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loving-n0t-heyting · 2 months ago

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currently reading james shaws book on wittgenstein, or more specifically the rule following segment of the investigations. argues fairly convincingly

(tho idk, its easy to be convinced of anything the ~1st time you read a serious entry on a topic, the only other literature i can recall reading in this particular niche is kripkenstein and some stuff of mcdowells i really was not in a position to understand at the time; 0th entry ive read in the literature ofc would be the investigations ipsum; none of this is my specialty) that much of whats going on, especially early on in the rule following block, is W trying to convince the reader and his fictitious interlocutor not to look for reasons we have to carry out a rule in "the ordinary way" in all possible cases when challenged by a perverse interpreter of the rule. he encourages us to conclude, after examining our ordinary ways of thinking/acting with care, that while we sometimes act for reasons, and sometimes we have reasons for those reasons, sometimes we also simply act for no reason at all. our spades eventually turn up empty. (smth like the argument in play here from W is clearly on eg anscombes mind in intention sec. 20)

it is interesting to compare Ws remarks here about spades turning up empty to a) the long and storied topic among philosophers in roughly the tradition of aristotle to take the idea of a "summum bonum" very srsly and ii) the distinction btwn "terminal" and "instrumental" desires. (the former is very very clearly also on anscombes mind but i dont think the latter.) its a key feature of philosophers in the tradition of aristotle to (like W) take chains of reasons or desires or intentions or whatever very srsly, and to take consideration of them to point the existence of reasons/desires/intentions not had for any further r/d/i. the way these arguments tend to go is very different from in W: in W the existence of "arational" reasons of ours seems to be smth he expects us to notice as part of the usual background of everyday life, not a conclusion to a speculative argument. but the summum bonum and the arational reasons share some important features: they terminate chains of nested such rsns, standing in roughly the same relation to rsns lower down in the chain as intermediate ones stand to all those beneath them in turn. thus they are in an important sense of the same (familiar) kind of thing as the "lower" rsns. and while W would ofc disavow that their existence and role in our activity is any kind of philosophical posit or potentially surprising philosophical thesis, he thinks they require a little bit of work to point out, at least to those of us encased in the fly bottle. he cant just allude to them or rattle off some buzzwords and be done with it

this is very much not how the terminal/instrumental distinction gets discussed, is it? when introduced at all (in eg the introductory chapters of textbooks on one kind or another of ratl choice theory), its usually somewhat cursory; the distinction is supposed to be obvious, virtually self explanatory. if either is treated as more opaque or sophisticated and not-immediate, it is the "instrumental" desires rather than the "terminal" ones. (obviously in this corner of the internet mostly its prolly downstream of big yud, who treats everything he discusses this way, but there are other ppl to discuss these topics actually capable of and willing to put forth arguments for their beliefs instead of screaming abt how yr stupid if you disagree with them who nevertheless are pretty cursory with their introduction of the concepts.) now there is ofc an important and very interesting history of arguments (of a sort) for terminal desires (here: utility functions) in the relevant sense that begin rather than end with the "instrumental" desires (here: preference orders), in the tradition starting with von neumann & morgenstern on thru jeffrey and later joyce. this is the tradition of "representation theorems" in decision theory. but even here, one gets the sense that the terminal tail is wagging the instrumental dog; there is a simply astounding quote from jeffrey he makes in the course of "justifying" one of the less intuitive assumptions abt the structure of preference orders required for the theorem to go thru:

The axiom is there because we need it, and it is justified by our antecedent belief in the plausibility of the result we mean to deduce from it.

similar (motivated) reasoning, if not always so explicit, seems in play with savage and von neumann/morgenstern as well

and what is more, terminal desires are NOT treated as fundamentally akin to instrumental desires the way "ultimate" rsns in W/aristotle are treated as akin to "lower" rsns. not mathematically ofc, but also not intuitively. a difference in terminal desires founds a definitive break btwn two agents. to the extent they can reason practically with one another it is of a fundamentally different kind than reasoning among similarly-terminal agents, and change in ones terminal desires is to be explained in similarly fundamentally different terms; often but not inevitably this takes the form of treating any change in "terminal" values as at least arational and at most a shift in ones literal identity as a person. it tends to go along with a hostility to treating terminal desire as any kind of belief (tho this is not strictly a necessity)

i think all of this contributes to why i feel more suspicious of talk about terminal desires than of the summum bonum or reasonless reasons. it simultaneously requires this fundamentally, categorically different kind of attitude we have than other more quotidian ones, and it requires moreover that we accept this distinction basically without argument. not a good combo! it speaks to ones being already in the grip of a picture or grand theory that goes well beyond the humdrum facts of daily reasoning, without any clear idea or memory of what it would be or was like to be motivated to enter the grip from without. ppl managed to talk about reasons for doing stuff long long before ramsey or von neumann or whoever were but a twinkle in their parents eyes

there are more exact arguments to be made against more exact formulations of the distinction ofc but this helps get at the spirit of the thing. and to discourage false assimilations of the distinction to older more traditional ones

#this is all very off the cuff and sweeping #dont take it too srsly #the prime audience of this post is me

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mywifeleftme · 8 months ago

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349: Joe Jackson // Look Sharp!

Look Sharp! Joe Jackson 1979, A&M

I have a general sense that Joe Jackson was, at least at one time, a little huffy about how retrospectives on his career focus so heavily on his early new wave records. (Is this true? I dunno, I didn’t get to 349 reviews in this series by sourcing all my claims.) Trouble is, the immature “Angry Young Man” music of his debut Look Sharp! is by some distance the best stuff Jackson ever did, despite the restless stylistic diversity of his later years. Being a man of a certain age myself (43), I can now understand how it would be disheartening to think I’d done my best work as a 22-year-old idiot, the rest of my life perceived as a failure to maintain that standard. On the other hand, I haven’t done any “best work” as yet, and the prospects of ever doing so are starting to seem remote…

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You can never be sure how much artists are blowing smoke when they tell you to your face/screen that they think their new album is better than their most popular classic, but when that classic is as good as Look Sharp! is…ah, Jackson’s gotta know right? I often forget just how much punch the record packs before it makes its way back on to my table, but then I drop the needle and start to seriously wonder whether there was a better top-to-bottom record by any of the singer-songwritery new wavers—Lowe, Parker, and Costello very much included. It’s that undeniably heavy Costello influence that probably especially galls Jackson, as this is essentially a punked up, Vox organ-free refinement of Elvis’s first two records. But by ’79’s Armed Forces (released just weeks before Look Sharp!), Costello had already essentially abandoned that sound, and no one before or since scratched that My Aim is True itch like Jackson and his band do here.

The Joe Jackson Band gives the Attractions a run for slick, compact punch (especially superhero bassist Graham Maby), moving adeptly from sophisticated ska pop (“Fools in Love”) to jagged new wave (“Look Sharp!”; “Happy Loving Couples”) to thrashing pop punk (“Got the Time”; “Throw It Away”). Though it’s not my favourite song on the record, there is something slightly brain-busting about the existence of “Is She Really Going Out with Him?” on an LP from 1979, given that it could absolutely have come out unchanged in 1997 and been an alternative radio smash. In fact, one thing Joe may have on Elvis is that (in my opinion) Look Sharp! had more direct influence on a swath of ‘90s band than Costello’s comparatively sour original article: “Is She Really Going Out with Him?” alone contains like the complete DNA of Ben Folds, Weezer, Jimmy Eat World, Sugar Ray (who even had a hit covering it) and much of the guitar contingent from the Now That’s What I Call Music! comps.

