#i have zero ability to be succinct and to the point

[theresattrpgforthat]

hey what are some good zero-prep for players and good for one shot systems?

Theme: Zero-Prep Characters / One-Shots

Hello friend! I have some really fun games here that I think just produce straight-up Vibes for you to check out, although I also recommend checking out my Games To Run With Strangers recommendation post for some more great options.

Android Outbreak, by Munuxu.

Android Outbreak is a quick, skill/luck-based TTRPG that will have players taking the roles of escaped androids racing and battling their way towards an evac point on the other side of a megacity that is raised high in the sky above a burning miasma that's taken over the planet. 

Character creation is sleek, requiring one choice and a a roll or two to determine what your strengths are and how you are unique. Your goal is simple too - you just are trying to get out and get away. The game page itself is part of the rolling mechanics, with the lines on the page used to help measure at what distance you are throwing your dice onto the table. The GM is responsible for creating androids to pursue you as well as other obstacles such as weather events or events obstructing the streets. If you want a game that combines throwing skill with random chance, I recommend Android Outbreak.

Operation Final Monarch, by poorstudents.

A one-page espionage TTRPG in an alternate history 1940's. Assassinate Aleksander Von Korte on his opulent airship, The Watchful Luftrahmer.

Operation Final Monarch is a one-page Tabletop RPG for 4-6 players. One player will act as the GM, providing obstacles, portraying passengers, and describing the Watchful Luftrahmer. You play as Infiltrators, spies from the fallen countries around Arstarkan. Your final mission is to kill Aleksander Von Korte.

When situations get risky you gamble with danger and can always push your luck to try to succeed in any situation. Be careful not to roll a 1 though, as a devastating consequence will soon follow. Use can also use your leverage over the passengers of the Watchful Luftrahmer, asking them questions they don’t want to answer or enacting your special abilities.

Operation Final Monarch provides you with playbooks, which is one of the easiest ways to make the game little to no-prep for the players when they sit down to play. It also gives you a very specific goal - that of assassinating an important political figure while aboard a blimp. The setting is semi-historical, giving the players a frame of reference, but spices it up with elements like Machine Priests and steampunk technology.

Mechanically, the game uses a gambling mechanic that involves the GM rolling 1 dice publicly and 1 dice secretly. Players have to judge whether or not they can beat the total difficulty, and decide whether to Push or Call. Pushing gives you an extra dice but worsens the outcome should you fail, while Calling leaves the outcome up to chance, but minimizes consequences. One of those consequences may be revealing a character secret, which makes your character vulnerable, but also provides other characters the opportunity to help. I think the succinct way the game allows you to dive into character backstory as you are playing the game makes this a prime candidate for one-shot play.

CBR+PNK Core, by Emanoel Melo.

In CBR+PNK (Cyber plus Punk) you play as a team of RUNNERS—mercs, criminals, activists living on the edge and running in the shadows of a gritty, ultraviolent world.

In each game we play an entire new cast of characters making their LAST RUN.

CBR+PNK runs on a super-condensed version of John Harper's Forged in the Dark system, specially tweaked for action-packed ONE-SHOT sessions.

CBR+PNK is well known for its friendliness for one-shots, stripping away a lot of the mechanics that give Forged in the Dark games weight and length. The game is packaged into pamphlets, which means you can hand out only what is relevant to each person at the table: the GM pamphlet for the person running the game, and the character pamphlets to folks who will be playing characters. There are additional supplements that you can add to the game to alter or edit your experience.

The player pamphlet has two columns where you enter all your information, one column for character creation instructions, and a number columns with help and player instructions that you can use as a reference when you come across the relevant rule in play. The GM pamphlet takes a little bit more time to familiarize yourself with, and I think this game will be a lot easier to pick up if you’ve already played other Forged in the Dark games. That being said, this game has won a lot of awards and recognition for how concise it is, and I think it’s definitely worth checking out.

MotherFucker Stole My Baby, by Brabblemark Press.

MOTHERFUCKER STOLE MY BABY! is a quick-play roleplaying game inspired by Cradle 2 the Grave and other action films. 

You're a jewel thief - and you and your crew just nabbed a bag of black diamonds for a mysterious employer. You hand the jewels over to your fence for appraisal and kick back for a well-deserved party. Then comes the unexpected double whammy…

Gangsters robbed your fence and swiped the diamonds - and your only child has been kidnapped by the billionaire that you stole the diamonds from! Can you retrieve the diamonds and make the exchange - and how many bodies will litter the streets on your path to victory?

You can only wonder, as you stand in the rain and scream to the sky… MOTHERFUCKER STOLE MY BABY!

The genre and tone of this game are immediately understandable, and it shouldn’t take any time at all to communicate to your players exactly what’s going on in this game. Character creation is very simple - one of my favourite parts is that you circle three items from a list of possessions on your character sheet, and also that your character sheet looks like a Wanted poster.

The game itself is styled after Lasers and Feelings, with a single number representing your strengths, and your successes depending on whether you roll above or below the number. The game also comes with some d6 tables to help the GM craft scenes as you play. There’s also some very succinct but very helpful pieces of GM advice in the GM section, that I think will help you deliver a short but sweet experience for your players.

The Fall of House Prosh, by NotWriting.

The Emperor Hakkan VI has died without an heir. The Imperial throne world Lecatom Rex is empty. The previous Stewards of the throne, House Kotar, are leaving in shame. Their rivals, House Prosh, have ascended the other noble houses as new Stewards of the throne and the Imperial palace. 

Humanity lives on a thousand worlds. Star Witches fold spacetime to navigate the cosmos. Noble houses settle conflicts through duels. Prophecies and portents guide politics and religion. And now noble houses whisper of war and secession.

A thousand years of peace are in jeopardy.

The Fall of House Prosh is a sci-fi tabletop RPG about noble tragedy and melodrama inspired by stories like Dune, Shakespearian plays, and Game of Thrones. Players take on the role of characters within 3 factions: the powerful House Prosh, the maligned House Kotar, and the servants of both these houses. 

The Fall of House Prosh is a narrative guide through a story of tragedy and politics, where only one house can survive. You cannot decide who falls; you can only decide what that fall looks like. Players can choose to embody the members of House Prosh, House Kotar, or the servants of the two, with at least one character from each faction required to play the game. Each faction has their own special moves, half of which can be employed in the Day phase and half which can be employed in the Night phase. Over the course of the game, you add tokens to each houses’ tragedy pool; those tokens are then spent to carry out moves against each-other.

If you want a game about tragedy and epic stories of loss, you want The Fall of House Prosh.

The Family Rat, by V2S Games.

ONE OF YOU IS THE HEAD OF AN ORGANIZED CRIME FAMILY.

The rest of you are 'friends' or members of the family, who will be forced to decide where your loyalties lie. Who can you trust? Who'll be left standing? How will the family survive?

The Family Rat is a Tale of 21 and a hack of The King's Poisoner. It's a one-page tabletop roleplaying game for 3–8 players, which can be played with a deck of regular or virtual playing cards OR two ten-sided dice (2d10).

The Family Rat uses blackjack hands to navigate a story that carries the themes and vibes of the Godfather movies, setting up one player as the The Boss and the rest of the players as members of the Family. I think this game could be classified as GM-less, because even though the Boss has a different roll from the rest of the family, they’re still a solo character, which I think is an interesting format in which to couch this story.

Over the course of three acts, the family members will decide to make requests, moves, and suffer the consequences of their actions. The Boss enters each round with a significant advantage with their Blackjack Hand (having one card hidden from the others, and winning ties), and uses special mechanics at the end of the final act to dictate the actions they’ve taken for the good of the family.

This is a game with a winner and a loser, but I feel like it oozes with the same charms as the original movie. None of you are great people, and all of you have chances to pursue personal goals and leverage favours or debts against each-other, but at the end of the day, you’re depending on the heart of the cards to decide who comes out on top.

24XX - The Deep, by Chaosmeister

ONE DAY THE OCEANS DROWNED THE WORLD. Humanity survived below the waves. The sea birthed leviathans. Your crew owns a dingy old sub. Odd jobs, salvage, leviathan hunting and a few merc gigs keep you afloat and breathing.

I’ve played 24XX games a couple of times and all of the ones I’ve played before are definitely one-shot friendly and require minimal prep. Players choose a character class or type, and get everything associated with it, along with a few key choices like gear or background to flesh them out a little bit. All in all it can take as few as 5 minutes before you start play. The games also usually come with a bunch of roll-tables that give the Game Master interesting encounters, obstacles and goals without having to do a lot of prep. You can also easily condense an adventure into a couple of hours, making these ideal low-prep one shots.

What I like about The Deep is the setting. It’s an excellent example of how you can bake in unique setting elements in just a few roll-tables - for example, are you working for a genetic research & development group or a mining corporation? Does your submarine have giant claw markings from various dives, or a mural of a sea god that has importance to you? If you have a repelling electric net, what kinds of animals are you repelling? These kinds of details infuse the setting with flavour, which I think can really inspire and entice the people at your table.

Other Games I’ve Talked About Before…

Something Is Wrong With The Chickens, by Elliot Davis.

Faewater, by A Smouldering Lighthouse.

The Children of Saturn, by Dan John Crowler.

Subway Runners, by Gem Room Games.

Gay Crime: Sapphics Against Capital, by Evey Lockhart.

Spirit Line, by Jhryne.

Cryptid TV, by yahahn.

Lady Blackbird, by John Harper.

[starlightandetherealshadows]

Hello! Feel free to ignore this, but I wanted to give my two cents about the MC's initial personality while playing. Now, this may be blunt, but at first, I was incredibly disappointed. Usually, I tend to play stoic/quiet MCs who don't lash or speak out, and it seemed to be quite the opposite to the distrusting and stoic mc in the game. However, I was thinking extremely hard about this, and I actually get why the MC was so outspoken, especially when V literally pointed a gun at them. Stoic and stubborn MC, from what I saw in the prologue, could easily be more nonchalant *before* the alien invasion, but that, obviously, changed. When C found them and brought them to the hideout, I didn't take into account that MC was in a vulnerable position, and I only focused on the part that MC hadn't interacted with another person in years. So, yeah, of course, MC may be overwhelmed, but their not gonna let people (V *cough*) walk all over them. I guess the thing was that I was so used to stoic MCs in IFs just standing on the sidelines and observing, but that is obviously not that kind of IF. The thing that had gotten to me the most, however, was the second-hand embarrassment of MC actually talking back to V after he blatantly insults them because I could never😭 I guess what I am trying to say is that even though I was seriously taken aback, none of the characters (including MC) are not gonna be 2-dimensional (as you have stated multiple times), and it has definitely grown on me, even if the MC was a little more of a fire-cracker than I expected. I am really looking forward to seeing where you take this story, and I will absolutely be eating it up because even if I might have to be tossing my phone across the room occasionally (bc my second-hand embarrassment is so easily triggered😭😭), I cannot get enough of your writing and characters!! I hope this made sense because I was just rambling about my take on if you are willing to make the MC a little more stoic or have some mute choices, which I am not against, but at the end of the day, I will still be reading the fuck out of Memento Mori! Have a good day/night!!! MWAH💋

Hi sunshine!

I appreciate your super-thorough analysis of both MC's personality and also your initial/developing reaction to it!

Just wanna offer some perspective on why I'm writing MC the way I am (you've already nailed a lot of the points but this is gonna be a succinct explanation from my head hehe)

MC is ultimately a fully fledged character in Memento Mori. While writing, I have about six different MC's in my head, each with distinct personalities, motives, and reactions to events. As I'm writing Ch. 2 in particular, I'm using these characters to influence the choices available and the stat checks necessary for certain actions. MC was never going to be a self insert. I love a good self insert sometimes, but it doesn't work with this if!

What makes characters feel realistic and multi-dimensional to me is their ability to break out of their different archetypes. We all know the ones like The Mean Girl or the Shy Kid or the Comic Relief. We can use your Stoic!MC example. Do we as humans act the same exact way every single day with every single event and interaction? No, we don't. Because we are complex, muli-faceted individuals that can have conflicting thought and actions, or opinions. What makes a character feel flat is when they are only given like 3 personality traits and stick to those regardless of what happens around them in the story.

So in Memento Mori, your Stoic!MC will have moments where they're outspoken and opinionated. The Charming!MC will lose their cool and lash out rather than smooth talk. The Friendly!MC will snap at someone without thinking. We aren't perfect, neither is MC, and I think that adds dimension to what can easily be a very blank slate kind of character. This isn't exclusive to MC, either! Veronica/Vincent will be nice to you sometimes for seemingly no reason. Zero will have moments where he is not okay and rejects your comfort when he reads it as pity. Cecelia/Chase will not always be the bouncy comic relief that uses humor to make everyone smile.

To add insult to MC's injury, like you mentioned in your ask, they are suffering from extreme amounts of PTSD and trauma. They have lost everyone and everything, they're a young adult living in complete isolation for two years. They're starving, they're injured, they hate themselves and being alive. It's going to take them a while to feel like themselves. In the span of one day, they've been nearly killed by a monster, then they're covered in blood guts and sweat when they meet C, then C brings them to meet 6 other people (including two aliens) and now they're going on this extensive journey with complete strangers, while that very morning they were contemplating ending it all. it's a lot.

By the time MC meets V, they are already at their limit of dealing with bullshit so V pointing a gun at them was never going to fly. V insulting them was a no-go either. Now, in the future, MC can ignore V more often because they'll be less on edge than when they were all first introduced. Once they have time to process, then they can react what is most familiar and comfortable for them. It will take time.

I laughed when you called MC a firecracker! I'd say they're more...unpredictable as a character when they're under high stress. As time goes on, they'll adjust and mellow out in some ways, but right now? MC has had ENOUGH with feeling like shit all the time.

I'm really glad you were a bit embarrassed by MC talking back to V because that was my goal AHDSEWLKMFRLK it's supposed to feel a bit uncomfortable. It's MC trying to clap back on someone when they have lost most of their social skills. It made ME cringe while writing it. Like oof MC, just ignore them???!!!

I'll definitely be adding some more options to be a bit more stoic or selectively mute in chapter 2, and as for chapter 1, I think more options to stay silent while talking to Cecelia/Chase or when they're speaking with Delphine/V could be good too. I'll see how it flows!

