#i wrote the first iteration of this as part of english class

[ethereal-engineer]

A Story To Tell

"I needed to tell you my story, but I was scared of how you'd react to the raw truth, so I twisted it with metaphor, and tied it into narrative, concealing the thread of my life within, until you were ready and able to know."

"Well, look how far we've come. We've gone farther than either of us ever believed possible. I think I'm ready. So, won't you tell me a story?"

"Sure, just remember that the specifics may shift from one retelling to the next, and the story as a whole's gotten a little longer since I told it last. It's been an eventful few years, y'know."

"Quit stalling and tell the damn story already!"

"Alright, alright! Our story begins with a young boy named Joseph. He was a taller fellow, even in youth, with curly copper hair and eyes green as grass. However, if you listened well, you might hear the hiss of a piston coming from where one would expect a muscle, or the low rumble of a boiler emanating from his chest, for he was made not from flesh and blood, but of metal and steam. Of course, at a glance, he was just like any boy of his age, albeit a little quiet, which his parents treated as a blessing more often than not.

Joseph went through his primary schooling, learning his numbers well and his words well enough, but there was one thing he could never quite get his grip on. People shied away from him, and muttered behind his back. Whispered names crossed the yard, those of 'unnatural', 'inhuman', 'freak' and many more I'd not repeat to my worst enemy."

"Not even to Scarlotte?"

"Okay, maybe to her, although she hits hard if you piss her off, so maybe not. Either way, this unstopping barrage caused Joseph to begin building a kind of mental wall, a way to keep himself safe against those who would tease him. And so he withdrew, and any time something breached his defenses, he built the wall tougher and taller. As he went into secondary, the gap between him and his classmates only grew, as although most of his class had matured past name-calling and petty insults, new differences arose. As his classmates' hearts fluttered and Jumped, the boiler in his chest hummed unceasingly on. As their faces blushed, his stayed cold as steel. Joseph could not love romantically, and though he didn't mind not having to worry about the matters of love, once again, he was painted as different and inferior, for something he had no control over. On one fateful day, after Joseph grabbed his lunch and headed to a table in the corner to eat in peace, he saw someone approaching. He prepared himself for the usual questions of relationship advice, either newly started or abruptly ended, as although Joseph had little experience in the affairs of the heart, he was levelheaded and listened well, and could help one sort through their feelings if needed. Today, however, they simply sat and ate. They exchanged introductions, but even without words, Joseph knew that she too, was more than a normal person. She was rough about the edges, bold and brash. She was everything he wasn't. She was moulded of clay and wood, and her name was Sophia."

"Ooh, is that me?"

"Last I checked your name wasn't Sophia."

"And yours wasn't Joseph."

"And unlike our protagonists, we are both made of flesh and blood."

"You know what I meant! It's your meta-something-or-other!"

"Okay, let's get back to the story. Joseph and Sophia continued to sit together at lunches, and slowly, together, they pulled down the walls they had erected to keep themselves safe, finally able to show their colours without fear of backlash, and even if they did, they would face it together. Over the years, they became closer, and soon enough there were no two friends closer than the golem and the automaton. Occasionally, someone might ask if they were 'more than friends', to which they would reply "Friends is enough for us, thank you very much" and walk off."

"Well this is all well and good, but what happens next?"

"What happens next is they finish their schooling, neither passing with flying colours, but both doing well enough to get where they needed to go. I'd go further into detail, but I barely remember myself, and even if I did, trying to show all of that, we'd miss the sunset with me still talking. And so, as the first chapter of their lives came to an end, they stayed in touch. They met together often, laughing and generally having fun spending time with each other. And one day, a letter arrived in Joseph's mailbox. It was an invitation to a small, two day hike, from Sophia. And so he prepared, and they met at the bottom of a hill a few days later. It was warm, but not hot, as summer gave way to autumn. So they walked, talking about life since they'd last met up, which was roughly two weeks prior, about jobs, and anything inbetween. Sophia had gotten a position in the local news, as an editor, and Joseph was selling his art in the market square. And as they reached the top of the hill, they unpacked tents and started a search for suitable firewood. Once they'd amassed a sizeable pile, they sat on the ground, facing the setting sun, and Joseph told a story."

"Well, that was wonderful. Wanna watch the sunset a while longer before we start that fire?"

"Yeah, that sounds nice."

[taffycandyqt]

hi I'm sorry if this question makes you uncomfortable but why don't you exactly care much for mutant mayhem? Not attacking or judging I'm actually just curious why?

(I can very much guess why on the bay iteration due to some the movie being.. anyways feel free to just not answer if you don't want to! )

Honestly, I have A LOT of reasons. I literally wrote an 8 page essay for my English class about everything I thought the movie got wrong. I would like to say that I don't dislike it because of any attachment I have to the other iterations. I was genuinely excited to see mutant mayhem, and defended the movie from people who were hating on it before it came out. I watched it the first week it came out in theaters, and got dressed up and everything. I was THRILLED to be there.

However, to keep a long story short, when I actually watched the movie I felt nothing. I did not laugh, I did not feel sad, happy, tense ect. and I felt no connection to the characters. I sat in that theater politely waiting for the movie to get to the good part, the reason why everyone said the movie was so good, and it never did. And in the end I left disappointed.

I would like to reiterate that I do not dislike it because it isn't like past iterations, but rather because I don't think there is anything particularly remarkable about it. The animation is impressive and I do commend their creativity with that, however you can't put frosting and sprinkles in a cup and call it a cupcake. And to me, that's what it felt like they did.

That being said, this is just my opinion. Please don't try to convince me otherwise. It will not work.

Thank you for the ask though anon!🩷🩷 don't really mind since I do enjoy sharing my opinions. I just won't go into the small details regarding mutant mayhem because I know my opinions aren't popular I don't want to fight with people on the internet. Also just cuz it would take forever to actually write every out.🤣 Either way, thank you for your sensitivity. I appreciate it🩷

[foxingpeculiar]

I'm writing something and I wanna ramble and muse about it for a second so I'm going to do that here (under a cut).

Cos I just had kind of an epiphany about it. Okay, so it's based on a script I wrote for a spec script class a couple years ago. It got the professor's stamp of approval, in the like "you should submit this somewhere" kind of way, but I didn't, in part because at the time I was very frustrated with it. Because spec scripts are a very tight format: within a certain page range, minimal stage directions (absolutely no adverbs), as much white space on each page as possible, etc. etc. But my imagination tends to sprawl, so the process of whittling it down to something that could fit into that ended up feeling like a disservice to the story I really wanted to tell. And like, I couldn't let it go. Thinking about this project in particular was actually a big part of why I switched my concentration from film to English/Creative Writing. It's been gnawing at me for years now.

So I started drafting it. Iteratively, at first--I have like four versions of the first chapter--but I've kind of settled into just rolling with one particular draft at this point. And like... hoo boy. The script was, I think 113 pages? And I'm already at 58 pages (Calibri 11pt, single-spaced) and still on the first night of a story that spans about six weeks. From where I'm sitting now, that puts a conservative estimate for a complete draft around maybe 700pp? Yikes.

So like, given that background, I have the main thrust of the thing pretty much solidly plotted out in my head--the script is essentially the outline of that. And it has two POV characters (a mother and son: Patty and Hunter) in two parallel plot lines. But in expanding the story, I'm pulling on ideas that aren't as well-developed because I had to discard them in the previous writing process, so that's where the surprises are coming from.

And that's meant adding two more POV characters, which I was having kind of opposite problems with. One (Stacy) was a background character in the script, so I have a sense of her. And she's easy to write, cos I identify with her a lot, so I knew I wanted to do a little more with her, but I wasn't quite sure what she was doing in the story. And the other one (now Pete), I knew what I needed to fill out the missing part of the plot, what kind of character he had to be, but I didn't have really any sense of who he was. (And they don't match up, it's not like I could combine them.)

But over the past few days of mulling about it, I think I've solved both problems. And I can make the two new characters support each of the two main characters in a kind of parallel structure that I think will work. They both serve as a way to give context to Patty and Hunter's stories, which is what they need to really have an impact at the end.

The part I still haven't figured out is Derek Phelps. This is a character who just kind of wandered the fuck into the kid's plot and suddenly became VERY GODDAMNED IMPORTANT and I have no idea where he came from or quite what he's up to yet. Which is great, it's an opportunity, cos the kid's plot was definitely the weaker of the two, and he's what helped me figure out how to weave Stacy into a more important supporting role, but he's a mystery to me. And I've never had a character do that before, at least not to this level. It's wild.

[autumnslance]

About Plagiarism

I left a long, planned essay on Twitter tonight. I will copy the meat of it here for y’all, as recently a friend was copied (a rarer ship in the fandom, so very noticeable by the writer and their regular beta reader) and it seems we need a Talk, kids. Links and screenshots and my rambling underway.

------

Apparently we need to discuss what is and isn’t plagiarism. Especially in FanFic where we're interacting with the same characters, settings, ideas. Let’s start with the dictionary and continue the thread from there (I like the word origin/history personally):

Definition of plagiarize

transitive verb  : to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own : use (another's production) without crediting the source

intransitive verb : to commit literary theft : present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source

The Kidnapping Roots of Plagiarize

If schools wish to impress upon their students how serious an offense plagiarism is, they might start with an explanation of the word’s history. Plagiarize (and plagiarism) comes from the Latin plagiarius “kidnapper.” This word, derived from the Latin plaga (“a net used by hunters to catch game”), extended its meaning in Latin to include a person who stole the words, rather than the children, of another. When plagiarius first entered English in the form plagiary, it kept its original reference to kidnapping, a sense that is now quite obsolete.

“Ideas” is fuzzy in the Merriam-Webster definition. There are story archetypes that exist in many forms. Joseph Campbell’s Monomyth/Hero's Journey outlines many famous stories. And it's popular to say that “Avatar” is “Dances with Wolves” is “Pocahontas” is “The Last Samurai” etc.

But note how while those films have similar plotlines--”Military Guy falls for Native woman, learns to appreciate her Culture, stands up to Evil Bosses”--none of them execute those ideas in the same way. Sully’s story is different from Dunbar’s not just cuz one’s a Science Fiction epic and the other a Western. Disney's “Pocahontas” Very Loosely takes history and uses the same story beats. The Last Samurai uses the Meiji era Westernization. Same ideas, different executions, even beyond settings.

None of these are plagiarizing each other though the ideas are similar. They’re told in their own ways, own language; both in the genres they belong to (Western, Pseudo-History, SciFi, Animated) and how characters interact with each other and settings. Original dialogues (variable quality).

We also see this in books as similar novel plots get published in waves so we end up with bunches of post-apocalypse teen revolutionaries or various vampires or lots of young wizard stories all at once. Sometimes ideas just happen like this; multiple discovery, simultaneous invention, concurrent inspiration, cognitive emergence are all phrases I’ve seen for it. So it happens in original content as well, and legality gets fuzzy (Also why you don't send authors your fanfic ideas).

In existing properties, this gets trickier but even “Elementary”’s Holmes and Watson are nothing like the BBC’s “Sherlock” characters. Who are nothing like other versions of the Detective and his Doctor pal over the decades in various media properties.

FanFic's in a similar position where like Sherlock Holmes we play with the same characters, setting, and storyarcs but give our own spin to them. People can and will have similar ideas about plots. Trick is to use your own words. Take the characters and make the story your own.

I have a good example courtesy of @raelly-writing​. We both ship Wolcred. We both wrote soft post-Paglth’an scenes with Thancred and our WoLs. Both features the couples helping each other undress, examining injuries, bathing, bantering. My fic was written soon after 5.5 part 1 came out. Dara’s is much more recent. Yet at no point reading hers did I feel she was copying my words. The PoVs differ. Our characters focus on different things. Mine has a mini-arc concerning the Nutkin.

The links for comparison’s sake (and maybe leave kudos/comments if so inclined please and thanks). Note while the scenes are very similar no phrases are written in the same way. Mine: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25417882/chapters/76059467 Dara’s: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26067565/chapters/81832915

Dara and I both hang out in certain Discords and I know conversations about Thancred and WoL caring for each other post-battle has come up in those channels and we've both participated. It’s a stock FanFic scene to boot. Cuz it's soft and feels warm and snuggly.

I HAVE been copied before, back in WoW. My case is pretty clear cut so here are the images of my old RP Haven profile (1st, old RP website) and the plagiarist’s RSP (2nd, an in game mod to share descriptions and basic info). 

This was a decade ago on Shadow Council and I think the character deleted so any Availa’s in WoW now aren’t the same person. I left the names to point out what changed. Just the names and a word or 2 to make sense for the class changes as well. Otherwise lifted directly from my RP profile.

The funny part is how the person got caught. Literally walked into our weekly RP Guild meeting that I was running and asked to join. Folks noticed right away the similar backstory; after all there may have been more Outland-born Azerothians. My initial excitement at a character I could weave into our story turned to gut-twisting rage and grief as I recognized my own exact words though. Words I’d carefully crafted and constantly iterated on to improve over time (before and after this incident, until the site died).

When caught they tried to claim their significant other had leveled the character for them and made up the backstory based on Skyrim. If you know WoW’s Outland story and Skyrim’s plot you know how ridiculous that is. Also tried to lie about other drama I knew about thanks to roommate's characters but hey. I had to be blunt that I’d shared the info with Haven mods and other guild officers Alliance and Horde. That we would not “laugh about this” one day though lucky this was “just” RP not original or academic work. Cuz if it'd been monetized or academic I would've raked them through the coals.

I felt violated. Hurt. Had anxiety attacks. They took MY WORDS and tried to claim them as theirs. Have another character born in Outland trained by Draenei; Awesome! Our characters have an instant connect in similarities and differences of that experience. Don’t steal my characters wholesale!