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349/365

#joe jackson #joe jackson band #graham maby #elvis costello #the attractions #new wave #pub rock #'70s music #is she really going out with him #look sharp #guitar pop #music review #vinyl record

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sinceileftyoublog · 2 years ago

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Hedvig Mollestad Interview: The Rhythm of Care

Photo by Kim Hiorthøy

BY JORDAN MAINZER

On her upcoming album Maternity Beat, Norwegian guitarist and composer Hedvig Mollestad redefines what it means to be maternal. Though she has two kids, her exploration of motherhood is not autobiographical, nor is it dependent on having children at all. Really, Mollestad boils the concept down to its essence: caring for something other than yourself.

Around the European migrant crisis of 2015/2016, Mollestad had her first child but was faced with images, whether on the news or in person, of immigrants from Syria coming to Europe to request asylum, many of whom had young children of their own. At the same time the unfortunate nativist aftereffects of the crisis arose around the world, Mollestad was beginning to feel like she needed to do something different with her music. She drafted Maternity Beat for the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra and pitched it to the Molde International Jazz Festival and Midtnorsk Jazzsenter. While they rejected it in 2017, they eventually accepted it for the Festival’s 60th anniversary in 2020, which, unlike so many other festivals that year, actually did go on, albeit at a much lower audience capacity. Last October, Mollestad and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra recorded Maternity Beat, which finally sees release next Friday on Rune Grammofon.

Though the recorded version of Maternity Beat is a bit shorter due to studio time and vinyl constraints, the ideas are consistent: It’s a piece about how we support each other and help each other grow. Mollestad knew pretty early that she wanted to include spoken word, or at least voice, on the record, and from the very first track, we’re presented with what’s at stake: “Is there a boat on the horizon? / With mothers and children and fathers?” Atop rolling drums and sharp guitars, and eventually woodwinds that sound somewhat hopeful, we experience the rollercoaster of emotions brought upon by these images of desperation. “Do Re Mi Ma Ma” contains improvised nonsensical vocals that sound like a baby trying to say their first words, and clattering drums that are akin to how one might play with their toys. Eventually, the band picks back up, with horn blasts and searing guitar solos, the song developing in sophistication along the way. “Her Own Shape” is comparatively subdued, inspired by parents giving their children tools they need to create, with peaceful, wordless harmonies over bendy, exploratory guitars.

But it’s “Donna Ovis Peppa” that’s the album’s centerpiece, touching on the brunt of the record’s themes. The title itself is inspired by the phrase Dona nobis pacem (“Grant us Peace”), which comes from the Agnus Dei section of the Roman Catholic mass. “Ovis” itself is a play on Ove, the name of the father of Mollestad’s childhood best friend, who was a big supporter of her as a child and was sick with cancer at the time Mollestad was writing Maternity Beat. “I had a little contact with his family...in spring of 2020,” Mollestad told me over Zoom a couple weeks ago. “I had this urge to make something in this music for him. That’s the 5/4 pattern in the middle. It’s made only for him and his family.” He ended up passing away the day before Mollestad and the Orchestra performed for the first time. The last part of the song’s title is, yes, inspired by Peppa Pig, whose instrumental theme you can hear in the song if you listen closely enough. Mollestad’s children loved Peppa Pig, and though they’re too old for it now, I guess she wanted to nod at least once to her own motherhood.

Read my conversation with Mollestad below, edited for length and clarity, in which we talk about the album’s themes, working as a guitarist with a large orchestra, and the distinctive cover art.

Since I Left You: Last time we were talking, you mentioned Maternity Beat in context of reading Dag Hoel’s Fred er ei det beste, about ammunition production in Norway. Now, I understand the context, you thinking about the world you want your child to grow up in. As such, this album is your first time exploring gender and motherhood in relation to your music, which you were reticent to do before. Why was that, and what changed?

Hedvig Mollestad: The main reason in the beginning was as simple as I thought it was very important for there to be female instrumentalists where [people] were only talking about their instruments and their craft, the subject of their music and guitar and art. Very often, I saw female musicians being asked to comment on their gender, and of course, male musicians never were. So I was very strict on that. Gender-related stuff wasn’t my expertise. My experience with it would have been a very selective voice to the matter. If someone wanted to know something about it, they could find some good feminist research about it.

Music and art today are fighting a lot against the media. At the same time, it’s a way of reaching people, as that’s the nature of music, to be heard by others if not necessarily everyone. You want to find a way of getting into the ears of people who appreciate it. But [the media] is also problematic because it’s taking away the focus from the music itself. Very many musicians have to work with the media to be there in the right way, and you have to produce and tell people you’ve done it and present it in a way. [The media] grasping into the places where the art is made and taking over a little bit. For that reason, I was trying to focus on the music. As it’s instrumental music, I don’t have lyrics I can pull meanings and philosophies from.

Now, as I’m 40 and a mother of two, I’ve understood that as a touring musician and a composer, it’s also important for others that mothers are visible as musicians. Now, I’m sharing a little bit more for both female and male musicians. Touring as a family member is hard. It’s very good for the community to be open about it and talk about it and share our experiences. I’m also in a position to be able to work with my music as it is.

I was playing with my much beloved Trio for many many years. I started feeling that I wanted to make music for other kind of ensembles using other kinds of instruments and expressions. [I had the idea for Maternity Beat] very early in 2017, and I drafted it for the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra and the Festival. They didn’t pick it up at the time, but they picked it up a couple years later for their 60th anniversary. It took some time for it to come to live. I started to work on it and was supposed to work on it at the start of 2020. The pandemic came. The festival was so big, they decided to go through with it even though the capacity would be very low and very uncertain. I got to work on this February-June of 2020. The children were not in school. I spent time with them during the day when my boyfriend was working, and when he came home, I just left the house for my rehearsing and working space. I worked the evening and the night and came back. It was very focused and so undisturbed. It was such a good place to dig into another world, thematically and in terms of deeper structures and working them out all the way.

SILY: When did you start to think about motherhood and parenthood as it relates to the various social issues you explore on the album, like the migrant crisis?

HM: The idea for this music was first and foremost musical. I wanted to write for a big orchestra, and I wanted to put the guitar in a way that could drive it without taking up too much space and without being an instrument like the saxophone and the trumpets [that are] playing lines. The title Maternity Beat was very good to work from because it suggested rhythm and something that, yes, [has to do with] motherhood, but also mother earth. I wanted to connect it to my experiences, but I was also clear to myself from the beginning that it wasn’t going to exclude anyone. It’s not about being a mother; it’s about caring. What’s happening when you’re caring for someone or something? What’s waking us up to care for others? For people that have children, it could be parenthood, but it doesn’t necessarily have to me. Many people have bad relationships with their parents [or no parents] at all. [Maternity Beat] is a way of describing how we care and what makes us care. That’s the only thing we have in common. We all come from parents, but not all of us know them or like them.

When you’re a new mother, you’re very full of hormones, and it’s very overwhelming. Suddenly, another life is relying on you and your presence so much. That was very shocking for me as it is for very many new parents. There are so many parents and children around the world that have so many bigger issues than putting their kids to bed and making them go to sleep. When the migrant crisis happened in Norway in Europe in 2015/2016, that was when I had my first child. I found it very disturbing we were [having] this amazing experience at the same time there was a crisis for people in my situation. I was going around and making my baby fall asleep, but I felt like I wanted to go and help others because they really needed it. It’s a cliché, but with the loss of power you feel when a global crisis comes close, it feels meaningless to go on with your life and letting [the crisis] pass by on the side. So I didn’t want the album to be about [speaks in precious voice] my child and the beauty of life. It’s such a harsh contrast and still is.