You'll see at the beginning of Ch.2 that MC already feels a tiny bit better. Nothing much but at least they aren't alone anymore, and they have a hot shower and some real food. So small wins for MC!

I think that's all I wanted to say for now!!! Thank you again for your message, my friend!!! I'm glad you're liking my writing and my characters, it does mean a lot to have your support!! <3

[pigeontheoneandonly]

Would you be willing to expound on the Kaidan/Anders similarity? I’d never really considered it and would love to hear your ideas 💛

I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve started this post over the years, and abandoned it unfinished when it got out of hand.  But I’ll try my best to be succinct.

At its core, the reason why I find Kaidan and Anders to be similar is that both are centrally driven by profound compassion, and preyed upon by the consequence of profound compassion, which is an absolute intolerance of injustice.

Let’s dispense with the superficial details of their arcs.  Both are outcasts in their societies due to their unique capabilities, feared, loathed, and used as tools in the same breath.  Both have chosen to turn those abilities towards the service of others.  When we meet Anders in Awakening, he is literally trying to survive, to hide from the templars and maintain his own freedom.  When we meet Kaidan in ME1, he is metaphorically trying to survive, to keep his head down and be a “normal” marine, in hopes this will let him escape the stigma of being a biotic.  Anders declares to you “this is a place of healing”; Kaidan confides that he won’t use his abilities against sentient beings.  Both see their feelings harden and their willingness to accept more extreme methods expand as their enemy’s power grows. 

Even their childhoods are similar.  Anders was obviously taken as a child and imprisoned in a mage tower, but I’m not sure many people realize BAaT was founded when Kaidan was nine years old.  Though it’s mostly assumed Kaidan was taken to BAaT as a teenager, since he’s in the first known exposure group, there’s a case that he was actually taken much younger.  Regardless, both characters were strongly marked by their early experiences.  Anders escapes to the Wardens because the tower is so awful it makes that option look good.  Kaidan escapes to the military because it’s one of the few ways he can actually make use of his abilities, even if he has no illusions this will allow him to escape surveillance (“might as well get a paycheck for it”). 

In both their romances, they view their partner with a sense of wonder, and as a grounding point, making them feel safe and like they have somewhere to belong.  There is a sense that they are extending a trust that’s been buried a long time, which makes it all the worse if their partner then chooses to leave them later.  But both will stand by their principles even if it costs them their partner. 

Anders’ anger has been examined by the fandom at length, but we say relatively little about Kaidan’s anger and the ways it changes and hardens him, on Horizon, and especially through the arc of ME3.  He clearly understands and believes that the reapers are sentient beings and even expresses curiosity about them in ME1, but by the end of ME3, he’s fully willing to wipe them out because of the evil acts they’ve committed.  It takes a real act of effort for him to step back and try to understand Shepard’s role in Cerberus and reconcile that with what he knows about Cerberus.  His sense of injustice is twisting his perspective every bit as much as did Anders’, but it’s somewhat easier for us as players to sympathize with someone fighting against an ancient race of machines vs. someone facing down a religious institution that has far more parallels to real life situations.

(I also believe that if Kaidan were Subject Zero, the comparison would be that much more obvious.  Imagine that the side mission in ME1 where you rescue the hostage, Chairman Burns, instead becomes Subject Zero!Kaidan’s recruitment mission.  Imagine a Kaidan that much more deeply impacted by trauma, who has made it his life’s work to help other biotics.  Starts to sound a bit familiar, right?)

[a-lil-perspective]

Handle With Care

A/N: Okay I know y’all are probably sick of the repetitive Crosshair X Reader works lately. But I promise it will all make sense soon. First and foremost, I’m working to dig deep in establishing some key points while the narratives move forward. Aiming for the full effect here. (Also, keep in mind that I’m reviving ‘Verd’ika’). The fic takes place sometime after ‘Reticle’, for reference. Sick Crosshair. Soft Crosshair. (I know, basically all of my works are that way) I will defend that moody sniper because in actuality, he is a very soft boi who not-so-secretly just wants to be loved and coddled, and that is the hill I’m dying on. As always, feedback is greatly appreciated. [Warnings: None] @shadow-hyder @starflyer-104 @thegoodbatch @obiorbenkenobi @kriffingunlucky @karpasia @halzore @everyonehasanindividuality (Tag List is open:))

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Have you ever sneezed while your face is sealed airtight inside a bucket of plastoid?

News flash: It’s nearly as annoying as having a Yalbec male try to eat you alive—well, mate with you. Same difference, the sniper of Clone Force 99 will eventually come to find out.

The sneezing makes the air stagnant and it’s obnoxious, yet Crosshair is uncontrollably going on his fourteenth one in the short span of five minutes.

That’s completely normal.

The forebode of a creeping illness intensifies as the day progresses, and Crosshair finds himself growing more perturbed, fluctuating between hot and cold like an oscillating pendulum, and ticking like a time bomb waiting to go off, because of it. Tech’s face, scrunched with concern after having come at Crosshair with a thermal scanner, informs the sniper of a budding fever. But he’s not sick. Not at all.

He’s not sick, until your irresistible amiability convinces him that it’s okay to be, and that promptly earns him a spot snuggled in your lap, his stiff neck resting atop your thighs with only a slight begrudge to follow. His breaths are somewhat labored at the tightness seizing his chest. There’s a sharp pain running behind his eyes, and the feeling of suffocation is palpable—there’s so much pressure along his facial structure, his sinuses are burning. Yet he still manages to enjoy the way you’re running your fingers through the short fibers of his hair, nails scratching lightly along his temples and eliciting a stuffy hum of contentment from the miserable sniper.

Despite his unfortunate state, you’re having a rather lovely time. There’s no denying; you experience the swell of your already nurturing heart and an exhilarating thrill at the prospect of taking care of others—of Crosshair, specifically; ever the complex individual. You’ve long since established your solicit of such assistance, to which Crosshair slowly found himself relenting to the idea of as time paved the way. But the actual application of moments were rare.

It made the sniper slightly uncomfortable; the way his initial sneeze earlier that day had you immediately zeroing in on him with an intensity he believed only his sniper eyes were capable of. “I’m onto you”, your archly tone had soon informed, while a smile displaying nothing but affection immediately followed. Your height of perception rivaled his own, and extensive time spent with you reminded Crosshair that it was foolhardy to even attempt a facade, at this point. All it took was a beckoning of your index finger for the sniper to succumb to your care.

It’s every Clone’s most inward desire, really: to want, to crave the extended offer of a wholesome company that’s found beyond fellow Clone brethren. It’s but a dream. To take a beautiful soul by the hand and lead them past the doors of mass duplication—and in turn be lead—before traveling a ways until they each ascend the staircase of individuality; a spiraled one, snaking around itself yet still managing to differentiate. A Clone wants to usher you onto the same ship as them, wishes you to travel along the exact journey they’re on. It’s a never ending one, until it’s a short lived one. It surpasses beyond the surface level, transcending the artifacts of scars littering the planes of their battle-worn skin. It grants you a passage through the ancient cave of their emotions, where each broken piece you find along the way presents another opportunity for restitution, however minuscule. To say it’s a journey is only half of the intel.

Only half, but it’s progress for the sniper Crosshair. The thought worms it’s way past his sickly haze and warms him more than the herbal tea you steeped and promptly ordered him to indulge. He can’t exactly pay the same type of homage to the taste however, as he finds himself reflexively wrinkling his nose in disgust with each sip. The muted liquid didn’t taste near as good as one of his oldest companions that is Corellian Whiskey, in which he’s certain one long swig of will immediately restore his health to optimum performance.

“I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way,” you let him down with pragmatism and a chuckle. “You need something that’s going to help you get better, not get you tipsy.”

You ignore his rising justifications, taking the empty mug that he downed through a swirl of complaints and placing it on the small stand beside the cot before opening the drawer to sift through the contents in search of the standby supply of anti-inflammatories. A sound of disappointment elicits as you turn up empty, and you gingerly begin to shift Crosshair off your lap in order to exit the room in continuing the search.

“I’ll be right back,” you promise gently, however, his fervent resistance halts any further movement.

“So this is it... you’re just gonna leave me here, sick and dying?”

The sight of Crosshair’s perceived indignation is beyond amusing to you. His voice is faint and the words are drawn out in attempt at gaining sympathy over your apparent ‘inhumane’ treatment to the frail sniper. You’re in the middle of convincing him of his long life ahead and encouraging him to drop the theatrics when goggled eyes peer in from the doorway.

“Need anything in here?” Tech’s oh-so-helpful self inquires. You note that there’s a thinly veiled mischievous ring to his question. Realizing there’s no negotiating with the over-exaggerating sniper, you’re thankful for Tech’s intercession, unbeknownst to him.

“Yes, actually; anti-inflammatories and some antihistamines, if you’ve got them? I’ve got a clingy, feverish assassin in my lap who I’m trying to convince isn’t dying from a cold.”

“I’m not clingy!” The sniper’s hoarse whine permeated, eliciting a snort from you that failed to overpower another round of his sneezing fit.

Tech’s eyes sparkled with mirth in mirroring yours, and he beamed knowingly. Words seemed to play at the tip of his tongue but he appeared to think better of it, instead responding with a succinct nod of his head before promptly making a retrieval.

It took seventeen seconds and approximately ten sneezes before Tech returned to the scene of Crosshair’s frustrated state now manifested as various obscenities. The engineer handed you the bottles of medication, and the whimsical glint returned once again. He backed out of the room slowly and with deliberation while keeping his eyes trained on the sniper, before addressing his older brother.

“Oh, by the way Crosshair: I’ve recorded the sound of your rather undignified whining; prepare for blackmail—” the pillow suddenly and aggressively sailing over your head towards the fleeing engineer had you ducking and trying not to develop your own state of wheezing from the laughter that ensued.

“TECH! I’m gonna kick your ass!” The raspy threat fell on deaf ears, for the cheeky youngest brother was long gone. Crosshair was left in the company of both your quietude and incessant coughing once again.

“If you don’t cough up a lung, first,” you address him in concern.

Crosshair’s eyes met the frown tugging your features. The cool pads of your fingers absently traced the line-work of reticle surrounding his right eye. The gesture bestowed a sense of comfort, and Crosshair allowed his contentment to echo in the space between. He reached up to capture your fingers in his own. The radiating heat from his increasingly flushed face was a stark contrast against your mild body temperature.

“...I feel terrible,” he allows himself the admission. It’s a work in progress: Crosshair’s understanding that he can truly be authentically honest in such company—a good kind of honest. Vulnerable, even. More communicative. You’re constantly testing his mettle and his ability to emote, and you manage to bring the sniper to his knees each time; though not out of defeat, not at all. You stroke his hair and that smile, it burns right through him. In all honesty, Crosshair would find a way to malinger nearly every day if it meant getting to be taken care of like... this. He confesses that it’s... different. It’s... nice—very nice. A rarity, but one Crosshair found himself to be enjoying a little bit more with each budding opportunity.

“I know,” you soothe. “Rest, ner cyare ram’ser.”

His fond expression at your doting soon donns a coat of revelation; an afterthought. “Actually, I think just a good smooch will do the trick for me, Doctor—best medicine there is,” he convinces, however weakly.

You snort incredulously. “You’d know this from experience? And for the last time, I’m no Doctor—you go around saying that and I’ll have some of the best Clone medics in the GAR greeting me with trivia, or something.” You briefly acknowledge the way Crosshair has conferred upon you the title of ‘Doctor’ ever since you patched up a nasty gash of his some time ago, and you find sudden hilarity in the picturesque scenario of having Clone Trooper Kix, profound medic of the 501st whom you’ve met a handful of times, suddenly taking a predilection to you because he thinks you’re some prestigious civvie medic capable of wrangling in even the Bad Batch.

Oh how that couldn’t be farther from the truth—the quartet of super soldiers hardly adhere to your advice or sound reason on a good day. You’ll be the first to admit: you have no control over those rowdy men.

The sniper shrugs, rolling his shoulders before tentatively returning to the comfort of your lap and sprawling out. He inhales deeply, and smoothly continues. “In theory, it’s the best medicine there is. So maybe we should, you know, test that out—”

Crosshair melted against the spontaneous velvet of hungry lips. In that moment, neither of you actually paid any mind to his sniffles or the adenoidal lilt of his voice that was now resonating. He tastes exactly as you remember; you’ve had a few previous engagements. Though few and far between, they leave you certainly not forgetful, and Crosshair is a man to relish in the sight of you imprinting your affection on him. The flight to blissful paradise is over before you know it as you retract and consider it a victory over the way Crosshair nearly whines at your absence.

“That’s all you get, ram’ser—just a taste for now to get you to shut your yap and rest.”

Crosshair regards you with as much indignation as he can muster. “You’re a cruel woman.”

You deflect with a smirk and assertion. “Yet here you are, coming back for more.”

“Because I can never get enough,” he defends.

“But you feel somewhat better at least, don’t you? Best medicine there is,” you smugly remind the ill sniper.

Crosshair’s eyelids grew heavy laden as he focused on the hot smolder benevolently spreading through his veins like a blessing; an antidote that is your delicious affection and strong medication. It’s beyond welcoming, and Crosshair can’t decipher whether the rising heat was from the fever, or your intoxicating taste, or both. While the sniper wasn’t absolute, he came to the fierce deduction that it definitely had something to do with you, and suddenly his head was spinning.

“Yeah... Verd... you taste way better than the Whiskey,” Crosshair slurred with realization while in his delirious state, barely above a murmur as he nestled his head further into your lap and Maker, drowsiness was forcefully threatening to claim him already and the medications had barely begun to take effect. Your serene embrace deserved utmost commending for rivaling Wrecker’s, who’s only other arms Crosshair ever felt secure within—prior to you.

Your brows arch as a playful smile materializes. “Verd?” You questioningly test the syllable on your tongue.

Crosshair manages a conspiratorial smirk through his thickening fog of exhaustion. “Yeah... ‘Verd’. You know... Verd’ika? It’s a... new nickname for you—the shortened version,” he struggles to explain—well, ramble is more like it—he’s uncharacteristically rambling at this point, and you absently wonder if Tech and his impish tendencies are just around the corner still recording the latest developments for future leverage.