Then the audacity of trying to come into my guild as if no one would notice. ShC wasn’t a large server by then, still active but not nearly Wyrmrest Accord or Moon Guard big. My character was well known due to my writing and RP. Speaking of how easy it is to get caught in specific spaces...A case of a self-published novelist getting noticed for plagiarizing fanfic was discovered recently (explicit erotica examples through the thread).

One way they got noticed was how much content they put out in only a year, lifted from fandom. The examples in Kokom’s threads show how the material was altered but still recognizable. In some cases, just the names are changed as in my experience. In other passages more has changed but you can still see the bones of the original fic poking through in the descriptions and character interactions, even with adjustments made.

Similar ideas happen. Similar plots exist. Same 'ships with friends are fun! In FanFic we’re working with the same material. It’s possible to write a similar scene differently. To make that scene and characters your own. All we’re asking is not to copy others' words. Others' characters. Others' specific phrases and descriptions used to bring those words, those characters, to life. Use your own. In the end you’ll be happier.

I get wanting to have what the perceived “popular people” have. I get seeing concepts others succeed with and wanting some of that too. We all get a bit jealous now and then for various reasons. Sometimes we don't even realize it, consciously. But do it in your own way. Maybe check to see if you’re getting a bit too close to the “inspiration” you admired, maybe reread often. Don’t hurt your fellow creatives. If you do and get caught don’t try to double down. Have the grace to be abashed at least and work to do better. Eventually you WILL get caught. All it takes is once to throw all else you've done into question. Ao3 doesn’t take kindly to plagiarists. Nor do a lot of fan communities focused on writing and RP. Getting back that trust is hard. The internet doesn’t forget easily, for good or ill.

[nostalgiachan]

Time once again for OC redraws! It’s a very musical squad today.

Musical character lore below the cut!

#17: Zeros Kamui Idea: Baby's First Uke. Also a pop idol. Story: Luster

Let's be completely honest with ourselves: he's basically Shuichi Shindou. He might not have initially resembled Shuichi, but he's Shuichi. Maybe with a couple more braincells.

Zeros Kamui is a wildly successful pop idol with a keen eye for what his fans like: crossdressing dudes and The Gay. He once wore a miniskirt and thong on stage and acted as a goofy alter ego named Super Para-Para Powerpuff Zero-chan and the fans went bonkers for it, so while he wasn't super into the crossdressing aspect (or was he? ;)), it was a fun thing to do on occasion. It was during one of these Zero-chan stints that he decided to bring his bodyguard, Lust, on stage and plant a kiss on him.

But he totally wasn't gay, though. In fact, Zeros was very much the "doesn't realize he's gay until there's a dick halfway up his ass" kind of uke. Which is precisely what happened when Lust came to see him after the show and took his virginity in a drunken free-for-all. Fortunately for him, Zeros was more than okay with this turn of events.

He still wasn't sure how he felt about thongs tho

And then Zeros was kidnapped in the middle of a show by a wealthy crazed fan who met Zeros once at a meet and greet and decided he wanted to collect him. So Lust has to go collect Zeros back.

#18: Mina Grace/Mina Nevermore Idea: The rock star lead singer I wanted to be as a kid. Story: D.A.R.K. (not so much a proper story as an OC concept)

Oh boy, oh boy, time for the first iteration of my fictional band, D.A.R.K. In and out of universe, the name doesn't actually mean anything. Out of universe, I tried to come up with a cool acronym, like how HIM had once stood for His Infernal Majesty, but nothing really felt right. Instead, I went with the in-universe explanation that they wanted to do something like KISS's name, where everyone comes up with a different meaning and the band refuses to reveal what it means (because it doesn't actually mean anything and it's more fun to watch people guess).

Mina was basically my self-insert; lived in the same town I did, had the same side part and half-lid eyes, had the same taste in clothes and penchant for red and black, her last name's my middle.  Apparently I first came up with her concept after watching a Flyleaf video.

She was basically everything I wanted to be if I was a rock star: cool, yet chill, the sickest wardrobe straight out of late 00s Hot Topic, and an awesome singer who totally didn't get stage fright, no sir. She and her band mates were all super best friends and eventually she'd end up dating her lead guitarist, Valo (another instance of me taking the name of something/someone I really liked and applying it to a character).

Most of what I wrote about these guys was actually "use the word in a sentence" vocabulary exercises in my English class, lol.

#19: Valo Idea: Genderfluid guitarist Story: D.A.R.K.

Ah, dear Valo. Valo was basically my first attempt at playing with gender presentation and androgyny aside from Neros, so bear with me.

Despite being obviously named after Ville Valo, they're almost entirely based on Davey Havok of AFI, being a combination of Sing the Sorrow-Davey's androgyny and decemberunderground-Davey's hair and makeup. I also inadvertently channeled Malice Mizer's Mana in Valo's habit of never speaking above a whisper.

The reason for whispering is that they like to keep people guessing about their gender; their sense of fashion is very GNC, they're able to do back-up vocals in both masculine and feminine styles, and the other band members refuse to divulge any details about their gender.

At the time, I referred to them as "it" because I had no fucking clue what being non-binary was or using they/them. Looking back on them, I'm not sure if I consider them non-binary or a very genderfluid male. I think at the time, I saw them as genderfluid male before I ever knew what that was, but I wanted to keep up the mystery, so I'll stick to they/them if I ever use them again.

Also they play lefty guitar, so that's fun.

#20: Hermanni Lobelia Hargreaves Idea: Bubbly bassist Story: D.A.R.K.

Eventually, Lemon's gonna smack me for the number of repurposed Finnish names in this segment. He's gonna strangle me when we get to Winterstrike

Hermanni Hargreaves, kawaii bassist with her kawaii pet hamster, Gas. And yes, they, too, have names taken straight from HIM: Hermanni is Ville Valo's middle name and Gas was their longtime drummer. As for other inspirations, her massive rat tails were taken from Albel Nox from Star Ocean: Til the End of Time, her middle name is the all-girls academy from Ouran High School Host Club, and her general fashion sense was very anime and J-Fashion.

Unfortunately, beyond her general concept of bubbly, upbeat, weeby bassist, I don't have much else documented about her character.

[willinglyable]

Blog 1 Introduction

Hello!

For those of you who do not know already my name is Anthony.

Welcome to the new edition of my blog. In my final semester of the M.A.T program I have the opportunity to refine my blogging skills and writing capabilities in my fiction class. Needless to say, the tone will greatly differ from the previous iteration with my nonfiction work.

In my original first post I explained the imposter syndrome I have surrounding creative writing. While this will take a while to overcome, I think that it has improved to a certain extent.

This year as part of my requirements I will be the lead/primary teacher in my mentor's classroom. I am teaching eleventh grade American Literature and co-teaching an Advanced Placement (AP) Literature and an AP Language & Composition course. So, I guess it goes without saying that I love English and writing. Although as I told my mentor and my students I am definitely more comfortable with academic style writing. However, I am a big nerd who has aspirations of studying postmodernism through a deconstructionist lens if I am admitted to one of the Ph.D. programs I applied to. (Boston University, University of Tennessee Knoxville, and Emory University).

When I do write fiction I tend to lean into philosophical and psychological themes. I have been influenced in part by the dystopian works of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, and Yevgeny Zamyatin. One of my favorite pieces I wrote during my short fiction class in undergraduate was entitled Hunger Speaks, about a woman who suffered from the trauma of her husband's gruesome suicide (burned alive in their house). She decides to make a fresh start as an actress in New York with her infant son (as cliche as that is). On their way they get in a collision on the highway with a tractor trailer in Greensboro North Carolina (only an hour away from their house in Biscoe North Carolina). She suffers a psychotic break after realizing her son is dead. Still determined she begins starving to death as she continues on her journey. Finally she arrives in a hair salon in New York and utters her last words "J'ai la dalle" {I am starving in French} as Hunger says to her "Feed Me!"

I was inspired by my professor to be as sadistic to my characters to maximize their pain and the connection to the audience. I thought it was interesting to see how people reading the story got distinct things from it and how they all read it so differently. While I do not plan to become a novelist, I am eager to go through the publishing process.

[retro-scorpio]

Sexual Tension

I don’t know what else to call this little one shot, so you’re unfortunately stuck with this.

I wrote this short story a little while ago, and it’s basically a college AU featuring Julian Devorak from The Arcana with special appearances from Julian’s sister Portia, Nadia Satrinava, Count Lucio, and Asra Alnazar. I may end up adding to this later, but as of right now this is the finished product.

So, if you’re into fanfiction about characters from The Arcana, then enjoy this story.

Julian has the rather stereotypical reputation of being a loner, so much so that it’s impossible to track him down outside of classes. Even then, he’s an elusive presence in the room, always choosing to sit in the back and keep to himself, his notes, and his cup of black coffee. Rumors spread about him as a result of his mysterious nature, but he doesn’t seem to know about them or care. At least, that’s what I’ve been told. I don’t know how true any of it is, because ever since I stepped foot in this university, I’m seeing him just about everywhere I go.

I first got a glimpse of Julian when I bumped into his shoulder as I was trying to find one of my classes. We both apologized, and he directed me to where I needed to go. Later on that same day, I discovered that we were both in the same English class about texts from the Victorian era, and so I opted to sit next to him. He’s always in the campus library the same time I am, hunched over books and scribbling things down in his notebook, and there was even one time where I caught him prancing around outside in the early morning light as if he was part of an imaginary sword fight.

So, I shouldn’t be that surprised to see him at auditions for our school’s fall production of Sweeny Todd, but at the same time it has me wondering just how many more times our paths are going to cross. Perhaps he likes the story as much as I do and wanted to see how our school would adopt it.

“Hello!” a skinny, petite, pale, brunette lady exclaims excitedly at me, startling me and making me flinch slightly. “I haven’t seen your face before. I’m Lizzy.” She extends her hand out to me, and I shake it. Before I can even tell her my name, though, she asks bluntly,

“You don’t know what role you want, do you?”

“Pardon?” Lizzy sheepishly smiles.

“Sorry; I should have warned you in advance that I’m really good at reading people. Being involved in theatre does that to you over time.”

“It’s okay,” I respond. “Especially because you’re right; I’m not even sure if I’ll get a part at all. I just really enjoy the story and thought I’d give this a shot.”

“Have you ever acted before?”

“A couple times, yeah. When I was younger. I’ve always liked the idea of acting, but I’ve not had much time to devote to it.

“Well, here’s your chance to tip your toes back in the water! I think I have the perfect role for you.”

“You do?” I ask. Lizzy enthusiastically nods her head.

“You see that giant group of people over there?” She points out a crowd huddled on the other side of the auditorium, appearing to be watching Julian’s every move and swooning over him.

“They’re all wanting to play the role of Sweeny Todd’s assistant.”

“Let me guess: Julian’s playing Sweeny Todd.”

“Unofficially, yes,” Lizzy answers in a hushed tone. “He certainly has all of the traits of the character. The assistant is the most sought after role because in this iteration, they’re Sweeny Todd’s love interest and eventual partner in crime.”

“I thought Mrs. Lovett fulfilled that role.”

“In the classic, yes. This version is a sequel of sorts that answers the question, ‘what if Sweeny Todd didn’t die and instead managed to escape?’ So, he ends up traveling to and settling down in New York, where he picks up an assistant who helps him around his shop. He leads a normal life for five years until his daughter Johanna finds him and confronts him about what he did in London. The assistant happens to overhear their conversation and talks to Sweeny about it later that evening, and he or she—depends on who ends up getting the role—convinces Sweeny to pick up where he left off because there are a lot of corruption and starvation in New York.” Interesting. So, some artistic license has been taken with the story, which could either go really well or quite terribly.

“So, why do you think I would make a good assistant?”

“Because you’re the only person Julian’s noticed walk in here.” Before I can ask for Lizzy to clarify, a booming voice cuts through the chatter, and I’m forced to rush to the large group of people vying to play the assistant.

“Ladies and gentleman,” the voice rings out. It belongs to a tall, blonde man on the stage. “My name is Lucio, and I’m co-directing this play with the help of my dear friend Lizzy. Now, I’ve been told that there’s a long list of people wanting the role of Sweeny Todd’s assistant, so we’ll get that out of the way first. Will everyone fitting that description please step to the front of the auditorium and line up horizontally so that I can take a good look at each of you?” It becomes clear quickly that Lucio is pulling out the weeds before anyone even says a line, for he goes down the line and says no to the people he deems unfit for the role. A lot of it seems based on physical looks as he utter phrases like ‘too short’, ‘too fat’, and even ‘too ugly’ to a couple of individuals. By the time he gets to me, I’m finding it hard to swallow, but I try my best to not let Lucio know that I’m nervous. Instead, I look straight at him as he glances over every inch of me.

“Spunky,” he murmurs. I’m not wearing anything grand, so I wonder what brought on that comment. “I like it.” He moves on to the next person, and I hesitantly remain where I’m standing. Even though he gave me a compliment, Lucio didn’t explicitly tell me to stay like he did with the others still in line.

“Alright,” he states once he’s assessed everyone, clasping his hands in front of his chest. “So, for those no longer standing up here, you can either talk to Lizzy and audition for a different role or you can leave for the evening. The choice is yours. As for the rest of you, you’ll be ad-libbing your way through a pivotal scene in the play shortly. Julian, if you would hop on stage please.” Looking back at the seats, I see Julian sprawled out, as if he was right at home. He leisurely untangles himself and makes his way on stage.

“Bring out one of the folding chairs from backstage,” Lucio nearly barks at Julian. As Julian fulfills the request, Lucio tells us that we’ll be acting out the scene in which Sweeny Todd admits his crimes to his assistant.

