#i dropped the communist thought bc i wanted to just focus on getting to the end of the game (so i could play it again LMAO)

[mechawolfie]

i’m sorry this is going to be umm kind of disjointed my brain is like a hive of panicked bees

ok ok so basically my thoughts are “AAAAAAA FUCK FUCK FUCK WOW WOW WOW WOW HELL YEA” but to translate: i didn’t seriously get into videogames until VERY recently when i took an interest in worldbuilding & was curious abt the different ways one could present a fictional world, & i think videogames r just such a cool way to do that, & basically this game is my favorite thing ever. its just so intriguing!!!!

i’m not very politically versed so i can’t talk on that aspect but i will say that it’s a big reason why i love the game so much. like… just getting to talk to these characters and learn about their beliefs, how they see the world & how they’ve chosen to live in it etc etc etc??? brilliant amazing genius i love that shit SO MUCH. and like some ppl will think ‘oh i need to think of Every Single Aspect of my world & i need to show off Every Single Bit of it’ but what i love abt de’s worldbuilding is that you know about as much about everything as it’s residents do - which is very little (depending on who they are)! which is realistic! and just a very interesting way to present your world! i love it!!!!

then theres the ART. GOD. i haven’t seen the art book yet but man i cant wait to look bc this game is freaking Gorgeous. im not sure what the name of this style would be but it reminds me of things like transistor or dishonored. like it feels it takes insp from old art movements. & the fact that the game’s map is also stylized - how everything looks like a painting??? chefs kiss. i mean it made it kindof difficult to navigate at times but its sooo pretty so i dont even care. discovering a new part of the map felt like opening a christmas present like every time i thought i’d seen everything i realized there was a new place i didnt explore and i just. man. the church. THE CHURCH. god. going into that area for the first time was CHILLING, the atmosphere is soooo good its insane!! i kind of felt bad bringing the rave kids in bc that just haunting quiet.. the soft singing.. beautiful truly honestly beautiful

and the soundtrack is so perfect. it just. ok when ur walking out into rue de saint-ghislaine and u hear that horn come in??? there’s this feeling that’s like… it just says “this is home. this is all we have. time to keep living”. it’s nostalgic it’s kindof sad it’s accepting it’s fate. does that make any sense.

basically the art direction is just so good, everything comes together so well to create this very specific atmosphere. and it can change so swiftly but its a smooth change. im thinking abt the climax of the game - its so panicky so on edge (was LITERALLY shaking & crying then lmao 🙃), and then its just. over. but it feels natural. again, that feeling of “time to keep living”. what else can you do but that?

i think one reason everything flows so well is the narration? it kind of.. spreads things out, putting what’s happening into words. helps you process it better. or maybe i just have adhd & having things narrated helps me understand wtf is going on lmao

also ok. the characters. god. i think if i tried talking abt the characters this’ll get too long so abridged version: FUCK cops but harry is my pathetic little meow meow, im disappointed i havent seen more ppl get into who kim is as a person (bc theres SO MUCH to him!! i think he’s the most fleshed out character in this game honestly) but im glad we’ve all decided he is Definitely autistic, & i like that this game while having characters who are shit ppl/have shit takes (& doesn’t try to excuse them for it!!) they’re still human first & foremost. it rly just - again, the atmosphere. the vibes. this is a home. this is a world we’re getting a glimpse into. it just feels.. real. despite yknow. the pale.

oh my god the pale. the fucking pale. the insulindian phasmid. SHIVERS. i have to fucking stop. i haveto stop or this is just going to keep going oh my god im so sorry. but listen the pale is so cool & interesting right??? its so fucking c- oh my god

ok hold on 1 more thing. 1 thing i couldn’t get past: the fatphobia. u go this whole game where the bigoted language is obviously coming from the characters’ own biases, but w the fat characters it’s not just how the other characters talk abt them, it’s how they’re portrayed. does that make sense? anyway that honestly made me like the game less

and… ok thats all. i mean its not, but this is already long enough ahaha

HI OKAY so i know we've literally never spoken before but. PLEASE tell me your thoughts on disco elysium ive been going insane about it since i played it in january and i think my friends are tired of me infodumping about it lol

hi hello hihi. ok hold on I need a moment

[unstoppableforcce]

dark side

CHAPTER EIGHT: a slip

pairing: Javier Peña x reader

previous part | next part | masterlist

a/n: okay i had this queued to go up during my vacation but then it didn’t post (no surprise there lol) but it’s okay! bc i didn’t like it much anyways and this version is so much better now honestly (so tumblr saved me lol)

its still short bc I cut it in half so i can post this and simultaneously work on the next part !! maybe next part tomorrow night? I don’t want to get hopes up but maybe !! thanks for being so patient w me guys !!