SILY: Even though your music doesn’t usually have lyrics, this album does have passages of spoken word that allude to what you’re talking about. At what point during the creative process did you realize you wanted something more lyrical on here?

HM: I knew it quite early, because I was setting up what type of musicians I wanted to be a part of the project. I wanted to use vocalists for that purpose, not just to use their voice but to speak words that had meaning. I also knew very early I wanted the opening track to contain lyrics about the darkest part of this, to set the pace and get it over with. [laughs] For the first track, I was very inspired by Scott Walker and the opening of Tilt. It hasn’t been many years since I heard that for the first time. It made such an impression on me. The atmosphere that he creates, and the emotionlessness of the words. [sings] “Do I hear, 21, 21, 21.” There’s no metaphor. It’s very simple yet extremely powerful. I really wanted to go in that direction because the focus he managed to make there is really amazing. During the composing process, I wanted to have different theories in different parts of the music. I didn’t want it to be one big fat sausage. I wanted various things represented, both humorous and my experiences with motherhood. So I put in the words for when I thought [the music] needed it.

SILY: You really get at what you’re aiming for on “Her Own Shape”, which is about parents giving children the space and tools they need to thrive. That song is so spacious as compared to the rest of the record, almost like a canvas that demands to be filled.

HM: The words [on that song] are so very specific and filled up with serious meaning, the music cannot be as emotional as the text. It should be beautiful and easygoing, and a place for that lyric to be able to be what it is without too much disturbance.

SILY; Can you talk about the song “Do Re Mi Ma Ma”?

HM: The recorded version is a lot shorter than what we’re doing live. There’s a wonderful transition from the first part to the second. In general, [on the record], I was very specific for how the lyrics should be performed. I read them, recorded it how I wanted it to be, how short, etc. But I wanted to give [the vocalists] a task where they were a lot freer. So I thought, “Okay, what’s the [simplest] thing they could say?” It was, “ma.” So I gave them 5 minutes of improvisation. I said, “You can use 'ma,' but you have to avoid it sounding like 'mama,' at least for the first three minutes.” It was so funny and so interesting how they worked around that. I also wanted to have a bassline pattern that I could write so I could focus on the horns and trumpet section. “On The Horizon, Part 2″ has a lot of things happening with the band, very busy patterns with the guitar and the time signature changes. So I wanted to [follow it with] this very slow, bluesy bass riff where I could get the most out of the horns. That was a good thing to bring together with the vocalists.

SILY: You mentioned wanting to use the guitar in unexpected ways with this orchestra. Both of the singles, “All Flights Cancelled” and “On The Horizon, Part 2″, do that. When you think, “Guitar in a jazz orchestra,” you don’t necessarily hear the sounds of those two songs.

HM: “All Flights Cancelled” is a band song, with an A part and a B part. Rune Grammofon released that single first, but I think it’s the least orchestrated piece on the whole record because it’s only the band. I like it because it has a whole other mood than when we recorded it with the Trio. It was a good way to break everything up and bring back the focus to what I’m usually working on, which is the guitar in a band setting. [This time,] it was much more complex and involved a lot more composing. It was so hard to make it fit with the rest of the music. It had to be pointy and very audible. I’m not used to pointy and audible; I want to be broader. The tempo was quite high, and the time signature was changing. [The drummer] was really mixing the ingredients. That helped a lot with the role of the guitar, which had to be restricted.

SILY: I was also surprised by how much music from other regions of the world snuck in. “Donna Ovis Peppa” had some klezmer, and the hand percussion on “Maternity Sweep” was almost Latin. Was that intentional?

HM: I don’t think it was very intentional, but it was important for me to have percussion, other rhythmic impulses besides drums, to have another person go crazy on all these other rhythmic sounds. It’s an orchestra, and it should be in the drum section as well. The percussionist was instructed very little. He was encouraged to do what he thought would fit. Then we worked on it. We used congas and so many woodblocks! He was very free there. He’s amazing and eager and has so many ideas. He’s so vibrant and was working so hard. He was the one who left the studio the latest.

SILY: What’s the inspiration behind the cover art?

HM: I’ve been working with Kim [Hiorthøy] since the first record I released on Rune 11 years ago. When I signed there, cover art was one of the only things I couldn’t decide. They said, “Kim is making the covers, and he’s making them the way he wants. If you really hate it, you can tell me, and he’ll make another one, but if you just don’t like it, it’s not enough.” I was very cool with that because Kim is amazing. But I really wanted to have pictures on the covers. I talked to him about it, and he was cool about it. When we make new covers, we meet up, talk, maybe have a beer, hang around at some strange place. For the first cover, we did a lot of straight things. I showed him around my rehearsal room while he was taking photos. For the second, he came to a gig. For the third, we went to his very small studio. For the fourth, it was outside where I used to live. Then he came to the rehearsal space again. He’s into closed places.

When Maternity Beat came up, it was obvious it was something a little different, elevating on a philosophical level. I don’t know why, but I think he wanted to try another technique. He suggested we would do it in two processes. He would first take photos of me and then project it. I instantly liked that idea because it was very analog and something I could relate and connect to. He couldn’t fix it; he had to develop the film, make small [versions], and then we could meet up again. It was going to be a process that would take some time. I came back [to him] and brought my grandmother’s dress, and we tried different ways of projecting me on myself. It was another way of working with him. Of course, it took a lot more time, but it didn’t matter because it’s so nice to spend time with him. Whatever session I have with him, something extraordinary comes out of it. He has an eye for something else. He’s not looking for the face, or what the media tells us is beautiful. He’s looking for something very human, other structures in a photo. There’s so much to think about when I see all of his photos, which is so much better than having a big, fat face on the cover.

SILY: You mentioned “Do Re Mi Ma Ma” is a lot longer live. Are there any other stark differences between the recorded and live versions of these songs?

HM: Yeah. There are very many transitions that have been left out. There’s even a whole part with a lyric and an improvised piece that had to be left out because of time limitations both in the studio and on the vinyl. We haven’t performed this live more than twice, but it was a main idea to have transitions. “Do Re Mi Ma Ma” is one of them. There was a longer part in “On The Horizon, Part 1″ where Ingebjørg [Loe Bjørnstad] actually spoke in Norwegian. There was a solo bass transition at some point. For the record, I really wanted to shape and tighten things up because there was so much going on anyway. I was pleading on my knees to have a conductor. It was freaking impossible to play this piece and still get the most out of a horn section, putting them in where they were supposed to be. I was with the guitar in another room. We tried to do most of it as live as possible. But we had to move a little away from that because I couldn’t do all of those tasks. We [did get] a [conductor] who was working with the horn section--saxophone, trumpet, flute, and violin--and taking over the score. I really depended on him. He was really important in making the peaks as good as they are. I wouldn’t have managed to do that without him.

SILY: Do you have any upcoming dates playing this material?

HM: Yes, in a year. That’s because I have this big residency at a Norwegian festival in July, playing so many different shows with a lot of different projects. I’m going to have to work for 6 months. But next October, we’re going to have 5 shows in Europe. It could be that some of them have to be in Norway. It would be amazing to go to New York and play there. The Jazz Orchestra have played there. I really hope we can play this live.