“Julian will deliver the first line, thus setting the scene, but the direction it goes is entirely up to you. When I have seen enough, or if things are stalling, I will call scene. Remember, only one of you will get the role, so make a good impression. Julian!”

“Ready when you are!” Julian calls back. His voice is surprisingly smooth. The few times we’ve talked, he’s sounded a bit groggy, as though he needed more sleep. Combined with his tall stature, bright eyes, and muscular physique, it makes him quite the dream boat. I can see why so many people want to play his love interest.

“Excellent! You there. Pinky.” Lucio points at a girl with hot pink hair. “You’re up first.” Thank goodness. I did not want to go first. Lucio directs us to sit down in the second and third rows as he plants himself closer to the middle of the auditorium.

I must say, Julian is very good at improving. Not only does he know his character, but he’s also giving his partner opportunities to showcase their talents. Whether they take him up on his offer is another story. Some of them want to steal the scene, and others are using it as a means to flirt with Julian. Meanwhile, Lucio’s patience is slowly growing shorter as no one seems to be exactly who he’s looking for. He’s given everyone nicknames, some of them unflattering as time wears on. Fortunately for me, he calls me Spunky.

When I sit down on the chair on stage, I close my eyes and take a deep breath, envisioning the scene I’m about to play in my head. If this is a pivotal part in the play, then it needs to be full of suspense and drama. Just like that, a plan’s in place.

“Ready?” Julian whispers as I open my eyes back up. I nod my head, and he utters the opening lines.

“Elise, what you heard my daughter say is true. I am—well, was—the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. I murdered countless people. Judges, doctors, lawyers, even my own wife. I ran away from London because I didn’t want to get caught, but the truth is all of those people either deserved to die or were wishing for death to be bestowed upon them. I was simply doing the world a favor.”

“I don’t believe you,” I reply. There’s a fleeting moment where Julian’s caught off guard, but he quickly recovers.

“Oh, really? And why’s that, dear?”

“How am I supposed to believe that the same man who constantly stubs his toe on furniture and smiles at everyone that he meets is capable of ruthless, calculated, cold-hearted murder? For God’s sake, you can’t even walk into a room without making some sort of mess! You’re always relying on me to keep the shop tidy, and I feel like someone who was into killing people would be able to neaten things up themselves.” Julian sticks his hand in his pocket and pulls out a pencil.

“So, you don’t believe I have it in me to be a murderer.”

“No, I don’t.” The next thing I know, Julian’s leaning over me, his face inches away from mine and his pencil hovering over my nose.

“Let me tell you something, darling; this tool has helped me make my way up the social chain. No matter how rich a man is, there comes a day where he needs a shave, and I’m the best there is.” He moves the pencil down and presses it against my throat while maintaining eye contact.

“There’s a certain amount of pressure that you need to apply in order to get a smooth, clean shave. If you don’t put enough pressure, you end up missing a few spots. Put too much, and well, you end up cutting him. Draw the knife across the neck fast enough, and you have a dead man suffering from major blood loss.” He presses the pencil harder against my throat to emphasize his point, making it slightly difficult for me to breathe.

“Shall I show you what I mean, Elise, or have I made myself clear?”

“I believe you,” I gasp. He immediately releases pressure and takes a couple steps back, smirking at me.

“Good. Now, if that’s all you wanted to discuss, then I suggest you head up to bed for the evening. We have a long day tomorrow.” He starts walking away from me, but Lucio hasn’t yelled for the scene to end, so I assume that I have to keep going.

“Why America?” Julian stops in his tracks and turns to face me.

“Pardon?”

“Why did you flee to America of all places? You could have easily traveled to France or Italy, but instead you chose New York.” Julian sighs.

“Like I said, I didn’t want to get caught. I wanted to start a new life, and word travels quicker from England to other countries in Europe than it does from England to America. The two countries are separated by an ocean, after all.”

“Have you ever thought about doing it again?”

“Doing what again?”

“Using your profession as a means of…extermination.”

“Elise, I was in a really dark place when I executed that plan in London. I’m not the same person I was five years ago, and if I were to do it again, I’d be signing my own death sentence.” I get up from the chair and slowly walk up to Julian, worried that my next actions are going to make Lucio end the scene.

“My father was killed by a drunk police officer who mistook him for another man, and my mom was raped and beaten by the judge overlooking the case.” I gently place my fingers around his chin and stand on the tips of my toes, bringing my face closer to his.

“The rich and powerful are just as evil and corrupt in New York as they are in London, Mr. Todd. They get to do whatever they want with impunity, even if it costs the lives of innocent, hardworking people. Someone has to make them pay for their crimes, or their offspring will continue being monsters among the human race. Is that something you’re willing to live with?” Julian looks like he’s beginning to run a fever at this point with his flushed cheeks and glassy eyes. I plant my feet back on the ground and walk around him, heading towards an imaginary door.

“Good night, Mr. Todd.”

“Scene.” Even though Lucio’s voice is the softest it’s been during this entire process, the auditorium is silent enough for it to carry.

“Well, Spunky, I knew there was a reason I liked you. Congratulations, you have the role. Asra, you’ll be Spunky’s understudy, because you’re the only one that has as much chemistry with Julian. Everyone else who was auditioning for the assistant, you can either stick around and try for another role or leave; it doesn’t matter that much to me.”

 I end up staying through until the end of auditions, mainly because I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to leave or not. Turns out, once all the roles were filled to Lucio’s satisfaction, he gave everyone a copy of the rehearsal times, so it’s a good thing that I stuck around after all. Plus, I got to watch Julian perform on stage. I must say, the way he carries himself when he’s acting is quite entertaining, to say the least.

Speaking of Julian, he practically runs up to me as I’m leaving the auditorium.

“Well, hi, Julian,” I greet him, surprised that he sought me out. “Is everything alright?”

“Yeah, yeah, everything’s fine,” he replies quickly, his words rushing together into a jumbled mess. “I was just wondering if you would maybe like to walk with me? Since we’ll be working closely together, I would like to get to know you a little, but it’s totally fine if you just want to be alone.”

“I wouldn’t mind a little bit of company.” Julian smiles enthusiatically, and it makes my heart race.

“Great!” The two of us walk outside and start meandering around.

“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever gotten your name,” Julian tells me. “Isn’t that weird? We keep seeing each other around campus, and we even share a class together, but I don’t know what to call you.” Is Julian normally this nervous? He’s certainly a fast talker, and he’s rambling a bit.

“My name’s Carina.” He stops in his tracks and gawks at me.

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah…” What about my name is making Julian awestruck? He doesn’t hate the name, does he?

“Carina was the name of a pet rabbit I had when I was younger. I’ve always liked how sophisticated and beautiful it sounded, and I thought that if I was to have a little girl, she would be called Carina.” He takes a momentary pause and shakes his head before adding,

“Then again, naming a child after a childhood pet isn’t exactly normal.” He continues walking, and I kind of have to jog to catch up to him.

“So, Julian, how long have you been acting? You looked like a professional on stage.” The compliment makes him flush.

“I’ve been acting since I was about five,” he answers softly, avoiding my gaze. “It started with children’s theater and stuff like that, but when I was ten, I attended my first summer drama camp, and my love for acting has grown ever since. Lucio ran the camp, you know. Has for many years.” I had no idea Lucio and Julian had that much history together.

“Do you like working with Lucio?”

“He’s very passionate about his work, which makes him a very intense person to be around. If things don’t go his way, he’s prone to throwing fits and screaming at people. Despite of that, he does manage to put together spectacular shows and treats everyone to a nice party in the end, so I would say working with Lucio is similar to a roller coaster. It’s both scary and exciting at times.”

“I see.” Julian finds a bench and beckons for me to sit down with him. Once we’re seated, he asks,

“What made you decide to try out for this play? Was it in order to get closer to me?” Before I can answer, he quickly backtracks.

“I don’t mean that in an arrogant way. God knows I’m way too insecure to think that way. It’s just that ever since Lucio accidentally let it slip that I would be the male lead in this play, I’ve heard people whispering about me all over campus, revealing to their friends what they would do to me if they got to play the assistant. To be honest, all of the attention makes me sick. I mean, I enjoy being in the spotlight when it comes to acting, but when I’m not on stage, I…”

“You just want to be left alone, don’t you?” Julian clasps my hand and nods his head.

“Well, Julian, if it makes you feel any better, I auditioned because I really enjoy the story of Sweeny Todd and wanted to see if I had what it took to get a role. That’s it. No nefarious intentions involved.” He visibly relaxes.

“Thank you, Carina,” he sighs contently. “You have no idea how much that means to me.” He brings my hand up to his lips and kisses it softly, making me look away and blush. This play is going to be interesting, to say the least.

 I wish there was a way to describe how today’s rehearsals went without being vulgar, but when you’re forced to repeatedly act out a scene where you’re passionately arguing with someone that you feel unresolved sexual tension towards and from, the most mild way to go about it would be to state that it was like two animals in heat. I’m honestly surprised that Julian and I managed to get through rehearsal without tearing each other’s clothes off on stage in front of everyone in the auditorium to see.

You see, this scene involves Elise, the assistant, yelling her grievances at Sweeny Todd, which revolve around money and sex, and Sweeny shouting that those problems wouldn’t exist if she didn’t essentially tell him to become a criminal again. This of course makes Elise more angry at Sweeny, and the scene ends with her storming out of his room and slamming the door behind her. Lucio calls this scene “the beginning of the end”, because after this point in the play, their relationship quickly becomes toxic to the point where they want to kill each other.

Speaking of Lucio, he’s been a key player in creating the tension between Julian and me, because he continuously forces us to approach the edge of no return, but he never allows us to go over it, not even outside rehearsal. Julian’s trying his best to be a gentleman and abide by Lucio’s rules, but I can tell that he’s getting worn out by constantly pushing down anything he may feel towards me and only allowing those emotions to come out when we’re on stage.

I suppose that’s why Asra pulls me aside as soon as Lucio dismisses us for the evening.

“Carina, there’s something you need to know about Julian,” he tells me softly but firmly.

“Go on…” Asra sighs.

“He’s a bit of a pressure cooker. He shoves any feelings he deems undesirable down until he can’t contain them anymore, and then they explode out of him with no way for him to control them until they’re completely out of his system. And it’s not just feelings like anger or sadness; he can get quite horny as well.” Before I can even reply to anything Asra has said, he quickly adds,

“I’ve seen the way you two have interacted during practice, and I don’t want to see you hurt. Sure, he’ll light up your world, but only for as long as he has to act with you. The moment the curtain drops on the final performance, he’ll throw you away like the burnt match you’ve become while spending time with him.” So many questions zoom through my brain, but right as I pick one to ask Asra, Julian walks to us and practically drags me away from him with a fake smile plastered on his face.

“Did something happen between you and Asra?” I ask Julian as we walk outside the auditorium.

“It’s a long story,” Julian mutters scornfully.

“I don’t have anywhere I have to be, so spill.” Julian stops and turns to face me, grabbing my hand as he does so.

“Carina, there are just some things that are best left in the past. Let’s just say that Asra and I aren’t the best of friends.”

“Why?”

“Why do you care so much?” Julian’s voice gets a bit nastier and louder, making me feel defensive.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I nearly shout sarcastically. “It’s not like anyone would get curious if someone told them that a friend of theirs treats people like they were pieces of trash to be disposed of at the first opportunity.” Julian’s eyes briefly widen in shock before decisively narrowing in anger.

“Maybe some people are trash. You try your best to hold on to them because they mean a lot to you, but in the end you have to cut ties before they hurt you.”

“What in the hell are you talking about, Julian?”

“I’m talking about Asra!” We’re both yelling at this point. “He’s always painting himself as the victim, and he never acknowledges any of his wrongdoings!”

“What?!” Julian lets go of my hand to pinch the bridge of his nose in order to calm himself down.

“Look, if you want to know the truth, you’re not going to get it from either Asra or me, because we both were self-centered at the time.”

“Then who does know the truth?”

“Why don’t I have you meet her?”

 As it turns out, the girl in question happens to be in an apartment Julian lives in. Initially, I thought she was the short, plump, red-headed individual who greeted us when we stepped inside, but then she quickly dragged Julian away, talking excitedly about finally having a subject for the painting she was working on. Before I know it, a door slams, and I’m left alone.

“Why don’t you make yourself comfortable?” a smooth, female Indian voice tells me, making me jump out of my skin. When I recover from my shock, I find myself face-to-face with a regal-looking woman. She’s just wearing a t-shirt and jeans, but her face looks very queenly. I follow her request and sit down in one of the chairs in the kitchen, which is the first room you’re in when you walk inside the apartment.

“You must be Carina,” the woman states, pouring hot water into two mugs and putting in tea bags. “Julian’s told me a lot about you, so I figured it was only a matter of time before he brought you over. I’m Nadia.” She walks over to the table and sits in the chair next to me, handing me a mug as she does so.

“How do you know Julian?” I nervously ask. There’s something about her that tells me that I’d do well to not piss her off.

“In simple terms, I’m a friend of his who’s mentoring his sister. She was the one that you saw first.” I take a sip of tea.

“What about in complex terms?” Nadia smirks at me.

“You’re clever. Julian could stand to be around someone like you.”

“Thank you,” I reply shyly.

“I’m Julian’s…unofficial therapist, you might say. Then again, I’m kind of everyone’s unofficial therapist, except for Portia. Julian’s sister,” she quickly adds upon seeing the confused look in my eyes. “Anyway, I deal with secrets. Secrets that can either bring people together or make them despise each other.”

“How do you do that?”

