn’t nervous as he strolled up to Nova’s office. He knew it was vacant. He knew Nova was working late. Not only based on her beat up Toyota in the parking lot, but he also considered her consequential work ethic. For someone as paranoid as Nova, he would’ve thought she would’ve had better protective measures.

Nova sat in her office, worn down and exhausted. The desk lamp was the only thing keeping her awake, the excessive light blinding her sight from most of the room. In her hand sat a worn out pencil, the graphite scribbling the proxy symbol on a sheet of paper. “I used to draw those too you know,” Toby chuckled. He sat crouched on the windowsill, inviting himself inside once Nova’s gaze landed on him. She reached for her gun, shocked to find her secret spot empty. Toby held it up lazily with one finger, his eyes narrowing. “L-looking for t-t-this?” He questioned. He tilted his head to the side, before tossing Nova her python. Nova had no idea you stole it, her mind raveling as she tried to pinpoint when Toby broke in and took it. Or when he even had the opportunity to.

Immediately Nova held Toby at gunpoint, shutting off the safety without a second thought. “I was right all along. I knew it. You can’t have her Tobias,” Nova growled. Toby raised his eyebrows. “Yeah that’s right. I investigated all of you fucking freaks. Timothy Wright. Brian Thomas. Tobias Rogers. I know it all,” Nova spat harshly. Toby’s neck twitched, a giggle escaping his lips. “You know about The Operator then I ass-u-u-me,” Toby suggested. Novas eyebrows furrowed, as if she could’ve believe what the brunette was saying. Casually he strolled up to her desk, rummaging through the papers. Drawings of The Operator, ominous phrases, and eerie proxy symbols littered the pages.

“Oh b-boy. He sure does like you,” Toby mused, chuckling to himself. Nova readjusted her grip on her gun, brushing her hair out of her face. “How do I get rid of him? Explain yourself. Explain it!” Nova demanded. Toby let out a low whistle. He rocked back and forth on his heels, shaking his head. “There isn’t any e-escaping him. From the l-looks of it he’s embedded himself right in that brain of yours,” He concluded. He leaned forward, poking Nova’s forehead. Nova swatted his hand away, pointing her gun directly at his head. She rounded her desk, placing the metal right under his chin. “It’s not like it m-matters anyways. You’re not really the one he wants,” Toby informed her.

“What’s that supposed to mean you ticking time bomb?”

Toby seemed unnerved to have a gun pointed under his chin. He knew Nova’s trigger finger was growing heavy, yet he seemed unbothered. “Who else knows about us besides you? That’s t-tied into our l-little rebellion,” Toby questioned. Nova’s facade fell, her face growing pale. She lowered her gun. “Fucking hell. Why does he want y/n? Why does he want me?” Nova asked. Toby tilted his head to the side, shoving down his face mask. He delivered Nova a wicked grin, soaking in the fear that radiated off of her once she saw the side of his face. It was chewed straight through, the flesh absent and poorly healed. “I-I’m n-n-not sure. Why don’t y-you eat one of the blueberry muffins I m-made you and maybe it’ll jog my memory,” Toby suggested.

Nova cringed as she looked over at the trash can, piled with discarded papers. But on the very bottom, sat the untouched blueberry muffins. They had been sitting there for over a week, her stomach churning. She collected herself, glaring at Toby. “I don’t think so Tobias. You don’t get to win,” She hissed. She pushed the head of the gun harder against his chin, surprised the brunette had no reaction at all. “Y-you kill m-m-me you don’t get answers,” Toby chuckled. Nova frowned, knowing he was right. Even if she killed him off, thing one and two were one for vengeance. She cringed as she looked at her trashcan.

“I take a bite of the muffin, you give me answers right? Who’s to say you’re not lying?” Nova questioned. Toby shrugged, giving her a sly shit eating grin. “I guess that’s a chance you’ll have to take,” He snickered. Nova huffed as she trudged over to the trashcan. She threw her old coffee cups and crumpled papers aside. She cringed as she dug out the plate of blueberry muffins, the tinfoil now pulled back. Toby watched calmly as she took the paper wrapper off of one, her fingers shaking. “Y-you c-c-can’t possibly be t-that grossed out. You investigate corpses for a living,” Toby said sassily, rolling his eyes. Nova glared at him, shooting daggers in his direction. “I investigate homicides of innocent people you ticking fuckwad,” Nova snarled. She sighed, forcing herself to think of you as she took a bite of the expired food.

Toby took great joy in watching Nova’s face curl into disgust. She could taste droplets of the coffee she had drank days ago. Toby’s grin grew wider as she slowly chewed on the muffin. “Go o-on. Swallow it,” He purred. Nova contemplated shooting him right then and there, deciding against it. Oh, if only you knew how much she adored you. She forced herself to swallow, gagging on the taste as it traveled down her throat. “That wasn’t s-so hard. W-was it?” Toby taunted. Nova wiped her mouth with her sleeve, trying to get the taste out of her mouth. “Get on with it Tobias. I played your game. What does he want?” She questioned.

“What he’s doing to you is very different from what h-he’s doing to y/n. H-he just wants y-y-you to go crazy and kill yourself. But I see you’re a o-one tough cookie,” Toby praised mockingly. He went to grab her cheek tauntingly, Novas hand quick to swat his away. “B-but with her, he sees s-s-so much potential. The w-way she’s willing to die f-for us,” Toby explained. Nova’s eyes widened, her rage clouding her judgment as she repositioned her pistol. She pointed it at Toby’s face, pulling the trigger. Nova was stunned as nothing happened, her Python useless. Toby broke out into a mechanical laughter, one that only enraged Nova more.

“What the fuck?” She muttered. Toby grinned as he took the bullets out of his pocket, tossing them into the air. They scattered across the wooden floor, Nova quick to drop to her knees to collect them. With shaky hands she tried to reload her gun, Toby quick to squat down to her level. He gave her an egotistical grin, watching as she struggled to put the bullets in her python. “There’s a-a chance we can stop The O-Operator’s influence. B-but we can’t do it alone,” He said. This made Nova stop in her tracks, her chocolate eyes wondering over to him. Looking at him made goosebumps roam across her skin, his lack of a right cheek unsettling the closer he got to her.

“S-she’s going to need-d-d you. Even if we dont understand it,” Toby concluded. He rose to his feet, satisfied that he got his point across. Nova swallowed as she rose beside him, her gun now loaded with three shiny bullets. “What do I need to do?” She asked. Toby gave her a wicked grin, waltzing towards the open window. He grinned over his shoulder, sliding his mask back on, “Come with me.”

\/

“I don’t wanna do this guys. This is so stupid,” You protested. Hoodie and Masky had succeeded in getting you dressed up and ready for a nice dinner. What they had failed to account for was your protest. Despite their protection and consistent surveillance, it didn’t subside your paranoia. However, they couldn’t recall the last time you had a decent meal. Additionally, they couldn’t remember the last time they had seen you smile. They didn’t like Nova either, but between her and seeing you go insane, she was lesser of the two evils.

“You’re just going to have to trust us. This’ll be good for you,” Hoodie encouraged. You sighed, looking through the window of the fancy restaurant. Soft golden chandeliers lit each table, a thick white table cloth covering each one. The silverware looked like they were actual gold, each individual inside looking like a million bucks. You nervously tucked your hair behind your ears. “Okay fine. Just this one dinner. Then let me lay in bed for the next ten years,” You huffed. You stormed into the restaurant, Masky and Hoodie close behind you. “They should be here somewhere,” Masky muttered. You were under the impression you were only meeting Toby. “Who else is there? Guys I don’t want to meet anyone new,” You protested. That’s when you saw them.

Toby waved, a bright smile spreading across his lips. He wore a neat jet black tuxedo, his curls bouncing with life. Beside him sat Nova, a dark sapphire dress decorating her caramel skin. Her lips were dark red, smiling just as bright as Toby’s. You practically ran to her, attempting to not trip over your own heels or run into any of the waiters. You threw your arms around her in an embrace, soaking in her coconut scent. “What are you doing here?” You asked. You hadn’t seen Nova since you had ditched her at the hospital, stealing her python before dashing into the night. “Tobias invited me. I think it’s time the five of us have a serious discussion about The Operator,” She said firmly. You glanced at the boys for affirmation, Masky giving you a nod. “You know?” You whispered. Nova nodded, giving you a sad smile.