SILY: Anything you’ve been listening to, reading, or watching lately?

HM: I’ve started to only read newspapers since February. I stopped reading news online. It got to me. [But my decision] freed up a space inside of me, not worrying as much. I feel happier.

I’ve been listening a lot to Led Zeppelin lately, as well as a lot of fellow musicians in Norway.

I’ve been touring a lot.

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#interviews #hedvig mollestad #trondheim jazz orchestra #molde international jazz festival #Midtnorsk Jazzsenter #maternity beat #kim hiorthøy #rune grammofon #zoom #peppa pig #dag hoel #fred er ei det beste #scott walker #tilt #hedvig mollestad trio #Ingebjørg Loe Bjørnstad #led zeppelin

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llycaons · 1 year ago

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it's admirable of le guin to revisit her earlier works and examine the gender dynamics she had treated as a given, and to explore the lives of ordinary and overlooked people rather than kings or wizards. the first book was fine but have to admit, I did not like the farthest shore. tombs was my favorite of the three because it focused so much on the struggles and liberation of one individual raised under terrible circumstances, as well as her flaws and faults. I didn't care as much about any other character compared to tenar

le guin's approach in tehanu to a world in which one gender primarily uses magic is so much more sophisticated that robert "men and women might as well be a different species' jordan's

the use of the magic system in earthsea being heavily informed by societal misogyny but not actually tied to any biology is really well explored, I definitely recognized the repudiation of bioessentialism and ~divine feminine knowledge~ and I do recall a quote from le guin floating around here addressing just that. but I think without the prior knowledge a lot of the passages would have been very confusing

with the mention of love potions early on, I wondered idly if they'd get into the dubious ethics of their use, and I was gratified to find such a thorough (if...roundabout?) discussion of them with respect to power dynamics and the recognition that a woman using magic to compel a man was just as bad as vice versa

the language around sexuality and trauma blends in so well with the style of the rest of the book. that's something I always appreciate in fantasy or historical stories, because nothing breaks the atmosphere like a clumsy attempt to incorporate 20th or 21st-century vocabulary in a work set in a world without that jargon

I thought it was interesting that tenar describes what sounds like a period of dissociation directly resulting from therru's trauma, which she can head off by swaddling her and singing to her. I don't know the exact term for what therru experiences, but it's definitely got a name. and swaddling is exactly what many caretakers do in real life for children who have undergone trauma

it does make some passages somewhat difficult to parse though, so I'm hopping on a reddit summary for chapter 8 to clear up some things

I was surprised to find allusions to what sounds like csa...I guess I hadn't expected the series to ever address that topic, given that up until now. well. strike that. it's not like the cult in book 2 was easy to read about either

halfway done already! my heart just aches for therru and I love tenar so much. there is something so powerful in watching a survivor of great violence become a protector and caretaker for another child who's undergone terrible things

#cor.txt

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kcpstarscream · 1 year ago

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With this issue we move onto a new editor, Ian Rimmer who would go on to edit TFUK from #22 onwards. In this post I made back when I talked about Simon Furman and about the UK run, I mentioned it was Ian who recommended Simon to Sheila.

Ian knew Sheila through IPC Magazine's Photo Love, and knowing of the dispute over Scream going on at IPC, prompted Robert Sutherland, the Managing Director, to give Ian a position and after working on works such as Conan the Barbarian and Spider-Man Weekly. And when Sheila would move on to edit for the Doctor Who Magazine, Ian was invited to replace Sheila on Transformers. After appointing Simon as assistant editor and John Tomlinson as designer, they set about redesigning a comic that "thus far had struggled to find it's identity" (The Transformers Classics UK, pg 13). To John, Neville Brody (who popularized the logo/title tilt) and I.D.Magazine---with it's "spectacular layouts and great ideas" despite its almost fanzine like appearance--would serve as influence John.

During this time they found out that they'd be going weekly and in full color and aimed to flesh things out by the time it was set in place. #22 brought changes such as less clutter and more focus on the Transformers. The 2-pg opener, that I haven't seen and might be due to the scans, were replaced with a Transformers information page packed with text to prime the reader for the next story (quite different from other comics today), and letters got a dedicated page in the middle of the comic under the persona of a Transformer hosting it containing trivia and hints. The design philosophy for Marvel's most popular series would go on to influence the companies house style/style guide.

According to Ian, the comics had a bit of troubles with Hasbro early on, though following the revamp they seemed quite happy with what was going on, what Sheila was doing, he mentions, was a generalist approach such as covering lots of areas and not focus one on particular story. The definitive strategy was to turn that around and bring to life the bright, futuristic world and the expanding cast. Tomlinson was responsible for the look of the entire comic like placement of text on the cover and the pages of the comic itself. To quote John from The Transformers Classics UK.

"This was well before the age of InDesign, Photoshop, and even Quark XPress, so the design was a good deal less sophisticated than anything you'd see now. My brief was to create a strong, simple template that could be used again and again. [...] The Hasbro style guide was quite sparse compared to the style guides for licensed properties now, which usually include fonts, logos, icons, backgrounds, approved color schemes, ect. We had a few variations on the Transformers logo... and line art for some of the key Transformers, but that was about it. What visual identity the comic has was created in-house at Marval UK - not ust by me - and evolved gradually over time." Issues UK #22-26 encompass the US #6-8 by Bob Budiansky. The next UK original would be the #27-28 story "Repeat Performance!" along with the switch to full color and a weekly schedule.

Speaking of color, US strips would be done by Nel Yomtov and at the time he was only able to work with a 64 color pallet as the CMY method was expensive due to the longer time for the mechanical color separation process and wouldn't appear very well on the cheap newsprint of US comic paper. UK was different in that it was drawn, lettered, than printed on the canvas-like Kentmere and then was painted by hand.

#kcpstarscream #MarvelTransformers #kcpMT22 #creator spotlight #Ian Rimmer #John Tomlinson #Marvel InHouse Design

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calciopics · 2 years ago

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Not just football

When we arrived in Udine it was raining, or rather drizzling. It is still December, Argentina and Leo Messi are not yet world champions, and Serie A, like most other leagues, is experiencing an irritating lull. Even the Dacia Arena is unusually silent, suspended in a metaphysical void that makes the places around it all the more material. One becomes aware of the painstaking work done by the people of Udine and the ownership, which, in addition to having the second most-owned facility in Serie A, has built the entire headquarter made up of training fields, gyms, and offices where all those who make the 'bianconera' club, one of the most modern clubs in Italy, meet every day. But for three seasons now, the Dacia Arena has been the home of Gerard Deulofeu, the protagonist of the seventh episode of More Than. Born in Catalonia and raised in the Masia - Barcelona's academy - Deulofeu has been wearing the Bianconeri jersey since 2020 and ever since that year he wears the very important number 10 on his back.

The first jokes we exchanged are related to the World Cup, the final in fact was to be played in a few days. "I hope Messi wins the World Cup, he deserves it, however, France is really strong," he tells us as we move between the black armchairs of the Friuli and he wears one of the first looks. Gerard Deulofeu is still struggling with an injury, the second to his knee, that is keeping him from playing football: his last match in fact ended at the Maradona Stadium after only 25 minutes of play. But from the way he looks at the field, the turf described as one of the best in Europe, it is clear how determined and eager the Spanish striker is to pick up where he left off. Gerard Deulofeu grew up among the blades of grass at the Spanish academy with a different awareness than his teammates, "when I was 12 years old I was very strong and I already knew I could do it, I was always playing with the older guys. I knew I could become a great soccer player. After that it's not easy, it's different playing in the academy and then on the first team of course, but I knew from that age there that I would break through and make this sport my job." A stubbornness and predestination that perhaps comes from his last name, which means "made by God" in Catalan, and that led him, the only one in his class, to make it to the first team. "Imagine a whole generation where almost no one has made it. It's clear that it's very difficult, there's a lot to do and I myself am very proud of where I've arrived."