“You’re adorable when you’re like this,” you endearingly point out. Slightly goading though, you realize, as Crosshair’s head abruptly twists to better regard you with nothing short of perceived offense. His pride appears to have momentarily overpowered his cold in favor of salvaging his dignity.

“I’m a sniper,” he fiercely explains. “I’m not adorable.”

“No, of course not,” you smoothly placate after smothering a laugh. His newfound nickname for you once again surfaces from your sea of thoughts. You pursue your lips in contemplation. “Verd... I like it.”

Crosshair smirks approvingly. “Can’t wait to hear all the nicknames you have for me, Darlin.”

Of course he would say that. Crosshair’s not dying from a cold, but he is dying to hear the mellifluous vocalization of all the different names you’ve stored up for him while finally in the midst of love making.

Good thing patience is his strong suit.

A textured palm lovingly rests against the expanse of his forehead while his fatigued fingers card through your hair before coming to a standstill. In the production of quietude, sniffles, and unspoken devotion, your eyes flutter shut as you lean down to gently bond your forehead with his own as his exhaustion finally establishes itself in the form of light snoring.

“Another time,” you hum assuredly.

[fortunatelychaoticphantom]

What is your opinion on the portrayal of bloodbending vs that of energybending in atla? It might be a stretch but I think because energybending is solely used by Aang, it is not thought of as "evil" as the way bloodbending is.

That might be the most perfectly succinct way to describe the difference between the two bending forms that I have ever seen.

A part of the fact that Aang does nothing to gain the ability to energybend and instead it is simply bestowed upon him at the last second as a cop-out to making a choice, is that this technique, its cost and its consequences are not at all discussed in any form. In “The Puppetmaster” we got an entire episode dedicated to the way water can be harvested from practically anywhere, including the human body, and what it means, with the disturbing visuals of dead Fire Lilies and crumbled sucked-dry trees to drive the point home

and this comes as an extension to the already established manipulation of water in plants that we saw in “The Swamp” and the creative water sources in “The Runaway”. In “The Old Masters” and “Avatar Aang” we get, like, what? a combined 30 seconds of explanation of how energybending works? only it’s more of an inspirational quote than an actual explanation... Honestly, we still don’t know how this works or why it works and why is Aang able to preform this technique in the first place.

Considering the horror narrative of Hama’s story and the atrocities that she committed*, it’s obvious why bloodbending was framed in such a dark and heavy light when it was presented. The fact that is was never touched again except to be used when Katara was at her ���darkest” in “The Southern Raiders”, shows what the creators think about this ability. It’s ridiculous to think that in thousands of years of history not a single waterbender besides Hama has ever bloodbent**, or that there is no existing traditions, discussions about it’s possible use in healing, or even taboos about this subject in Water Tribe cultures. But, anyway, the writers just tossed this ability aside and declared it “forbidden” in LoK, so that kids will know just how bad bad bad this bending form is.

Energy bending, on the other hand, never got this treatment, even though it is absolutely horrifying???? and lacking any redeeming quality that I can find like with using bloodbending for healing??? They didn’t bother to go into the depths of horror that is energybending in AtLA, but boy oh boy did they try to in LoK. But instead of actually talking about energybending they did a pretty sinister thing (in my opinion), that feels like it was specifically made so as not to taint the purity of the technique and its wielder, and just copy-pasted the implications of energybending onto bloodbending.

LoK’s first season actually tried to touch on the pain and devastation of what it means to be stripped away from your bending abilities. And even though it was far from perfect and never fully explored or resolved, at the very least they showed us that side. We see how drained and sad that pro-bending player (don’t remember his name) was after losing his bending, we see how heartbreaking Lin’s power-stripping was and what a sacrifice she had to make to ensure that the last airbenders in the world will not lose their abilities, we see how broken Korra is after losing her own bending, even though she still has airbending, and the very very much implied suicidal thoughts that it brought to her. We understand that taking someone’s bending has gravitas, has deep emotional implications. But... we can’t talk about energybending in a bad way, right? So...

HEY KIDS! Did you think ebergybending was a random ability that did whatever the plot needed it to do with no plausible reasoning or explanation? Well! From the people who brought you the Magic of the Pointy Rock, we re-introduce you to bloodbending!! But now! It can take your bending away! For some reason! We don’t know why! It just does!

**Bryke at some point, probably**

So beside shifting the entire discussion from one technique to another, even though only one of them actually does the thing we are talking about, they went so far as to make sure we don’t suspect for a second that what we see is actually energybending, showing Amon/Noatak always positioned behind the person he strips, using only one hand on the forehead

instead of Aang’s position in front of the person, with two hands, one on the forehead and one on the chest (don’t even get me started on what a horrible ending this shit was. I swear if I see one more literal deus ex machina in this franchise I’m gonna scream! oh wait, this is just season 1...)

(Sorry for the low quality of photos. I don’t have LoK for obvious reasons so I had to screenshot these from youtube)

So, in summation, yeah you’re absolutely right. Energybending is specifically and methodically portrayed in a positive way, even when it shouldn’t be, especially in light of and in contrast to bloodbending, a form that gets far too many beatings and more than it deserves, for reasons that I don’t understand at best and I don’t think I want to understand at worst (the fact that this is a Katara-centric ability and her lack of statues in LoK, its connection to Katara’s very much existing brutal and belligerent tendencies that are continually ignored and swept aside for the “dream girl” image, the connection between bloodbending and anti zutara rethoric in tsr... this list isn’t pretty)

----------

* I still don’t understand how Hama’s victims were alive. She kidnapped just one person each month, but the cave was full of people. Did she feed them? cleaned their potty buckets? like what was the point?? to make them live through the pain that she had to live through as a prisoner? how is this sustainable for one old lady? this makes zero sense and drives me crazy to this day. There should have only been one living person, the most recent that was kidnapped, and just skeletons around them. That would have been more logical. And it’s not like skeletons weren’t shown on the show... sorry, I’m rambling (and haven’t seen the episode in years, I hope I remember it correctly).

** Toph’s metal bending is a little different, since obviously metal had to be invented at a certain point so no one could attempt to bend it before that. Human bodies on the other hand have been more than available and full of water since the dawn of humanity, and I doubt there hasn’t been a single waterbender powerful enough who could sense the presence of water in people and, I don’t know, tried to talk to someone about it? also, waterbenders are healers?? they actively know the human body, not just coincidentally? how did no one talk about this before?? and regarding metalbending again, It’s not entirely unreasonable that Toph really was the first to bend metal, since of course there has to be a first in everything. But honestly if you ask me it’s a little... weird. But this is very much off-topic.

[aahsoka]

So having been on tiktok for a bit I wanna talk a little about it.

What I like

It’s actually rather entertaining to scroll through up to 30 second videos one after the other. Sometimes the humor falls flat or it’s not your taste, but the algorithim is quite good at recommending the kind of content you will like.

I joined right when there was a big trend going around about sharing your culture, and soon after a Blackout trend where non-Black creators stopped posting for a day & spread/supported videos by Black creators. So I ended up with a fairly diverse fyp or “for you page”. It also quickly gathered that I am bisexual, so I get plenty of lgbt+ content. There’s some art mixed in there, some cosplay, some historical costuming/seamstresses, lots of avatar jokes lately, musical theatre content, fashion, girls in bikinis on rollerskates (in outer space), commentary on political issues, body positivity, all the kinds of stuff I like. To get a feed that caters to your interests you just have to watch & like videos you’re interested in & eventually it gets a feel for what you’ll watch and what you won’t.

Theres a trend where people say which ‘side’ of tiktok they’re on and I get ‘science side of tumblr’ flashbacks but I’ve mostly avoided the “straight” and conservative sides of tiktok. I would be considered a part of “woke”, “alt” (as in alternative) and lgbt+ tiktok (there are separate ones for each letter of the acronym). Possibly also “theatre” and “cosplay” tiktok. These categories are nebulous and you’re usually part of multiple communities; its just as arbitray as ‘science side of tumblr’ was.

The format reminds me of snapchat a little, and I love to talk to myself on video & post dumb thirst traps for my friends (none of which I’m attracted to so idk what my goal is there) and make stupid jokes. So this app is kinda perfect for my attention seeking side & hyperactive tendencies. Its very easy to consume on a short attention span, though not as easy as vine was.

Being in quarantine, its a way for a lot of people to engage in hobbies that involve community. Cosplay is pretty popular, as its a fun way to show off a costume & dress up & have fun without having to attend a convention. I enjoy the way lip synced audios can be used to emulate the character someone is dressed as; that’s something you couldn’t really do unless you were really good at impressions. Its a nice succinct way to show the process of creating a cosplay as well.

Those who enjoy theatre, but cannot perform in shows at this time, are able to create mini-monologues & sketches as well as sing parts of their favorite songs. Its an avenue through which to perform without putting anyone at risk of the virus. It’s also an easy way to show off your talents without having to go through the audition process & actually get cast in a show as a prominent enough role that someone will notice it.

It’s a convenient format for discourse and educational videos. Nice, short, easily digestible tidbits that stay in your mind. This extremely catchy song, for example: “Black neighborhoods are overpoliced, so of course they have higher rates of crime, and white perpetrators are undercharged, so of course they have lower rates of crime. And all of those stupid stats you keep using are operating off a small sample size. So, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up”.

As well as other videos where people take the time to explain historical events, satirize racist arguments to demonstrate why they are wrong, talk about prevalent tropes in movies, teach a few signs in ASL, share facts about their culture, etc, etc. I have found there are quite a lot of people there from unique and fairly unknown cultures and backgrounds- and this is a place where they’re able to share their culture & existence with people all over the world. There are a thousand different viewpoints. Their videos are doing far more for diverse representation than any other platform, I’d argue, as everyone is extremely visible on the app. (‘Their’ as in the creators, not the app itself).

I also have enjoyed coming across new artists on the app. It’s really fun to watch the process they go through, as most art videos deal with the whole creation of a piece. It’s inspiring. I have also come across a painter who’s work I’m in love with, and a woman who makes and sells the CUTEST ceramic mugs, and I need to purchase some stuff from them both.

Now onto the bad:

Unfortunately, the app doesn’t have much in the way of a filtering or warning system. I talked about that tiktok of the kids coming across human remains? That was just on people’s fyp. Just popped up. No warning. No reason for it to still be up. Traumatizing.

You can click on a video and say ‘not interested’ (I do this to literally every video I get where some girl is thirsting after kylo ren 🤮..... like I want the star wars videos just not THOSE videos). However, it doesn’t seem to know exactly why you weren’t interested, because I still get those videos from time to time. There’s no content filter where I can blacklist the kylo ren or any other hashtag.

There’s some very shitty content. There are racist conservatives. Misogynistic teen white boys. Really weird thirst traps. Videos where people lip sync to something with a straight face and tag it with #acting. Harmful body image trends. I thankfully stay very clear of this, but this kind of content makes me worry for the minors on the app. The one’s who don’t have enough of a concept of self yet to realize they don’t need to be able to do the newest pointless beauty trend to be beautiful, to realize it’s ok for them to be gay, to realize how predatory some adults can be, etc etc.

It is extremely easy to come across minors on the app who don’t look like teens. One time I went to a girl’s page and it said she was FIFTEEN. I’m usually good at guessing ages but something about this app messes that up. I wish there was a way to separate people under 18 and adults. Where I don’t have minor’s thirst traps popping up on my fyp. Where pedophiles don’t get a chance to curate that fyp intentionally. If anyone reading this has kids, I highly recommend they make their tiktok private or only viewable to friends.

Just like any site, there are plenty of bigots. Lots of racist comments. Plenty of transphobia. Any hatred you’ve seen elsewhere, of course it exists on tiktok. I have actually zero clue if you can report people & if it works. Most people seem to send a video commentary to their haters or duet a video of a racist pointing out their racism. I’ve heard of creators blocking people, however. I remember a tiktok of a Black woman who’s video somehow went fairly viral in Poland and now she gets a lot of racist comments from this large group of random racisf Polish followers she has and its extremely time consuming to block them all, as there’s no mass block feature.

The rumors about what works with the algorithm and doesn’t abound. I’ve heard well lit videos get more views. Many people suspect they have been shadowbanned for speaking out about current events. TikTok will remove the audio from videos sometimes if they deem it controversial enough. Most of us know they were criticized recently for intentionally keeping Black creator’s videos from being seen (a catalyst for the Blackout, actually). Or you may also recall when it was criticized for widely removing lgbt+ content. Those creators are fighting to be seen the same amount as straight cis white creators are allowed to be seen with no effort.

The effects some trends could have on teen girls. So many of them are already so uncomfortable in their own skin simply because of societal standards, but the absolutely meaningless challenges people come up with on tiktok make it so much worse. One trend was based around whether your finger touched your lips when you put it in your nose. Or if you could get your clasped hands around the back of your legs and over your butt (if they get passed, you have a flat ass, if they get stuck, its big). These completely arbitrary signifiers of the things you need to have in order to be pretty, are far more ridiculous that anything I have seen yet in my life. I worry about little girls taking these ideas to heart. There is a very kind body positive community on the app & I hope more people can find that.

There’s also that thing where they steal your data. Like most apps. But apparently they got a lot more invasive than usual, so I would look into it before making an account; if you want to do that.

I think the apps users can be great & its a pretty intuitive set up. It certainly deserves its popularity solely as a creative form of social media. That being said, its owners are so so insidious & do the worst things. Just like all other social media, its controlled by the worst kind of people. Who can never figure out how to effectively get rid of nazis or keep kids safe from adult content.

These are my less serious gripes with the app:

1) Lip syncing

When people lip sync and don’t do any kind of skit, joke, etc, just look as if they’re saying what someone else said; I hate that. I have to go back and find the original tiktok so I can like it instead. You literally did nothing interesting by ripping off someones audio and moving your lips along to it. So many people on this app are creative and so many others lack any semblance of creativity.