“You’re not the only person that slimy fucker has been terrorizing,” Nova chuckled dryly. The five of you sat down, your mood feeling evaluated for the first time in forever. You didn’t ask too many questions about Toby or Nova. Or why they both felt possessive enough to sit on either side of you. Toby’s hand sat on your upper thigh, Novas hand holding your own. You felt like you were missing something. Like something happened and they wouldn’t tell you. Masky and Hoodie were strangely transparent about their existence. “So you both only exist due to a series of unfortunate supernatural events that traumatized Timothy and Brian so much they developed you two?” Nova questioned. She poked her fork back into her pasta, swirling it as you nervously chewed on your steak.

“Thats about right,” Masky agreed. He kept his gaze on his own steak, cutting the meat with a sharp knife. “And what about you?” Nova questioned. She pointed her fork at Toby, who was thoroughly enjoying his chicken tenders and fries. “What about me?” Toby hissed. Nova squeezed your hand under the table. “You don’t have an alter so you’re insane right? You had a pretty extensive length of mental disorders according to your record,” Nova shrugged. You shot Nova a dirty look. “Hey lay off of the kid,” Masky intervened flatly. Hoodie quietly nibbled at his salad, watching the whole scene unfold.

You caught his gaze, the blonde subtly cocking his head towards the window. You almost missed what he was referring to, a streak of white dashing out of sight once you looked. “I don’t think I will. They have decent excuses but you don’t Tobias. So, explain it to me,” Nova spat. You removed your hand from hers, feeling Toby’s fingers dig into your thigh. “Nova that’s enough, it’s not your business,” You hissed. She refused to glance at you, her cold gaze still centered on Toby. “Considering he’s been making himself quite comfortable between your legs, I think it is,” She argued. You audibly scoffed, your patience running thin.

“It is not your fucking place to mother me-”

Your spitfire was cut short by Toby interrupting, “The only thing you need to k-k-know is that i’d never h-hurt her. But don’t think-k-k you’re in the same position.”

The table fell silent, your heart pounding as you stared down at your dinner plate. A wave of nausea washed over you, your face going pale. “Hey hey are you good?” Hoodie asked, changing the tables topic. You could feel your stomach churning. Masky rose to his feet. “He’s nearby. We need to go,” He said firmly. He threw a wad of cash on the table, uninterested in the social construct of waiting. You were more important. The five of you hurried out of the restaurant, Nova slinging your arm over her shoulders. Toby followed suit, the two of them helping you follow Masky and Hoodie.

“Staying in town is a negative. We need to leave as soon as possible,” Hoodie told Masky. Masky dug in his slacks pockets, searching for his beloved box of cigarettes. “We need to ditch the car. Too traceable. There’s a train down east street. We can go down south from there,” Masky suggested. You could faintly hear static, your head beginning to spin. “I don’t think she’s going to make it to the train. We need to stop by her apartment. Or mine,” Nova interrupted. Masky and Hoodie shared a look, both of them reaching in their suit jackets and sliding on their mask. It was unusual that someone were to interrupt their planning. Whether they liked it or not, the dynamic of the group was changing with Nova’s addition. You felt faint, gripping onto Toby for support.

“I’m gonna be sick,” You groaned. You tried to hold back your nausea, swallowing when you felt yourself gagging. You could hear Masky and Nova bickering, their voices growing more dull. “Her apartment is a death sentence!” Masky growled. Nova let your arm down, getting in his face. “So is having her get on a goddamn train when she’s five seconds away from passing out!” She snarled. It was then you noticed it, the flash of white from earlier. You tilted your head to the side. Was this an illusion? Was the person you were seeing real? The white was so blinding to you. Why wasn’t anyone else noticing?

You glanced up at Toby, whose attention was focused on Masky and Nova arguing. You tried to understand what you were seeing, your eyes finally able to make out a mask. It was a human shaped figure, running towards the five of you. You tried to make sense of who the target was, realizing that the persons gaze seemed to be centered on Nova. Its head hadn’t cocked in your direction once, despite you looking right at the person. In the dim streetlight you were able to see a flash from a blade, your mouth falling open to say something. Anything. Your body sprung into action before you could warn anyone, your veins pumping with adrenaline.

You shoved Toby away, pushing Nova out of the way as the attacker trudged forward. It all happened so fast, you hardly had time to process the flash of hot white pain that electrified your body. You fell forward, your knees hitting the pavement. The sharp pain lodged into your stomach, your eyes widened so large you feared they were going to pop out of your head. Time seemed to slow, your hand shaking violently as you touched your wound. A kitchen knife was lodged into your stomach, the blood soaking your dress. Your vision became spotty, your gaze finally looking upwards. Toby and Masky were on the attacker in the blink of an eye.

“It had to be done! She’s the target and you know it!” The attacker hissed. Hoodie grabbed her by her hands, shoving them roughly behind her back. Masky delivered a sharp uppercut to her jaw, knocking her mask off of her face. Toby knew Kate to be obedient to The Operator, but he never would’ve imagined she would’ve done something like this to them. You fell forward, choking on your own spit as Nova tried to hold you upright. “Dont touch it. You can’t pull it out,” Nova rambled. She grabbed your shoulders, laying you on your back. She held you against her chest, tears welting up in her eyes. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” She whispered. She brought her hand to your hair, stroking it as you watched the seen before you unfold.

“I’ll fucking kill you Kate! I’ll fucking kill you!” Masky roared. Black spots began to appear in your vision, each movement you tried to make only sending a wave of pain up your spine.

Masky delivered sharp and powerful punches to Kate’s face, a sharp snap echoing throughout his ears. Her jaw hung loosely, blood traveling down her nose. “This is the way it has to be! You know better than this Masky!” Kate argued weakly. She was no longer thrashing under Hoodie’s grasp, instead struggling to stand on her own. Masky grabbed her face, a painful whimper escaping her lips as he glared down at her. “You are so lucky my girl is watching, otherwise i’d gut you like a fish,” He snarled. He lifted his mask, spitting in her face. He struggled to keep his composure, fighting the urge to beat her to death.

“W-wait so you won’t kill me?” Kate questioned. Masky turned around, his devious gaze meeting Toby’s. The younger brunette had taken out a smaller axe he carried on his person, twirling it in his hand. Masky sighed, looking over at you for confirmation. He never wanted this for you. But as the blood pooled around your body, he shrugged off any feelings of remorse or reconsideration. “I won’t, but he will,” Masky replied plainly. He walked past Toby, the boy quick to raise his axe. Masky relished in the sound of the sharp blade connecting with Kate’s skull, another loud crack sending sadistic pleasure down his spine.

—> next chapter

[anheliotrope]

Rambling About C# Being Alright

I think C# is an alright language. This is one of the highest distinctions I can give to a language.