Compared to his early days, Gerard Deulofeu has now become a veteran and has experienced from inside the changes that football is currently going through. "Football has changed, so much has changed. The footballer today has a different visibility, he is on TV every day, and the arrival of social media has completely transformed the way we communicate. Today we have a very big responsibility, there are new generations who are watching you day by day, and we who are in the elite of football have to set the right example to understand also how many sacrifices there are behind, coming to this level." In short, people today are looking for a sophisticated and elegant character on which to build a narrative, far from the stereotype of the player who has dominated the magazines for years. And this transformation has not only taken place on the surface but also in the Udinese striker's thoughts and head. In response to my question about what football represented for him, a question as simple as "it is complicated for someone who has made the sport his job", Gerard Deulofeu thinks about it for a moment before giving an answer I would not have expected to hear: "Football? Many people would tell you it's everything, but for me it is not. Before it used to be everything, now it is an important part of my life, but over the years I have managed to differentiate and there are many other important things. I am "loco" about football, I look at all the statistics, the numbers, however, you get to a point where you have to detach, you have to have a side life. In my opinion, focusing on family and having the right people next to you is everything, those are goals I try to pursue day by day."

We are used to perceiving a footballer as someone devoted only to the ball, unable to think of anything else, whereas Deulofeu, while still calling himself "loco"- using Spanish to explain himself best - has learned to balance all aspects of his life, both on and off the pitch. From the very first exchange of banter in our conversation, one notices how concrete and well-ordered Gerard Deulofeu is, almost the opposite of how he moves in the green rectangle, where he brings out imagination and strokes of genius. A pragmatism that is also evident in his social profile, where the Catalan player uses a different approach from the norm, not just commenting or celebrating matches, goals, and records. "I like to show another side of myself on social media. For example, after matches I directly want to interact with the people, explain how it went, what I felt and communicate my feelings. I don't like to write '3 more points or a great match,' I want to explain everything because I love football, I like to experience the matches and I think people are interested in that too". In addition to the usual tactical analysis, the business side of the Udinese striker, something rarely seen in a footballer, immediately stands out: "I want to show this passion of mine, several proposals are coming. I don't have a clear goal yet but I'm always looking for a well-organized project, I think that's the important thing".

However, with his arrival in Italy in 2017 at the court of AC Milan, Deulofeu discovered what will eventually become a new passion of his, fashion. "Obviously in Italy, fashion is something else. I remember my 6 months with AC Milan, I was living at the hotel, and fashion week was incredible. I also remember with pleasure several Milan players who had a unique and sophisticated style. Abate, for example, was one of those who always dressed well." Indeed, arriving in the 'Bel Paese' changed his relationship with certain garments, and he ended up giving more and more attention to this aesthetic aspect. Now, he explains to me, he is aware of how every garment made in Italy is renowned for the quality of the fabrics and the elegance of their construction: "In recent years I have developed a much closer relationship with fashion. Every day I wake up and try different looks, it depends on how I feel when I get up, what my feelings are. Before, I remember that I always used to wear sweatpants, for training and really all day long, however now I like to choose all the clothes and think about the possible combinations. I believe that putting on a certain outfit helps you to make the day better. Although as you have seen I am a terrible model (laughs)."

It's a passion that everyone is aware of by now, so much so that as we're in the final stages of the shooting, several staff members of the technical staff look out to see Gerard Deulofeu in definitely not institutional outfits. He too is sure to be the one with the most style in the team, it's "hard to find another," he tells us. But the passion he discovered and perhaps rediscovered in Italy has its roots in Spain, where he used to meet up with his two close friends Marcos Llorente and Marino: "when I can, I go around a lot with them to stores or even tailors to have clothes tailored for us. They helped me change my wardrobe. However, if I have to tell you a name, the most stylish footballer I have been with is definitely Sergio Ramos, he's always dressed impeccably." Gerard Deulofeu seems to have found his dimension in Italy among his many side projects and especially on the pitch, where with time he has become the driving force of a young team that is always tough to play against. In addition, he is doing so with a new number on his shoulders, which in football is synonymous with quality, imagination, and leadership: "the number 10 here has only been worn by great footballers so it is a great responsibility. I know that when I get on the pitch, I am Udinese's number 10, so I have to be a leader on the pitch and especially on offense. Now I don't want to talk mid-season, because I prefer to talk at the end of the season since this number needs facts. I know what I'm up against." And it couldn't be otherwise in a setting like the one in Friuli, where everyone is a fundamental part of a bigger mechanism, in a lifestyle that for years has never ceased to amaze: "I feel very happy here, it's been two years and my level on the pitch is also feeling the effects. Being happy on a team for me has so much value, I don't want to think about the future because otherwise I don't live the present, and being here the present is very good. I don't go out too much, I stay with my family, I'm always thinking about the game, always focused," always keeping in mind how football is not everything.

#Gerard Deulofeu Lázaro #Deulofeu #FC Barcelona #Everton FC #Sevilla #ac milan #Watford #Udinese #nss magazine #football #fussball #fußball #foot #fodbod #futbol #soccer #calcio

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coelakanths · 2 years ago

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bookcase & library card?

bookcase: out of all your wips, which do you think would sell the best?

ohhh probably werevamps. it gets ppl most excited when i talk abt it. it’s about a werewolf and a vampire who accidentally turn each other so they’re both hybrids now and both kinda furious about it but they end up falling in weird love a little and they’re also being hunted at the same time so they kinda have to work together. i don’t have all the details fleshed out because it’s a newer idea but it’s a really fun one :-) the main characters are hawkins (a sexy sexy vampire, she loves women and eating them yes all ways) and sydney (a werewolf whos kinda ashamed of the fact she’s a werewolf)!!

library card: what’s the first genre you wrote?

ok i was a very avid writer as a kid so i had to think hard about a definite first genre. most of it was modern fantasy— i remember one about a guy named silas and his magical wolf indigo living in the woods, one about four kids in a music-less world discovering these instruments but they’re also weapons, one abt some teenagers who have to save their small town from a beast that’s been systematically killing everyone for thousands of years, etc etc etc. that last one, aka crooked star (the earliest story with a name!), is technically my longest wip clocking in at like 60k. there are a lot of drafts. ones on wattpad (the first) while the rest are in my google docs. i wrote a lot abt it for nanowrimo when i was like…. thirteen? it’s a little crazy lol but ive recently scrapped the whole idea because there was a lot i needed to work out and the concept just doesn’t rlly appeal to me anymore it kinda lacks substance

it would be uncouth of me not to mention the great story writing contest from when i was eight between me and my two older siblings who would’ve been twelve and fourteen at the time— we had a month to write a story about a prompt picked by someone else. my sister wrote a post apocalyptic story, my brother a romance (i picked that LOL), and i had to write sci fi. i wrote about this kid on mars getting kidnapped or something. he eventually went to earth with his two friends i think? they were all named after planets. it was really bad and nobody voted for it iirc. absolutely devastating. but i moved on very quickly because i always had another story to write— preferably in genres i was more familiar with !