Also people are too easily impressed by lip syncing to kinda-fast songs. I lip synced to like....10 seconds of the devil went down to georgia and two people praised my lip syncing abilities. Like, I can also sing and talk fast, out loud, isn’t that more impressive? more skillful? The fiddle playing in that song is impressive, not the fact I can lip sync ‘the devil went down to georgia, he was lookin for a soul to steal, he was in a bind, cause he was way behind.’ Have you ever seen someone play Johnny’s fiddle solo????? It’s insane!!!

Rather than see someone lip sync to the verse in Stressed Out 2x faster than normal (which is, extremely simple and the song was overplayed and ingrained into our collective consciousness) and go WOW what about someone.....doing the verse out loud. You can litterally just mouth random words and look like you’re saying the right ones. It’s driving me crazy lmao. I’m set to become a God of tiktok because I have a repertoire of fast songs and rap verses memorized. It’s not even an uncommon skill to speak or sing quickly, people literally make rap music for a living! Listen to it maybe.

2) “Acting”

I am begging you to stop making me sit through those horrible POVs. I cannot take another girl not quite fake crying towards the camera as she lip syncs the words from a song that apply to the random situation she decided she was in. I cannot take another boy who thinks its sexy to stare into a camera and smirk in every single situation he creates.

Back to lip syncing, making facial expressions along to words isn’t really acting. Try saying the words out loud perhaps? The inflection you use with your lines is a pretty big part of acting. Like you can lip sync all you want, just stop tagging it with #acting.

3) Comedic timing, or lack thereof

You don’t need the entire intro to sit there looking at the camera waiting until the first line starts and you can lip sync to the part that’s the joke. You could cut off at least 15 seconds. Brevity is the soul of wit.

When your joke involves both reading text on screen and listening to the song for the punchline, if it isn’t done prefectly, its so difficult to follow. I can’t read a paragraph in 5 seconds. Paraphrase.

4) self deprecating artist audio

the audio thats like ‘this wont get views’ ‘I suck’ ‘you probably won’t see this anyway’ LOVE YOURSELF

It sucks when people dont enagage with your art but it sucks worse when your value in yourself and you art is based solely on receiving that validation. Please find a healthy medium.

Also you’re asking for pity, and you don’t want that. You want people who genuinely love your art for what it is.

5) editing videos is really hard how do you make such cool & smooth transitions????

please help me I don’t understand

Finally

here’s my account if you’re interested

[mintycanoodles]

mmmmmmaybe a Cupcake Wars au where the Graduation Kiss never happened and Bitty and Jack went their separate ways never able to shake the feeling they missed out on something big and maybe neither of them really get over it but what can you do but waste countless sleepless nights thinking about what if’s??

so a handful of years down the road Bitty has his bakery and Jack is the darling of the Falconers but is a walking talking PR disaster who never really grew out of the hockey robot thing. so.

The Falconers are having some sort of Thing and get involved with Cupcake Wars to promote it. And who gets guest judge duty? To work on his public persona and media navigational abilities? Jack of course.

And who, of course, is one of the contestants??? Bitty duh so Bitty goes, and iirc contestants aren’t told the theme or guest judge beforehand so the drama bomb that drops when eyes meet and repressed feelings get tapped into and yeeesh now that’s what I call Awkward.

so. Despite two participants with major internal and interpersonal drama happening, the episode actually goes mostly smoothly. Neither Jack nor Bitty mentions it to anyone on the production team because whose business is it anyway and obviously no one did any homework on them so they?? act like they just don’t know each other???????? It’s not like they can sneak off for five minutes and hash it out so both just. Try not to interact directly too much but come on you know things happen.

Bitty can’t exactly forget Jack’s favorites and Jack cannot even begin to be unbiased (not when every taste he gets of Bitty's baking feels like home again, even after all this time). Jack may or may not fight the judges at every critique aimed at Bitty’s cupcakes, but Bitty hardly needs it, he solidly trounces the competition and wins. And gets invited to the Falconers Thing. Which works out pretty great in Jack's eyes.

Except it doesn’t. Bitty avoids him all evening? He cold shoulders Jack the whole time and Jack kind of gets it, the cameras are still rolling and they can’t exactly catch up now but still? Before Jack gets anything approaching a chance to talk Bitty packs up and he’s out of there as soon as he’s contractually able to.

So Jack may or may not eat his feelings in cupcakes over it. It feels like another missed opportunity and it stings and he wonders how he keeps getting it so wrong.

According to Georgia it’s an unqualified success. She watches the footage, pats him on the back for going through with it, and says something offhand about how well he got on with a few of the contestants (one in particular she notices. she doesn’t mention it). Jack gets in a funk over it, but there’s nothing to do but forget about it until the episode airs.

No one, definitely not Georgia, definitely not the PR department, is prepared for the chaos the premier causes. It’s not immediate, the episode comes out on a quiet Tuesday and the Falcs do some promotion for it, but not much, so some of Jack’s diehard fans watch it but they’re not expecting any kind of major major response. It was supposed to be something small and light to soften Jack’s image and work his media relations muscles. Who even watches Cupcake Wars anyways???? Plenty do. And they go nuts for the episode.

People who have no idea who Jack is, barely an idea what hockey even is, see Mr. tall dark and Canadian and see too exactly what Georgia had seen. Bitty and Jack and all the special attention paid to the little southern baker boy.

It’s, of course, obvious to anyone with eyes the sparks between them, the lingering looks, how Bitty can barely stop from grinning when Jack lists off his every favorite part of Bitty's cupcakes but has monosyllabic responses for the other contestants. As subtle as the two thought they’d been, they really hadn’t and it’s only a matter of time before it’s trending on Twitter and every lovelorn Cupcake Wars fan is writing RPF and subtweeting the Falcs and Bitty's account about it.

This is not exactly the public image Georgia had been hoping Jack would cultivate. They try to put out the fires, calm things down and make a few #relatable Twitter posts about it that the PR interns cook up. Georgia wheedles the real story out of Jack, and it throws her off kilter actually, once he fesses up to a few details that would make the collective heads of the internet reel, but she’s a professional. The PR team is a crack squad. They get things under control.

Until, of course, some intrepid fans uncover The Truth.

Mamely, how Bitty and Jack totally knew each other because they were totally on the same hockey team in college??? And had totally set records together and there were totally pictures still archived on school websites of celebration hugs and even a few traces left of a senior photography project that featured one Eric R. Bittle (and others) in touchingly intimate portraits???? and uhhhhh explanations????????? are needed?????????

#cupcakegate takes the Twitterverse by collective storm. Kardashians whom??? Bitty gets bombarded, the Falconer’s can’t make a single post about a home game without demands for updates on the drama and Georgia is nearly drowning in it all but wading through it like a champ.

The PR department reaches out to Bitty in an email that Bitty never responds to, his stomach too tied up in knots over all this debacle is bringing up, but he feels like this is partially his fault. He tries his best. He does a tell all vlog to set the record straight.

He tries to keep it simple, stick to the main points.

Why didn’t they say anything? Why act like they didn’t know each other?

Neither of them knew the other would be there (truth) and they didn’t want to disrupt filming or make it seem like Bitty had an unfair advantage.

Are they currently romantically involved?

No (truth).

Had they ever, at any point, back in college, been romantically involved?

No (truth?).

Was there anything, anything at all behind the long looks and soft gazes? A single spark? An ounce of unspoken, hidden attraction?????

No (lies).

Bitty bears his heart a little, gets going on a tangent on their relationship back in college and how much Jack helped him through and what a good team they’d been and how he’s a little sad he and Jack drifted so far apart (lies, it hurts, it’s never stopped hurting) but he’s happy for Jack and really proud of him and glad he got the chance to see him again and wishes him the best (truth).

Of COURSE this only makes things worse. Bless Bitty's heart but he has zero self awareness when it comes to Jack and his clearly lovesick vlog brings avid followers of the whole debacle to new emotional heights. People are invested. The drama continues.

It comes to a head when Jack himself braves the world of Twitter, finally, to try and hash things out privately with Bitty so he logs onto the dusty old handle Georgia created and verified for him ages ago that he’d, bless her heart, just never gotten the hang of. He knows Bitty's handle from all this hullabaloo now so he opens up a message, stares at the blinking screen for about a minute, then promptly has a breakdown.

Everything comes back to him. Every warm moment they’d shared back in college. Every time he felt Bitty there for him and every inch of home and safe Bitty ever gave him.

And how he never told Bitty how he felt (lies. still feels). How he’d let that slip right through his fuckup fingers.

It takes him two weeks to draft the message. That’s ages in internet time, so things die down a bit in the interim and other celebrity dramas unfold so Jack finally stops getting pestered about it by every pap and chirped by every team mate. He’s glad they’ll never put him on reality baking competition show duty again but is it worth it? (yes. yes it is)

It gives Jack plenty of time to stew and stew he does, until he’s finally able to write out a pretty succinct summary of everything he never got a chance to say.

It boils down to a couple main points:

Bitty was probably the best thing that ever happened to Jack. Bitty made him softer and better able to handle things and just gave him the safety net he needed and he would always be grateful to Bitty for that.

Jack had also never meant for them to drift apart, he’d always wanted to stay in touch, actually, he’d always wanted so much more than that but Jack knew Bitty didn’t feel the same way, so Jack created the space between them and he was sorry he’d been such a poor friend and had gotten it so wrong.

Jack hoped, maybe beyond hope, that it wasn’t too late. Jack asked if they could be friends again, that he missed Bitty, and he hoped to hear back from him.

Jack is rather proud of himself for all the emotional eloquence that goes into the message. He thinks Shitty would be, too. Of course, it is kind of annoying he has to split it up into so many pieces and tag Bitty's account in each one so they’ll send to him, something about a 140 character limit? Jack doesn’t really get it, but social media isn’t his thing. So he sends his piecemeal message and waits patiently for Bitty to get back to him.

Georgia regrets ever trying to get Jack any amount of media exposure.

Jack’s not so private love letter is screen capped, saved to hard drives, printed into longevity and takes the internet land by storm all over again. Jacks completely oblivious to it until day two or so when Shitty, Lardo, and every person he knew at any point at Samwell bomb his phone. Georgia does her best, she really does, but it’s the last straw for the PR team. They’ve long since collapsed in a puddle of tears and Georgia has to coordinate the disaster relief effort herself and enforce the media lockdown until they can just deal with this and Jack, it’s okay, we’re all here for you and your sexuality is valid but honey, no more internet for you. Georgia does take the thread down but its too little too late and there is going to be a million and one interviews about this and she hasn’t slept in days and-

and Jack feels bad for her. He feels a little embarrassed his personal business is so out in the open like that but. Well. It’s his own fault. He should have probably asked a few more questions about how to work Twitter. But deep down? It’s a huge weight off. He’d never exactly planned on coming out publicly because he never really thought he’d have anyone who would make him consider it but. Well. He’s said what he needed to say. About time.

He lets Georgia tell him what to do and what to say to whom. He does a few interviews, nothing televised, just a few online publications. It takes several more weeks for any of it to approach any sort of calm again, but eventually, an equilibrium is reached. And then, only then, does Jack get a call from a number he doesn’t have saved yet.

“Hey, Jack,” he hears in a thick southern accent when he picks up, and it doesn’t, not at all, send a shiver of pure warmth all the way down to his toes (lies, all lies).

“Bittle-Eric? Bitty. Hey,” he says. Bitty laughs.

“I think maybe we should talk. Would you, maybe, want to meet up for coffee sometime?”

“Yeah. Yeah, of course, I’d love that.” (truth)

[rigelmejo]

Reader Tools

An AMAZING resource for using on the computer or phone for reading Chinese: MandarinSpot.

Specifically, the MandarinSpot Chinese Text Annotation - just paste a text into it, and it will produce pinyin annotation above all characters, and also provide click-definitions for every single word. The definitions provided seem pretty good, and seems about as good as Zhongwen chrome extension (I love that extension but can’t use it on all my devices, so this MandarinSpot tool is a good alternative). Viewing the pinyin annotation above all text is optional, if it’s turned on you can see: just pinyin, or pinyin and characters. If it’s turned off, you only see characters. Either way, if you hover over a word it will pop-up a definition.

An alternative to the MandarinSpot Chinese Text Annotation, is Chinese Zero to Hero’s Online Reader - it seems to do the same thing. It puts pinyin over all text you paste in, and gives hover-over definitions. Both seem to work about the same, both require you to paste in the text you want annotated. So if you need pinyin printed above the entire reading material, both of these are good websites to use for it. 

There is also Bookmarklet - for annotating websites. It does the same thing, adds popup annotations and click-definitions to any page. It does not change the functionality of the websites. It’s incredibly easy to use on a computer or mobile. you just make a bookmark from that page as the directions instruct. Then you either: already have the page you want annotated open, and click this Bookmarklet bookmark (and it automatically is now useable just like Zhongwen extension would be if it’s extension icon were clicked). Or, you open the Bookmarklet bookmark, then paste in the url you want to read in the url area. The resulting page will now have popup annotations. This tool is extremely useful if you need this functionality but can’t use extensions on your device (such as phones/ipads versus computers), if you don’t want to use a program or extension (since it’s just a bookmark basically). Unlike the other tool above, this version does not give the option to view pinyin all characters as you read - it only includes the pop-up pinyin+definitions. 

I have been Bookmarklet on my phone a ton now that I know it exists! I love it. And I also have the Chinese Text Annotation webpage opened as a tab on my phone, for when I want a full pinyin annotation of some excerpt. 

I usually use Pleco reader, but the Pleco reader limits the functionality of some sites like mtlnovel.com’s ability to show chinese alongside english, and pleco reader does not give pinyin transcription. Positives of Pleco Reader do include their extensive dictionary, their audio feature, and the ability to immediately bookmark/flashcard any new words. So, I’ve been using MandarinSpot’s tools and Pleco Reader depending on what my needs are. I really love the Bookmarklet tool - I love that it works on mtlnovels, and sometimes I like reading without having the ability in Pleco to easily make a flashcard or click for an extended dictionary entry. Using Bookmarklet, because it’s simpler, gives me a chance to just practice reading with some dictionary-help, without giving me anything to potentially distract me, without giving me additional tools that might spur my more intensive study habits. I like that its a way to read without distracting me as much. (Pleco is not distracting, it’s probably the top-tier tool for reading for me, of all the ones I’ve tried - it’s just that... because it IS so useful, sometimes I’ll study more than I intend to like practicing listening by playing a whole page in chinese, or looking up example sentences of words that take me away from my story page, or listening to the pronunciation of every new word and shadowing it instead of just continuing to read... which is all fantastic for my learning, but I just can too easily fall into studying more than maybe I intended to that particular day lol.