Warning: This post is verbose and rambly and probably only good at telling you why someone might like C# and not much else.

~~~

There's something I hate about every other language. Worst, there's things I hate about other languages that I know will never get better. Even worse, some of those things ALSO feel like unforced errors.

With C# there's a few things I dislike or that are missing. C#'s feature set does not obviously excel at anything, but it avoids making any huge misstep in things I care about. Nothing in C# makes me feel like the language designer has personally harmed me.

C# is a very tolerable language.

C# is multi-paradigm.

C# is the Full Middle Malcomist language.

C# will try to not hurt you.

A good way to describe C# is "what if Java sucked less". This, of course, already sounds unappealing to many, but that's alright. I'm not trying to gas it up too much here.

C# has sins, but let's try to put them into some context here and perhaps the reason why I'm posting will become more obvious:

C# didn't try to avoid generics and then implement them in a way that is very limiting (cough Go).

C# doesn't hamstring your ability to have statement lambdas because the language designer dislikes them and also because the language designer decided to have semantic whitespace making statement lambdas harder to deal with (cough Python).

C# doesn't require you to explicitly wrap value types into reference types so you can put value types into collections (cough Java).

C# doesn't ruin your ability to interact with memory efficiently because it forbids you from creating custom value types, ergo everything goes to the heap (cough cough Java, Minecraft).

C# doesn't have insane implicit type coercions that have become the subject of language design comedy (cough JavaScript).

C# doesn't keep privacy accessors as a suggestion and has the developers pinkie swear about it instead of actually enforcing it (cough cough Python).

Plainly put, a lot of the time I find C# to be alright by process of elimination. I'm not trying to shit on your favorite language. Everyone has different things they find tolerable. I have the Buddha nature so I wish for all things to find their tolerable language.

I do also think that C# is notable for being a mainstream language (aka not Haskell) that has a smaller amount of egregious mistakes, quirks and Faustian bargains.

The Typerrrrr

C# is statically typed, but the typing is largely effortless to navigate unlike something like Rust, and the GC gives a greater degree of safety than something like C++.

Of course, the typing being easy to work it also makes it less safe than Rust. But this is an appropriate trade-off for certain kinds of applications, especially considering that C# is memory safe by virtue of running on a VM. Don't come at me, I'm a Rust respecter!!

You know how some people talk about Python being amazing for prototyping? That's how I feel about C#. No matter how much time I would dedicate to Python, C# would still be a more productive language for me. The type system would genuinely make me faster for the vast majority of cases. Of course Python has gradual typing now, so any comparison gets more difficult when you consider that. But what I'm trying to say is that I never understood the idea that doing away entirely with static typing is good for fast iteration.

Also yes, C# can be used as a repl. Leave me alone with your repls. Also, while the debugger is active you can also evaluate arbitrary code within the current scope.

I think that going full dynamic typing is a mistake in almost every situation. The fact that C# doesn't do that already puts it above other languages for me. This stance on typing is controversial, but it's my opinion that is really shouldn't be. And the wind has constantly been blowing towards adding gradual typing to dynamic languages.

The modest typing capabilities C# coupled with OOP and inheritance lets you create pretty awful OOP slop. But that's whatever. At work we use inheritance in very few places where it results in neat code reuse, and then it's just mostly interfaces getting implemented.

C#'s typing and generic system is powerful enough to offer you a plethora of super-ergonomic collection transformation methods via the LINQ library. There's a lot of functional-style programming you can do with that. You know, map, filter, reduce, that stuff?

Even if you make a completely new collection type, if it implements IEnumerable<T> it will benefit from LINQ automatically. Every language these days has something like this, but it's so ridiculously easy to use in C#. Coupled with how C# lets you (1) easily define immutable data types, (2) explicitly control access to struct or class members, (3) do pattern matching, you can end up with code that flows really well.

A Friendly Kitchen Sink

Some people have described C#'s feature set as bloated. It is getting some syntactic diversity which makes it a bit harder to read someone else's code. But it doesn't make C# harder to learn, since it takes roughly the same amount of effort to get to a point where you can be effective in it.

Most of the more specific features can be effortlessly ignored. The ones that can't be effortlessly ignored tend to bring something genuinely useful to the language -- such as tuples and destructuring. Tuples have their own syntax, the syntax is pretty intuitive, but the first time you run into it, you will have to do a bit of learning.

C# has an immense amount of small features meant to make the language more ergonomic. They're too numerous to mention and they just keep getting added.

I'd like to draw attention to some features not because they're the most important but rather because it feels like they communicate the "personality" of C#. Not sure what level of detail was appropriate, so feel free to skim.

Stricter Null Handling. If you think not having to explicitly deal with null is the billion dollar mistake, then C# tries to fix a bit of the problem by allowing you to enable a strict context where you have to explicitly tell it that something can be null, otherwise it will assume that the possibility of a reference type being null is an error. It's a bit more complicated than that, but it definitely helps with safety around nullability.

Default Interface Implementation. A problem in C# which drives usage of inheritance is that with just interfaces there is no way to reuse code outside of passing function pointers. A lot of people don't get this and think that inheritance is just used because other people are stupid or something. If you have a couple of methods that would be implemented exactly the same for classes 1 through 99, but somewhat differently for classes 100 through 110, then without inheritance you're fucked. A much better way would be Rust's trait system, but for that to work you need really powerful generics, so it's too different of a path for C# to trod it. Instead what C# did was make it so that you can write an implementation for methods declared in an interface, as long as that implementation only uses members defined in the interface (this makes sense, why would it have access to anything else?). So now you can have a default implementation for the 1 through 99 case and save some of your sanity. Of course, it's not a panacea, if the implementation of the method requires access to the internal state of the 1 through 99 case, default interface implementation won't save you. But it can still make it easier via some techniques I won't get into. The important part is that default interface implementation allows code reuse and reduces reasons to use inheritance.

Performance Optimization. C# has a plethora of features regarding that. Most of which will never be encountered by the average programmer. Examples: (1) stackalloc - forcibly allocate reference types to the stack if you know they won't outlive the current scope. (2) Specialized APIs for avoiding memory allocations in happy paths. (3) Lazy initialization APIs. (4) APIs for dealing with memory more directly that allow high performance when interoping with C/C++ while still keeping a degree of safety.

Fine Control Over Async Runtime. C# lets you write your own... async builder and scheduler? It's a bit esoteric and hard to describe. But basically all the functionality of async/await that does magic under the hood? You can override that magic to do some very specific things that you'll rarely need. Unity3D takes advantage of this in order to allow async/await to work on WASM even though it is a single-threaded environment. It implements a cooperative scheduler so the program doesn't immediately freeze the moment you do await in a single-threaded environment. Most people don't know this capability exists and it doesn't affect them.

Tremendous Amount Of Synchronization Primitives and API. This ones does actually make multithreaded code harder to deal with, but basically C# erred a lot in favor of having many different ways to do multithreading because they wanted to suit different usecases. Most people just deal with idiomatic async/await code, but a very small minority of C# coders deal with locks, atomics, semaphores, mutex, monitors, interlocked, spin waiting etc. They knew they couldn't make this shit safe, so they tried to at least let you have ready-made options for your specific use case, even if it causes some balkanization.

Shortly Begging For Tagged Unions

What I miss from C# is more powerful generic bounds/constraints and tagged unions (or sum types or discriminated unions or type unions or any of the other 5 names this concept has).

The generic constraints you can use in C# are anemic and combined with the lack of tagged unions this is rather painful at times.

I remember seeing Microsoft devs saying they don't see enough of a usecase for tagged unions. I've at times wanted to strangle certain people. These two facts are related to one another.

My stance is that if you think your language doesn't need or benefit from tagged unions, either your language is very weird, or, more likely you're out of your goddamn mind. You are making me do really stupid things every time I need to represent a structure that can EITHER have a value of type A or a value of type B.

But I think C# will eventually get tagged unions. There's a proposal for it here. I would be overjoyed if it got implemented. It seems like it's been getting traction.