It was a slip right?

The words repeated over and over again in his head and for minutes he just stood there with the phone in his hand, long after you had already ended the call, letting them repeat. They bounced around like an echo between his ears, hitting every inch of his head. It was the only thing he could focus on. 

But it was a slip, wasn’t it? A simple slip of the tongue. 

At least, that was what he tried to tell himself to steal even the tiniest bit of focus back. He had work to focus on, finding Christina to focus on... he had to hang up the phone and get on a plane. He had to focus on something other than you, and to do that, he had to tell himself that it was a slip and that it was meaningless. 

It was meaningless, like telling your waiter at a restaurant that they should enjoy their meal as well. Just a slip.

Meaningless.

And for the first few hours, that worked. It got him back on the plane, it got him thinking about getting Christina back and getting Jurado’s testimony. It got him back focusing on his work, prioritizing it over you like he was supposed to do. Work was supposed to come first, that was the whole basis for your relationship. 

This was just the first time it felt wrong... No, it was the first time he admitted it did. 

There were plenty of times that came before where his heart weighed heavy having to put you at arm’s distance to protect his work. That morning in the shower, as your hands cascaded with the hot water down his skin, your eyes just pleaded to help him, to alleviate the heavy stress... but he put work first. That night, after the Ambassador’s drink party, when he started asking you about work, putting his job before your’s and your loyalty, he put work first. The day he caught one of the god father’s and you paid the price, suffering in the shouting match delivered by Stechner while he kept his mouth shut about your arrangement, he put his work first. 

And it had felt wrong every time, but it was only very recently that he figured out why. 

It was because even though you ended whatever things were between the two of you before he left for Curaçao, he loved you. It was because now, even after fighting through the new pain of heartbreak inflicted by another, he loved you. 

It was because for the first time in his entire life, he loved someone and they said it back. For the first time, he wanted them to say it back. For the first time, there was no obligation, no sense of doing it because it was the right thing to do or because that was what was expected of you. For the first time, someone told them they loved him because they meant it, because you meant it. 

Even if it was just a meaningless slip. 

But who was he kidding? Putting work before his feelings for you, trying to pretend that it was just some meaningless slip... it just wouldn’t work. 

The problem was that he knew better. He knew you better.

Part of it was the creeping memories of his psychology degree from what felt like a whole lifetime ago, part of it was just the fact that he knew you too well. 

Slips weren’t meaningless and you were too careful for anything you did to be meaningless.

Slips came out when they were practiced phrases. Telling your waiter to enjoy their meal as well was a practiced phrase, maybe not meant for your waiter, but practiced on your tongue nonetheless. That’s why they came out, they were practiced.

And he heard almost all your phone calls.

You were practically living with him for a few weeks, he heard your phone calls even if he didn’t listen to them, and you never told anyone you loved them over the phone. So it couldn’t have been practiced in that way. The only way it could have been practiced was if you were thinking it, over and over again, the same way he was.

It didn’t matter that you were exhausted, that whatever was happening at work was weighing you down so far that you snapped and broke up with him... none of that mattered. Because a slip doesn’t put words in your mouth that you wouldn’t say naturally. 

It wasn’t meaningless. It couldn’t be, not with you. If it slipped from your lips, it was because you meant it. 

And he couldn’t get it out of his head, no matter how hard he tried or pretended he had. Work had to come first and all he could think about was you, the quick words playing over and over again in his head.

“Bye, love you”, “Bye, love you”, “Bye, love you”, “Bye, love you--

Fuck. He loved you and goddamn, maybe you loved him too.