#mel tag #asks #good morning. sorry if any of this is incoherent #i am feverish :-) im being so normal about it :-)#ohhh there was also this story abt cats in space ….#it was cats. housecats. but they were a hyper intelligent alien race #and they had to leave their home planet and go somewhere else #and when they got to the new planet it was inhabited by alien dogs!!!!!#(my older sister was supposed to collab with me and write the dog pov but she never did)#that one was actually rlly good ngl. im still a huge fan #there was intrigue and cool characters and a backstabber and a love interest #it was very sophisticated compared to my other early work!#sorry lol i could talk abt my old shit all day i thibk it’s so fun

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wh0rephobic · 2 years ago

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My brain is rotting from thinking about William just being this super rich CEO who appears super cold to anyone and when you met him you were no different until one day he goes with you to a business meeting in this super fancy restaurant and things went so well he decided to drive you to his house and hwhwhmdjdksjsjsfmrmdke yea

aofhkfkvlsmxkwhelloooooo

being his little assistant or something and always breaking a sweat trying not to stutter to deliver messages or papers to him in his office. he usually ignores it with his cold stare or breaks a squint for you just to make you more nervous. truth is, he really finds it cute, how shy and small you make yourself compared to him. you make him feel powerful, and he just wants to show you off.

so, he invited you to accompany him to this dinner conference in a fancy restaurant downtown. he told you about it before dismissing you for your lunch break and slipped you his credit card, telling you to leave work early today and buy the nicest outfit you could find for tonight, then meet him back outside the building at eight.

by eight thirty, he entered the restaurant with you hanging off his arm, truly a breathtaking couple that seemed to turn every head at the table. it made you fluster, but william had no such reaction. he only nonchalantly walked you to one end of the table with and pulls your chair out for you, being the gentleman that he is and sits down next to you.

the dinner is long, slow, and boring. eventually with the timing, you grew bold enough to whisper a few jokes into his ear, to which he spared some low chuckles at your humor; and eventually he grew bold enough to land a hand on your thigh. a pale, bony, yet strong hand practically covering your leg, and you can’t take your eyes off of it.

william notices your stare. “something wrong, dear?”

“not at all, sir.” you assure him in a mumble, making william smile in return, flashing his sophisticated crows-feet.

“very good,” he nods, taking this opportunity to drag his hand slightly further up your leg. you can’t help but tighten your muscles. “relax, darling… or else i’ll have to do it for you.”

it’s an empty threat, you’re more than aware of that. but just the sound of his low voice rumbling in your ear makes you fluster, your heart pounds against your chest and your breath is caught in your throat in anticipation of your boss making moves on you, in public, too! you let go with a sigh, slowly parting your thighs for him on your seat to give him better access. he accepts, slipping his fingers further up, under the skirt of your dress and toying with the hem of your panties as a warning before dipping his fingers inside, petting your cunt. you begin to huff, turning your chin to his shoulder to hide your reactions, only for him to turn his head so that his lips are resting on the shell of your ear, whispering in a low tone.

“be quiet. if you make any of this suspicious we will both be thrown out, and you will be in lots of trouble.” he warns, and you only nod before removing your face from his neck and standing your ground.

you can’t tell if the night is long or short. your brain is left in haze for most of if, but for the rest of it you’re fighting the urge to cum on your boss’s fingers, or lunge forward into the table and let out only the lewdest sounds ever. you learn quick that william is no amateur with his fingers, the way he twists his wrist AO perfectly to rub at your clit at the same time that he pushes his other fingers against your g-spot, making your lets shiver under the table while you smile unsuspectedly at the guests across the table from you.

the night ends late, ten minutes to midnight when you and william leave the restaurant, hand-in-hand. he holds a tight grip on yours as if to make sure you won’t run away, though he just wants to keep you standing upright. there’s an empty feeling inside of you though, one that comes from denied orgasms all night long. you nearly pout when you and william leave, understanding that you two will now go your separate ways, and tomorrow this will be as if it never happened… william stops in his tracks.

“well, i’d call that a successful night. would you not?” he comments.

“i-i would,” you shudder.

“would you?” he questions with a squint, teasing grin tugging at his lips when he asks, “even though i never gave you release?”

to his words, you only pout. with big, sad eyes and a drooling pussy between your legs, you don’t have to beg for william to already be on your side.

he chuckles. “poor thing… i was thinking, why don’t we continue this evening at my place? that is, if you haven’t had enough already,”

you brighten up at his suggestion, nearly jumping when you tighten your hand in his. “oh, never enough with you, sir!”

he nods, praising you quietly before continuing to walk, walking you into your longest, sorest, most spoiled night ever.

#🍒 — let’s talk!#🍒 — william afton

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eleyhsa · 3 years ago

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one more earlier episode of valtteri's podcast i never translated, this is the last one i promise 😅 episode title: money

oskari: let's start with how much money do you have? valtteri: it's pretty hard to say because i have invested quite a lot of it, but yeah, a lot i guess. enough that i don't need to back my bags and go drive cars around in circles if i don't want to. oskari: do you consider yourself rich? valtteri: yeah of course, compared to where I came from, yeah i'm rich in a money sense -------

oskari: forbes does these, sophisticated guesses let's call them, every year and they say your payroll is around 8-10m every year, how close is that to the truth? valtteri: if the season goes well, meaning i get all the bonuses i'm supposed to get, it's more than that actually oskari: how much was your payroll at williams? valtteri: 2010 was kinda my first year working for them and at the time it was 40 000 pounds a year, and then it rose some amounts every year, and my first year as a f1 driver i think it was around 300k -------

oskari: you already mentioned that considering where you came from you feel very rich, so what was your background like, because we are not talking about a rich kid right? valtteri: yeah no, to me i'm from a pretty basic finnish family, priviledged in a sense that we had our own house and i could go to school, start playing hockey which is not a cheap sport and do karting since I was 6, with a used car, used overall and a used helmet, a used helmet is something I do not recommend! karting took more and more money every year and I was lucky that a lot of local companies helped me financially because they saw how much I loved karting and that i had some talent as well. some of these companies also supported me long term when my family truly couldn't pay for it any more. oskari: where was that line for you when the family money wasn't enough anymore? valtteri: we got quite far i think, it was my first year in formula renault with the Koiranen team. We found just enough outside help that with not testing as much as maybe other kids were because I couldn't pay for it, I could drive for them and Koiranen kinda met me halfway with that. But yeah, at that point no change to pay for it yourself because I think a season cost around 100k at that point.