If anyone happens to care, my favorite chinese reader tools: - Pleco, free or purchased version, but purchased version is more convienient since it is a web reader (free is only a paste-clipboard reader). Definitely the most in depth and accurate definitions, audio, broad functionality, convenient. What I usually use whenever I’m on my phone. - Zhongwen Chrome Extension, free, in accurate and succinct, broad functionality on any website and even some video captions, mentions/links some grammar points, very convenient if on a computer. Probably the best all-around tool if on a computer. (I wish I could use it more, but I can’t use it on my current computer and it doesn’t work on my tablet). - MandarinSpot tools - Annotation and Bookmarklet, free, one does pinyin transcription over words, both do click-definitions pretty close in quality to Zhongwen’s. A wonderful alternative to Zhongwen extension, if you’re on a device that can’t use chrome extensions or just don’t want to use an extension. I usually use these when I’m reading on a computer.  - Chinese Zero to Hero Reader - free, does pinyin transcription over words, does click definitions that are generally right (it has better definitions then LingQ or Idiom app), links to the site’s very useful Dictionary site for words and characters, the site also includes some pre-made free reading materials that are Graded Reader type in difficulty and include audio. About as useful as MandarinSpot’s tools to me, but the site is just ‘busier’ so I use it less. I use this site occasionally for it’s provided free reading materials like Journey to the West. 

[megrimlocke]

How We Are All Going to Die Laughing

The other day, I was looking at a post made by one of my favorite internet comic artists.  The guy used to be something I’d read in the army newspapers, next to the adds for cheap TVs at the post exchange, but these days it’s mostly a facebook feed I occasionally read.  The artist and writer behind “PVT Murphy” (though these days Murphy’s a sergeant, I’m aging after all it seems) was annoyed at Facebook showing him a shopping page offering what amounted to white nationalist (US neonazi, if you prefer) paraphernalia.

Now, I pointed out that this was what the robot had concluded he wanted to see, and honestly none of us should be surprised by this.  Military members lean right, and in the age of Trump this means that radicalization is around every corner- though for the record it always has been.  In some insidious ways with a cancer of racists and bigots among our ranks, sure, I know because being gay I was targeted by a few myself, but also in more subtle ways.

I once watched a man scream at some Iraqis who were emptying a waste bin nearby, screaming that they didn’t get him, because he’d been the target of an IED attack two hours prior.  Those men had no way in hell of having anything to do with it, but the guy that hit us got away free and the trash guys looked like someone he could defiantly vent his feelings of helplessness and victimhood upon in a vain effort to reclaim his power.  I’m not condoning it, I’m just saying that sometimes the path to prejudice isn’t paved with propaganda and privilege.

I have every faith in the artist who draws PVT Murphy himself, but if you attract the attention of a lot of white supremacists, then probably the robot is going to conclude that you might want to look at some of the things that all the people who like your posts are looking at.  Hence the shop page that offered a wall pinup of a templar knight preparing to smite the saracen to defend (white) Christendom with a few crass remarks about Islam written on it.

Now I explained, in truncated terms, how the robot made this call.  The artist wasn’t excited about this explanation, and in fairness no one is excited about the black mirror showing them something ugly, it’s almost like an automated attack.  But the machine was really just trying to be helpful.  It wasn’t programmed to be sensitive to racial issues, and certainly the people who took out the add didn’t take that into their considerations.  It identified a pattern and arranged the delivery of data that conformed with its instructions based upon the data input.

Now, some right wing dude decided to join in this discussion to point out that the robot didn’t know what it was talking about, included the terms “lib” and “snowflake” in his post, and suggested that if the robot had any idea who he was it wouldn’t keep showing him liberal content- after all he always used the laugh react on it.  I pointed out this part as well, but I’d like to go into a deeper analysis for this discourse.

The right, and perhaps a lot of people using the reacts on facebook, has decided that you can use the laugh react to express a dismissive chuckle to the words of others.  I think this has several sweeping, problematic implications.

First, the people using the internet are using it to each other, and are either unaware of the robots they share the internet with or ignorant regarding how they function.  The robots do not interpret Laugh as a dismissive gesture.  The data they gather from this is that you were paying attention to something and decided to put a reaction on it.  The Laugh react is not a downvote on reddit, the robot, innocent little helperbot it was made to be, assumes you are amused by the thing you clicked on, and so endeavors to further tickle your funny bone.  In short, it’s your good-natured wholesome friend who doesn’t understand the difference between you laughing with liberals and laughing at us.  It thinks we’re all friends.

This leads to the second problem.  If you are a conservative and you do not care to be bothered with leftist posts, then using the laugh react doesn’t help you at all.  It further engages you with the content that annoys you.  The stuff that caused you to try and put on your dismissive “ha ha tawdry communist drivel” mid-atlantic aristocrat voice is going to keep appearing.  If you’re the sort given to conspiracy theories (and you are my bro, you still hate Hillary for the pizza thing), you might draw the conclusion that you are being targeted by leftist internet operatives, spamming your feed with leftist propaganda.

The truth is you’re spamming yourself with leftist content because your socially clueless helpful robot pal is gonna go out and find more things for you to laugh at.  You’re not special or important enough for leftist internet operatives to target your facebook feed with propaganda attacks, and you have damned yourself to an experience on facebook in which you are bombarded with annoying or even blood-boiling content.  All of this guidance, by the way, is equally applicable to left leaning users of the laugh react as a dismissive gesture.

What this does is contribute to people’s paranoia.  It makes them believe that an enemy that doesn’t exist is trying to get into their heads.  It fills their electronic lives with incendiary content that makes them angry and it encourages them further to continue to have generally unproductive electric arguments with people that they disagree with, leaving them exhausted by a brain full of cortisol.

Personally, I think the Left’s electric sin is more to do with our frankly superior witticisms (sorry Right, you invented and stuck to Nobama, you’re just not witty) and the craving so many of us seem to have for delivering that sick burn one-liner so cutting and succinct that it stops the conservative dead in his rhetorical tracks seems to consume online political discourse on the left almost as aggressively as call-out culture does when arguing among our own.

In the effort to sell us more things by pandering to our professed passions, the capitalist internet has created an electric rage engine that wraps you into one heated argument after another among people who are not listening to one another and who are learning to disengage from hard discussions.  This last part is so dangerous to our democracy.

To be clear, I’m not lamenting the death of compromise specifically.  There can be no compromise on the income gap, healthcre, free elections, or the rights of people who are darker in skin than I.  But the electric rage engine makes it difficult to even have conversations about these things in the real world, and if you’re not talking to the people you disagree with face to face in the here and now, your chances of finding compromise are precisely zero percent, nevermind actually changing their views.

Have you noticed yourself having conversations with people that could just be copy pasted almost word for word off the tumblr where they “informed” themselves about this topic?  I’ll bet that you have.  Or else, more dangerously, you have begun to avoid having such conversations at all with people.  Have you ever been in a discussion turned friendly debate with your friend and realized after a few moments that the debate isn’t suddenly so friendly?  I’m willing to bet it’s been a while, so much so that you might even be shocked if it happens.

People like to go on about how fraught the holidays can be because of how politically charged family dinners can be, but I can’t remember such an experience within the past ten years.  No throw down arguments, no discussions about the merits of one tax policy or another- we can’t even seem to discuss weighty matters with people who are blood kin anymore unless we already know they agree with our own views- and thanks to the electric rage engine, we can know, in precis, what their views are and what we think about them as a result long before we ever think about what to put in our covered dish.  The opportunity for someone stepping into a landmine social or foreign policy issue at family and social gatherings has been eliminated, and with it the ability of the dinner table to serve as a place for families to reach consensus by resolving their arguments.  We don’t talk politics with people who disagree with us in the real world anymore, we all just avoid it and spit our venom on the internet, achieving nothing but our mounting unhappiness and dislike for one another.

I have a young colleague at work, maybe 25, who demonstrated the ability to just promptly end a discussion last week.  Now it was a nonsense discussion and in fairness the participants had gotten into trolling him for kicks, saying a blue shirt was green on purpose or some other nonsense, I don’t remember the particulars.  But what I do remember vividly was the ease and efficiency with which he was able to simply end the discussion, how disengagement came so very naturally to him.  I despise the phrase “agree to disagree” because it means that the argument hasn’t been resolved, but it is at least a sign that there was actual thought going on between participants.  No such gesture here.  My colleague put down the conversation and simply went back to his work with all the ease with which you might put down your phone when you decided you were done arguing with someone, and the ability to do this in realspace chilled me to the bone.

Moreover, there is a certain epistemological nihilism that has arisen among us, suggesting that no one can truly know anything because the sources of information, with whatever omissions or biases they may possess, are a matter of consumerist choice rather than objective fact.  We can’t agree on what is real anymore because if you dislike someone’s account of events, you can simply get someone else to present a more palatable story and declare the other people liars.

If you don’t like what you read on NBC, you can simply tune to Fox to hear it told in a way that you choose to consume, often playing to your appetite for validation rather than your need for actionable information.  We like feeling right, and the consumerist information economy has identified that as a means to get our attention long enough to upload some ads along with our news video of choice.

If the very identity of a person can be expressed by a computer algorithm and 4 or 5 hundred clicks across news articles, think pieces, and shopping pages, how easy will it be for the people who do understand how the machines work to begin influencing who we are?

In closing, I think every single one of us is developing a progressively more toxic relationship with the internet, particularly when it comes to political discourse, and I think that if we aren’t especially careful our ability to simply shut down and switch off, while healthy on the web, is going to begin invading our lives in the waking world in insidious ways that will hurt our ability to function as a cohesive society. I think that the marketing robots and the very act of making a profile and posting to it things that are important to you are dangerous influences on our sense of identity, and that by wrapping our sense of identity in the ideas and products that we consume in such a contrived, calculated fashion that we are restricting our ability to be flexible in our thinking, making us less able to get along with one another.  

I’ve been on a soft departure from Facebook for a good while now, making it my loose rule to stick to messenger and instagram because I like indulging my vanity but for the most part I want to be interacting with people directly and not selling myself for likes when I use these things.  Real attention from real people  is much much better.  

In 2020, I invite you to join me in kicking facebook or your own social media vice altogether and bringing our political lives and our debates back into the real world so that we can practice and re-acquire the skills of persuasion and discussion; not as a cynic call to begin trying to convert every conservative we can find, but for the sake of a political discourse that serves as less of a battleground with immovable ideological fortresses and more of a crucible in which the useless can be burned away and useful consensus and meaningful, mind changing-discussions can be had once again.  We cannot afford to keep unsubscribing from one another if our democracy is to survive. (<- leftist witticism addiction in demonstration)

[douchebagbrainwaves]

YOU START BY WRITING A STRIPPED-DOWN KERNEL HOW HARD CAN IT BE

Both of which are false. You must resist this. The main value of the succinctness test is as a guide in designing languages. They'll be fine.1 A typical angel round these days might be $150,000 raised from 5 people. If a hacker were a mere implementor, turning a spec into code, then he could just work his way through it from one end to the other like someone digging a ditch.2 I never read the books we were assigned. So please, get on with it. No one has to commit explicitly to what the central point is. But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of ancient texts was the essence of what scholars did.

If you expressed the same ideas in prose as mathematicians had to do without. But actually being good is an expensive way to seem good. Because the fact is, if you believe as I do that the main reason we take the trouble to write two versions, a flame for Reddit and a more subdued version for HN. In a real essay you're writing for yourself. The reason they like it when you don't need them is not simply that they like what they do. The Internet is changing that. That's why I'm so optimistic about HN. And unless you already have if you can't raise the full amount. And so once university English departments were established in the late 19th century the study of literature. I'm not proposing this as a new idea. Bill Gates would probably have something to read.3 There's always a temptation to do that completely.

They raise their first round fairly easily because the founders seem smart and the idea sounds plausible. So the ability to ferret out the unexpected. Even if you only have one meeting a day with investors, somehow that one meeting will burn up your whole day. And anything you come across that surprises you, who've thought about the topic a lot, will probably surprise most readers.4 For a painter, a museum is a reference library of techniques.5 I can't. It means that a programming language is obviously doesn't know what a programming language should, above all, be malleable. The true test of the length of the delay inversely proportional to some prediction of its quality. Almost everything is interesting if you get deeply enough into it. It hadn't occurred to me till then that those horrible things we had to rely mostly on examples in books. And once you start to doubt yourself.

So no matter how many good startups approach him.6 But I know the house would probably have ended up pretty rich even if IBM hadn't happened to drop the PC standard in his lap. Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do or what I do is somewhere between a river and a roman road-builder. And open and good.7 A couple hundred thousand would let them get office space and hire some smart people they know from school. And yet a lot is at stake. Browsers then IE 6 was still 3 years in the future, and the power of the more unscrupulous do it deliberately. Hacker News is an experiment, and an experiment in a very young field. So when a language isn't succinct, it will feel restrictive. The paperwork for convertible debt is simpler.

Their search also turned up parse. The study of rhetoric, the art of arguing persuasively, was a kind of final pass where you caught typos and oversights. Colleges had long taught English composition. The existence of aggregators has already affected what they aggregate.8 Study lots of different things, so you can learn faster what various kinds of work. I think he really wishes he'd listened. The advantage of the two-job route is less common than the organic route. There is nothing investors like more than a plan A. Long but mistaken arguments are actually quite rare. Scientists don't learn science by doing it.9 Even the concept of me turns out to explain nearly all the characteristics of VCs that founders hate. Relentlessness wins because, in the Gmail sense everything I've told you so far.