And maybe none of it mattered because work had to come first. He had to find Christina, he had to focus.

As his plane slowed to a stop on the runway adjacent to the embassy, he quickly jumped up, grabbing his bag and moving to the door, ready to burst out the second they let him. He had his focus back for a minute and he needed to ride it as far as he could take it.

He just didn’t know that it would only take him a few steps onto the runway, finding you dressed in your street clothes, crossing over from the opposite direction with a file in your hand.

He froze on the spot, letting the gusts of wind that fought by dishevel his hair without second thought. You were all that he could see. 

He never saw you in your street clothes, or at least, he hadn’t since the first night he met you. It was just pant suits and sometimes nothing at all. But now, you were just wearing jeans and a tee shirt, your hair blowing in the same blustering wind that threatened to push him over as he stood caught, like a deer in the headlights.  

Immediately, his brain started up again, accelerated, like the beating of his heart. 

He loved you. You loved him. He loved you. You loved him—

He couldn’t do this right now. He had to focus. 

Shaking his head in a way that surely looked like he was trying to save his hair from the wind, he tried to shake the thoughts from his head. And by the looks of it, you were fighting a similar onslaught of thoughts. 

But by the time you crossed the runway to meet his frozen form, you had picked the line of focus you were going in on and it wasn’t the slip you had made over the phone. With your stern face and file in hand, it was clearly work that you had chosen as well.

“I found her.” You shouted slightly to counteract the loud wind that whipped around the two of you. 

It wasn’t as easy a fight for him to overcome now that you were in front of him though. As you passed the file to him, he couldn’t help but spend an extra half-second mesmerized by you and your ability to do your job. He had called you what? a few hours ago and you had already found her? Even if being a blonde white girl in Colombia was like wearing a tracker, it was still impressive work that you had done for him. 

Work you had done because he asked... No. He stopped himself quickly. This was about finding Christina, not the fact that you had done it for him. 

He flipped open the file, not hesitating on the fact that it was a CIA file but fighting the wind to keep the papers from flying away. “Where is she?”

“FARC has her in a jungle stronghold.” You explained, stepping up closer to him to point at the picture paper-clipped to the bottom of the file.

It was definitely her, filthy and restrained, newspaper in her hand and the barrel of a gun pressed up under her chin. This was his fault. All of it. Getting her involved and now you... he couldn’t shake this feeling that something was going to go terribly wrong. 

But he also couldn’t linger on just a feeling. This was his job, he had to get her back. 

“You’ve got coordinates?” He asked, glancing up from the file’s top edge to find your stare directed down to your feet. Immediately, his heart dropped a similar distance. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s... look, it’s complicated.” You huffed, settling your hands up onto your hips as you brought your eyes back up to meet his. “You’ll need an army to get her back, the Ambassador won’t give it to you and I can’t either...”

He flipped a page in the file almost subconsciously, glancing down from your hesitant frame to find an all too familiar name scribbled at the top in red pen and your handwriting.

The Castaño Brothers.

“They’re CIA sponsored communist killers, two of Stechner’s contacts but I can’t get you a meeting because—”

“Fuck.” He huffed, shutting the file as it all caught up to him.

The interruption caught you off guard though, your face twisting slightly as you asked back to him, “what?”

This was what he hated about being in Colombia nowadays. It was his history, it was the blood that coated his hands, ten layers deep. 

He couldn’t stop himself from wondering if you knew or not. He got your file the first day he was truly introduced to you, but did you get his? You had to, right? Your whole job was to spy on him, how were you supposed to do that if Stechner didn’t fill you in on exactly what he was? 

He wasn’t the hero the embassy hailed him to be. He was just a man who wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty to bring down Escobar. 

Did you know? Did it matter if you did? 

The more he thought about it, the more he realized those two questions had very different answers. 

You had to have known. If it wasn’t in his file, you had to have heard from everyone else around the Embassy. Hell, Stechner probably went out of his way to fill you in on his dirty past the day he assigned you to him. 

And that first night? You had to have seen it in him when you agreed to take him home with you. 