Also there was an entire section on unchecked exceptions that I removed because it wasn't interesting enough. Yes, C# could probably have checked exceptions and it didn't and it's a mistake. But ultimately it doesn't seem to have caused any make-or-break in a comparison with Java, which has them. They'd all be better off with returning an Error<T>. Short story is that the consequences of unchecked exceptions have been highly tolerable in practice.

Ecosystem State & FOSSness

C# is better than ever and the tooling ecosystem is better than ever. This is true of almost every language, but I think C# receives a rather high amount of improvements per version. Additionally the FOSS story is at its peak.

Roslyn, the bedrock of the toolchain, the compiler and analysis provider, is under MIT license. The fact that it does analysis as well is important, because this means you can use the wealth of Roslyn analyzers to do linting.

If your FOSS tooling lets you compile but you don't get any checking as you type, then your development experience is wildly substandard.

A lot of stupid crap with cross-platform compilation that used to be confusing or difficult is now rather easy to deal with. It's basically as easy as (1) use NET Core, (2) tell dotnet to build for Linux. These steps take no extra effort and the first step is the default way to write C# these days.

Dotnet is part of the SDK and contains functionality to create NET Core projects and to use other tools to build said projects. Dotnet is published under MIT, because the whole SDK and runtime are published under MIT.

Yes, the debugger situation is still bad -- there's no FOSS option for it, but this is more because nobody cares enough to go and solve it. Jetbrains proved anyone can do it if they have enough development time, since they wrote a debugger from scratch for their proprietary C# IDE Rider.

Where C# falls flat on its face is the "userspace" ecosystem. Plainly put, because C# is a Microsoft product, people with FOSS inclinations have steered clear of it to such a degree that the packages you have available are not even 10% of what packages a Python user has available, for example. People with FOSS inclinations are generally the people who write packages for your language!!

I guess if you really really hate leftpad, you might think this is a small bonus though.

Where-in I talk about Cross-Platform

The biggest thing the ecosystem has been lacking for me is a package, preferably FOSS, for developing cross-platform applications. Even if it's just cross-platform desktop applications.

Like yes, you can build C# to many platforms, no sweat. The same way you can build Rust to many platforms, some sweat. But if you can't show a good GUI on Linux, then it's not practically-speaking cross-platform for that purpose.

Microsoft has repeatedly done GUI stuff that, predictably, only works on Windows. And yes, Linux desktop is like 4%, but that 4% contains >50% of the people who create packages for your language's ecosystem, almost the exact point I made earlier. If a developer runs Linux and they can't have their app run on Linux, they are not going to touch your language with a ten foot pole for that purpose. I think this largely explains why C#'s ecosystem feels stunted.

The thing is, I'm not actually sure how bad or good the situation is, since most people just don't even try using C# for this usecase. There's a general... ecosystem malaise where few care to use the language for this, chiefly because of the tone that Microsoft set a decade ago. It's sad.

HOWEVER.

Avalonia, A New Hope?

Today we have Avalonia. Avalonia is an open-source framework that lets you build cross-platform applications in C#. It's MIT licensed. It will work on Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android and also somehow in the browser. It seems to this by actually drawing pixels via SkiaSharp (or optionally Direct2D on Windows).

They make money by offering migration services from WPF app to Avalonia. Plus general support.

I can't say how good Avalonia is yet. I've researched a bit and it's not obviously bad, which is distinct from being good. But if it's actually good, this would be a holy grail for the ecosystem:

You could use a statically typed language that is productive for this type of software development to create cross-platform applications that have higher performance than the Electron slop. That's valuable!

This possibility warrants a much higher level of enthusiasm than I've seen, especially within the ecosystem itself. This is an ecosystem that was, for a while, entirely landlocked, only able to make Windows desktop applications.

I cannot overstate how important it is for a language's ecosystem to have a package like this and have it be good. Rust is still missing a good option. Gnome is unpleasant to use and buggy. Falling back to using Electron while writing Rust just seems like a bad joke. A lot of the Rust crates that are neither Electron nor Gnome tend to be really really undercooked.

And now I've actually talked myself into checking out Avalonia... I mean after writing all of that I feel like a charlatan for not having investigated it already.

[edmcmayonnaise]

Months ago, I wrote "biographies" for Edwin and Simon in the style of the Edwardian (Third Edition published in 1915) study on "Sexual Inversion" (medical phrasing that pre-dates the term "homosexuality") in the style of Studies in the Psychology of Sex by Havelock Ellis. This book can be found for free online and is a treasure trove due to the collection of biographies written by queer people.

Maybe against my better judgment, I will share them now for Simon Appreciation Week, as they capture to some extent how I perceive their interpersonal dynamics.

HISTORY E.P. - English, student at public boarding school, aged 16. His father, who comes from an unremarkable middle class lineage, is a physician. His father has been deployed to France since 1914 for wartime service. His mother’s family has a history notable for hysteria in his maternal grandmother, and his mother he describes as a high-strung and nervous woman who herself has been intermittently institutionalized for afflictions of mood. 

He has no siblings, and describes the relationship with his parents as distant. He lived most of his early childhood life in the care of a nanny. At age seven, was sent away to boarding school. 

He has never been attracted to girls or women, though had minimal contact with girls his age, He takes little interest in women or in their society. There is nothing markedly feminine in his general appearance, but he does believe that his general kinesthetic disposition is not viewed by others as manly. Specifically, he says that he is concerned that the animated way in which his hands is too recognizable as a symptom of what he considers to be his congenital condition. 

He is of average height and medium-slim build, but generally normatively developed and healthy. He considers himself to lack skill in athletic pursuits with the exception of fencing, but is an omnivorous reader and excels in academics. 

In his own words:

“I have always been very shy of showing any affectionate tendencies. Most of my acquaintances (and close friends, even) find me curiously cold. For obvious reasons I have been unable to speak as to why this is. I fear being cruelly misunderstood, and I have at times felt as if wrestling in the folds of the morally reprehensible python of inversion.

"I find myself cut off from others, feel myself to be an outcast, and, amongst others my age, am intensely withdrawn. Privately, I am miserable. The desire to love and be loved is hard to drown, especially when treading through a veritable pool of ‘what-ifs’ as I am surrounded by male virality in all aspects of my life at school.

“I am not sure entirely what it is for which I am longing. Certainly, my parents neglected to impart to me any sort of knowledge of the adult modus vivendi. The only thing I do know with confidence is that no bodily satisfaction should be sought at the cost of another person’s distress or degradation, including my own.

“At my school, I have heard rumor, and in fact been the subject of rumor, regarding attachments and gratifications with other boys, which are all untrue. As with any topic that is discussed only behind cupped hands and in whispers, the stories become more and more fantastical as they are shared from schoolmate to schoolmate. Upon my truest promise, I have never yielded to the temptation of any sort of intercrural connection. I have preserved strict chastity. I do not know how long my mind can hold back the instincts of my heart and body, but I am terrified that I will soon lose this seemingly never ending battle.”

Shortly after E.P. submitted his history for publication in this book, it was reported that he and several other boys at his school went missing in what the school is calling an Act of God. Any additional information about what may have happened to this youth and his friends is not forthcoming at this time. 

~

HISTORY S.M. - English, student at a public boarding school, aged 17. Father and mother both living; the latter is of a better social standing than the former. He is much attached to his mother, and she gives him some sympathy and companionship, when he is at home. He is the third of four siblings, all boys, and he suspects that his next elder brother is also inverted.

In early life, S.M. was of delicate constitution and his studies were often interrupted by illness. Though living under mostly happy conditions he was shy and nervous, often depressed. This he attributes to having been on several occasions mishandled by his next elder brother; concedes that his brother is prone to foul and violent moods. However, his brother is well-liked, by his father and other siblings, he says, because of his masculine character. His brother has many friends at school. Though S.M. does report that he does have some influence over some of his classmates, he has few close friends.

Of his inversion, he reports the following:

“There is a boy in my year who has become the absorbing thought of my school days, and who comes to me in my dreams almost nightly. I have absolutely no words to tell you how powerfully his beauty affects me. He is well-formed, lean, shy, and in my dream he sits beside me, allowing our legs to touch and for me to caress his thigh. He looks at me with desire in his eyes, green, but clouded over dark with his want for me to kiss him. And I do want to kiss him– on his wrist, and his palm, and into the gentle, milky curve of his neck, and to leave my lover’s mark on him, to say to anyone who might pursue him that he is mine and mine only. 