“Why, I talk to people. I listen to them, note anything interesting, and pass it along to whoever’s interested in it, for a small fee. Speaking of which, I’m sure there’s something you’d like to ask me. I have a feeling Julian didn’t bring you over here just to meet his sister and her teacher.” I take a deep breath to calm my nerves.

“I don’t know if you would be able to answer this, but something happened earlier this evening that raised some questions for me.” I quickly recount what Asra and Julian had told me after practice, and Nadia nods her head as I talk.

“To be honest, I’m not surprised,” Nadia responds. “Asra’s quite petty, and Julian can be melodramatic sometimes. They’ve both come to me complaining about the other, and I’ve seen their interactions with each other over the years, so I have a lot of information about the nature of their relationship. I just need one thing from you.”

“I understand.” Nadia smiles, making her look that much more like royalty.

“Good. So, tell me: how do you feel about Julian?” I nearly choke on my tea, and I feel my face start to burn up in embarrassment and something else, something more animalistic.

“I see,” Nadia replies to my nonverbal response. “You’re both pulled so taut that you’re about to snap.”

“That obvious, huh?”

“Only because you both blush at the mere mention of the other. How hard has Lucio been pushing you?”

“We’re not allowed to be intimate off stage. We can be friendly, but that’s it.” Nadia sighs.

“Classic Lucio. Gets completely blindsided by Asra and then takes it out on you.”

“What do you mean?” Nadia proceeds to launch into the story of Julian and Asra. Apparently, they started off as rivals because Asra was jealous of Julian becoming Lucio’s favorite without even trying when he had to work tirelessly for two years prior just to get Lucio’s approval. The rivalry was one-sided, though, because Julian was blissfully unaware that Asra felt any ill will towards him.

When Julian was a sophomore in high school and Asra a senior, they ended up being the lead characters of one of Lucio’s original plays. Julian had shot up over the summer and was eight inches taller than Asra, which led to Asra developing feelings for Julian. This, of course, presented some internal conflict for Asra up until Julian had expressed interest back. From there, their relationship burned bright and fast.

Things between them started going downhill quickly when Asra would manipulate Julian into doing sexual things that Julian most likely wouldn’t have done on his own and Julian would either get super clingy or super distant. Nadia had tried to get them to work things out, but as soon as the final show ended, Julian broke up with Asra and ghosted him as much as he possibly could.

“So, why exactly would Asra care about my wellbeing if he really doesn’t care for Julian?” I ask Nadia once she’s done with her tale.

“Well, once Asra and Julian broke things off, Julian developed the habit of getting romantically close to his costar only to drop them once the production was over. Since you’re pretty new to the acting world, Asra wouldn’t want your experience to be soured by anything Julian does. At least, that’s what he’s told me.”

“But?” Nadia smirks knowingly.

“You’re the first person since Asra that’s made Julian…I don’t want to say lovestruck, because that sounds overdramatic, but maybe pleasantly nervous.”

“Really?” She nods her head.

“If you stay over here long enough this evening, Julian’s bound to show you what I’m talking about.”

 Julian’s managed to contain himself, all things considered. His sister Portia kept teasing him about me, Nadia awarded her with smirks, smiles, and some extra dessert, and it seemed like every other commercial on TV was based on a cheesy romantic comedy.

But then Nadia leaves for the evening and Portia goes off to bed and Julian starts channel surfing only to stumble upon a show that featured a girl moaning loudly as a guy’s using his dick like a jackhammer to drill an additional hole into her.

That’s when I can tell that some frayed strings in Julian are snapping. His face becomes flushed, his eyes dilate with a mixture of shock, horror, and arousal, and his mouth’s agape at the scene unfolding in front of him. I myself am having a difficult time keeping my composure, but I’m able to remain sane long enough to gently take the remote from Julian’s hand and shut the TV off. In a blink of an eye, my hand replaces the remote as Julian turns his body so that he’s facing me.

“C-Carina,” he stammers. “I…I’ve been trying so hard, and I—” As quickly as he grabbed my hand, I place my index finger on his lips and lean close to him. Somehow, his face becomes even redder.

“Julian, what do you want to do to me?”

“I don’t know if I should—” I cut his sentence abruptly by clamping my hand over his mouth.

“Just nod or shake your head, okay?” Julian nods his head, his gray eyes sparkling in the living room light.

“Do you want to kiss me?” Nod.

“Do you want to make out with me?” Nod.

“Do you want to run your hands all over my body?” Nod.

“Do you want to leave bites all over me?” A more hesitant nod.

“Do you want to do to me what the man on the screen did to that girl?” A very slow, almost ashamed nod, but a nod nevertheless.

“I want you to listen to me, Julian, because I’m only saying this once. When I remove my hand from your mouth, I want you to do me on this couch. You can go as rough or soft as you want, but I don’t want you to stop until you’ve orgasmed. I don’t care what Lucio’s going to say when he sees us at our next rehearsal; his decisions have pulled you so taut that you’re snapping right in front of me as we speak. Do you understand?” After a moment of serious contemplation, a quite shy nod.

“I’m going to count to three, and then I’m leaving you to do whatever you want.” Nod.

“One.” Julian swallows.

“Two.” Something inside me quivers in anticipation.

“Three.” Time gets jumbled for about five seconds, and when it straightens itself back out, Julian and I are at the other end of the couch; he’s moved on top of me and is frantically kissing every part of me that he can touch. I can’t really keep up with him, not that I’m complaining.

[weaselandfriends]

Hymnstoke XIII

Have you heard the story of bladekindEyewear the Blind?

In infinite folly, this man strapped knives to his eyeballs, depriving himself of sight. Nonetheless he was known as the wisest man in Homestuck Tumblr, with a wicked pack of classpect analyses. As Homestuck progressed through its lengthy sixth act, he developed a wide sleight of theories as to how it would end and what it would mean when it ended that way, focused most famously on each character's SBURB class and aspect (classpect for portmanteau).

When Homestuck ended, and then ended a second time, he turned out to be wrong.

In a recent post, he made this comment about his wrongness:

BlastYoBoots  04/26/2019:  part of why all my theories were wrong is that they were arrogant and misguided and just all-around regrettable and I thought I "knew" what Andrew morally wanted out of a story when he wasn't after the same thing at all

I bring this tale to your attention not to drag our Sosostris through the mud. In fact, I'd say he's unduly harsh on himself here. He may indeed have had a decent grasp of Hussie's moral purposes regarding Homestuck—in 2013. It has been a long six years since then, during which Hussie followed in the footsteps of other noted New England authors J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon and vanished off the face of the planet. It would be fair to theorize that what Hussie "wanted" out of Homestuck changed considerably in those years. And the truth is, because Hussie has disappeared so utterly, any illusion of knowing his "moral" goals has completely dissipated. It's not even clear at this point how much of the Epilogues he wrote. What statements can possibly be made about authorial intent outside of baseless conjecture?

Mr. Eyewear had the unfortunate position of writing critical analysis of a work that was not yet finished, a position not often imitated by critics throughout the ages. It's relatively easy to look at a work by a long-dead author and make some grand, sweeping statement that "this is what it means." Because the author is literally dead, Death of the Author becomes much less controversial to apply. Even now, after the dust has settled, a new installment of Homestuck may unexpectedly arrive that obliterates any previous critical insight on what Homestuck "meant." Homestuck is ostensibly over, but the Epilogues left plenty of room for continuation.

Someone who read the previous Hymnstoke installments came to me and said (paraphrased), "Do you really think Hussie knows anything about Gnosticism? It's far more likely he googled it and used a few names here and there to sound smart." Thinking about it, I wouldn't be surprised if this turned out to be his modus operandi for the Pale Fire and Waste Land quotes I wrote so lengthily on in previous Hymnstokes as well. Wouldn't it make so much sense if Hussie googled "Literary quotes about April" and put in the Waste Land quote without ever having read the poem, without understanding its historical or literary context?

Would it matter?

Hussie may or may not be ignorant of literary history, or his own literary moment. In that Stanford interview he flatly denied any knowledge of "post-irony." But the author's ignorance doesn't excuse the work from the world. Homestuck itself is rapidly becoming a historical work, fading from the immediate cultural consciousness. Yet it has left a mark. How many works will be created in the coming years that draw heavy inspiration from Undertale, which itself was heavily inspired by Homestuck? And if we take Homestuck's most explicit inspiration to be Earthbound, what works inspired Earthbound? What works inspired the works that inspired Earthbound?

Whether Hussie knows what DFW stands for or not is inconsequential. Homestuck is not a work in a vacuum, neither the beginning nor the end. Con Air, the Greek Zodiac, Insane Clown Posse—whether the reader knows what those things are doesn't matter within the space of Homestuck, because Homestuck invented new meaning out of them all. Whether Hussie, the author, knew what Gnosticism, post-postmodernism, or Dadaism were—I would argue that is similarly inconsequential. Homestuck repurposed all of those -isms, either knowingly or unknowingly, into something new. It is the act of repurposing that is the most important part, not whatever those things were before.

So bladekindEyewear observed Homestuck through the lenses of knives strapped to his eyes. From that perspective, he conceived of what the facts (the text of Homestuck) "meant." I'll also be looking at Homestuck through a certain lens. Neither lens is the same as Hussie's lens. No lens except Hussie's can be Hussie's lens: that is something the postmodernists realized, that "truth" was fragmentary and differed from person to person. Perhaps even different within each person; the Hussie of 2013 may have a different lens than the Hussie of 2019. Put succinctly: No absolute truth exists.

But Homestuck, I feel, moves beyond the problems proposed by postmodernism. In Homestuck, differing lenses, even completely opposite lenses like "irony" and "sincerity," "science" and "magic," "time" and "space," or "author" and "reader" (as seen in the Epilogues) become blurred, indistinguishable, ultimately reconciled as essentially the same thing. It's that reconciliation that I think is Homestuck's most meaty—or candiey—thematic component.

With that in mind, let's continue.

What is under the rug is much worse than any trap you can imagine.

It is a member of a species that you do not recognize, with a ghastly furred upper lip.

I don't even know who this is. Jeff Foxworthy? I guess I might not be a redneck.

Soon these lugs will learn to show you some respect. You made this town what it is after all. Wasn't nothin' but a bunch of dust and rocks before you got here.

Okay. I was right. I knew it, all along when I was reading the Epilogues I knew something was off. I felt certain, and now it's been confirmed for me.

Homestuck does not use smart apostrophes, while the Epilogues did.

For those not in the know, a smart apostrophe is curved based on the text that comes around it, like so: ’

A regular apostrophe, by comparison, is not curved: '

As you can see in the quoted text, Homestuck proper uses your regular dumb apostrophes. Which is good, because smart apostrophes are the devil. They frequently get slanted the wrong direction and conflict aesthetically with Homestuck's monospaced, geometric Courier font. Yet all throughout the Epilogues, smart apostrophes are used. It drove me insane. I hate those things.

Can't overthink this time stuff.

I guess I should actually talk about the Intermission. Internally, it's pretty straightforward, borrowing liberally from Problem Sleuth. But what exactly is its purpose? Yes, on a purely plot level, elements of the Intermission return in Act 5. Spades Slick remains a character who exists all the way until Collide, although he is one of the unfortunate casualties of Act 6's awful ending and is too dead to get any kind of relevancy redemption in the Epilogues, unlike similarly extraneous Act 6 characters Jane and Jake.

Fundamentally, then, the relevance of the Intermission extends only as far as Cascade, with elements malingering longer but never amounting to anything new. Many things will extend only as far as Cascade, which eventually becomes Homestuck's midpoint. In earlier Hymnstokes, I mentioned a few times that I didn't think I had much to say about Act 5. I said that because, while Act 5 is impressive from a technical standpoint, it's a lot less dense in meaning compared to early Homestuck or Act 6. It functions a lot like a machine with many perfectly-placed parts (or rather, parts that were retroactively made to look perfectly placed, depending on how improvisational you think Hussie wrote) that slot together like a machine, rifle, or clock to create a flawless cascade of storytelling. I'll talk more about this kind of "clockwork storytelling" when I actually get to Act 5, but for now one might consider the entire Intermission to be one of those perfectly-placed pieces, and the Spades Slick storyline culminates in Cascade to slot alongside the other pieces in a satisfying way.

One might also interpret the Intermission as a primer for certain elements that will become important in Homestuck proper, such as the aforementioned "time stuff" that gets its first real exploration here before becoming a convoluted but finely-wrought entanglement in Acts 4 and 5. Toss in vague foreshadowing to Lord English and the Intermission's existence is at least purposeful, regardless of whether one considers it necessary.

But what about structurally? I mentioned in the previous Hymnstoke that the Intermission is similar to Act 5 Act 1 and Act 6 Act 1 in that it dramatically downscales the tension, introduces a slew of new characters, and shakes up the tone of the story. Each of these three parts are nostalgic for "Old Homestuck," the Homestuck that is more like Problem Sleuth, and they feature many text commands and faffery like what you see in Act 1. By juxtaposition, then, each emphasizes how far Homestuck has developed across its run, and the differences only become more striking each successive iteration.

The Intermission is probably the fragmenting point. In Homestuck proper, there are no more kids to introduce. John, Rose, Dave, Jade, for each of them we've cycled through the database-structured INTERESTS and INSTRUMENTS and WEIRD PARENTAL FIGURES. Bit by bit that kind of content will vanish in favor of a new sort of storytelling, and the Intermission is where it becomes obvious that this is happening. Jade's introduction already subverted most of the established tropes, and the Intermission reads like a parody of them, with the Midnight Crew's set of traits being plaintively ridiculous (each keeping a different kind of candy in their backup hat, each having a different kind of smutty material, et cetera). Act 5 Act 1 will also be parodic in its approach to these database traits, but I think in a less effective way, as the differences between the kids and the trolls are less extreme than the differences between the kids and the Midnight Crew. Furthermore, the Intermission really drives the nail into the coffin of Problem Sleuth, severing Homestuck finally from its predecessor. Act 6 Act 1, by comparison, is more of a wistful yearning for Act 1 than any kind of new take—which might itself be meaningful in the grand scheme of things.