The guilt in his eyes... the pain that he wore just beneath the surface... the weight that sat so heavily on his shoulders...It was everything he saw in you, everything that drew him to you in the first place. The familiarity of everything about you.

Did it matter if you did know?

Looking at you now, as the woman he loved, he wanted to say yes because he wanted to be a good man in your eyes, he wanted to be a man worthy of your love but if he was being honest with himself... it didn’t matter at all. 

He had seen the scars on your body. He had hear rumors around the embassy as to why your file was as redacted as it was. 

There was talk about explosions and spying and foreign governments and... and maybe none of it was true but he saw the same guilt in your eyes that he saw in his own when he looked in the mirror. He saw you trying to do good with every girl being trafficked that you tried to hunt down the same way he tried to do good by bringing down the godfather’s of Cali. He saw a familiar weight resting on your shoulders as he massaged the sore kinks from your muscles laying in bed at night. 

It didn’t matter what either of you had done, you were both in the same boat and he knew that from the first second he laid eyes on you. 

You had a dark side just like he did, and he didn’t care about yours so why would his matter to you?

“I know them.” He admitted carefully, looking up to meet your stare and gauge your reaction. And when you held it back with equally as careful, he felt just enough ease to continue. “I can get their help.”

When your head gave a quick but approving nod, he felt the smallest release of tension in his shoulders. He had your trust, he could relax in that respect. The rest of the tension held though, because now he had to walk head first into the dark past he swore to himself that he left behind as he came back to Colombia. 

And he had to bring you with him. 

“Where do we find them?”

—

“What do pretty girls like you eat? Hmm? The picada here is the shit, I can get you a plate.”

“Oh, I’m on a strict diet of lots of coffee and not taking shit from people.”

Any fear he had about bringing you along to meet with Don Berna had flown out the open windows of the restaurant the instant you sat down next to him at the table, taking up a space equal to him as you spread your legs and you leaned back.

Your quick wit, your smart mouth... he had to stop and wonder for a second why he had even been afraid in the first place. 

Narcos may not have been your game, but you weren’t new to the world of terrible yet powerful men. If anything, you had been dealing with them for longer than you had even been with the CIA. And you were good at it. 

Your smart mouth was enough to bring a hefty chuckle to Berna’s chest as he ate, enough to shake the table slightly and even more when he let his fist fall to the wood to grab the bottle in front of him. 

“I like her, Peña.” He minded as he washed down his food with a swig from the bottle, shifting his disgusting stare off of you and back to the suited DEA hero sitting next to you. “You should bring her every time.”

Every time? Like this was some weekly regular meeting? God, Javi forgot just how much he hated this. 

“Can you help us or not?” He quickly moved to refocus the conversation, leaning forward just enough to level his strict stare with the large man and settle his elbows on the table.

“Can I help you find your barbie doll? Easily.” Berna spoke with an nonchalant shrug as he reached for his drink again and downed a solid swig to wash out the barely chewed food that his mouth was stuffed with. But once the shrug fell and the food was swallowed, his head tilted much more playfully than either you or Javi could take comfort in. “Can you afford my price... maybe not so easy.”

You glanced to Javi in the same second he glanced to you, but the words fell from your lips first. “What’s the price?”

“A promise.”

The two of you didn’t need to verbally urge him to continue, your furrowed brows took care of that for you. Berna took another few bites, then another drink, then sat back with his napkin in hand and continued.

“One day, my name will pop up on the DEA’s to-do list, and all you have to promise me you’ll do, is give me a phone call.”

You scoffed at that, just loud enough to get the few guards who waited a few feet away to turn and look at the obvious show of disrespect. Thankfully, Berna just seemed amused by it, laughing into his meal. But Javi didn’t have the guts you had to back your brazenness, not as he began considering what that really meant. 

“A get out of jail free card?” He repeated back carefully in English as he drew his arms back to cross over his chest, leaving you leaned forward on the table. 

But again, Berna just shrugged, “Exactly.”

You glanced back to Javi, maybe in a look of commiseration or maybe to try and warn him against what you had to be sure he was going to do. Whatever look it was, he didn’t hold your stare long enough to decipher it. He didn’t have the luxury to let you get into his head right now. 