Hacker News is an experiment, and an essai is an effort. Users have worried about that since the site was a few months old.10 So a plan that promises freedom at the expense of knowing what to do, so here is another place where startups have an advantage. It sounds obvious to say that the answer is a simple yes, but no one can predict them—not even the protagonists: we're just the latest model vehicle our genes have constructed to travel around in. There are lots of other potential names that are as carefully designed and, if possible. Another easy test is the number of both increases we'll get something more like an efficient market. For example, in a recent essay I pointed out that because you can start as soon as the first one is ready to buy. Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? Twenty years ago, fascinating and urgently needed work. Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up train of thought—but a cleaned-up train of thought—but social and economic history, not political history. It will always be true that most great programmers are born outside the US.11 The whole room gasped.

I've met a few VCs I like. There's nothing intrinsically great about your current name would seem repellent. Since we hosted all the stores, which together were getting just over 10 million page views per month in June 1998 I took a snapshot of Viaweb's site.12 The advantage of the two-job route, if you have $5 million in investable assets, it would seem an inspired metaphor.13 The advice of parents will tend to feel bleak and abandoned, and accumulate cruft.14 The good things in a community site come from people more than technology; it's mainly in the prevention of bad things that technology comes into play. Investors like it when they can help a startup, but they did have to go to school, which was a dilute version of work meant to prepare us for the real thing.15 Or at least, a thesis was a position one took and the dissertation was the argument by which one defended it. I didn't realize this when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be 100% sure that's not a description of HN. Indeed, you can start as soon as the first one is ready to buy. It's kind of surprising that it even exists. And there was the mystery of why the perennial favorite Pralines 'n' Cream was so appealing.

Notes

Html. If early abstract paintings seem more powerful sororities at your school sucks, where many of the War on Drugs. Most unusual ambitions fail, no matter how large.

The quality of investor behavior. 03%. Bullshit, Princeton University Press, 1981. Source: Nielsen Media Research.

There is no different from deciding to move from London to Silicon Valley. Sites that habitually linkjack get banned. Xenophon Mem.

Hypothesis: A company will be big successes but who are good presenters, but we do the right thing to do some research online. Here's a recipe that might work is in the general manager of the products I grew up with elaborate rationalizations.

Sometimes a competitor will deliberately threaten you with a cap. It's a bit more complicated, because you have to keep them from the DMV.

A single point of a powerful syndicate, you now get to go deeper into the work of selection. The Sub-Zero 690, one could aspire to the hour Google was founded, wouldn't offer to invest the next investor.

At first I didn't care about, like languages and safe combinations, and one VC. Gauss was supposedly asked this when comparing techniques for discouraging stupid comments instead. Proceedings of 2003 Spam Conference.

In part because Steve Jobs doesn't use.

So as a rule, if an employer, I have no decision-making power. Your user model almost couldn't be perfectly accurate, and that most people will pay people millions of dollars a year for a patent is now. Obvious is an understatement.

It wouldn't cut their overall returns tenfold, because when people make the people working for me was the ads they show first. It's hard to say they prefer great markets to great people to claim retroactively I said yes.

Candidates for masters' degrees went on to study the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and that modern corporate executives would work better, and b I'm pathologically optimistic about people's ability to solve a lot of legal business. One of the iPhone SDK.

Cost, again. And they are building, they were. If a company growing at 5% a week for 19 years, it means a big company. However bad your classes because you spent all your time working on is a convertible note with no deadline, you should push back on the parental dole, and journalists—have the perfect life, and stir.

This is not an efficient market in this essay talks about the distinction between money and disputes.

That name got assigned to it because the ordering system was small. In fact, we should make the argument a little about how to deal with them. Auto-retrieving filters will be big successes but who are weak in other ways to do more with less? By your mid-game.

No big deal. This is isomorphic to the frightening lies told by older siblings. It was revoltingly familiar to slip back into it. But should you even working on that.

[bi-rising]

since ppl are telling you how they feel i thought i would too lol. idk if this is just me but i have the lowest self-esteem and like, i've always forced myself not to fall in love? bc ik there's no point as it would be unrequited. so whenever someone wants to sleep with me or go out (it's only happened twice), i feel like i now have to force myself to like them because the wall i've built to protect myself from heartbreak is thick asf. but now idk if i truly like people (bc it didn't happen naturally and i was like "i have to make myself fall for whoever comes my way since i'm so unlikable and it my be my only chance") or if i don't and i'm just using them not to be alone. this has also made me doubt my bisexuality bc, do i really like everyone or is it that i want to have more chances at love? a mess, honestly.

honestly i've gotten more asks in the past like three days than i've gotten since i started out on tumblr so idk why ppl are sending stuff like this, but it's kind of fun in a weird way adjfalkf it's like i'm microdosing on internet clout 🖐️😳

also, sorry in advance for the long reply, i got carried away aldsfkjasdk

but anyway, would it be too cliche to say i feel like you're just describing me?? aksjldfaskdf i had like,,,,,five dates in high school, and one was bc his first choice of date couldn't come and he didn't want to waste the money from the tickets he bought, one was bc i asked him for a girl's choice dance, and one was bc my friends managed to convince him to ask me out so i could go to senior prom, bc my mom wouldn't let me go without a date. and that's literally all the dates i've ever had, and i'm 22 now with all my friends getting married D:

so yeah. i totally understand what you mean. it's incredibly difficult to live believing that you will be lucky to find someone to care about you. i genuinely believe there is true damage that can be done if you don't experience dates and stuff at an early enough age (like high school, not like, u know, 12-13 or whatever) bc you really don't learn how to handle those situations, how to approach them, and how to deal with the times when you aren't currently involved with someone. it makes you doubt that you're worth anyone's time, and it makes you think that, if anyone shows any desire towards you at all, you have to accept it bc that's the only chance you're ever gonna get. and it gets even worse if you're not part of the 'accepted' demographic, i.e. you're not conventionally attractive or you're neurodivergent or lower class or anything like that. so yeah, i totally understand how you feel, and you're not alone. it's a terrible thing to experience, and i wish that no one had to go through what you n I feel like regarding this. it really makes you doubt everything you know, both about yourself and about other people

regardless, i want you to know this, even tho it might not mean much coming from an internet stranger: you ARE worthy of being loved. you are worthy of finding someone that YOU love. i cannot say for certain that you or i or anyone else will find someone to love forever, because that's unrealistic and can also be damaging, however: you will always deserve to be happy. single or dating, married or divorced, with no dates or a hundred dates under your belt. you are bi regardless of your dating status, you are bi regardless of if you find 'the one' or not, you are bi regardless of your self esteem. you have worth as a person, not just as a romantic partner, and one day, you will find happiness, one way or another.

i'd also like to apply a trick for neurodivergency i learned to this scenario. i want you to pretend to be angry. seriously--pretend you're angry at something. i'll give you a second. okay. noticed how you KNEW you were pretending? now pretend to be happy. see, you KNEW you were pretending there, too!! you can't fake an emotion without knowing that you're faking an emotion. this is what i use when i worry that i'm faking my adhd--you cannot subconsciously fake something. it just isn't possible. it's the same for sexualities. you cannot fake being a sexuality without knowing that you're faking. and the same for liking a person. you can't pretend to like someone without knowing that you're pretending. faking and pretending are conscious, willing actions. you legitimately cannot slip your way into accidentally faking an emotion, a sexuality, a neurodivergency--anything like that. you will always know, for certain, because that's just how brains work.

anyway. i know this was long but hoo boy, it really struck a chord with me. and again, even tho i know u don't know me, i hope that knowing you're not the only one struggling with something like that will help, at least a little bit!! and i do wish you a very bright and happy future, and my inbox is open if you ever want to keep talking about this or anything else :3

[quidditchc]

Alejandro Giraldo, Dyma Loving

So does anyone remember the video that circulated of a police officer tackling a Black woman to the ground after she and her friend called the cops on a man threatening them with a gun?

Here is the video, about 10 minutes in total, for anyone wanting to see. He tackles her to the ground at about 3:10. It is bodycam footage from the offending officer.

The woman, Dyma Loving, was arrested for disorderly conduct but was subsequently released. The officer, Alejandro Giraldo, was deemed at fault. Ms. Loving is pressing charges, one felony and one misdemeanor, and Giraldo was suspended without pay pending investigation.

The most recent update was that Giraldo would have his next court date in August. There is absolutely no news or information about it of any kind. If you search his name, there are zero news articles about him in the last month. It’s not circulating facebook anymore, so people don’t share it to look cool. SO,  no one gives a shit. I pride myself on my internet stalking abilities and could find no police record, no mugshot, no court record, nothing on Giraldo’s arrest and prior court dates.

On top of everything, Giraldo was a field training officer. Which means he trained many officers in procedure which he himself then violated. Miami-Dade Police Department has not addressed this aspect in any press release, and they need to ensure proper retraining for anyone influenced by Giraldo.  Last week (10/08/19), I emailed 311 in Miami-Dade county. I knew someone else had emailed before me about the same subject. Neither of us heard back, so I reached out again a few days later (10/10/19). I got a response reassuring me it had been passed on, and to give them time. This was from someone in the Communications department. I responded to her (Judana Jimenez, Miami Dade County Communications) saying I believed information was being purposefully withheld, and to please make sure I hear back in a timely manner.

The next day (10/11/19) I received a response from a sergeant in the Miami-Dade police department (Sgt. Waldo Lorente). The person I knew emailed before me still has not received anything, so I can only assume this was a result of my badgering. He gave me his phone number and suggested we have a phone conversation.

Phone calls cannot be effectively cited beyond a shadow of a doubt. I don’t have a written record of a phone call. It is also easier to manipulate people on the phone, interrupt them, redirect their questions, etc. So, I emailed him back saying I appreciated his time, but prefer written communication.

Keep in mind my original email was succinct, clear, and had explicitly stated questions to which one could provide explicit answers. In my response saying I preferred email, I offered to clarify anything he might not understand in my original message.

Those last two emails went to and from me before noon on Friday (10/11). The Sergeant was available for a call all day long, but miraculously, couldn’t make time to reply via email. Strange, no?

Anyone who wants to send an email to 311 (311@miamidade.gov) with similar concerns, I encourage you to do so. 

Check on this post first on my page to see if there are updates!!!!

Points to mention:

Is Giraldo still suspended without pay from the department?

What happened to Giraldo’s court date in August?

REGARDLESS of the court case outcome, what will Miami-Dade PD do to counteract misinformation spread by Giraldo in his capacity as a Field Training Officer?

Keep in mind that the people reading these messages aren’t police, and that regardless of how you want to speak to the police, for this to be effective you need to be civil in your tone. I don’t mean to sound condescending and of course anyone is free to send whatever they want to whoever they want, but keep in mind that you are more likely to get information if you aren’t volatile.

[forsetti]

On Writing: The Wrong Frame Of Mind To Write

For the past year, writing has been a struggle.  At first, I thought this was because it was impossible to stay on top of the amount of bullshit being pumped out by President Narcissist and his band of deplorables.  By the time I got through writing the first paragraph on something that happened, three more things would occur that were equally or more upsetting.  Trying to figure out what to write about and how felt overwhelming.  It's been over a year and we've all become acclimated on some level to the non-stop nonsense coming from this administration.  Yet, I'm struggling as much today with writing as I was after the Inauguration.  This reason might be part of the cause but it isn't the main reason I'm finding it hard to write.

Another reason I've been telling myself why I'm finding writing difficult is because I'm emotionally drained and pre-occupied after the end of the best relationship I've ever been in. With my emotions so focused on and so damaged by the breakup, I didn't have the mental energy and focus to also write.  This can't be the reason for the struggle writing either.  Writing has always been an emotional release, for me.  It doesn't matter what the emotion-anger, frustration, grief... If anything, the end of my relationship should have spurred a desire to write.  It didn't.  Again, this might be part of the cause as to why I've been finding it hard to write but it isn't the main reason.

I certainly believe that Trump's election and the end of my relationship have had an impact, separately and taken together, on my writing, but neither one is the main, underlying cause of my writer's block.

It wasn't until this past week after reading an article suggested to me by a good friend and a Twitter thread by someone I've been following for the past couple of years that I really understood why I've been struggling-I have fucks to give.  The two articles I read were written by people who are passionate about what they write, willing to say what others sometimes don't want to but need to be said, completely honest about themselves and brutally honest about the world around them.  They write with zero fucks to give.

The first thing I read-”Awkward and Beautiful Things You Think and Do When You Might Be Dying,” was written by Emily Dievendorf who was diagnosed with a brain tumor eleven years ago and is in a limbo state when it comes to really knowing her prognosis.  The sometimes brutal, sometimes funny, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes inspiring honesty in her article came from a place of no fucks to give. As I read it, I was both impressed and envious of her ability to lay it on the table, no-holds-barred.

The second thing I read was written by Propane Jane, a black woman who is not only a psychiatrist with her Masters in Public Health but a legend of the brutally honest Twitter thread.  The thread I read the other day was about Bernie Sanders' recent comments about President Obama and the Democratic Party while he was speaking in Mississippi during the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's assassination.  While some people were pointing out some of the problems with Bernie's comments, Propane Jane brought the fucking receipts, threw them down on the table in a perfectly laid out, organized fashion, and dropped the mic all in very succinct tweets. There are a few people on Twitter who are really good at a Tweet Storm.  Propane Jane is the best of the best at it.  It wasn't so much what she had to say about Bernie's comments that struck me, it was how I reminded just how powerful and wonderful something written with zero fucks to give can be.

These two women, coming from very different perspectives on very different topics showed me what has been missing from my writing the past year.  I've been struggling with writing because for some reason I have had fucks to give and it goes against who I am and why I started writing in the first place.  

When I started my blog seven years ago, it wasn't for anyone but myself. It was a place where I could write down whatever was swirling around in my brain.  It was a place where my stream of consciousness could take on a tangible form.  The handful of people who followed it were a few close friends who know me really well and have heard the live versions of what I write many times over drinks.  This all changed right after the 2016 election.

For reasons I've never fully understood, my blog post right after the presidential election in 2016 about rural voters got picked up by Alternet and later Raw Story (who has run it at least three different times.)  Instead of the few dozen shares and reads most of the things I'd write would get, this essay went viral and was exposed to millions of people.  Within a short period of time, the number of people following my blog went from a handful to over a thousand.  The same was true with my corresponding Forsetti's Justice Facebook page. As much as I appreciate everyone who follows and enjoys what I write and post, they are the reason I'm having a hard time writing.  Well, not them specifically but as a catalyst which brought out a trait in me, I thought I'd successfully dealt with years ago.