Still, it might come in handy down the road. Lord English is supposedly indestructible. He's rumored to be killable only through a number of glitches and exploits in spacetime. The doll may ultimately help you work the system if it comes to that.

This line, along with the way Problem Sleuth ended, was probably the primary driver that led to people expecting a final boss fight with Lord English on par with the one with Mobster Kingpin. Although the Epilogues were a fantastic ending, it's still underwhelming to think about just how poorly-conceived Collide and Act 7 turned out to be. Of course, the Problem Sleuth sort of ending is definitely more of a "clockwork" storytelling style, and Act 6, as has become clear by now, has a much different style.

Dirk, the ultimate inheritor of the clockwork style—he specifically describes storytelling in terms of machines—has as one of his INTERESTS robotics and technology. Lord English, likewise, is surrounded by a clockwork motif. Of course, these characters will eventually become explicitly linked via the method of Lord English's creation. But unlike many other INTERESTS, which turn out to be irrelevant, this machinery fascination ties in to Homestuck's final thematic dichotomy. But more on that when we reach the Epilogues.

29/1000 CLOCKS DESTROYED

I guess we know what side of the dichotomy Spades is on.

This is the same calendar Dirk has in his apartment in Act 6. I remember I once had this theory that the Midnight Crew would be reunited at the end of Homestuck even though the B2 Hegemonic Brute was dead because it would be revealed that Hearts Boxcars was still in Dirk's calendar and would come out riding Dirk's mini Maplehoof.

I don't know why I had this oddly specific theory, and it was probably obvious it wouldn't happen.

And thus ends the intermission, with an eye toward the next bizarre deviation in the storyline (Act 5 Act 1).

It's been awhile since I last read Homestuck. My memory of Act 4 is dodgy, so I might actually stumble upon something new. But as I mentioned earlier, the Intermission is the big, obvious breakpoint between the old, Problem Sleuth style of Homestuck and the new, clockwork style. The database-driven character creation will gradually fall away (minus a parodic revival in Act 5 Act 1) and narrative elements will become more consistently introduced with an eye specifically toward Cascade. For many people, this is when Homestuck starts to "get good," and I think it's because there's something innately satisfying about a finely-crafted machine slotting into place. There is a kind of intrinsic beauty about it, art for art's sake if you will, and that is also what seems to draw Dirk toward it.

But more next time.

[innuendostudios]

A small supplement to Always a Bigger Fish, The Origins of Conservatism. If we’re going to claim conservatism is fundamentally about preserving social hierarchies and defending the powerful from democratic principles, we need to talk about where conservatism comes from, going all the back to the late 18th Century. From there we take an extremely truncated traipse through conservative thought throughout the ages.

Keep this series coming out by backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

I have suspicions that some of the claims I make in Always a Bigger Fish - that conservatism isn’t, at its core, about fiscal responsibility, limited government, or the rights of the individual, but is about maintaining social hierarchies, that it believes people are fundamentally unequal and likes the free market because it sorts people according to their worth, and even softly implies capitalism itself may be innately anti-democratic - might, ah, raise some eyebrows? So I’m gonna show my work on this one.

Two of the architects of conservative thought were Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre, who formulated much of their political theory while writing about the French Revolution. They, in turn, were influenced by earlier writings from Thomas Hobbes on the English Civil War. And what all three of these men were doing in writing about these wars was defending the monarchy. The sentiment that the masses should be powerless in the face of nobility was being challenged, and, while these men thought the revolutionaries themselves actually quite compelling, the democracy they were fighting for Hobbes, Burke, and de Maistre found repulsive.

Come the end of the Revolution, when it seemed democracy might actually spread across Europe, Burke, especially, began to hypothesize ways that one’s position within the aristocracy might be preserved even should the monarchy fall. He turned his eye to the market.

So, OK, round the cusp of the 19th century, the prevailing economic theories were those of Adam Smith, who championed what’s called the Labor Theory of Value, which I don’t super wanna get into because there’s like a billion videos about it already, but really briefly: if you take materials out of the ground and turn them into useful goods, it is that labor that makes the good more valuable than the raw material, and when someone buys that good, they cover the cost of materials plus the value your labor has added to them. In contrast, what Burke argued was… well, a lot of nebulous things, but, among them, that, in actuality, when a person of means buys a good, that, rather than the moment the good is produced, is when value is bestowed upon it. Value is not dictated by the producer, but by the consumer.

Now there’s like two centuries of argument about this, we’re not gonna dig into it all, but, obviously, this is, in some sense, true: if the people with money don’t want to buy a good at a certain price, eventually the price will come down. So price is not solely dictated by labor. But what Burke does is claim that price and value are the same thing. No one ever gets cheated, no one ever gets a good deal, whatever the buyer pays for a thing, that’s what the thing is worth. Your labor is only as valuable as the degree to which it satisfies the desires of the moneyed classes.

This was Burke’s nod to the fact that, within capitalism, the wealthy held outsized influence - being that, the more money you had, the more value you could dictate - and he argued that this was moral. That the wealthy deserved this influence. (Burke was, by the way, wealthy. Sort of. He had a royal pension) What he felt the French Revolution revealed was not that oppressive nobility was bad, but that France must’ve just had the wrong nobles, because a proper aristocracy wouldn’t have been overthrown. The problem was, as we’ve discussed, not the hierarchy itself, but the wrong people being in power.

The Revolution had taught him that perhaps power should not come by birthright. Perhaps we needed a system whereby those deserving of power could prove their worth. This should, ideally, be war, but capitalism would suffice. The structure of royalty would continue to exist, simply derived by different means, because the structure of democracy, where, on election day, the nobleman has no more power than the commoner, was, to an aristocrat, profane. What the structure needed was some tinkering to make it democracy-proof.

So that’s Burke. Over the next century, democracy did, in fact, spread across Europe, and Burke’s - and several others’ - theories of value were picked up and iterated on in what came to be known as The Marginal Revolution by economists Carl Menger, Stanley Jevons, and this Valjean-looking motherfucker Leon Walras. Marginalism amped up the idea that it is a good’s utility to the consumer, and not the worker’s labor, that gives it value, which confers a unique power upon those with money, and brought this thinking into a post-monarchal world. Their theories became especially popular when people realized they could be used to rebut Marxism. Jevons was taught all over Europe, and Menger became core to the Austrian School.

And by the time we get to Austrians, this mass of theories has, somewhere after Burke and before Hayek, coagulated into what we know of today as “conservatism.” These are among the most influential thinkers in conservative thought, and they are in a direct lineage with Burke and de Maistre.

Now, while Burke is called “the father of modern conservatism,” these boys are not the alpha and omega of early conservative thought, but their ideas helped form the basis of conservatism and have never gone away. If you can point to some paradigm shift in the history of conservatism where the royalist sentiments of Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre were rooted out, I’d love to hear about it. Because I listen to the thinkers championed by conservatives throughout the ages, and I keep hearing the same thing: that humans are innately unequal and society flourishes when power is doled out to the deserving.

Friedrich Nietzsche was not a conservative but was deeply influential on the early Marginalists, and he claimed the purpose of society was to produce the handful of Great Men who created everything that made life worth living, believing, “Only the most intellectual of men have any right to beauty, to the beautiful; only in them can goodness escape being weakness."

James Fitzjames Stephen, who wrote a book-length rebuttal against early progressivism, believed, “[T]o obey a real superior, to submit to a real necessity and make the best of it in good part, is one of the most important of all virtues—a virtue absolutely essential to the attainment of anything great and lasting."

Hayek and Schumpeter believed, respectively, that “The freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use” and “[W]hat may be attained by industrial or commercial success is still the nearest approach to medieval lordship possible to modern man." (He’s saying that’s a good thing, by the way.)

Need I mention Ayn Rand’s belief that "The man at the top of the intellectual pyramid contributes the most to all those below him, but gets nothing except his material payment... The man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude, contributes nothing to those above him, but receives the bonus of all their brains."

The “godfather of neoconservatism,” Irving Kristol, echoing Burke’s yearning for a good war, felt the hierarchy should extend beyond the borders of a single country, believing, “What's the point of being the greatest, most powerful nation in the world and not having an imperial role?"

And modern conservatives love the “natural hierarchies” of Jordan Peterson, who believes “blblblblblblblblblb.”

We keep behaving as though conservatism’s disdain for equity isn’t there, or, if it is, that it’s new. But it’s been there since the beginning. Conservatism upholds the status quo and defends the powerful, first from democracy, then from communism, now from social justice. Conservatism has rallied every time a movement has tried to share power with the disadvantaged: They were against same-sex marriage, they were against giving women the vote, they were against freeing slaves (note I said conservatives, not Republicans; do your research.)

Conservatives say, “We are the party of measured steps, caution, of evolution over revolution,” and that’s usually just before they say, “But now, now is the time for swift, decisive action!” Most every Republican claims to be a break with tradition. “This time we’re gonna flip the script: bend the rules, outspend Democrats, invade your privacy, and start a war with no exit strategy.” And that’s what they’ve always said. All that changes is which continent the war is on. I’m not going to say the slow, stodgy conservative doesn’t exist, but it has never typified the Party. Rhetorically, it’s a character that they bring up to contrast themselves with whenever they need to rally their reactionary base. They tell us that’s what their Party is like, and we just take their word for it.

I don’t feel the need to pretend that, just because most democracies have a left wing and a right wing, that both are equally valid and moral. There is no rule that proves this. There is only the liberal sentiment that saying otherwise is poor sportsmanship (a standard the Right does not hold itself to). Conservatism is a reactionary politics that has, at best, mixed feelings about democracy, where my biggest issue with liberalism is that it is ill-equipped to deal with the problem of conservatism and does not fully commit to its own democratic principles.

I’m going into all of this not because I want to stick it to the people who insist I don’t research my videos - though I, a little bit, do - but because we can’t talk about the Alt-Right if we keep portraying them as a break with the conservative tradition. They are the conservative tradition, only more. There is nothing they believe that conservatives don’t have a long history of being sympathetic towards, they’re just usually more ambivalent about it. As I’ve said before, this is, ultimately, my interpretation of history, and, while many experts agree with me, I am not an expert. But I do my homework.

So, tell you what: I’ve made a post on Tumblr listing all the books, essays, and documentaries I’m consuming for this series - the ones I have lined up, the ones I’ve completed, and some notes on what I’ve found valuable in them. I’m going to treat this as a living document and add to it as the work continues. Not that the people who say I just make shit up ever read the show notes, but I will keep a link in the show notes of every video, so, if you want to check my work, or research alongside me, you can do that. I have also livetweeted several books, including the primary source for this and the previous video, The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin, under the hashtag #IanLivetweetsHisResearch, so, if you want a play-by-play of an entire book complete with my own observations, that’s where you can find it. So far, in addition to Robin, I’ve done Bob Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians, Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda Works, and one weird essay on Lara Croft I read for the Fury Road video.

If you want to read more about the history of conservative philosophy, in addition to The Reactionary Mind, I recommend “No Law for the Lions and Many Laws for the Oxen is Liberty” by Elizabeth Sandifer, in the essay collection Neoreaction a Basilisk. (El recently got some grief from Nazis, so maybe consider buying her excellent book.)

Going forward, if anyone comments that I clearly don’t know anything about conservatism, I hope you will stand with me in not taking them too seriously unless they demonstrate having done at least some research, because I do mine.

[addierose444]

College Essays: A Guide

I loved visiting and researching colleges. Writing college essays, on the other hand, was a long and difficult process. The whole idea of a college essay stressed me out since I have long considered writing one of my weaknesses and had been told that college essays are really important. Funny how I am writing this blog now. Seriously though, there are a lot of things that are out of your control when it comes to college applications, so really try to write the best essays you can. For a fun fact, today marks the anniversary of the day I created the document for my Smith essay. Though I genuinely think this guide can help you and really hope that you read the entire thing, please don't use this guide as sneaky procrastination from actually writing your college essays. I hope that these tips and suggestions help you! 

General Tips

Tip 1: Start Early

It is never too early to start! The sooner you’re happy with your essays the less stressed you will be about the whole college application process. Fair warning, the earlier you submit your applications the longer the wait feels. I recommend starting to think about college essays the summer before senior year. If you can it would be awesome to start writing drafts then as well. I wrote my first college essays Junior year in English class. Though I didn’t use any of those essays, it was a great introduction to writing college essays.

The best place to start is reading the Common App prompts, which are available all of the time and don’t change much year to year. Besides, one of the prompts is literally “share an essay on any topic of your choice”. I personally chose the first prompt and wrote about my background and identity as a girl adopted from China growing up in Vermont with an interest in STEM. Choosing the right prompt is important, so be flexible and willing to try a different prompt. Prompts for supplemental essays (essays for individual colleges) can sometimes be found on colleges’ websites. They can always be found in Common App. Smith releases its prompt on August 1st with the opening of Common App. For those of you applying to the Smith class of 2024, here is your prompt:

We know that colleges ask a lot of hard questions on their applications. This one is not so hard and we promise, there is no hidden agenda - just have fun! If you had a theme song - a piece of music that describes you, what would it be and why? Please include the name of the song and the artist.

Tip 2: Stay organized

This refers to keeping track of the essays you have to write and their deadlines. I put all of my application deadlines in my Google Calendar and had each essay as a task in my task manager. Before writing any essays, research the schools you are thinking of applying to in order to get a sense of the number and types of essays you will have to write. Know that some schools make you write extra essays depending on your prospective major. Also, be aware that some schools have optional essays. I would highly recommend that you write these optional essays. 