“I keep my feelings hidden, however, hardly daring to look at him for fear of being found out. His bed is next to mine, and the rest of the dormitory is boisterous and lewd, and there is a good deal of bullying, which I cannot bear to have directed my way.

“I have tried to tell myself that these dreams are not due to a moral failing of my own, but indeed this boy’s own influence upon me. I love him and I resent him. His seeming indifference towards my existence, as he has never responded well when I have plucked up my courage to speak with him, angers me. I want him to look towards me and love me, too.”

S.M. was involved in the same incident as E.P.,  where he and several other boys went missing from their school. It is reported that their last known whereabouts were their school dormitory rooms.

[gingermintpepper]

I continue to be in the foulest of moods so here are some Zeus + Apollo headcanons because they make me happy :)

(Important note: this is largely specific to my original work and is not me making inferences from mythical or historical texts)

Zeus and Apollo spar. Like a lot. Like a lot. A big reason why Apollo gets so good at boxing is because he usually sparred with his father as a young god and getting hit with one of Zeus' punches is!! Not advisable. He focused on becoming fleet-footed to combat Zeus' more solid fighting style which was definitely helped by his dancing. Conversely, Hermes would later develop wrestling partially as a response to Apollo's annoying fleet-footedness in combat.

Zeus decides to tie his mind to Apollo's when the strain of Apollo's visions become too intense for him to handle alone. When Apollo first returns from his exile after slaying Python, his visions are so severe that he suffered from 'time-blindness' where he could only percieve the future and was completely unable to see the present. Zeus shoulders some of that strain until Apollo becomes strong enough to handle prophecy on his own - though Zeus is careful not to give Apollo absolute prophecy lest he get overwhelmed again.

Despite their closeness, or maybe because of it, Zeus and Apollo argue quite a lot. Usually it's banal things like administrative work or squabbling over which of them should get the larger portion of a hecatomb, but they do argue about how prophecies should be carried out quite frequently too. There's a general agreement for Zeus not to bring up Apollo's children after how messy Aristaeus' anointing was (and how angry Apollo was at Zeus' disagreement with his decision to make his firstborn son a god) but the odd occasion where it cannot be avoided is usually when they have their most grave spats.

One of Zeus' greatest regrets is his relationship with Ares, partially because Ares grows up seeing him dote and teach Apollo with his full attention. There is... a lot of himself that he sees in Ares. A lot of Kronos too and the part of Zeus that is a warrior before he is a king has done his best to keep the boy at arms length entirely because of that familiarity with the face staring back at him. It's another of the things he and Apollo have argued ceaselessly about. Naturally, Apollo has attempted to bridge that gap many times and while Ares is still quite close with Artemis, when it comes to Apollo, he is particularly sensitive.

Zeus is the one that ultimately decided that Apollo should never marry. Due to Apollo's love-curse and his already concerning tendency to be overly attached and committed to his mortal affairs and offspring, Zeus decided that marriage would be doom to Apollo's spirit and proclaimed him unfit for the ceremony and its status. Instead of the expected argument, everyone was quite surprised when Apollo merely bowed his head and accepted such an outrageous decision.

[nixcraft]

How to Become a Farmer 🧑‍🌾

00. Learn Python 01. Write code day and night 02. Become a senior developer 03. Burn out solving problems 04. Finally had enough of this. Quit. 05. Become a farmer. Work with trees and animals and grow crops.

[discount-shades]

Sleepy Baby Part 12

a/n: This will make more sense if you have seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Pairing: Jake “Hangman” Seresin X reader

Warnings: None, back to fluff

Word Count: 1400 ish

Summary: Jake is Lancelot and Kisses is Guinevere

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When Jake had said he only had twenty six months left in San Diego you saw two options, either end it then and there or go all in. The prospect of living the rest of your life without Jake was unimaginable so it had been an easy decision to bet it all. Even though neither of you are behaving differently everything feels like it has shifted. 

Knowing that what you were feeling was real and had a future made everything seem easier. You had a goal. You and Jake were building a future together. While the relationship had started as a happy accident and a fun way to get back out there emotionally, it was now the foundation to your future. 

True to his word Jake had become one of Grace’s biggest supporters, always encouraging you to spend time with her and the small group of friends you began to develop. When you brought it up to him he admitted that your not quite hypothetical future marriage was one of his reasons. 

“When I’m deployed you need people in your life you can turn to.”  He explained. “Any of my Navy buddies like Javy will help if they can, but you’re right, they would be helping you for me and it won’t be the same support system.”

You still saw the Dagger Squad often and that is how you ended up back at the Hard Deck clustered around the pool table at the back. Jake was playing and easily beating everyone. He finally beats Phoenix and casually walks over to you. 

“You’re my good luck charm,” he throws his arm around you as you sit perched on a stool. You roll your eyes and grin up at him as he kisses you on your lips. 

“I don’t believe that for a second,” you tell him. “At the risk of overinflating your ego, I have it on good authority that it's a game of skill.”

“No, it’s my love for you that lets me win,” he says with a false sense of confidence. “And to prove my love to you I shall beat Rooster next.” You glance over at Bradley and see him racking up the balls for the next game.

“Jake, you would win even if I wasn’t here,” you tell him. “If you love me you’ll lose.” You gaze at Jake with a forced innocent expression that is hard to maintain at the look on his face. 

“No,” Jake's small response is confused and offended. 

“It’s Arthurian Jake,” you say dramatically, “Guinevere asked Sir Lancelot to lose at a tournament to prove his love. Your pool cue will be your lance.”

“You’re Lancelot-ing me?” he says in disbelief. “If I am Lancelot and you are Guinevere our love is doomed and I don’t like that ending.” He is standing between your spread legs and his hands slide to your hips pulling you closer. 

“We can rewrite that part.” you tell him with a kiss. “Now go out and lose for me, Sir Lancelot.”

He sighs in resignation, “is this what you really want my Queen Guinevere?”

“Sure is,” you grin mischievously. “But you can’t make it obvious you are losing on purpose.” 

“Hangman, leave your girl alone and get over here and play some pool.” You peek over Jake's shoulder at Bradley’s words before turning back to Jake with a grin and raise your eyebrows in challenge.

“The things I do for love,” Jake’s breath moves over your neck as he whispers in your ear and you burst out laughing. 

“No way,” Bradley calls out, pointing at you. “It’s like poker all over again. You are not allowed to talk to her while we are playing, and she is not allowed to talk to you.” 

“Can I at least cheer him on?” you say indignation in your voice.

“Fine,” Bradley agrees, “you can cheer him on and console him when I win.” Jake glares at Bradley but agrees with a huff and they begin to play.

Bob ends up sitting beside you watching. Jake is playing poorly. He is not missing really obvious shots but he is not playing to the same ability that he usually plays at, only sinking one or two balls per turn. “What did you say to him to throw him off?” Bob asks you in confusion. “He is usually way better than this.” 

“Uhhhhmmmm,” you tug on your hair. “I may or may not have told him to prove he loved me by losing.” you shoot a sheepish look at Bob. 

Bob snorts, “You ‘A Knight’s Tale-ed’ him? Come on, did you really need to do that to know he loves you?”

“No, I know he does, and I’m pretty sure it is originally Arthurian.” You pause your conversation with Bob to console Jake after a shot bounces off the edge of the pocket and rolls back across the table. 

“It’s OK, Babe, you nearly had it!” Jake glares at you with the tiniest hint of a grin on his face shaking his head and you smile back. 

“Then why did you ask him to lose?” Bob is looking back and forth between you and Jake. 

“I don’t know, I thought it would be funny,” you say with a grin at Bob. “Maybe it's a role play we like to do, you know, to spice things up in the bedroom.” 

“Ew,” Bob looks at you with a wrinkled nose. “I do not want to hear about yours and Hangman's sex life.”

You just laugh before looking at the table. The game is almost over. “Quick you have to go tell Jake to win!” You say shaking Bob’s arm. 

“Oh no,” he shakes his head, “I don’t want to be in the middle of whatever you two have going on!” 

“Please Bob,” you say desperately as Jake chalks the tip of his cue. He has four balls left and to win he would have to sink them all and then the 8 ball without missing any. “Bradley won’t let me talk to him. Please be my fair maid and tell my valiant knight that if he loves me he will win!”

Bob looks at you in disappointment before sighing and going over to Jake mumbling, “I’m going to regret this.”

You watch eagerly as Bob walks over to talk quietly to Jake with a pained expression on his face and grin impishly when Jake jerks his head up to glare at you at Bob's words. Bob slinks back to your side and hangs his head in defeat. “I can’t believe I did that for you.” He shudders, “I feel dirty.”

“Cheer up Bob,” you nudge him with your shoulder. “I was joking about it being a sex thing.”

“That does make me feel a little better.” You watch Jake sink his final 4 balls with an intense look on his face.

“It wasn’t about sex when I said it originally, but that could change,” you eye Jake’s hungry look with a grin as he stalks over to you after sinking the 8 ball and winning the game. 