When it was just me writing for myself into a fairly unpopulated space, I never thought about how it would be perceived, if it was important, if it was interesting, if it was anything.  For some reason, on some level, now I do.  Being the oldest of ten kids instilled an over-developed sense of responsibility that always bothered the fuck out of me.  When I'm on my own or with a small group of carefully selected friends, this sense of responsibility dissipates.  When I'm in large groups or around people I don't really know very well, this sense is heightened.  The difference between these two situations is the lower the sense of responsibility, the fewer fucks I give. Having a lot of people follow and read my stuff has caused this sense of responsibility to kick into high gear.  Don't get me wrong, the people who follow and read my stuff are not to blame in any way for by writer's block.  The problem completely rests with me.  I need to figure out how to go back to writing for myself.

I need to once again not care if anyone reads what I write and just write.  I need to have no filters in any step of what or why I write/post.  I have to get back to having zero fucks to give because deep down, I know exactly what I want to accomplish, why, and how to get there better than anyone else.  There are much, much, much better writers than me.  In fact, I don't even consider myself a writer because I spend no time working on the art and craft of writing.  My “editing process” consists of a rudimentary spellcheck and not much else.  The main reason I write is to get thoughts, connections, emotions out of my head and these are almost always loosely structured and certainly not grammatically correct.  It is mostly a stream of consciousness but a stream that has been hewn into bedrock by years of reading and studying philosophy, health care, economics, politics, world civilizations, religion...  I know my wheelhouse and need to feel completely comfortable in it again. The people who read what I write are probably not even aware of any of this.  I am and it needs to stop.

Now that I've figured out the problem, it is up to me to figure out how to fix it.  Hopefully, I can.  I just have to figure out how to not care about who reads what I write and what their response might be. I need to be comfortable in my own skin and with my own abilities.  I need to get back to writing like the two women whose works brought to light the flaw in what I've been doing, exposed the cause of the problem.  However, unlike either of them, I will always come from a place where not having any fucks will never be as risk-taking as what they do because as an older, white, straight male, any risk I take will always be done from a position of cultural acceptance and power. This is something I'm not in control of much more than being keenly aware of the situation.  What is completely in my control is the amount of fucks give when writing.  I've been giving too many lately and it has got to stop because deep down, this isn't why I write and isn't who I want to be.

[perfectirishgifts]

Barking Commands At A Self-Driving Car Won’t Do You Any Good

New Post has been published on https://perfectirishgifts.com/barking-commands-at-a-self-driving-car-wont-do-you-any-good/

Barking Commands At A Self-Driving Car Won’t Do You Any Good

Verbal commands can save lives, including for self-driving cars.

The powerful impact of the spoken word.

I was in a local park the other day and someone had let their dog off its leash, allowing the frisky pooch a chance to run around wildly and relish its newfound freedom. At one point, I saw that the canine was about to dart wantonly into the street where cars were zipping along, so I yelled out to the dog and called for it to come back towards the trees and grassy area. Thankfully, the pooch heard me and scooted away from the dangers of the busy byway.

Later that same day, I was walking along on the sidewalk in my neighborhood and saw up ahead a car that was backing out of a driveway. Meanwhile, seemingly unbeknownst to the driver, a child was riding a tricycle down the sidewalk and was inevitably going to end-up directly behind the car, for which I doubted that the driver would realize, and thus there was an imminent and painful encounter about to occur. The driver’s window was slightly rolled down, so I yelled out to come to a stop, and the driver did so. Thankfully, no one was hurt, and the youngster continued peddling unabated.

What do these two incidents have in common?

Sometimes the barking out of a verbal command can make a difference, a big difference, including the possibility of choosing between life and death.

Both of the incidents became non-incidents in the sense that nobody got hurt and the world kept revolving without anyone getting injured or killed. Since these non-incidents did not produce fatalities or severities, they pretty much would be considered mundane and unworthy of any news media attention. No one would ever know that the yelling out of a type of command or instruction had saved a child and likewise saved someone’s beloved pooch. Just an ordinary activity that had extraordinary and joyful outcomes.

There are some noteworthy characteristics underlying these verbal commands.

First, the command or instruction had to be short and sweet, quickly getting to the point and being abundantly clear cut as to the meaning of what was spoken. This was not the time or place to provide a lengthy soliloquy or quote eloquently from Shakespeare.

The verbalization had to be done with a semblance of strength and conviction. Doing so allows the receiver of the oral indication to realize, nearly immediately, something of great importance that requires their rapt attention. Furthermore, the vocalizing has to be directed towards the subject or target, otherwise, the intended receiver might not sense that the words are aimed at them. Imagine that if I had yelled straight up into the air the resulting confusion on the part of the receivers. They would not likely have realized that my messaging was specifically for them.

An act of this kind also tends to occur in a real-time situation whereby there can be little or no delay. If I had waited to yell out my commands there was a heightened chance that the driver would not have stopped in time, and similarly, an increased chance that the dog would have entered into the street and been in the midst of grave danger.

All told, the verbalization has to happen at the right time, in the right place, aimed at the right receiver, worded in the right way, spoken in a loud and commanding tone, and proffer a succinct and actionable warning or recommended action that will prevent a pending and looming disaster from occurring.

Wow, that’s a lot of stuff jammed into a brief moment of time and without any room for error or delay. And yet it seems likely that this kind of activity happens all the time, all around us, and we do not particularly give it much notice or credit. Sure, from time to time there are stories about someone that heroically saved a life by a verbalized command, but by-and-large this is an unheralded act and one that goes on daily without fanfare or limelight.

The other side of the equation about uttering such verbal commands is that the targeted receiver has to be receptive to the utterance.

Consider the instance of the driver backing up his car. Had his driver’s side window not been partially open, I doubt that he would have heard my exhortation. Most cars these days have car interiors so well-built that any noise from outside of the vehicle is essentially muted. The odds are that my yelling would have been entirely rebuffed by modern-day soundproofing. I shudder to think of what would have taken place and how chilling it would be to know that my attempts to avert calamity were for not.

Of course, the receiver of the verbalization has to also be willing to listen and react to what has been stated. The driver of the car could have completely ignored my command to stop the vehicle. He might have thought that I was referring to someone else and opted to ignore what I was saying. Or, he might have heard me and understood my instruction, yet mentally calculated that stopping is perhaps not what he should do.

Believe it or not, there have been circumstances wherein someone was told to stop, and instead they slammed their foot onto the accelerator rather than the brake pedal. This use of the accelerator might be completely unintentional and was a mistaken reaction of missing the brakes and inadvertently landing on the gas pedal. Another possibility is that the driver gets scared at someone yelling stop, perhaps worried that they are going to get robbed or mugged, and deliberately decided to use the throttle to rocket away from the predicament.

Speaking of drivers, consider the future of cars and what will occur as self-driving cars gradually become prevalent on our roadways. For true self-driving cars, there is no need for a human driver. If you’ve ever seen pictures or videos of true self-driving cars, it is somewhat eerie since there isn’t anyone in the driver’s seat.

This brings up an interesting question: How will the advent of AI-based true self-driving cars impact the ability to bark out commands at a car in hopes of forewarning or advising a driving action in real-time?

Let’s unpack the matter and see.

Understanding The Levels Of Self-Driving Cars

As a clarification, true self-driving cars are ones that the AI drives the car entirely on its own and there isn’t any human assistance during the driving task.

These driverless vehicles are considered a Level 4 and Level 5 (see my explanation at this link here), while a car that requires a human driver to co-share the driving effort is usually considered at a Level 2 or Level 3. The cars that co-share the driving task are described as being semi-autonomous, and typically contain a variety of automated add-on’s that are referred to as ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems).

There is not yet a true self-driving car at Level 5, which we don’t yet even know if this will be possible to achieve, and nor how long it will take to get there.

Meanwhile, the Level 4 efforts are gradually trying to get some traction by undergoing very narrow and selective public roadway trials, though there is controversy over whether this testing should be allowed per se (we are all life-or-death guinea pigs in an experiment taking place on our highways and byways, some contend, see my coverage at this link here).

Since semi-autonomous cars require a human driver, the adoption of those types of cars won’t be markedly different than driving conventional vehicles, so there’s not much new per se to cover about them on this topic (though, as you’ll see in a moment, the points next made are generally applicable).

For semi-autonomous cars, it is important that the public needs to be forewarned about a disturbing aspect that’s been arising lately, namely that despite those human drivers that keep posting videos of themselves falling asleep at the wheel of a Level 2 or Level 3 car, we all need to avoid being misled into believing that the driver can take away their attention from the driving task while driving a semi-autonomous car.

You are the responsible party for the driving actions of the vehicle, regardless of how much automation might be tossed into a Level 2 or Level 3.

Self-Driving Cars And Spoken Exhortations

For Level 4 and Level 5 true self-driving vehicles, there won’t be a human driver involved in the driving task.

All occupants will be passengers.

The AI is doing the driving.

Some people seem to believe that the AI is omniscient and able to drive a car in a miraculous manner, including being able to always avoid car crashes and avert the striking of pedestrians. Perhaps this false impression about the AI is due to science fiction movies or possibly due to self-driving proponents that either exaggerate things or outright misstate what the AI can do.

In any case, please be aware that today’s AI is not sentient, it lacks entirely any semblance of common-sense reasoning and otherwise is arguably closer to a monkey-see-monkey-do than it is to the full gamut of human level of intelligence. Also, it is crucial that we prevent the misleading portrayal of AI as though it does have human qualities, which can lead to a lot of confusion and adverse consequences, so all in all let’s stop anthropomorphizing the existing spate of AI.

The point herein is that you cannot expect the AI of a self-driving car to always avoid running into someone or something. I’ve repeatedly stated in my columns that the notion of zero fatalities due to self-driving cars is malarkey and has a zero chance of happening. There will still be car crashes and sadly deaths and injuries, though the hope and expectation are that it will be a lot less than the existent annual 40,000 fatalities and some 2.3 million injuries in the United States alone from car accidents (see my indication about the major driving statistics at this link here).

This emphasizes that there is still room for the use of spoken commands to alert a driver when a pending endangerment is about to happen.

Were somehow magically the AI to on its own always and perfectly be able to avoid any car collisions, presumably the providing of any external warnings would not be warranted. I’m saying and declaring that those external commands are still going to be valuable and that we should not delude ourselves into thinking that the AI is all-knowing.

Recall that earlier I had mentioned that the receiver of the verbal commands has to be receptive to hearing the spoken words, else the act of yelling or providing the instruction is null and void. For the car driver that I alerted about the toddler on the tricycle, he heard me due to his window being partially rolled down and he apparently was able to hear what I exhorted.

What about AI?

You might be pondering whether the AI of the self-driving car is going to be a willing receiver of externally urged instructions. Well, similar to the case of the human driver, some key elements have to come to play for this to happen.

One crucial aspect is whether the AI will even hear a spoken command that has been urgently barked from somewhere outside of the vehicle.

Self-driving cars are typically including internal audio capabilities such as microphones to be able to hear the passengers that are inside the self-driving car. The AI is using contemporary Natural Language Processing (NLP) that is slightly adapted to interact with riding passengers. Currently, this NLP is extremely crude and a bit like the stilted interaction you might have with Alexa or Siri. As such this interaction is very limited and usually focused on obvious facets such as where a passenger wants to go. In the future, it is anticipated that the AI will be much more socio-conversational and be able to engage in quite extensive dialogue related to the driving task and the wishes of the passengers (see my predictions at this link here).

Few of the self-driving cars are being outfitted with exterior-based audio microphones.

Doing so is currently considered relatively unnecessary and an added and unneeded cost. The use of external listening is overall ranked as an edge or corner case, suggesting that it is a matter that is a low priority and might someday rise on the list of things to do. When you are knee-deep trying to get an AI driving system to simply drive from point A to point B, doing so without hitting anything, the prospects of coping with listening to the outside world offers little added value in comparison to the other meat-and-potatoes capabilities.

Some self-driving cars are adding external audio capabilities such as speakers that will allow the AI to speak at people, such as telling pedestrians to stand away from the curb or advising them to get out of the street when in the path of moving cars. Also, these audio capabilities are including microphones. The most prominent use to-date is to listen to the sounds of sirens coming from ambulances, fire trucks, police cars, and the like. As you know, human drivers are supposed to be listening for such sirens and then are supposed to pull over, though it seems that more and more human drivers are ignoring the sirens (a quite dreadful trend).

For those self-driving cars that do not yet have any external microphones, those brands and models have little chance of hearing any externally spoken commands or instructions. There are small odds that the interior microphones might pick-up an externally uttered human command, which is kind of what happened with the human driver (he was sitting inside the vehicle at the driver’s seat), but this is highly unlikely and also not being programmed with any prevalence anyway.

One supposes that a passenger riding inside a self-driving car might hear a person that yells out a command that is directed at the vehicle, and then the human passenger might repeat or attempt to relay the command to the AI system. This is fraught with difficulty. The person inside the self-driving car is bound to be startled at the externally yelled instruction and therefore not be alerted to what is happening, especially since they aren’t driving the car and they naturally assume there is no need to be conscious of the driving actions.

Even if the passenger hears the spoken command, there is a significant chance of a pronounced delay between them hearing it and then opting to repeat the verbal command to the AI driving system. Keep in mind too that the passenger is not sitting at the driving controls. The rider can only implore the AI about the driving act and cannot themselves directly use the driving controls. For now, the approach of having an externally exhorted command become relayed via an internal passenger is essentially untenable and relatively unlikely.

Bottom-line: Barking commands at a self-driving car is not going to do you any good, not today, though perhaps someday in the future this feature will be provided.

In the instance of the human driver backing out of their driveway, if the vehicle had been among the current crop of self-driving cars, I would have been better off yelling at the toddler rather than the car.

You might also have noted that when I yelled to try and stop the dog from running into the street, I opted to call out to the dog rather than the cars. Why? I could see that the cars were all moving fast, and their windows were rolled up. Trying to yell to those drivers would have been futile. My best bet was to hope that the dog would care about a human yelling at it, despite my not being the actual owner.