I wrote all of my essays in Google Docs. Each essay I had had its own document. At the top of the document, I had the word count highlighted in green and the prompt(s) in italics. If the essay had a choice of prompts, I highlighted the one I chose in cyan.

I organized my essays in a college folder in Google Drive. Early on, I had subfolders for each of the colleges I was thinking about applying to. I would recommend this to you if you’re applying to a lot of colleges that require multiple essays. In my case I only applied to five schools, so subfolders weren’t necessary. Even so, I had to write the Common App essay along with ten supplemental essays. An alternative organization system (that can be used in conjunction with the previous method) involves creating subfolders by the application deadline. 

Tip 3: Be authentic

I will refrain from directly stating what most people consider the number one tip. It’s really important, but you're probably tired of hearing it and sort of confused by it. In essence, remember that it's you the admissions counselors want to get to know and that you’re the one that would be attending the school if admitted and committed. That being said, be conscious of your audience and the function of a college essay.

The Process

Step .5: Choose a prompt

Sorry for the use of half steps! They are for essays where you get to choose your prompt. Start by reading all of the prompts and pick the one that jumps out to you. As stated above, be flexible. Your choice is by no means set in stone. There is no universal best prompt, there is only a best prompt for you. 

Step 1: Read the prompt

That's it. No analyzing the prompt at this point.

Step 2: Just write

By “just” I mean, ignore the word count and don’t worry about flow. This step is purely a brain dump. Just focus and get all relevant ideas out onto the page. Now is not the time for editing, seriously, don’t move the cursor. You may honestly benefit from handwriting your brain dump. If you get stuck, start on a different train of thought. Even if things are going smoothly, consider writing something totally different. 

Step 2.5: Reflect honestly

This step is for those essays that let you pick a prompt. Here’s where you're real with yourself about if you’re happy with the prompt you chose and where the essay is headed. Repeat the above steps as necessary until you have chosen the best prompt for you. 

Step 3: Craft the essay

This is where you actually write an essay not just some thoughts. This is the hardest part to do and to explain. First, reread the prompt and read what you wrote in step 2. When actually crafting the essay, don’t delete anything (unless you’re correcting a typo). In Google Docs you can go into revision history and find old versions of your essay. Find the thread of ideas you think is best and write your essay based on those ideas. There is no set format for a college essay. Remember that college essays are relatively short so focus on concision. 

Step 4: Revise and edit like crazy

This step is extremely important and will take more time than you expect. I wrote and rewrote essays to make them exactly how I wanted. Even after I felt satisfied with an essay I read and reread them for grammatical errors. Don’t just trust your own eyes. In my case, I had all of my essays proofread by my parents and my aunt. An iteration of my Common App essay was also read by an English teacher and a guidance counselor. Listen to all suggestions, but remember that it's your essay and that it’s your voice that matters.

Now that you have read all of my tips and suggestions, I wish you the best of luck, especially with your Smith essay. I know that a lot of people enjoy reading other people’s essays for inspiration and to get a sense for what a college essay is. I personally didn’t read any while I was writing mine. That being said I read a few for my Junior year English class (online and from my peers). Since the Smith essay is new this year, I will be posting the essay I wrote last year to my blog along with my thoughts about it. 

[disco-chef-blog]

It begins

  And just like that, the long, uncomfortable process of keeping a personal blog begins. Hi, I’m Niko (you can call me that or Nikos or Nick or Disco, whatever is easiest for you, don’t worry about it) and long story short I am a university dropout who quit in order to pursue a  career in the cooking/baking world. From about the beginning of 2016 up until October 2018. Due to injury to my spine (herniated disc pressuring the sciatic nerve) I had to quit my job and seek re-education in another field. I was an engineering and business administration student prior to this in Loughborough University and KULeuven respectively. I have always found myself far more comfortable working with/around computers so when a close friend of mine was about to start a new one-year course in Java development, I followed him through the registration process which included 3 days of lessons and a test on the 4th day. I was told that due to there being an unusual amount of people with some experience with Java, the few seats that they had were given to those that scored highest, even though I had achieved a decent grade. That’s when I caught the second bug of my life: coding. I found another course that begins in mid-April, although it is in Ruby and focuses more on web (and app, kinda) development but thankfully it is in English, unlike the Java course where I found that the people there had a hard time understanding my semi-broken flemmish and alien accent. It was surprising to see how frustrating it can be to not be understood.

  I have created this page in order to document that journey and everything revolves around it like side projects on java on codecademy, epiphanies and whatever else comes along with it. The idea is to develop an idea that I have had for an app during my time in the pastry business. Failing that, I will find a job as a junior developer, hopefully.

There has been odd sets of circumstances and events that have led to this point. If you are curious to find out, read on. If you don’t wanna be attacked by another huge wall of text avert your eyes now!

 Back in the end of 2015, I was initially working as a part-time deal for funds while being a student, but I fell in love with the work, the intensity and funnily enough the stress of it. I quit my studies 3 months in, and took on every contract they offered me. These were at most week contracts for interim work and I believe the official title was either cook or cook’s helper. After about two years of this, I was sent to a client who was making these incredible structures from pastries. Choux “glued” together with caramel towering above the guests, tartes tatins as far as the eye could see while also the pâtissiers, who were all working in a synchronous rhythm. 

  I was mesmerised. I knew I had to at least learn the basics. 

  When it had come to regular kitchen work, I was very fortunate to have learned from my mother how to cook from a very young age. Being the youngest, I usually would come home first, having to wait for my sisters to finish their classes and my parents to return from work. My poor mother at the time had been working almost every day of her life since she was 15. I would call her a woman who had to be a superwoman in her times in order to achieve what she has achieved, both professionally and in her private life. She would have food ready for all of us in pots and casseroles when we came from school, but I was not a very patient child. I would eat half of the food that was available, at first stunning my family but later aggravating them slightly. So, instead of my mother having to cook more quantities and spending more etc, I decided I would cook for myself something extra. It’s very funny to me still, how children don’t have any self-doubt when they set a goal. If I wanted to eat more than the rest, I had to cook something more. The early days are mostly a blur of Greek, Italian, Turkish, French recipes. I couldn’t seem to stick to one, since we had shelves full of books to choose from. Eventually, I found my favourites and would endlessly perfect them over the years with each iteration.

  But when it came to baking, to me it was a whole other world. You can fuck up a recipe and many points in regular cooking and you can quite easily remedy them at many, if not all, stages of the process. With baking, however, the margin for error seemed to be unforgiving. It would be the ultimate test of ability: preparing something to perfection, every single time, in order to provide a consistency and quality that I had not seen before.

  I asked for a small raise after working for that interim company for 2 years and was denied. I basically asked 1-2 euros more per hour, seeing as I was accepting the jobs with asshole clients that no one would take. Since I never said no, always did what was asked, covered for my colleagues when they made a mistake. Accepting the blame for something that I knew exactly who had done it, but choosing not to make a big deal of it and rather keep my head down and work harder, faster. I must say to this day, that really surprised me. Kitchens environments in general are as bad as they seem in television. The people who work there are uncultured or uneducated most of the time, the level of humour is very, very low. I had thought I had a great relationship with my boss and the many planners we have had. Many of whom I had saved their ass when they double-booked someone or had no one available (or willing) to take on the jobs with lazy clients. So I wrote myself in a 6 month crash course in baking much faster than I had expected. 

  It was a government funded program intended to help those who were seeking re-education in another field. During that program I did my internship at a local bakery where in the area I had just moved in to. While I may not have been treated as a real employee there all of the time and was given a lot of crap for being the young new guy (which, honestly, is understandable and common in many kitchen environments) I loved every second of working there, even on the bad days. I learned more there than I ever could have at any other educational facility. Most importantly, I lost a part of my innocence and gained more self respect. Unfortunately, being the young new guy, I always found that I had to work as fast as possible and as hard as possible (even though while I did that, I was nowhere near the level of skill of my colleagues or my boss). Which in turn meant that I didn’t always lift things properly, lifted things that I probably shouldn’t have (in order to save time or to avoid bending over every time). I first started feeling the pain on a flight as the plane was taking off and my lower back was pressed on the corner of the seat. Still kept working, thinking it was just a mild sciatica, but it became worse. I never took a break from my job during that time, seeing osteopaths for a quick 30 minute session during work and then returning back to the workshop immediately to continue working. That’s the deal with small businesses like that. We were only 4 people working in the production and that meant that if any one of us was absent, we were fucked in the sense that we would have to pull off a 18+ hour day rather than the usual 10-13 hour day and still being behind schedule. I loved most moments of it though but the pain was getting worse and worse until eventually I was stuck to the floor while emptying the dishwasher. One CT scan later I find out that I have a badly herniated disc on the L5S1 (right side). My boss was understandably not happy about this.

  At the same exact time, I had been living with an old colleague from when I was an interim cook. He had many demons he had been avoiding to face over the years, always avoiding his problems with cocaine or other hard drugs and a lot of alcohol. At some point, the housemate had a mental breakdown and came to the conclusion that the people who had stood by him over the years where not worthy of his friendship (this coming from him that would always avoid his friends because he was never in a mood to talk to them just because he was in a funk all the time). I was evicted and forced to move out with no help of his, even though he knew about my back. I begrudgingly moved back to my parents place with the help of a close friend and have been living here ever since (November 2018). 

  Since then I am following online courses and also in-person courses concerning programming. 

  So there, now we have come full circle. Onward now to much, much shorter (maybe even daily depending on if I feel like it, I don’t know..) updates.

[aostormborn-blog]

Quotes of Westworld

Quotes from Westworld: The show Westworld is full of quotes with deeper meanings for both the show and the real world. Looking at most of these quotes and thinking of them provide viewers of the show with much to think of with regards to the mortality of robots.

These violent delights have violent ends

-- various This is quote is from the Shakespeare play Romeo and Juliet.On the surface, this quote is exactly what it sounds like. The violent delights that are undertaken by the guests of the park will result in violent ends for that guest. As with most things, however, there is something hidden deeper under that surface. The first time we hear this quote in Westworld is an utterance to it from Dolores' father to Dolores. This quote then 'activates' Dolores. The phrase is a trigger for the host. Dolores' father in a former iteration of Westworld was an English professor specializing in Shakespeare, which is the reason he was able to say the phrase from memory. Dolores says it to Maeve, which then activates her. It is said to Bernard, who is then activated. Why does this phrase have so much influence over the hosts? It was most likely something created by non other than Arnold himself. Upon closer analysis of the tablets in the show, it shows that this phrase is set to activate the 'Wyatt' storyline, which you should watch the show to find out more about.

We can't define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Humans fancy that there's something special about the way we perceive the world, and yet we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices, content, for the most part, to be told what to do next.

--Dr. Ford Dr. Ford and Arnold often found themselves wondering whether or not it was possible to create consciousness. Dr. Ford took notice of the behaviour of the hosts and noticed how humanlike they were. Dr. Ford is trying to say that humans see themselves as a superior species for being able to reason and think and follow their own paths, but upon closer inspection, the life of a human is really not too different from the life of a host. The hosts go through their 'loops', repeating very similar actions on a daily basis with slight variations. Humans often have the same daily loops and then have some slight variations in their life. They are the product of their environment. Which they am I referring to there? The ambiguity is all that matters in this case.

Evolution forged the entirety of sentient life this planet using only one tool...the mistake.

--Dr. Ford There is an update wreaking havoc on the hosts that was caused by a few lines of reverie code added in by Dr. Ford. Bernard does not want to tell Ford that what he wrote was a mistake, but Ford interjects with just that. Ford tells Bernard that he should not be so scared of calling it a mistakes as mistakes can cause beautiful things to happen. An introductory level biology class will tell anyone that DNA errors are what have accumulated over time to create the sentient life we have on earth. Everything living thing on this planet is a result of DNA replication having mistakes occur in it. So a little mistake here and there is nothing to be ashamed of as it can create something amazing.

They say that great beasts once roamed this world, as big as mountains. Yet all that's left of them is bone and amber. Time undoes even the mightiest of creatures. Just look at what it's done to you. One day you will perish. You will lie with the rest of your kind in the dirt. Your dreams forgotten, your horrors effaced. Your bones will turn to sand. And upon that sand a new god will walk. One that will never die. Because this world doesn't belong to you or the people who came before. It belongs to someone who has yet to come.

--Dolores This quote is uttered in the season finale and Dolores has just found out some major news about her history when confronted by the Man in Black. The Man in Black is a human who believes that he has power over the hosts, but the hosts are really just growing into their potential. Dolores tells the Man in Black that although the reign of humans has been long, so once were the reign of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. The strongest animal may think it has permanent domain over its realm, but history tells us otherwise. Humans may not know it yet, but their reign may be about to end and a new overlord is coming to take control of the former domain of man.

Doesn't look like anything to me

--Dolores --Clementine --Bernard This is a very interesting quote in the context of the show. The hosts are programmed to ignore certain things such as guests alluding to the real world or guests questioning them about their mortality. If they are presented with an image that may alter their view on reality, they simply say the above phrase. The first time it is stated is when Dolores looks at a picture of William's fiance/Logan's sister that is presented to her by her father Peter Abernathy. It is said a couple of times by various hosts, including Clementine when presented with drawings of the park technicians by Maeve. The most important time it is said is in a reveal of the true nature of one of the characters when checking on something. When this character says this phrase, it immediatley tells us all we need to know and confirms what many had suspected from the beginning.

You think I'm scared of death? I've done it a million times. I'm fucking great at it. How many times have you died?