“My Queen,” he says and pulls you to your feet before dipping you dramatically and kissing you. 

“My Valiant Knight you have proven your love,” you run your fingers through his hair smiling and pull his lips back to you yours. You can hear Bradley arguing with Bob in the background over what he said to Jake.

Jake hums happily into your kiss before standing both of you back up. “I am your King,” he corrects before giving you another kiss.

“Well I didn’t vote for you.” Your attempt at a British accent is terrible.

Jake looks at you frowning. “I was rewriting us a happier ending.”

“Oh,” you say in realization, laughing and continuing to talk in the terrible accent, “oh King eh, very nice.”

You yelp and jump closer as Jake smacks your ass, “you’re a brat.”

“If you are spanking me that makes you Galahad and you are in terrible peril.” 

Jake pulls you in close and you slide your hands up his chest and loop them around his neck so you are pressed against his hard body. “I’ll have to face my peril,” his words are spoken between heated kisses. 

“You’re sure it's not too perilous?” you ask, grinning into his lips.

Jake drags his lips down your neck placing soft kisses as he goes. “It’s my duty to sample the peril.” 

“Please go home.” Bob is still sitting in his chair next to your vacated one. Jake laughs and pulls you to the bar to pay the tab.

[queer-ragnelle]

Hi! I was wondering if you had any advice on how to craft a well-written, compelling Arthurian OC that isn't obnoxious or out of place but is still unique. I recognize the difficulty in doing so with so many different source texts (I'm most familiar with Le Morte, so that's usually my go-to) and the vast list of already existing characters. I'm just curious about your thoughts on the matter, since you're an author and also very knowledgeable about Arthuriana 💖

Hello there!

This is a tough question to answer! I think it's important to note that everyone will have a different opinion on this, but that shouldn't alter you writing your story how you want to. Some think adding any characters at all is too big of a change, while others write a full cast of original characters and then Merlin shows up randomly and makes the story "Arthurian."

I'm going to say something controversial.

Every Arthurian character is an OC.

Even King Arthur himself is an OC.

I'm going to elaborate on this quite a bit, as it's very important to me. But the TL;DR is that reading more will definitely help you conceptualize the boundaries of what's possible. Le Morte d'Arthur is a great start, but there's so much out there, both medieval and modern, that'll undoubtedly aid in your Arthuriana writing journey! :^)

While I do say things like "I love Arthurian OCs" as a means to convey that I view everyone's new creations as valid and interesting, I actually don't believe in a strong differentiation between Chretien de Troyes' Sir Lancelot or Marie of France's Sir Lanval and what you or I are writing today. We're participating in a tradition which can, at times, necessitate the creation of a new character or repurposing of an existing one. I think as soon as you create a character for your Arthurian story, they're an Arthurian character. Some refer to Lancelot or Galahad as "French OCs" or call Knight of the Cart or the Vulgate "fanfiction" as a means to degrade it's validity. Some seem to have an arbitrary timeline on which the full body of Arthurian works is measured, and the more recently something was written, the less authentic it becomes. I think they're wrong. I believe that whether or not we enjoy an installment in the ever expanding Arthurian tradition is irrelevant; it's all equally entitled to a measure of respect, even the new characters. No character or story is lesser than another by virtue of its age or language of origin or target audience or medium. I disdain the excess of scrutiny put upon certain arbitrary groupings of Arthurian tradition. Each story is full of original characters and building on the foundations of what came before. That's the nature of creative influence. Whether or not Arthur was a real person at some point in history is moot. The guy in the Mabinogion or the Vulgate or Le Morte d'Arthur or BBC Merlin is a character. He's a tool to tell a story. Such as your creation will be! Your brand new Arthurian character stands equally with all the rest who preceded them. :^)

Now, it can be helpful to distinguish between a medieval character and a modern one, sure, as they may represent different things depending on what point in history (or part of the world) they were created in. But Arthuriana isn't a franchise one must obtain express permission to contribute to, and it doesn't have a "canon," so therefore differentiating a character as "other" can be counter productive when developing a story. I don't believe Sir Robin from Monty Python and The Holy Grail (1975) or Brian from The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956-1957) are any less valuable as characters, even if they do draw on traits of existing Arthurian motifs in order to commentate on them or otherwise expand. In fact I think they're great characters and serve their narrative roles beautifully. One simple and one complex. I recommend watching those to see how it's done well and that may help you develop your own characters. But I'll delve into it a bit here to illustrate what I mean.

Sir Robin carries the coat of arms of a chicken, he's a cowardly knight followed around by a troupe of musicians that sing songs about all of his exploits. That is, the things he's run away from. Rather than use an existing Arthurian character and degrading them, Monty Python developed Sir Robin in order to tell their joke.

The flipside is Brian, a bona fide kitchen boy, who attaches himself to Sir Lancelot and desires to squire for him. Brian's narrative purpose is to deconstruct the nobility in a way that Gareth Beaumains, whom Brian is plainly inspired by, could not. Brian begins as a true serf forced to endear himself to Sir Lancelot to elevate his station. Merlin forges papers of nobility to convince King Arthur that Brian is worthy of this privilege. Even after that, Brian must face the brutality of his fellows while living in the barracks with them, as they don't take kindly to a "smelly kitchen boy" in their midst, plotting to get Brian to incriminate himself as a thief and get evicted from Camelot by Sir Kay. This role is incongruous with Gareth as Sir Gawain's brother, who was always noble, always a prince, and merely cloaked himself in the guise of poverty to prove a point. Gareth could return to the comforts of wealth whenever it suited him and his reason for going stealth was to intentionally distance himself from that privilege. The character Brian exists in order to commentate on the injustice of the upper class's oppression and dehumanization of the lower class in a way Gareth, or even Tor, could not, as they are of noble blood, even if it came by way of reveal. That's why Brian is a great addition to the Arthurian tradition.

Really, it comes down to treating the creation of your new Arthurian character like you would developing one for any other work, one entirely separate from the tradition. If they're a good character, they're a good character! Try not to get hung up too much on whether or not they're going to mesh well with the rest of the cast. For centuries, writers have transformed historical figures into Arthurian characters. (See: King Mark of Kernow better known as the Cuckhold King from the Prose Tristan, Owain mab Urien better known as Sir Yvain from Knight of the Lion by Chretien de Troyes, Saint Derfel better known as Derfel Gadarn from The Warlord Chronicles by Bernard Cornwell, etc.)

Speaking of Prose Tristan, would anyone consider Sir Dinadan an OC? Or Sir Palomides? They're characters added to a story drawing from a much, much older tradition, and I think they enrich the story. I feel likewise about the many Perceval Continuations, including the German Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach, which adds a half brother named Sir Feirefiz, or names Chretien's anonymous haughty maiden Orgeluse. What about Sir Aglovale's son Moriaen in the Dutch tradition? Amurfina in German Diu Krone by Heinrich von dem Türlin? Morgan le Fay's daughter Puzella Gaia in Italian La Tavola Ritonda? Not to mention the countless Middle English additions. The Green Knight and his wife? Dame Ragnelle and Sir Gromer? Or how about everyone's favorite Savage Damsel, Lynette of Castle Perilous? Is she not a late-era addition to the tradition courtesy of the man, the myth, the legend, Sir Thomas Malory himself? And then here comes Tennyson, who read Le Morte d'Arthur, and got to the end of dear Gareth Beaumains' story and had the same reaction we all did: "What the hell? He marries her sister?" And then he went about changing that in Idylls of the King. Speaking of Lynette, what's up with her niece Laurel? She's just a name on a page, the vast majority of retellings choose to ignore her, even if they do keep Lynette and Lyonesse. Laurel can scarcely be called a character, after all. She doesn't even have dialogue. So as I've gone out of my way to make her a prominent, fully developed character, with her own culture and back story and motivations, does that make her an OC of mine? And Henry Newbolt who included Laurel in his play Mordred: A Tragedy. And Sarah Zettel, who wrote from Laurel's point of view in Camelot's Blood. We did all the work, but we threw an Arthurian name on the character, so therefore, she isn't ours? But if we changed her name, she would be? Who gets to decide?

All of the Arthurian characters belong to all of us. That's the beauty of writing in a long-standing tradition, which exists apart from all other forms of writing. We have complete creative liberty to do what we want and refer to it how we want and no person or corporation or anyone can dictate otherwise. The intellectual property of Arthuriana belongs to the people. So invent a brand new wife for Gawain, and well, you're only the millionth author to do it! Just make sure she's an interesting character and that's literally the only requirement. Can't wait to meet her. (And all others you create!)

Have a great day!

[angellic-critique]