---------

rane, valtteri's dad: we got around 300k from finland and even that was thight, meaning we couldn't afford any crashes. but after he won his first race in 2008 my phone started ringing with people like mika häkkinen and toto wolff and then there was some difficulty to choose, renault was really interested at the time about valtteri, so we had kind of three directions to go, and i told valtteri and he has to choose for himself what feels right and he told me he liked toto. i think both me and valtteri also liked the idea of not being tied to any team, not to renault or even ferrari who he also visited that season.

oskari: have you ever tried to calculate how much you have spent of your own money on valtteri's career? rane: i have tried at some point, i definitely think it's more than this house we're sitting in now, luckily my cleaning services were often needed (laughing) oskari: i don't think many people know that you have a cleaning company and this is something that interests me because i think people learn a lot from their homes, do you see any "entrepreuner spirit" in valtteri? rane: quite a lot actually, when he turned 18 he started doing his own negotiations. when he was trying to get into f1 he was alone on the road, i paid for plane tickets and he would call me and explain what was said. of course we travelled a lot together in his early career so we know each other quite well and i think doing that on his own helped him learn a lot. even back in karting i took him with me to see sponsors so he would understand how much this all costs and because it's no rocket science you know, a lot of people are ashamed to ask for money but it's quite simple: you put a budget on the paper, here's our season targets, how much money can you give. valtteri learned to do that quite young. oskari: do you remember the day valtteri signed his first f1 contract? rane: yeah, very well! they were some special moments, and you actually sent me a text to congratulate me as well! oskari: yeah i did! rane: i went to see his first race and i definitely actually pinched myself in melbourne

---------

valtteri: 2008 was a good season so I got my managers in toto, mika and didier coton, and whatever i couldn't get from sponsor they would give from their own pockets oskari: how much was that do you think? valtteri: probably around 2.5 million that I have paid back now, so it's no charity in this sport. but i definitely wouldn't have made it to f1 without them.

-------

oskari: you're going into alfa romeo, while recording this it's still quite a new contract, you do your own negotiations is that correct? valtteri: most of them yes, for example all my mercedes contracts, but didier helped me with this one because the season was so busy and intense and i didn't really have the time oskari: how many options did you have? valtteri: pretty much two clear possibilities oskari: and after signing the contract you got a pretty interesting call right? valtteri: like two days after signing i got a call from an another team and they basically said "we can pay twice as much, and we want you", i just told them that you're a bit late. it just shows what kind of circus this thing is *laughing*

-------

oskari: what kind of money user are you? valtteri: when i first started making it pretty stingy, for example i wanted a simple rowboat for my cottage so i started asking around for a used one, and i had been a f1 drivers for like two years at that point already. it still hurts to pay 10 dollars for a goddamn water bottle in a hotel but I guess I'm not that stingy anymore because I still buy it *laughing*

#valtteri bottas #f1 #formula 1

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absolutepokemontrash · 4 years ago

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MC’s half Demon, and they look AWFULLY familiar...

‘Kay guys, I got a different kind of stupid Headcanon to throw at you. Get ready!

Part 2 Lessons 1-5 Part 2.5 Group Retreat Lessons 10-12 Lessons 13-15 Part 3 Part 4

*ahem* picture if you will, it’s the day the exchange program is set to start. The student council (nix Mr. Kill All Humans, Weeb-supreme, and our Scummy Sweetheart) have assembled to welcome the new human student. All is going according to schedule, the portal opens up at eight am sharp, they hear the pitiful screams of the selected human who was not given a heads up about the whole thing, and the poor little human falls straight onto the marble floor.

There’s something a tad... off about this human don’t you think? After they’ve peeled their sorry ass off the floor they observed the assembled student council with an air of sophistication and self importance that no one expected. Their posture was perfect, their eyes sharp and calculating... they bared a striking resemblance to-

“Lucifer,” Diavolo looked to his right hand man, then back to the human. “The human kind of looks like you!”

And out popped four pitch black wings from the human’s back and two small horns out of the sides of their head, one horn was a bit bigger than the other. They even still had some of their down feathers! How cute!

((Content warning: Swearing (I have a potty mouth, forgive me), but that’s it.))

Luci-dad

So, the MC is Lucifer’s kid! Of course Mr. Prideypants immediately tries to recall exactly what little romp in the human world uh... spawned this half-human half-demon child of his. Good thing MC’s got the other parent on speed-dial.

“Please note, MC,” Lucifer pinched the bridge of his nose upon hearing Asmo take even more pictures of his newly discovered hellspawn. “I was not aware of your existence, if I was I’d-”

“Don’t worry about it. I’m not upset.”

Lucifer blinked a few times in surprise. “P...pardon? You aren’t upset?”

“No, my parent told me that my father was a high ranking demon, and they bare no ill will against you. Though, I am looking forward to this whole... exchange program thing.”

Oh wow, that was easier than Lucifer thought. Damn. Well, he was a father... (let’s be real, he’s been parenting his brothers for thousands of years, and a good chunk of you sinners call him daddy)

MC is probably the most protected student at RAD, despite the fact that they have no visible security detail whatsoever. They didn’t want to be seen as... weak and pathetic.

Something about this human just... set the lesser demons on edge. Any talk of eating them was stamped out on the first day when they walked by. It’s like Lucifer himself was staring at them, daring the demons to try and bother the human. MC’s powerful presence kept them protected and feared.

...at least until dear uncle Asmo decided to do their hair one morning. All those ribbons may have looked adorable but they kind of ruined the intimidation factor.

MC loved to mess with the other students, keeping their lineage a secret for the first little while just made it so much funnier when the other demons tried to scramble out of MC’s way without looking like they were running from the ‘weak little human exchange student’.

Oh wow, what a sadist. Like father like child

Flying lessons are a must. Poor MC isn’t terribly good at controlling their wings, and their horns are still growing in so when they pop into their demon form the first thing they get is a sore skull. Ow... it sucks that Lucifer isn’t outwardly very sympathetic.

“Ow!” MC crashed face first into the grass in the backyard of the House of Lamentation. “Father! My wings are cramping! Can’t we practice this tomorrow?”

The sight of seeing his dear child crash face first into the ground had lost its hilarity after the first three times. Lucifer slowly lowered himself to the ground and crossed his arms as he stood over his incredibly grass-stained kid.

“MC, we’ve been ‘practicing this tomorrow’ for the past month. If you want to learn to fly you’re going to have to actually manage to stay in the air for more than three minutes.”

MC shot Lucifer a withering glare that only preteens were capable of, Lucifer matched it with his own much more sophisticated glare.

“You’ve been flying for over a thousand years! Don’t you have any tips that can actually help other than ‘don’t panic, you’ll look ridiculous’?”

Lucifer dragged a gloved hand down his face and looked around, the two were alone as far as he could see.

“MC,” Lucifer began. “When I was a young angel, I needed to learn how to fly with someone else.”

MC perked up. “Who?”

“Michael. The smug bastard picked up flying quicker than I did.”

“What’d you do?!”

Lucifer smiled at his child’s intense investment. “I practiced flying every day for five extra hours until I could do everything that Michael could do, just better.”

MC’s starry eyed interest died almost instantly upon hearing about the extra five hours of practice. “Humph, I bet I could outfly younger you and Michael with only two hours of practice a day.”

“Really now?”

“Yes! Watch!” MC shook off their wings and took off in a running start before shakily making it into the air. Their form was decent enough, and they weren’t shaking as much as the previous attempts. “SEE?!”

“Yes MC,” Lucifer smiled. “I can see.”

You know what else Lucifer could see? MC crashing right into a tree.

“Ouch...”

Okay... maybe they could halt practice a little early and order a treat from Madame Scream’s. A little sugar to refuel is needed when the end goal is crushing a mutual rival beneath their heels. Just some good old fashioned father/child bonding time!

MC has a smaller seat right next to Lucifer’s seat in the Assembly Hall. I will not compromise on this one.

For all your fluff needs, I give you: Lucifer teaching MC how to play the piano. He has a proud little smile on his face when his kid finally starts getting it. That’s all. Enjoy the image.

That one Uncle who gives you Alcohol at Family Gatherings (Mammon)

Yeah, when Mammon burst in late to the party and whining about everyone’s spamming him with texts to haul his scummy ass to the Assembly Hall, the last thing he expected was to see a mini-Lucifer.