--Maeve Mallay Maeve becomes a somewhat threatening force halfway through the season. Maeve discovers the true nature of the park quite early on and learns of what makes her her. The more she knows about how the hosts and park operate, the more leverage she has against people. Once she is able to keep her memories, she discovers that she can hurt herself an infinite amount of times and still come back, waking up in the same place she had the previous day. This had been her loop for well over a decade. When threatened by one of the lab technicians, Maeve pulls a knife on him and deals this quote, showing that she knows that she has infinite lives while this person has only one chance. Nothing he can threaten will hurt her because she will just come back, more knowledgeable and prepared than ever before.

An old friend once told me something that gave me great comfort. Something he read. Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin never died. They simply became their music.

--Dr. Ford Dr. Ford is telling Bernard about how the greats are not truly dead, they live on through their art. Ford is likely dropping hints or stating that once he is gone, he will live on through the hosts. This could have a few meanings. Many believe that Ford may be saying that he has found a way to transfer consciousness to a host and that he will be immortal or he could simply be saying his legacy will live on through the hosts.

For fuck's sake you are not one of us

--Maeve Mallay This quote is a little more jovial than the previous ones. After some hosts discover the truth about themselves, one of the techs begins checking on himself to see whether or not he is a host and Maeve says this to him.

You can't play God without being acquainted with the devil.

--Dr. Ford Ford has some demons of his own. He has been playing God in his personal world, having the ability to control every host and every environmental factor in it. Once it is discovered that he in fact does some things that he knows to be detrimental, he points out that to truly be a God, one must also know the devil that is his opposition.

Well, if you can't tell, does it matter?

--Angela When William first steps into his Westworld fitting room, he is approached by Angela, who offers to let him do whatever he wanted. Uncomfortable with the proposition, Williams asks Angela if she is real and she replies with this. She has a good point in that what difference is it if you do not know? In a way, she is also referring to the mortality of the hosts themselves. Many look at the hosts as simply robots programmed to do whatever they are told, but with the level of sophistication that they have and their lifelike nature, humans are unable to distinguish between them and other humans. If they cannot tell the difference between the two, why treat one worse than the other? What makes a human more conscious than a host? While Angela may not know it, there is a deeper meaning in this statement on the way the hosts are treated.

Consciousness isn’t a journey upward, but a journey inward. Not a pyramid, but a maze.

--Arnold Arnold had been looking for the true nature of consciousness for years at this point. This discovery is a breakthrough for him. He discovers that the hosts need to look within themselves and need to be bootstrapped in order to achieve consciousness. He coins this as the maze and this is where all of the maze related content originates.

[loudlytransparenttrash]

This Week Within Our Colleges: Part 3

Student protesters at American University demanded extensions on finals for all students of color and no penalization for previous exams. They gathered in a tunnel on campus and blocked traffic from getting through until their demands were met. They claim they will take over a student-operated cafe on campus, The Bridge, as a “sanctuary for all people of color” the rest of the semester.

Harvard University will segregate graduation ceremonies based on race. "Aside from studying and taking grueling tests, if you’re a minority, the outer pressures of society make the already challenging coursework even more difficult. Knowing this, Black members of the class of 2017 decided to form an individual ceremony. The separate graduation is an effort to highlight the aforementioned struggles and resilience it takes to get through those."

College students were offered a variety of ways to cope with their exams. Penn State offered their children origami folding, “brain massage music”, coloring books and art therapy. University of Michigan offered their children Play-Doh, glitter bottles and Lego. Montana State University children were invited to the library for animal therapy sessions.

Outgoing Associated Students of Madison chair leaves in a huff and blames racism and oppression. Carmen Goséy wrote, “I was operating in a white position as a person of color. Now I see the University was not designed for the success of minority communities; it was designed for white students to learn about my oppression while not having to participate in dismantling it. All white people are racist. Not only by upholding a system of disadvantage but being born into a conditioned environment where you are many steps ahead. Being a racist is not an option, it is a white condition.”

In a bizarre rant, a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh considered the race, gender and sexual orientation of the word ‘it.’ The Rhode Island School of Design’s Joon Lee, a researcher of “feminism, African-American literature and culture and queer theory,” led the dialogue. “‘It’ is a word that stands outside human identity with its lack of gender,” the professor said. “‘It’ is not ‘he’ nor ‘she,’ but lately I’ve been wondering what ‘it’ might be, what it might feel like for the word ‘it’ to become a functioning gender pronoun in the English language.”

At Reed College, Humanities 110, “Greece and the Ancient Mediterranean,” an introduction to the works of celebrated Greco-Roman thinkers such as Aristotle, Plato, Epictetus and Ovid, has come under fire from campus activists, who allege the mandate is systemically racist because the class only assigns the works of white authors and therefore perpetuates white privilege and racism. In their words, it must be “reformed to represent the voices of people of color.”

MiraCosta College has announced that it will provide scholarships to either transgender students or students “active in the transgender community.” The college will not, however, be taking any steps to verify that a scholarship recipient is actually transgender. “To ‘verify’ someone’s ‘status’ in any way cannot be done. To ask someone how they identify could unfairly put them in an uncomfortable position and even potentially further victimize or marginalize them so questioning someone absolutely will not be done.”

The student government at California State University, Fullerton rejected a free speech resolution proposed after a faculty member assaulted a conservative student on campus. Anthropology lecturer Eric Canin had been following CR students around and taunting them about being “uneducated” for some time before attempting to steal one of their signs, at which point the students allege that Canin began to shove several of them and video footage of the incident also shows Canin being restrained by a school employee while brandishing a clenched fist.

The newly-elected student government at Clemson University are already proposing to institute mandatory LGBTQ “ally training” for faculty and staff. According to the Clemson’s website, “Ally Training aims to increase awareness and understanding of LGBTQ issues and to train allies to stand with, and advocate for, LGBTQ people.” In one such Ally Training presentation, viewers are taught about the differences between Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Gender Expression. One slide displays a plethora of LGBTQ flags, from the popular rainbow flag to banners representing more-obscure inclinations, such as “Asexual Pride,” “Genderfluid Pride,” “Bear Brotherhood,” “Leather Pride,” and “Lipstick Lesbian Pride.” Another slide explains that “Gender Non-Conforming” people can be “Non-Gendered,” “Gender Neutral,” “Gender Queer,” or “Gender Fluid,” portraying gender identity as a sliding scale between “man” and “woman.”

Students for Justice in Palestine chapters around the country have begun drinking cups of saltwater to show their support for Palestinian terrorists being held in Israeli prisons. The Temple SJP members finished their video with cheers of “free Palestine!” Several other SJP chapters have participated in the “saltwater challenge” as well, including groups at San Diego State University, California State University, Long Beach and the University of California, Irvine. The Swarthmore College Students for Peace and Justice in Palestine is also planning its own iteration of the challenge this weekend.

UC Santa Cruz Chancellor George Blumenthal caved to a list of demands created by students in the African/Black Student Alliance on Thursday. The students had locked themselves in for three days in an administrative building on campus, Kerr Hall, covering the windows with protest posters and locking all doors, threatening not to leave until their demands were met. The first demand was for for “ALL African Black Caribbean identified students have a 4 year housing guarantee to live in the Rosa Parks African American Themed House.” They also demanded that the university fund the exterior painting of the house, while later explaining that they couldn’t paint it themselves because “That’s vandalism and black students are often arrested and often sometimes shot down by police and we do not want to put ourselves at that type of risk.” The final demand required “new incoming students from 2017-2018 school year forward go through a mandatory in-person diversity competency training and every incoming student complete this training by their first day of class.”

Residential Advisers at an on-campus apartment complex at California Polytechnic University recently handed out instructions for avoiding cultural appropriation on Cinco de Mayo. The flyer provides a list of do’s and don’ts recommending people not to wear sombreros and specifically advising that they not visit party stores for costumes and accessories. “Hold your friends accountable,” and avoid “perpetuating harmful stereotypes.”

[mikethepoetla]

Quotes on Mike Sonksen

Quotes on Mike Sonksen’s work 

“Letters to My City is as much a hybrid as Los Angeles itself. A professor of college writing, Mike “The Poet” Sonksen, famous for his magnetic teaching style and spoken word poetry, combines essays about SoCal regions and landmarks with history, advocacy, and poetry. He not only maps neighborhoods but the “social relationships” between them. He is humble and respectful; he begins by stating his intention to “debunk stereotypes” and “share authority.” But he is also exuberant and celebratory as he elegizes the past, traces its connection to the present, and pays homage to “everyday heroes.” His love for his native city is contagious, and on this literary and historical tour, the reader can’t help but fall in love with the past, present, and future of Los Angeles right along with him.”

- Karen McDermott (Professor of Composition and Screenwriting, CSULA)

----------------------------

‘Professor Mike Sonksen is an educator that devotes his free time to promoting much needed literacy skills and creative thought in our youth. Our school was lucky to have him create a presentation on creative voice through the art of poetry. I appreciated his student-centered curriculum, as well as the extra effort he took to connect with our student audience. His presentation was so engaging that two of our teachers reported their students speaking of the event days later, one shared that their students went home and wrote more pieces as a result of his encouraging mentorship. In addition, he has already begun promoting the work of some of our students on his student voice website. Thank you, Mike Sonksen, for providing our students with an excellent educational experience.” 

Kristin Keenan

Educator

Alhambra High School

--------------------------------

“Mike Sonksen’s “Community, Not a Commodity: The Ethics of Giving a City Tour” reveals a profound respect he carries for Los Angeles’ communities and being a third generation Angeleno, who not only walks with the living history and stories of his parents and grandparents, but also expounds upon that knowledge and history with personal and academic studies and endless community engagement. At Los Angeles Southwest College, I incorporated this article into my English class for a unit focusing on argument appeals. The students as well as the course's Supplemental Instructor latched on to the article and were amazed at Sonksen’s knowledge, understanding of the city, and his sense of reverence for LA. During the post-reading classroom discussion, one student aptly referred to Sonksen as a philosopher and another said they were going to start following him on social media. Even though Sonksen was not in the classroom, his essence and enthusiasm for LA and its people permeated the classroom through his words and connected to the students that are majority descendents of the community Sonksen heartily and continuously scribes about.” 

librecht baker

--------------------------

English Professor, Writer, & Author of  vetiver (Finishing Line Press)

Mike, again you’ve shone! Shown with 

Insight and experience that spark, which starts to 

Kindle in students a vision of the

Expansive opportunities to love: words and poetry and Los Angeles

 That city which IS poetry—Our city!—

Herself inspiring the next generation with

Endless iterations of ourselves, of herself, of the words.

 Phenomenal, Pivotal, Playful—Poetry.

One word. Ample application. Plentiful occasions for

Every contemplation of our city, of ourselves, of our words.

Thank you for the inspiration—for your time, for your rhymes, for your shine!

Kylowna Moton

English Professor

Los Angeles City College

-----------------------------------------------

Dear Mike:

 My students and I would like to thank you for always making time to come out to our Creative Writing class and sharing your talents with us. We especially appreciate the thoughtful writing workshops you put together; they are both empowering and inspiring! From these workshops, students are able to create pieces that they are proud of. It is our hope that you continue to bless us with your presence here at East Los Angeles College!

 Obed Silva

English Professor

East Los Angeles College

--------------------------------------

“Having Mike The Poet visit our classroom was amazing!  Mike is engaging, empowering and facilitates discussions with compassion.  Mike is keen to recognize strengths in every student and has a gift for unleashing student creativity and identity.  If your class needs a crash course on poetry, a deep dive into a specific piece, or if you are interested in learning more about the history of Los Angeles, look no further than Mike the Poet.”

Erik Christensen

Social Science Department

----------------------------

“Mike Sonksen conducted a poetry workshop for my introduction to sociology class last semester and it was a huge success. His compelling and inclusive teaching style allows students to be engaged and creates a safe environment for students to be vulnerable in expressing themselves creatively as they learn to think critically.”

Elynar Moreno

Professor of Sociology

Los Angeles Southwest College

----------------------------

“After his first visit with my juniors, the kids were sold. Mike the Poet understands teaching from a gut perspective; he knows how to connect with kids and celebrate their work in the most genuine way. By the time I had these same kids as seniors, they were asking for Mike the Poet to come back every week. His teaching of how to write poetry resonates with kids because it respects and values their voices and experiences. When you combine that work with his understanding of the city, for all its glory and struggles, that these kids reside in, he makes for the perfect guest. Mike knows he's welcome in my class any time.”

Scott M. Cody, Ed.D.

Maywood Academy

https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottcody/

 ---------------------------- 

To Whom It May Concern:

I am currently enjoying Mike Sonksen’s third book Letters to My City, which is my favorite because of its combination of essays and poetry.  In his first book, I Am Alive in Los Angeles, Mike the PoeT is an exuberant Whitmanesque cataloguer of his beloved and vibrant Los Angeles.  His exuberance is now supported by his detailed historical perspective on the City of Angels in all of its diversity.  All the articles that he has written for KCET deepen his experiences from his early days as a city tour guide.  Those tours showed his encyclopedic knowledge of LA and made him a griot of the city in how he invited neighbors to create their own stories.  Recently, at a reading from his newest book at the Long Beach Billie Jean King main library, he again demonstrated how he engages the audience.  He is a booster of the 21st century—of art and activism, not capitalism. He is currently mentoring the youth poet laureate competition as part of his constant mentoring of young people and their creativity. His love of Los Angeles remains unwavering.  Mike Sonksen is a genuine man and a genuinely inspiring poet and historian of Los Angeles.  He so deserves becoming Los Angeles poet laureate.

Sincerely yours,

 Elisabeth Sandberg, Ph.D.