Honestly my biggest fear is to end up writing my characters the same way vivzie does, I feel like she doesn't even try on certain characters(female characters and literally any other that isn't her "uwu baby boi must be protected at all costs" characters like stolas, angel dust). Like imagine completely missing the point of your own character/srs

to everyone pre-release worries and anxieties just as much as I have-- Please take this time to read or explore different interests of books or authors of subjects and genres you like ! In the era of internet where the golden age of information is rusting into brainrot, the less time online anymore the better. I've been taking javascript/python tutorials for myself attempting to make a dating simulator for literal years at this point and its bounced around to the point of where I branched off to develop my own murder mystery 2-d sidescroller !

I wish for this to be a farewell letter to the crushed hopes and dreams I had for the original hazbin pilot and crew has moved on to other things whereas viv attempted to spitefully keep a story she clearly doesn't have any passion over- it is very evident over her lack of care for her own characters purely for the monetary gains of attempting and sadly wriggling her way into industry the way she did is so abhorrent to the world of genuine art and animation I grew up with.

Has Vivzie ever read a Felix the Cat comic strip or Dilbert even Hägar The Horrible? Does she even know about the history and strive of depth that animation has been at for hundreds of years? Does she even like comics, clearly not if she doesn't even have the patience to write her own and horribly rush whichever story she's interested in that day. I've never seen a careless writer be this selfishly unashamed to write literal garbage and surface level 'intrigue' of design and then falling flat face first at EVERY step. Hope she becomes as unbearable of a director as John K. is because honestly even though I'm cringing making that comparison, it's pretty fair in my book considering the outright ABUSE she has always trying to talk or hoard artists into her 'pet project' I recommend above anything else to watch Dan Stamanolous' 'Moral Orel' if you want an actually funny dark comedy or Christy Karacas' fast paced dark horror comic-come-to-life Superjail! for good animattion that doesn't belittle its audience... *[Trigger Warnings for Adult Swim-esque outdated 2007 humor and light transphobia, read for your own triggers if you dont want to though, please!]

The fact that Stollitz is written so flimsily like a wattpad fanficiton of tropes rolled into one is astounding to me, I used to like the dynamic pre-season 2 as I've mentioned on here and @tired-hellowl so I really don't want to get a headache going into how I USED to like it-Realizing the problematic consent issues all of STOLASS is, I physically cannot watch another Helluva or Hazbin promo anymore without rolling my eyes into the back of my head.

To the anons and people who used to also enjoy vivs work, there are other artists and there are other stories to tell. If you wish to be inspired from Dante's Inferno/Hell or WESTERN CHRISTIAN BASED RELIGION keep in mind what source material you're doing because I don't even think vivzie has picked up the bible once in her life.... And I say this as a drifter in the world who believes in reincarnation I don't really vibe with the athiest stereotypes however, I don't believe in most religion but more power to people that do get hope and love from their teachings and cultures.

She entirely missed the mark for several years, nearly a decade. Viv has had time and time again chance and opportunity to give a chance of storytelling with demons and what does she do? Adult Cartoon that has the demons scream 'FUCK SHIT DAMNIT DAMNIT LOOK IM SO HORNY AND SILLY AND WACKY WOAHH THE SCREEN IS CONSTANTLY MOVING YOU CAN NEVER HAVE A SECOND TO BREATH IN ANY AMOUNT OF WORLBUILDING OR SETTING BECAUSE FUCK. YOU.'--

I have said this time and time again- there is no substance or worth about Helluva Bosses or Hazbins writing, even without the show not being released because Amazon seems ashamed about it, I know it'll be a shitshow.

Honestly at this point I agree with the redesign community, take any character you used to like and rewrite them until it's unrecognizable from the original source material, let those fuckers in space fight alien pirates or hell take them out of the heaven and hell trope and just flip it on it's head entirely out of earth or wherever you want to set your story! I'm personally redesigning angel to be a slight aid to my addiction help via rewriting him into my murder mystery heheh while keeping the sexual abuse and recovery in mind because woah that shit happened to me too man !!!

I wish the best to any future writers, animators, programmers, lovers of animation or art, you can do what you put your mind and hands to! Spread more positivity and love then hate in this world please guys, this'll be the last time I pop in I promise I'm trying to get a better job and hopefully get accepted in a community college that i've been on the fence over trying to do more online coding ! The sky is the limit!<3

[izicodes]

Hiya! My name is Izzy-Loa, and a Jr Web Developer and today, I thought it would be a great idea to just share my own personal coding journey! I have answered a lot of asks in the past about how I recommend other people to start their coding studies, what websites to learn from and roadmaps etc. But one question I kept having to repeat myself answering is the "Okay how did you get started?" - it is completely my fault not writing this down properly~! (I did actually)

Anyhoo, I'll just speed through my journey, sharing what I learnt at what times and what I'm currently doing now! ✨

☆ Starting from Scratch

I started coding back in 2017 during the summer break when I was just 15 years old. At that time, I didn't even know what coding was! It was my dad who suggested that I learn HTML. I hesitated at first, thinking HTML was some "complex high-level programming language". Little did I know, it was just a markup language...

I started with HTML and then moved on to CSS during that summer. However, once school started in September, I set coding aside and forgot about it. The following year, 2018, I decided to give it another shot and relearned HTML and CSS. But again dropped it because of school work and upcoming exams!

☆ The Turning Point

Fast forward to 2020, a year that marked a turning point!. I started creating websites using HTML and CSS. I briefly played with JavaScript but decided to focus on mastering HTML and CSS.

In January 2021, I made a significant decision. I dropped out of school due to personal reasons and decided to fully commit to programming, plus getting my first remote job (non-Tech). From there, I gradually delved into JavaScript a lot more and even dabbled in Python along the way. My learning process was on and off, but I was making progress! Around this time I learnt Git and GitHub!

☆ The Apprenticeship

Around September/October time, I applied for an apprenticeship. My skill set included HTML, CSS, Python, and basic JavaScript. I got accepted and continued to learn Python, delving into C# and Java as well. It was a challenging but rewarding experience! Happily dropped Java towards the end!

At work, I also learned SQL, working with Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL. I even explored .NET Framework and ASP.NET. It was a lot to take in, but I embraced the learning process! The older developers at the workplace were super helpful and very experienced - felt as though they were happy to give me all their knowledge as best they could~!

☆ Expanding My Knowledge

During my apprenticeship, around October 2022, I decided to further expand my skills. I enrolled in a front-end bootcamp, where I revisited HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. I also learned jQuery, Node.js, npm, and even ventured into React. Though, due to not practising it enough, I forgotten React and Node.js~!

☆ My Ongoing Journey

Currently, I'm continuing to explore Python and experimenting with Lua. I'm also revisiting JavaScript, jQuery, and recently, I've started working with SCSS (Sass) to streamline my CSS development - I highly recommend people in Web Development to learn SCSS!! I love it so much!

Looking ahead, my learning wishlist includes TypeScript, React, Vue.js, Angular, and C++. However, I'm not rushing into learning everything at once. I'm taking my time to absorb each language and framework thoroughly.

In summary, it has been a continuous evolution, from HTML and CSS to SQL, .NET Framework, and various other languages and tools. I've faced challenges and taken LOTS of breaks, but each step has brought me closer to becoming a proficient developer. I want to be better! But slowly and in good time!

Hope this was somewhat helpful to other people and yeah, have a nice day/night!

⤷ ○ ♡ my shop ○ my twt ○ my youtube ○ pinned post ○ blog's navigation ♡ ○

[xiabablog]

Hey, what made you want to become a Front end dev?

Hiya,

TLDR: I like art & design + programming and Frontend Web Development allows me to exercise both~! 🐼💓

I love designing and building websites. I'm a creative person - in highschool I studied Art & Design, Graphics and Media. basically if getting into Medical School failed, I was going to go into Graphic Designing~!

But I dropped out in the last year, so I focus on programming (influenced by my dad of course) and I thought "What job combines being artistic with programming?" I googled it and the first one of the list was Frontend Web Development so I ran with that~!

Learnt HTML, CSS, JS and Python, applied for Software Development apprenticeship whilst doing a Frontend Dev bootcamp (free from the UK government) and here I am~!

Amongst my tech friends, I'm known for "designing pretty websites that may/may not be fully functional but at least the designs are cute"... I just asked them as I write this so I don't know how I feel about that-

That's all really 😅🙌🏾

[somethingelsecatchy]

Wandless Magic

HEED ME.

In Harry Potter facts there is a universal understanding that a wand is needed for magic unless you are super powerful with magic but this is FALSE.

I'm not even mentioning the games or lore in them either it is quite literally possible possible to use magic without a wand in this world even only using the books as reference.

HOWEVER because of the education system set in place this it becomes IMPOSSIBLE to use it AFTER.

Example:

A. HARRY MAKING THE GLASS DISAPPEAR IN THE PYTHON EXHIBIT