Because maybe you’d try to change his mind and he couldn’t afford that. 

He needed to get Christina back and you had made it clear on the runway that this was your only chance to get to FARC in the jungle and get her out safely. He knew you were too good at your job to not have found an easier way if one existed so that left this as his only option. Whatever Don Berna wanted, he was going to get and he knew it. 

That was why he looked so damn smug as he pestered with and easy, “Agent Peña?”

It was a promise to break the law, but what was his defense? Tell him ‘no, I know I did that for you in the past but not anymore’? It just wouldn’t work. Berna knew he was desperate because he was desperate. 

He liked to think that you’d do the same if you were in his shoes, he liked to think that you wouldn’t judge him for it. 

And as he looked back to meet the stare you passed him that he had carefully avoided, he found you already looking to the table in front of you, like you knew his answer before he had even come close to admitting it aloud. 

Either because you knew him that well or because that was what you would do and you couldn’t blame him for doing the same. 

“Fine. You have a deal.”

“Then lets go kill some communists.” Berna bellowed out loudly, earning a few chuckles from his men who stood around.

And you couldn’t help but laugh at that too. Not because killing communists was something you relished in, quite the opposite actually. 

You were surely laughing because of that day you spent in the jungle with him. The day you told him you didn’t come to Colombia for drugs or communism. 

Yet here you were. 

If he had the heart to laugh, maybe he would have mustered on as well at the irony of it all. Instead, he stood up with you and everything quickly got started. 

Before the two of you knew it, you were both dressed in green fatigues, loaded into the helicopter and headed off towards the jungle as you continued to fight off Berna’s comments.

“So, if you’re not DEA, what part of the gringo government can handle you?” He mocked playfully, practically licking his lips as he watched you lean forward to fix your feet in your boots.

“What makes you think anyone can handle me?” You easily retorted, growing a smirk on Javi’s face that he struggled to hide.

Berna was equally as amused, chuckling with each and every smart remark you mustered.

And it just kept going.

“Did he find you in a brothel? You know how he likes his brothels and hell, I know plenty of men who would pay for someone like you.”

Javi sent him a warning glare but you weren’t deterred.

“There isn’t enough money in the Narco world.”

“You’d be surprised, sweetheart.”

Eventually, you just rolled your eyes and switched off your headset and about a half hour later, the three of you ended up deep in the jungle, unloading night vision goggles for the Castano’s with ease.

You looked oddly comfortable in the green fatigues, strapping on a bullet proof vest, and loading your weapon.

He knew it was because underneath the sullen spy exterior you put on for work, and the sexy smirk you wore as you straddled him in his bedroom, you were a soldier. That’s what you had been before all of this.

And for the briefest of seconds, he couldn’t help but wonder what it would have been like to meet you in that phase of your life.

Without Colombia weighing down on his shoulders, when he was still just a simple DEA agent back in the states, would he have stumbled into you in a bar while you were on leave? Would it have been the sense of a dark familiarity in your bones that drew him to you on one of his darkest nights, haunted by the phantom bloodied hand as he sipped his whiskey, or would it have been your buoyant smile and the sway of your hips?

Would you love him all the same? Would your unscarred bodies feel as right as they did now, slotted against each other as your lips danced over his?

Was he glad that he met you now, because it gave him the chance to know you at all, or did he want you without all of Colombia, without the war and the work and Stechner and your job and his...

Did he want you as a respite from the darkness that haunted him at night or did he want you for you?

The longer he stared at you across the table while you prepared for the incursion, the more he realized that it had started out as a simple reprieve from work and the stress that came with it but that wasn’t what it was anymore. Whether you broke up with him or not. He loved you. Not for your work, though your competency certainly was a turn on, but just for you.

And it was getting easier and easier to think about in his head, becoming more and more practiced. He loved you for you.

For your smile when you woke up and rolled over to kiss his forehead first thing before you got up every morning.

For the sanity he felt when he was wrapped in your arms, no matter what was going on outside.

For everything he was when he was with you that he wasn’t when he was without you. Soft, human, unburdened... a good man...

Colombia had nothing to do with it. It was just you and him. 