All of this suggests that whenever you see a self-driving car that is about to get into trouble, the odds are that you’ll have better luck at proffering a verbal command to an endangered human or animal rather than to the AI of the vehicle.

That’s the current state of affairs.

Conclusion

Do not lose hope.

As mentioned, there will eventually and in my opinion inevitably be self-driving cars that are extensively making use of external microphones and actively listen to the world around them. I would anticipate that all self-driving cars will ultimately leverage such technology.

There are added twists though that need to be given due consideration.

Suppose that when I yelled to the human driver to come to a stop for avoiding the toddler, I was somehow mistaken. Perhaps it would have been better for the driver to quickly accelerate and get out of the way of the oncoming toddler (this is a bit ridiculous in this instance, but you can readily envision situations whereby the verbal command is askew of what needs to be done).

If an AI driving system hears a spoken command, should the AI obediently abide by the command?

Your initial answer might be that yes, the AI ought to always obey humans. Period, end of the story. But this belies the chances of a human that has unintentionally provided an incorrect command. Or perhaps the human is being dastardly and purposely wants the AI to drive adversely or do some other devilish act.

I believe we would all reasonably agree that we expect the AI to assess the given command, even when a command has been expressed directly by a human being. The possible downsides are just too high and risky to not evaluate whatever might perchance be spoken. We certainly expect a human driver to do so, such as the driver backing down the driveway. I am assuming that he momentarily thought about my exhortation and then decided it made sense to come to a sudden stop. Indeed, no matter what I might have said, we generally would all concur that the driver had the final say in the matter and would be held responsible for the driving actions undertaken.

Assuming you concur that the AI would need to first assess any spoken command, you have now taken a turn into an abyss or morass. This opens a veritable can of worms.

When should the AI unquestioningly do what it is told versus possibly countermanding or ignoring a human uttered instruction?

Can we actually hold the AI responsible for the driving of the car, as though it is the legal or moral equivalent of a person responsible for the act of driving?

And so on.

One of the most fascinating aspects about self-driving cars is not merely the mobility that can be had via the use of AI driving systems, and thus no longer needing to have a human as a driver and enabling a mobility-for-all future, but this also brings up extremely important questions about AI and ethical considerations (for my columns about the rising realization of AI & Ethics, see the link here).

We might ask overall questions about AI that is being used for deciding on the granting of home loans or the AI that helps you to figure out how to invest your money, though those matters are not especially life-or-death per se. The AI for self-driving cars is in fact about life-or-death. We already know that every time a human gets behind the wheel of a car, the human is entrusted with life-or-death choices, for themselves and other nearby drivers and pedestrians. The same absolutely happens when we let AI autonomously drive a car.

Besides the excitement and delightfulness of seeing self-driving cars on our roadways, we also need to somberly consider how the AI is doing the driving and how it will be making life-or-death choices. That’s a routine part of driving, yet the repercussions are far from routine.

Let’s keep the AI from barking up the wrong tree, doing so by all of us listening to each other about how to best devise AI for self-driving cars.

That’s verbal command or instruction that we can all live with.

From Transportation in Perfectirishgifts

[aurelliocheek]

Apple’s IAP deal with Amazon and the beginning of a new era

Last week, Amazon’s Prime Video app on iOS began offering users the ability to purchase and rent video content via Amazon’s payment system, bypassing the iTunes in-app purchase payments process on iOS. This is an enormously significant development: Apple has historically exerted tight control over payments on iOS by forcing developers to use the iTunes IAP payments process that levies a 30% platform fee on all transactions.

Developers have begrudgingly paid the 30% tax on IAP transactions on both iOS and Google Play for years, but as a number of high profile developers began moving their app transactions to the web in order to avoid these platform fees, a sea change seemed imminent. Netflix and Spotify encourage users to transact on the web so as to avoid using the iTunes payments system; YouTube last month went so far as to cancel all active iTunes subscriptions to force those users to subscribe via the web.

But a web-based payments flow isn’t ideal; it’s a bad user experience (a user has to leave an app, open a mobile website, log into the service, and enter their credit card information), and it’s also simply inconsistently implemented across the iOS ecosystem. Apple has been engaged in a sort of cold war with very large companies that operate across many platforms — Spotify, Netflix, YouTube were able to get away with bypassing iTunes payment processing on mobile because they could always claim that users may have discovered their services on any number of platforms (desktop, connected TVs, etc.). But by tacitly accepting the web payments workaround, Apple signaled to developers that allowing for non-iTunes payments on iOS was inevitable. With Amazon’s adoption of its own payments system for the Amazon Prime iOS app, that moment is upon us.

John Gruber has an excellent overview of how the new Amazon Prime payments process works on iOS, but as a succinct overview:

Existing Prime account holders can now purchase and rent videos in the Prime iOS app via the Amazon payments process with the credit card attached to their Amazon account;

Anyone who upgrades to a Prime account via the iOS app still has to do so via iTunes payment processing, which means Apple takes their 30% / 15% cut of that subscription;

Users who subscribed to Prime via the iOS app will pay for any movies rented or purchased via the iTunes purchasing system.

Apple provided a statement about the new arrangement with Amazon to The Verge:

Apple has an established program for premium subscription video entertainment providers to offer a variety of customer benefits — including integration with the Apple TV app, AirPlay 2 support, tvOS apps, universal search, Siri support and, where applicable, single or zero sign-on. On qualifying premium video entertainment apps such as Prime Video, Altice One and Canal+, customers have the option to buy or rent movies and TV shows using the payment method tied to their existing video subscription.

Parsing this passage reveals some vital information:

Amazon is taking part in an apparently pre-existing program that also includes Altice One and Canal+;

In order to qualify for the program, Amazon had to integrate the Prime Video app with a number of other Apple’s features and services.

Given that this is an explicitly designated developer program, it stands to reason that participation isn’t open to the development community at large: it’s very likely that preferential payment terms were negotiated between Amazon and Apple in order to entice Amazon to cooperate.

Given that, one might wonder if this development is actually meaningful. That two of the world’s largest companies negotiated a mutually-beneficial commercial partnership within the context of a narrowly-scoped, invite-only developer program doesn’t have broad implications for the developer ecosystem. But I think the deal struck between Amazon and Apple reveals something very significant that will eventually impact the degree to which the iOS platform remains rigidly controlled by Apple: that pricing power has shifted from Apple to developers, and Apple no longer gets to set commercial terms.

I’ve long maintained that Apple can’t be classified as a monopoly because of the 30% platform fee or because it doesn’t allow third-party app stores within the iOS ecosystem. Monopolistic power is fundamentally related to the ability to be a price setter: to dictate prices because, through lack of competition, consumers have no choice but to purchase from a single firm. But in the case of smartphone apps, Apple doesn’t actually transact with end users — it merely operates a marketplace that connects app developers (sellers) with the people that own Apple hardware (buyers). Apple’s relationship with developers is that of an agent, and developers certainly have more options than just iOS in terms of distribution platforms for their apps. Apple doesn’t even have a majority of smartphone sales market share; how could it be a monopoly?

This price setting property is important when considering a monopoly. If Apple increased its platform fee to 40%, or 50%, what would happen — would all developers simply accept that? And if so: why isn’t it happening? In fact, the opposite is happening: Apple reduced its platform fee for year-2 subscriptions in June 2016 and Google followed suit for Android shortly thereafter in October 2016 (monopoly accusations aren’t leveled at Google over platform fees because Android allows developers to transact directly with users outside of Google Play). If Apple enjoyed monopoly pricing power, it wouldn’t be engaged in a slow-motion race to the bottom with a competitor that owns more marketshare than it does.

Some proponents of the Apple as monopoly worldview argue here that within the iOS ecosystem, Apple exists as a monopoly because it doesn’t allow for competing stores. This re-scoping of the situation blurs some logical lines (both consumers and developers still have choice: Android is larger than iOS!), but even putting that aside, Apple doesn’t qualify as a monopoly within this perspective because Apple doesn’t sell anything — it connects buyers and sellers as a marketplace operator. If anything, Apple in this case might be considered a monopsony, or a firm that enjoys exclusive buyer status: a monopsony is the only party to whom goods or services can be sold and can thus set prices in a way that maximizes its profit regardless of market forces.

But there’s no marginal cost of production for software, and given that Apple takes a percentage of in-app purchase revenues and not a fixed fee per purchase, both Apple and developers are incentivized to maximize revenue through appropriate pricing. This is the whole reason the freemium model rose to prominence on mobile in the first place: developers, not Apple, began reducing app prices until most settled at $0 simply because the competition for attention in the ever-crowding App Store was so ferocious. In fact, Apple seems to host a non-trivial amount of antipathy for the freemium model, as is evidenced with its Arcade product.

Coming back to Amazon: it is clear with this deal that turning a blind eye to the web payments workaround on iOS is ultimately leading to adoption of third-party payments. Far from being a monopoly, Apple is competing for users in a very crowded platforms marketplace: a tightly integrated system in which almost all participants not only operate platforms but also publish content on other companies’ platforms — a matrix of content stores and content.

The calculus that Apple is dealing with is: at what point does the total surface area of this matrix begin to influence the way Apple polices its own slice of the matrix? As consumers are presented with ever-increasing opportunities to consume their favorite content, when, for example, does the incremental value from offering frictionless access to Prime Video content on iOS outweigh the incremental revenue from 30% of a poorly-integrated Amazon Prime on iOS?

Obviously that decision isn’t restricted exclusively to Amazon Prime: Apple will have to begin to decide how this matrix, which represents consumer choice and optionality, will influence the freedom to which it allows developers to operate on iOS. But a decision like the one that Apple made with Amazon seems unlikely to not cascade out to other developers into a more comprehensive platform policy.

Photo by Arnel Hasanovic on Unsplash

The post Apple’s IAP deal with Amazon and the beginning of a new era appeared first on Mobile Dev Memo.

Apple’s IAP deal with Amazon and the beginning of a new era published first on https://leolarsonblog.tumblr.com/

[smartsheffield]

Notes from Meetup #7: Tech and the City - Part 1

(This edition’s write up is split into two separate posts in order to get around Tumblr’s 5 embedded videos per post limit - we had a lot of talks at this one :)

The December 2017 edition of the SmartSheffield meetup was probably our biggest to date, with tickets selling out over a week before the event, people on the waitlist and 8 speakers. We nearly finished all the pizza this time!! (Thanks Arup as ever for laying on such a generous spread :)

The talks were definitely shorter and more succinct this time, but with so much to get through it was still a squeeze to be finished by 9pm. We’ll continue to tweak and improve, but it’s also a measure of how much activity there now is going on across the city, and the popularity of our event, that there is more and more content to get through. And some of the topics cannot be covered in just a few minutes, so it’s all good.

There was also much talk around funding bids again, which is good to note. Unfortunately the planned 5g testbed bid workshop that was planned for November didn’t happen in the end, but we still very much want to arrange monthly open bid workshops to alternate with the meetup proper. We’ll look to see whether we can get one booked in for January, with the next meetup pencilled in for Monday February 5th.

We also, as per usual, organised a meeting of the Sheffield Things Network before the meetup, which was excellently attended. And with Things Network LoRaWAN gateways now being shipped, we’re confident there will be a significant network up and running in Sheffield by the Spring. I should also note that the Sheffield Honey Company have put the first Gateway in the field (well done Jez Daughtry!) and also that Sheffield Hallam University have teamed up with the Digital Catapult and have commissioned a Things Connected LoRaWAN gateway in the city centre, so we now have two IoT platforms to play around with, as well as the SigFox network which WNDUK is also rolling out.

Speaking of which, I should point readers at the Urban Flows Observatory’s first innovation competition, which is focussed on building a prototype to capture new data. There more about this in Steve Jubb’s talk below, but the deadline is very short, and it’s worth highlighting here - so get you’re expressions of interest tout suite.

Right, now without further ado, here are the talks from the event:

Ben Atha: Smart kiosks and transparent screens

Ben Atha is the director of Milk Lab, a creative design agency based at the Electric Works, and in Istanbul, which specialises in applying interactive technologies for advertising. Ben explains how the company has been developing smart kiosks for retail applications, that could also find uses in cities, and also how new transparent OLED screen technologies are making new kinds of static augmented reality applications possible, which also have potential applications in cities.

Stephen Elliot: Location-based apps for cultural heritage and behaviour change

Stephen is the founder and CEO of Llama Digital a Sheffield agency that specialises in location based applications and experiences, and were one of the first agencies to explore and exploit bluetooth beacons.

Stephen introduced us to two of their applications:

Situate, which allows museums, galleries and other cultural heritage organisations to create their own location-based tours and experiences, giving ‘non-technical’ curators the ability to easily manage their visitors’ digital experience of the physical location.

Bicycle Island - an app developed for the Isle of Wight, designed to encourage people to cycle along the route between Cowes and Newport in order to promote a healthier lifestyle and reduce congestion along the route. It’s a gamified active travel app, that engages cyclists in a collective effort to beat monthly distance targets in order to unlock charitable donations to local causes, and shows what can be done by building bespoke interaction on top of Llama’s underlying .Situate engine and backend.

Jonny Douglas: Update on Mount Pleasant and Avenues to Zero project

Back in July, Pennie Raven introduced us to the plans for the development of the Mount Pleasant estate in Sharrow, and the Avenues to Zero project that presents a holistic vision of a community where living, working and play are all integrated. This time her business partner Jonny Douglas presented us with an update on the project and how the SmartSheffield community can get involved.

Fabio Ciravegna: A Data Ecosystem Proposal to Model Sheffield City Region Mobility Patterns

Fabio is Professor of Language and Knowledge Technology at the University of Sheffield’s Computer Science Department. He is also a co-founder of successful University spin-outs The Floow and K-NOW. Fabio has a proposal to bring data together from a number of sources across the city region in order to analyse movement and transport patterns. He also raises  important points about how the city should be doing more to enabling projects like this, and how the SmartSheffield community can play a role in reducing the friction.

Please check out part two for talks by Steve Jubb, David Oliver, Sam Chapman and I (Chris Dymond).