B. HARRY BLOWING UP HIS AUNT

C. RON MAKING IT SNOW

It is ENtiREly possible to use magic without a wands because CHILDREN DO IT.

My theory is the same that goes for education across the globe. I forget study name but there was something that involved a group of five year olds. The scientists that were studying this group wanted to see how genius people developed over time. Seems straight forward enough however at the AGE OF 5 ALL CHILDREN WERE AT GENIUS LEVEL. Over time (in the education system) these numbers dropped drastically.

I think that this is what wands do for the students in Hogwarts and Ilvermorny.

If you want to determine your ability to magic without a wand here is how I think of it.

The wand is a fork.

Using magic without a wand is like chop sticks.

You either learn it from a young age/learn it over time/ or are just not skilled in using them at all.

There's no shame in using a fork. A lot of people use forks. But there are a lot of people who don't or its not apart of their culture.

[your-local-squip-fanatic]

You know what, I have had zero motivation for writing, BMC is eating my brain, and figuring out what to do with DLAU is killing me. So I say screw it, I'm sharing some of my plans.

Lester's Connection to Commodus- This whole plotline is why I dread STL, Save the Light (No, I did not get it from SU, I forgot that game even existed. It's not even the finalized title). I STILL don't know how exactly to handle it. Basically, I wanted Lester to have SOME personal stake when it came to the emperors, even more than Eliza. So I came up with this: back in ancient times, Lester had an ancestor named Belenus that wandered Greece and, against the advice of his father, went to Rome. Angry at how the gods had been changed, he tried and failed to speak against it, and was sentenced to be a gladiator. Praying to Apollo every day for release, Belenus eventually got good enough that Marcus Aurelius thought about letting him free.

Then. Y'know. He died and Commodus became emperor, and we know that Commodus fought gladiators all the time. Eventually Belenus had to fight Commodus, and was unsurprisingly killed. With his dying breath, he cursed Commodus, saying that the last face he would see would see would be his own. That is, Belenus'. A thousand years later, guess who looks nearly exact to Belenus and has become Commodus' big target, just as important as Apollo?

At first, Lester obviously CANNOT hope to fight Commodus. He tries this, he gets his ass kicked. Again while defending the Waystation and would've been decapitated by the emperor if not for Apollo managing to reveal his godly form. In BMR, Lester's toughened up and out for blood after Jason's death (yea, he goes from sweet to murderous after the yacht infiltration. Buckle up boi) and can actually manage Commodus better until he gets stabbed IN THE DAMN LIVER AND IS HOLDING ON TO HIS THREAD FOR DEAR LIFE FOR APOLLO'S SAKE. That fight is one I really look forward to.

Admittedly yeah, kinda needless plotline with Belenus but STILL. I'm figuring things out, so not everything is final.

The Scene We Don't Talk About- You know it. I just mentioned it. Again, not everything in this post is final, take this with a grain of salt.

Jason's death is going to be a huge moment development wise for Lester too. As I said, in the aftermath Lester will become hellbent on killing Caligula- whether or not he gets to, idk yet, but I have a funny idea for if Lester does:

Caligula: I'm still alive! (gets killed by Lester)

Lester: Not anymore, you're not.

Yep. Lester changes DRASTICALLY after the yacht stuff. But funny enough, the whole sequence is one of those that I don't need to change much but I also have to change a lot of it. It's still very early in planning, but the idea right now is Lester eventually has to race over to boat twelve in order to save them, fails, endures the heart stabbing thing by Apollo (they share wounds if they're serious enough!), see Jason die, try to attack Caligula, and end up nearly dying fron pandai arrows to save Piper and Apollo. Lester's last conscious words to Apollo after three arrows in back and being drifted to safety by Tempest are: "You would've done it too."

Apollo's changing a bit, and Lester sees that. He's trying to help that change along the best he can and support Apollo after such a horrible event.

The Final Battle For Delphi: Apollo and Lester VS Python- Ohhh man. At first when making DLAU, I figured that I'd omit this as I didn't think I could fit Lester in the fight. But after careful planning, I realized I possibly could- but maaaan, it wasn't going to end well. Lester simply isn't built the same as Apollo by this point (he has his glowy gold eyes back by now! In Lester's body!!) and is reduced to a bloody, broken mess once we get to the part with Chaos. He fights hard beforehand, but Python is just WAY too much for him, plus, y'know, they're in a volcanic atmosphere or something?! (I need to re-read ToA soon, goodness.)

Of course, Apollo takes a hell of a beating too, but he's not the one on death's doorstep. As he's turning back into his golden godly form, he's weeping and DESPERATELY trying to heal Lester. Of course, because happy ending, Lester does survive by the skin of his teeth thanks to what healing Apollo could manage, though was hospitalized for a while. He later reunites with his demigod pals and shares a happy cry with Apollo once they see each other.

The ending will be much of the same as in canon ToA, but it ends with Lester finally going back to his parents, his family, and embracing his quirks about himself. The message from the ending is one that I think is too relevant to not share now, given what's happened.

Lester breaks the fourth wall a bit, telling the reader that everything that happened was indeed true. He reflects a bit on the insane adventure he had to go through to get a second shot at life, and tells us not to squander ours, since we're not as lucky to be given two chances- we get one, and that's final. A few words from him about accepting and loving yourself, stuff he wished he had before, and basically tells us to not be afraid to be ourselves and stand up for what we believe in, that no evil will persevere forever, and that ANYONE can make a difference. After all, without him, Apollo couldn't have made it back to Olympus.

And of course, his eternal words of wisdom that to this day I am so damn proud over: "Hope to see the sun rise."

There we go! There's just a few. If you're interested to hear about my other plans for scenes I'll change or add, don't be shy and ask!

[gingermintpepper]

Day 1: Apollo

Interpretation notes and trivia under the cut!

His interpretation for my work is based very much around the concept of his manifestation as the Radiant God of the String. Because of this, quite like Hecate, he’s triple-fold and occupies three major spaces; the string of Fate and therefore prophecy, the bowstring and therefore distance and destruction and the lyrestring and therefore music and order. He’s a somewhat melancholy figure all things considered - Fate and following Fate’s tennants is something that he struggled a lot with as a child and even now as a more mature deity, the only solution he’s truly found is to take things one day at a time. Very diligent and fastidious, he’s a hard worker and tends to put his everything into completing any task set before him which also tends to work to his disadvantage since he’s prone to becoming tunnel-visioned until he’s finished what he said he would finish. His family orchestrated his winter breaks because he had the nasty habit of working himself sick when he was still very young.

Apollo is generally represented by circles in my work - priests of Apollo will be marked with at least three circles on their face and usually wear triangular jewellry (typically earrings or necklace charms) to reflect the triple-nature of their god. His favoured colour is a rich, deep blue and while he typically wears elaborate eye paint, he rarely uses face powders. Wears gem-toned blues for his lips unless in mourning where he will leave himself unadorned and unpainted out of respect.

Some quick trivia: 

Was born identical to Artemis even though they were born (years) apart. Had brown hair, wolf’s ears and fangs and horns when he was a child but never manifested those features again after his penance for slaying Python. If he’s very stressed or angry, sometimes his fangs will show. The brown of his hair grew out to blond naturally as he developed and matured as a god.

Proficient in all instruments but has always especially preferred stringed instruments. Truly unmatched with a kithara but only uses it for special occasions and official meetings. Generally prefers his lyre for every day usage

Really good at sewing and braiding strings together due to the exercises he had to do while under the tutelage of the Moirai sisters. Can’t weave since Athena banned him from touching a loom but he does like watching her spin. The one time she caught him trying to replicate her patterns with a needle and thread, she complained to Zeus that he had broken his oath. He teases her about that even now.

Was the last of the Twelve to learn how to read and write because he hates letter systems and finds it too arbitrary. Prior to the collaboration that resulted in written letter systems, everyone was perfectly fine with remembering the important stuff and encoding the rest in artistic format such as tapestries, pottery, furniture and jewellry. Apollo himself has a truly formidable memory since he’s been composing and immortalising the events and histories of the world in song since he was very young. He finds written books very dull but Clio’s very insistent about written histories being important and convenient so reluctantly, he’s given permission for his songs and poems to be -gags- transcribed and written down.

Is only called Apollo by his parents, Artemis and Dionysus. Hermes rarely calls him by name in general and the others, including other siblings like Ares and Athena, have always called him Phoebus. Interestingly, Zeus usually calls him Phoebus but will call him Apollo when they are alone or when he’s being especially serious. Apollo is completely comfortable with either name but he does see Phoebus as a bit more formal than Apollo. (Despite his best efforts, both Calliope and Clio also still stubbornly call him Phoebus though he’s fairly sure it’s mostly because they know it bothers him.)