“Thank you.” He said pretty silently, trying to keep it just between the two of you as the sun began to set around you, casting shadows over your face while you assembled the M4 in front of you with ease.

His words stopped you though, your hands freezing as your stare switched back up to him. ��For this?”

He nodded, “you don’t have to be out here for this, you don’t have to be putting your life on the line for me—“

“Javi, don’t...”

“I’m serious.” He fought as he positioned his gun in the back of his pants. “Thank you.”

“You don’t have to thank me.”

“You’re doing this for me—“

“Yeah, and if I thought for a second you wouldn’t do the same for me, maybe I’d hesitate but...” you sighed, shaking your head as your attention dropped back to your work, your hands still moving with practiced ease. “Just... you don’t have to thank me.”

Someone shouted something from across the small camp, signalling that everyone was ready to go and you quickly snapped the rest of the gun together and strapped it over your vested chest. But before you moved to head out into the jungle clearing and towards the helicopter, he caught your arm and pulled you towards him, as much as he could with the two of you wearing your bulky bullet proof vests. 

He lowered his voice as he brought his head closer to yours in spite of your protest, “thank you.”

And that was when you reached your hand back around his head and caught him completely off guard, bringing your lips to his for a brief kiss. A brief kiss that burned the same way your words had in his mind as the phone call from hours ago ended. With the simple touch of your lips to his, you were confirming everything you had when you ended the phone call, everything that had been occupying his thoughts the whole day.

“You don’t have to thank me.” You sighed one last time before turning away and following the soldiers and Castano brothers to the helicopter. And he heard the unspoken words that follow it. 

You didn’t want him to thank you because you loved him and you knew he loved you, you knew he’d do the same for you. 

He didn’t need to guess if it was a slip or not anymore, that didn’t matter.

He knew you loved him. And fuck, he really loved you.

Now, he had a war zone to head into and a woman to rescue. And with you by his side, things didn’t feel so dark anymore. 

tags: 

@the-feckless-wonder  @arrowswithwifi  @ms-dont-care @leo-moon @tiffdawg @readsalot73 @way-too-addicted-to-anime @keeper0fthestars @adikaofmandalore @opheliaelysia @magneticbucky @videogamesandpoorlifechoices​ @larakasser @littlevodika @mandoren @mistermiraclee @rogueonestan @kaetastic @littlemissthistle @maytheglitter(open)

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HOLDING A BIG DEAL

What they'll say is that they don't realize how incompetent they are. Fred Brooks wrote about it in 1974, and the number one thing they have in common is the extreme difficulty of making them work on anything they don't want to bet the company on Betamax. There may be more pain in your own company, but it is true that there are good ideas waiting to be discovered right under our noses. Add up all the evidence of VCs' behavior, and the headline read, I think we get away with being nasty to.1 Between the drag of legacy code, the overhead of doing development in such a large organization divided into groups in this way, and how do you do research on? For example, the rate at which you have to select 20 players.2 There may be more pain in your own company, like Wozniak did. If something that seems like work to other people doesn't seem like work to other people doesn't seem like work to you, that's something you're well suited for. Till recently we weren't clear in our own minds about the source of the problem is that humans weren't meant to work in groups of several hundred thousand dollars.

Venture investors, however, prefer to fund startups that won't leave. The text of each chapter was just some advice about solving them. So if you want to encourage startups. Will the future ever catch up with it? The only people who eat what humans were actually designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise. Google, and the latter because the whole culture cares about design will be sailing upwind. You need to cut and fill to emphasize the central thread, like an illustrator inking over a pencil drawing.3 They don't know what's hard, or what they're capable of.4

The fact that investors are so much influenced by other investors' opinions means you always start out in something of a hole. It was just like. There may be more pain in your own company, but it feels young because it's full of rich people, it has few nerds.5 You should only write about things you've thought about a lot. I think what a lot of money. The professors who taught history could be required to do original math, the professors who taught history could be required to do original math, the professors who taught math could be required to write scholarly articles about history, but what they want even more is to imitate sophisticated buyers, and they can cause surprising situations. I'm going to try to give the startups the money, though. As source of startups it's negligible compared to Seattle, number 15. The future is pretty long. I feel as if I have by now learned to understand everything publishers mean to tell me about a new startup he was involved with.6 To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called essais. There has been a lot of into considerable.