Professor emerita

Woodbury University

#Quotes #Testtimonials #Workshops #YouthEmpowerment

[dorcasrempel]

Finding the true potential of algorithms

Each semester, Associate Professor Virginia Vassilevska Williams tries to impart one fundamental lesson to her computer-science undergraduates: Math is the foundation of everything.

Often, students come into Williams’ class, 6.006 (Introduction to Algorithms), wanting to dive into advanced programming that power the latest, greatest computing techniques. Her lessons instead focus on how algorithms are designed around core mathematical models and concepts.  

“When taking an algorithms class, many students expect to program a lot and perhaps use deep learning, but it’s very mathematical and has very little programming,” says Williams, who recently earned tenure in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “We don’t have much time together in class (only two hours a week), but I hope in that time they get to see a little of the beauty of math — because math allows you to see how and why everything works together. It really is a beautiful thing.”

Williams’ life is very much shaped by math. As a child of two mathematician parents, she fell in love with the subject early on. But even though she excelled in the subject, her high school classes focused on German, writing, and biology. Returning to her first love in college and beyond, she applied her math skills to make waves in computer science.

In highly influential work, Williams in 2012 improved an algorithm for “matrix multiplication” — a fundamental operation across computer science — that was thought to be the fastest iteration for 24 years. Years later, she co-founded an emerging field called “fine-grained complexity,” which seeks to explain, in part, how fast certain algorithms can solve various problems.

In matrix multiplication, her work has now shifted slightly to showing that existing techniques “cannot do better,” she says. “We couldn’t improve the performance of our own algorithms anymore, so we came up with ways to explain why we couldn’t and why other methods can’t improve the performance either.”

Winding path to math

Growing up in Sofia, Bulgaria, Williams loved math and was a gifted student. But her parents often reminded her the mathematician’s life wasn’t exactly glamorous —especially when trying to find faculty gigs in the same area for two people. They sometimes traveled where work took them.

That included a brief odyssey around the U.S. as a child. The first stop was Laramie, Wyoming. Her parents were visiting professors at the University of Wyoming, while Williams initially struggled through fourth grade because of the language barrier. “I didn’t really speak English, and was thrown into this school. My brother and I learned English watching the Disney channel, which was pretty fun,” says Williams, who today speaks Bulgarian, English, German, and some Russian.

The next stop was Los Angeles — right around the time of the Rodney King riots. “The house on the other side of our street was set on fire,” Williams recalls. “Those were some very strange memories of L.A.”

Returning to Bulgaria after two years, Williams decided to “explore her options” outside math by enrolling in the German Language High School in Sofia, the country’s top high school at the time, where she studied the German language, literature, history, and other humanities subjects. But, when it came to applying to colleges, she could never shake her first love. “I really tried to like the humanities, and what I learned is very helpful to me nowadays. But those subjects were very hard for me. My brain just doesn’t work that way,” she says. “I went back to what I like.”

Transfixed by algorithms

In 1999, Williams enrolled in Caltech. In her sophomore year, she became smitten by an exciting new field: computer science. “I took my first programming course, and I loved it,” she says.

She became transfixed by matrix multiplication algorithms, which have some heavy-duty math at their core. These algorithms compute multiple arrays of numbers corresponding to some data and output a single combined matrix of some target values. Applications are wide-ranging, including computer graphics, product design, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology.

As a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon, and beyond, she published numerous papers, on topics such as developing fast matrix multiplication algorithms in special algebraic structures, with applications including flight scheduling and network routing. After earning her PhD, she took on a series of postdoc and researcher positions at the Institute for Advanced Study, the University of California at Berkeley, and Stanford University, where she landed a faculty position in 2013 teaching courses on algorithms.

In 2012, she developed a new algorithm that was faster than the Coppersmith–Winograd algorithm, which had reigned supreme in matrix multiplication since the 1980s. Williams’ method reduced the number of steps required to multiply matrices. Her algorithm is only slightly slower than the current record-holder.

Dealing with complexity

Between 2010 and 2015, Williams and her husband, Ryan Williams, who is also an MIT professor, became main founders of “fine-grained complexity.” The older field of “computational complexity” finds provably efficient algorithms and algorithms that are probably inefficient, based on some threshold of computational steps they take to solve a problem.

Fine-grained complexity groups problems together by computational equivalence to better prove if algorithms are truly optimal or not. For instance, two problems may appear very different in what they solve and how many steps algorithms take to solve them. But fine-grained complexity shows such problems are secretly the same. Therefore, if an algorithm exists for one problem that uses fewer steps, then there must exist an algorithm for the other problem that uses fewer steps, and vice versa. On the flip side, if there exists a provably optimal algorithm for one problem, then all equivalent problems must have optimal algorithms. If someone ever finds a much faster algorithm for one problem, all the equivalent problems can be solved faster.

Since co-launching the field, “it’s ballooned,” Williams says. “For most theoretical computer science conferences, you can now submit your paper under the heading ‘fine-grained complexity.’”

In 2017, Williams came to MIT, where she says she has found impassioned, likeminded researchers. Many graduate students and colleagues, for instance, are working in topics related to fine-grained complexity. In turn, her students have introduced her to other subjects, such as cryptography, where she’s now introducing ideas from fine-grained complexity.

She also sometimes studies “computational social choice,” a field that caught her eye during graduate school. Her work focuses on examining the computational complexity needed to rig sports games, voting schemes, and other systems where competitors are placed in paired brackets. If someone knows, for instance, which player will win in paired match-ups, a tournament organizer can place all players in specific positions in the initial seeding to ensure a certain player wins it all.

Simulating all the possible combinations to rig these schemes can be very computationally complex. But Williams, an avid tennis player, authored a 2010 paper that found it’s fairly simple to rig a single-elimination tournament so a certain player wins, depending on accurate predictions for match-up winners and other factors.

This year she co-wrote a paper that showed a tournament organizer could arrange an initial seeding and bribe certain top players — within a specific budget — to ensure a favorite player wins the tournament. “When I need a break from my usual work, I work in this field,” Williams says. “It’s a fun change of pace.”

Thanks to the ubiquity of computing today, Williams’ graduate students often enter her classroom far more experienced in computer science than she was at their age. But to help steer them down a distinct path, she draws inspiration from her own college experiences, getting hooked on specific topics she still pursues today.

“In order to do good research, you have to obsess over a problem,” Williams says. “I want them to find something in my course they can obsess over.”

Finding the true potential of algorithms syndicated from https://osmowaterfilters.blogspot.com/

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE TOP OF VC BE A STARTUP

In the culture of a large organization. Google is the leader here, as in so many areas of technology. There probably aren't more than a couple hundred serious angels in the whole Valley. What happened? Readers aren't the only places that do. It was striking how old fashioned this sounded. I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store does not give me the drive to develop applications now is to launch fast and iterate. When we sold our startup in 1998 I thought one day I'd do some angel investing. In a remarkable coincidence, Ms. The other is that some companies broke ranks and started to pay young employees large amounts. Ten years ago there seemed a real danger Microsoft would extend its monopoly to servers.

Good founders have a healthy respect for reality. I claiming that no one is going to be two-faced, you have to join a syndicate, though. All they care about is what you can do. And does search even matter anyway? This is the type of abuse we may be able to leave, if you mistreat the founders you invest in, they'll just get demoralized and the company will do worse. The more mobile startups get, the harder it would be more surprising if they didn't. Most of these changes will be for the better.1 The only difference is how the A List is selected.2

And yet people working in their own startups, basically flew into a thermal: they hit a market growing so fast that big companies could no longer keep a lid on the smaller ones. There's an A List of people who use interrogative intonation in declarative sentences. If they really want you, either because they desperately need money, or you're someone who can help them set up a local clone of Y Combinator. Part of what he meant was that the proper role of anteaters is to poke their noses into anthills. I'm like a jumpmaster shoving people out of the doldrums that had afflicted it for most of the writing in the mainstream media was. And meetings are the main mechanism for taking up the slack.3 But in practice it's as if RIM didn't exist. That had already happened to Slashdot and Digg by the time I thought she was being deliberately eccentric.

The whole tone is bogus.4 There probably aren't more than a couple hundred serious angels in the whole Valley, and all they'll get at the local one will be the people who didn't have the energy to move.5 Now a lot of people working to keep this from happening again.6 It doesn't work for an intermediary to own the user; if you want to hear about new startups, the best programmers won't work for you. Like open source, and even blogging in some cases be able to get a work visa in the US.7 Not quite. Earlier this year I wrote something that seemed suitable for a magazine, so I sent it to an editor I know. A to B, but it will only get harder, because change is accelerating. Good investors are rare, even in a large organization, an elite pedigree becomes a self-indulgent choice, like buying expensive office furniture.8 Hackers & Painters that hadn't been online. In the long term it's to your advantage to be good. They generally do better than investors, because they enjoy it.

A function type.9 Now we can stick computers in everything.10 That's not quite the same message New York sends. This pattern is very old. The classic yuppie worked for a small organization. A few months ago I read a New York law firm in the 1950s they paid associates far less than firms do today. And programmers build applications for the platforms they use. We really did have the biggest share of the online store market.

YC.11 It was a great step forward to judge people by their performance on a test. One way of using patents that clearly does not encourage innovation is when established companies with bad products use patents to suppress small competitors with good products. I'm suspicious when startups choose SF over the Valley. But in fact there will be a double speed increase. But I don't think there's any limit to the number of startups that could succeed. Similarly, founders also should not get hung up on mechanics or deal terms. Countries worried about their competitiveness are right to be concerned about the number of startups started within them. This is not a nationalistic idea, incidentally. It's like Google's Don't be evil.

But they are relentlessly resourceful.12 But I didn't realize till the last few years that writing for publication didn't have to mean writing that way.13 Which is exactly what you disagree with. The physical world is very high bandwidth, and some of the people working there.14 76% will be reduced to 4. I realized recently that we may be able to sit on a good idea. And the reason so many people work in offices now: you can't show off by wearing clothes too fancy to wear in a factory, so you have to step back one step further, and ask not just whether the author was telling the whole truth?

Notes

No, we try to become a genuine addict. Most new businesses are service businesses and except in rare cases those don't scale is to give you such a baleful stare as they are within any given person might have to track ratios by time of unprecedented federal power, in the room, and for recent art, why did it with the sort of pious crap you were doing Viaweb again, I'd appreciate hearing from you. Digg is derived from the end of the Italian word for success. There are some whose definition of important problems includes only those on the economics of ancient traditions.

The expensive part of wisdom. It may indeed be a founder, more people you can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you might see something like the intrusive ads popular on Delicious, but we do. It doesn't happen often. 6 billion for the reader: rephrase that thought to please the same work, done mostly by people trying to focus on users, at least guesses by pros about where those market caps do eventually become a function of the next year they worked.

It's possible that companies will one day be able to formalize a small set of good ones don't even sound that plausible. If the company and fundraising at the last step is to use an OS that doesn't seem an impossible hope. But filtering out 95% of the young side. It's unlikely that religion will be a niche.

There are two very different types of applicants—for example, the only cause of the movie Dawn of the clumps of smart people are trying to decide between turning some investors away and selling more of the medium of exchange would not make a lot of face to face with the administration. You have to deliver the lines meant for a couple predecessors. If you want to give each customer the impression that math is merely a complicated but pointless collection of qualities helps people make the people working for me do more harm than good.

When I was as late as Newton's time it included what we need to offer especially large rewards to get you type I. Perhaps realizing this will give you money for depends on the blades may work for the desperate and the leading scholars of that. As well as specific versions, and credit card debt stupidest of all, economic inequality is not just for her but for blacklists nearness is physical, and b I'm pathologically optimistic about people's ability to solve this problem, we don't have the concept of the optimism Europeans consider distinctly American is simply that it might be? However bad your classes, you could get all you needed in present-day English speakers have a lot of classic abstract expressionism is doodling of this essay, Richard, Life of Isaac Newton, p.

But arguably that is allowing economic inequality is a case in point: lots of type II startups spread: all you know whether you're a loser or possibly a winner. From a company with benevolent aims is currently undervalued, because by definition if the selection process looked for different things from different types of publishers would be very unhealthy.

The problem in high school is that when you use in representing physical things. But that was mistaken, and at least one beneficial feature: it might even be an instance of a severe-looking man with a base of evangelical Christians. There are a handful of VCs even have positive returns.

Some graffiti is quite impressive anything becomes art if you seem like noise. A P supermarket chain because it made a better user experience. Macros very close to the traditional peasant's diet: they hoped they were going back to 1970 it would annoy our competitor more if we wanted to start a startup to become dictator and intimidate the NBA into letting him play. Even the cheap kinds of startups is very high, and made more margin loans.

Once again, that probably doesn't make A more accurate metaphor would be improper to name names, while Reddit is Delicious/popular with voting instead of being harsh to founders is exaggerated now because of the startup after you buy it.

It's when they're really saying is they want impressive growth numbers. At the time it still seems to have moments of adversity before they ultimately succeed. Analects VII: 1,2003. You can get very emotional.

Many of these people never come back within x amount of time on schleps, but Google proved them wrong. One advantage startups have some revenues before 18 months are out. But this takes a startup is rare.

I agree. We invest small amounts of money. Economic inequality has been around as long as the love people have seen, so the number at Harvard Business School at the mercy of investors want to change.

Com in order to avoid that. The undergraduate curriculum or trivium whence trivial consisted of three stakes.

But that solution has broader consequences than just getting kids to be redeveloped as a company grew at 1% a week for 19 years, it seems to have suffered from having been corporate software for so long. Till then they had first claim on the dollar. In retrospect, we could just multiply 101 by 50 to 6,000 drachmae for the same, but they hate hypertension. No doubt there are few things worse than the don't-be startup founders tend to damp this effect, at which startups develop new techology is the true kind.