If all you want to do. For example, jam, bacon, pickles, and cheese, which are among the most pleasing of foods, were all originally intended as methods of preservation. VCs. What they'll say is that they want a language that's easy to program in now. I think we actually applied for a patent on it. What do hackers want? I saw what appeared to be a successful language, I mean the structure of business doesn't reflect it. Systematic is the last word I'd use to describe the way lions seem in the wild must feel better to a wide-ranging predator like a lion. The stronger your will, the less it would take to get new ones to move there. Work for another company before starting their own.

People are forced to use it. An office environment is supposed to suggest efficiency. I began that essay, and even now I find it especially useful to ask why about things that seem wrong. If people have to choose between the just-do-it model is fast, whether you're Dan Bricklin writing the prototype of VisiCalc in a weekend, when no one else is there.7 In fact we only spent about $2 million in our entire existence. We didn't know that, so we were pretty excited when we figured out what seemed to us the optimal way of doing shopping searches. Since speed doesn't matter in most of the calories. He's not just being modest. All that extra sheet metal on the AMC Matador wasn't added by the workers. West coast investors aren't bolder because they're irresponsible cowboys, or because the good weather makes them optimistic.8

Notes

When VCs asked us how long it would not be incorporated, but they can't afford to. There's comparatively little from it, and as we think we're so useless that in Silicon Valley.

But that means is we hope visited mostly by hackers.

As a result a lot is premature scaling—founders take a job to get endless grief for classifying religion as a consulting company is their project.

Users judge a site for Harvard undergrads. A larger set of good startups that has a sharp drop in utility. SpamCop��new things start with consumer electronics and to a VC means they'll look bad if that means service companies are run like Communist states.

But arguably that is exactly my point. Jones, A P successfully defended itself by allowing the unionization of its own mind. 5, they were taken back in July 1997 was 1.

Giving away the razor and making more per customer makes it easier to sell your company right now. People seeking some single thing called wisdom have been the general manager of the corpora.

The best investors rarely care who else is investing, but simply because he had simply passed on an IBM laptop.

Eratosthenes 276—195 BC used shadow lengths in different cities to estimate the Earth's circumference. I spent some time trying to tell how serious potential investors and instead focus on users, however, by encouraging people to work than stay home with them. Trevor Blackwell, who probably knows more about hunter gatherers I strongly recommend Elizabeth Marshall Thomas's The Harmless People and The CRM114 Discriminator. Wave is a well-known byproduct of oligopoly.

[lookwhatilost]

breadtube types love to think that every proud boy kind of dude was, at some point, 1 good conversation away from leaning left at some angle, fully ignoring the elephant in the room – their dad's failing small business they feel entitled to inherit bc they're NOT working class.

to me, the big question is why are the breadtubers so afraid of drawing a line in the sand? why are they afraid of the possibility (inevitability) of irreconcilable material interests? have they never worked fast food or retail? this shit is so obvious. nazis are pretty much all rich. and if they're not "cash rich" they're property rich, which actually is not a lesser kind of rich. they stand to inherit something, a business or some rentals etc. if they're not part of haute bourgeoisie they're part of petit bourgeoisie which, it turns out, is still the bourgeoisie.

idk why i expose myself to this garbage. i hate anything even marginally sympathetic to these pieces of shit. if a white person whose only difference from them is sexual orientation & gender can turn out like me, it's pretty clear what the problem is so fuck any angle on how they're actually innocent uwu. ultimately i find it so offensive & fash-sympathetic (thus fascist) to say only thing separating me from them is ideology. yeah okay w/e we're all cis people etc, but they dnt work for a living, and if you ignore that shit you legitimize their framing of themselves as normal. if you rly want to pull people in that minuscule population of fence-riders leftwards in a meaningful sense you'd make them confront the fact that their class is condemned to die by history & their only hope is to betray it. if they can't agree to that, what use are they to us?

the lack of instrumental thinking is epidemic in rhetoric-obsessed communities. what utility comes from delivering another slur-vomiting cracker parroting chan memes to The Left? we have to constantly police the mf? we hold his hand until he predictably becomes an "ex-sjw"? sometimes (usually) the people who are engaged and on the border enough that they "might" have "potentially" become reluctant communists are best used as fertilizer for the gardens that provide employment to the people we serve who never ever considered being goddamn nazis.

if you insist on climbing all the way down into hell to rescue a few of the demons, you simply cannot come back to earth pretending you brought us angels, much less that you have not experienced, yourself, why they wanted to be in hell. it's silly vestigial christian cultural bullshit to see any kind of value in rescuing a fascist from themself. in practical reality, you are simply forcing naturally decent people to put up with indefinite burden of a whiny shit whose life helps working ppl less than their death. happy to agree that "privilege" analysis provides a decent framework for priority. all else being equal a more marginalized person makes for a "more revolutionary" leader, etc. this is not reconcilable with the opinion that we should recruit reluctant defectors from enemy classes as active members, much less leaders, of our orgs. idk where the pathological desire to win the enemy over comes from but it is absolutely suicidal. regardless of the organization in question, any people who joined it reluctantly should be paying their dues, not defining the agenda

you could prob convince Logic/Reason Leftists of practical immutability of material interest if you had data on nazis being wealthy but of course they trust nazis' self-reporting & nazis always do stonetoss shit linking their own lawyer-son asses to off-color construction workers. and i’m using using "nazi" ~liberally~ in this offhand opinion, bc to me, any settler-colonial fascist is a nazi, and anything that would make them "more like", idk, an italian neo-fascist, is mostly a reminder of how bad the italians failed at their settler-colonial aims, so who gives a fuck.

thanks for reading or at least tolerating the existence of this rambling stream of consciousness. i would have written a real essay with sources and arguments for everyone's edification, but i have neither the capacity for focus to write one nor the desire to publish it.

(for reference, here is a commonly-recommended video that exemplifies the empathetic zoological economically-agnostic oh-shucks-he's-just-a-sad-normal-white-boy-he-is narrative of how a young man in north america becomes a literal brownshirt nazi)

note specifically where the narrator talks abt how "far right thought leaders" may not "see themselves as" or "intend to become" such "far right thought leaders" but are ~merely~ shills for consumer products "incidentally" popular among "alt-righters". also key to this video's reconstruction of online fascist indoctrination is "politics as a set of affects, not a set of beliefs", as thought "affects" of online nazis like stefan molyneux, blaire white, etc are universally disarming, that they wouldn't seem "off" to "normal" ppl. this necessarily defines "normal" people as people in a position to ~discover blatantly white nationalist arguments w unblemished curiosity, people w no awareness of the existence of white nationalism per se - i.e. it accepts as ~normal those "white people w only white friends". the creator also describes a feedback loop wherein grifters become "radicalized" by audiences, chasing engagement etc. this is bullshit, obviously. they're not children. they're grown-ass fascists full of superficial hatred w economic bases, who should be in re-education camps at best.

at several points in nominally(?) anti-fascist narrative of "gabe" narrator describes communities where "minorities" are welcomed insofar as they avoid "identity politics". i get maybe some people can't relate to psychology of fascists but such description can only normalize it. this description necessarily frames addressing of issues of e.g. representation that affect such minorities within such interest communities as something that genuinely, in some sense, diverges from the status quo. as though at some point their marginalization was uncontroversial.

like clockwork, this angle on "alt-right" takes as axiom that communities from which "alt-right" recruits were 1st non-ideological, that fascists represent incursion of ideology &, by implication, so do ppl they oppose. political battle encroaches on something magically apolitical.

later, the creator says 

nazis act "apolitical", dropping hints to divide "our community" from "the left" 

"the left" says "you have a nazi problem, y'all" 

nazis say "jfc have you seen this? they're calling us all nazis for liking thing" 

 how stupid do you think ppl are, dude

from this perspective, communities of consumer interest have some kind of linear basis, origin, development, etc. problem here is that they absolutely dnt. they're continuous & amorphous. also this is obv abt gamers/gg & plenty of us who "played games" had no hate for zoë quinn