“What the fuck am I lookin’ at?!”

The glare the two Lucifers gave the poor Avatar of Greed was enough to make him want to turn tail (uh, wing) and book it down the hall.

“Mammon, this is MC. They’re my child.”

“Hello.”

“...whaaaa..?” Mammon looked between the two, same glare, same intimidating aura, same annoyingly good posture.

Mammon scratched the back of his neck and looked over at his older brother. “Do I uh... still gotta babysit em’ if they’re not human?”

“The lake of Cocytus will melt the day I let you babysit without supervision.” Lucifer grumbled.

“I don’t need a babysitter!”

Despite Lucifer’s initial denial, Mammon and MC ended up spending a lot of time hanging out when Lucifer was busy with paperwork. Of course Mammon’s first thought was ‘how do I profit off this situation?’

MC is now Mammon’s designated babysitter after they caught him picking up their feathers that had fallen off with the intention of painting them white and claiming they were Lucifer’s from back in the Celestial Realm.

Mammon does end up spoiling MC a little. Just a smidge. They’re the kid of his totally not his favourite brother after all! How could he not? Whether or not these gifts are obtained legally or are legal at all is subject to scrutiny.

“Mammon, I can’t drink this!” MC placed the bottle of Demonus back on the counter of the kitchen.

“Why not? That’s a bottle of the good stuff! We gotta celebrate you gettin’ an A on that test somehow!”

“I’m underage! Incredibly underage. I’m not legally allowed to drink.”

Mammon wordlessly plopped a silly straw into the bottle. “...does that help?”

“No.” MC then inclined their head to the bottle. “And I don’t want to get hung from the ceiling, that bottle was in my father’s study yesterday, I’m above theft.”

“How old are you s’posed to be anyway? Never mind... uh...” Mammon wracked his brain for something else he could do for MC that didn’t cost anything (don’t judge him, the poor bastard was flat broke!). “I could... teach you to drive!”

“Driving?”

“Yeah! Drivin’ is awesome! We can take my car!”

The bills for the damages done to the car and the Devildom were mailed to Lucifer the next day, and MC and Mammon got to keep each other company as they hung from the ceiling. Ah well! At least MC wasn’t upside down!

Mammon wasn’t that good of a flight teacher either, he also crashed into a tree (the same tree MC crashed into, actually) when he was cheering for MC. They were finally able to do a loopdy loop! He was proud and distracted! Okay?! Lucifer! Stop smirkin’ at him! It’s not that funny!

At least the vantage point from the tree was decent and the branches didn’t scratch him up too badly. Oh hey... that person walking by was wearing a very nice watch... he’d be right back-

That Uncle That is Always Absent From Family Gatherings and When He is Present He Leaves Early (Levi)

He missed everything. That is not an exaggeration. He was in the middle of an online raid battle and couldn’t look at his phone! No Lucifer he can’t pause an online game! That’s not how it works!

Okay, the human exchange student is half demon? WOAH! THAT’S JUST LIKE THAT ONE ANIME- W A I T. THE LITTLE NORMIE IS LUCIFER’S KID?!

Okie doke, he was fully convinced that MC just had to be an anime protagonist.

They binged every series that Levi compared them to. Sure MC might have missed a few assignments because of late night anime binges, but they were too good for this school crap anyway, right?

Nope. Lucifer put a ban on the two watching anime until both their grades improved. Surviving that hell brought the two together.

“Ugh!”

The sound of a pencil case being haphazardly thrown across the room made Levi peek out of his bed-tub. If his figurines got knocked over so HELP HIM-

“This is stupid!!I shouldn’t have to catch up with this!” MC crossed their arms and gave their Demonology textbook their best disapproving glare.

Lucifer Lite (tm) was having a hell of a time trying to claw through their missed work, and Levi sympathized, he really did, it’s just... he was playing Animal Crossing-

Levi paused the game to placate his anime-buddy when their wings popped out and he feared for his rare merch’s safety.

“H-hey, MC? Do you need help?” Levi’s offer was met with a bone chilling glare that lived rent free in his nightmares ever since. He had pulled a Mammon and forgotten he was talking to Lucifer’s child. Lucifer’s allergy to help must have passed down to MC.

“No! I don’t! It’s just... dumb!” MC hissed, she turned and looked over at the fish tank. “Right Henry 2.0?”

Henry 2.0 did not respond.

“MC, you need to finish your homework or we can’t watch anything together,” Levi sighed, he had finished his work over an hour earlier. He had mastered the art of all night anime binges and managing to do most of his work in the fifteen minutes between the time he woke up and the time school was supposed to begin. “We haven’t even binged all of volume 4 of TSL yet!”

“Mmm...” MC grumbled. “Fine...”

MC picked up their pencil case and began continued their work. Levi breathed a sigh of relief and went back to Animal Crossing.

The tiny normie did in fact finish their work, only after they caved and asked Levi for help. Swore him to secrecy, they did... very intimidating, they were.

Just saying, he most definitely sent that one Keanu Reeves meme with big Keanu and little Keanu but with Lucifer and MC to the wrong group chat. Poor bastard.

Flying lessons? No. Levi hadn’t flown since his time in the Celestial Realm, he had no advice to give other than: “Flap your wings!”

“THAT’S WHAT I’M DOING YOU-”

MC didn’t get to finish that thought, they lost their balance and fell right into RAD’s fountain. Ah well, Levi had a head start on running for his life that he squandered by laughing at MC. RIP.

The Uncle/brother/whatever the fuck that Starts a Fight With Your Dad at the Family Reunion. (Satan)

Oh... another Lucifer? Eugh. Gross.

Satan gave the kid a wide berth when they first met. Everything the kid said or did ticked him off. “Tsk. Look at MC. Making an omelette. So annoying.” “Oh wow, MC vacuumed? Roll out the red carpet, we need to celebrate their existence!” “Look at them. Breathing. Disgusting.”

MC’s pride wouldn’t ever let them admit it but... they knew Satan didn’t like them, and it hurt their feelings.

“Shhhh,” Satan whispered into his backpack.

“Meow.” The backpack replied.

“I said shhhhh.”

The backpack did not reply after that, which was a good thing considering the little princet of the HOL was nearby.

“Satan?” They asked. “Who are you talking to?”

Satan coldly brushed past them as he made his way to his room. “No one you need to concern yourself with.”

When the little calico kitten was safe in his room, Satan quickly realized a mistake in his foolproof ‘sneak a cat into the house’ plan. He didn’t have any toys for the kitten, and he didn’t want his books getting scratched...

It was alright, he’d just rush out to the a store that sold cat things and rush back! Five minute trip tops!

Well when Satan got back the cat was no longer in the room. Oh dear. He discreetly tore apart the house looking for the poor little thing until he ended up finding it in the library, happily chasing around a loose feather being held up by MC.

“Oh, hello Satan.” MC chirped as the kitten batted it’s adorable little paws at the feather.

“My... my door was closed. Did you let the cat out?”

MC shrugged. “I heard meowing.”

Satan ran a hand through his hair and grumbled. Stupid smaller Lucifer. Stupid original Lucifer. Everyone sucked.

“Let me guess, you’re going to run to Lucifer and tell him all about the meowing and the rule breaking.”

MC shook their head and glared at Satan. “Of course not. I’ve already gotten way too attached to this little guy anyway. We’re co-parenting this kitten like mature adults.”

With some coaxing, Satan did sit down and play with the kitten, maybe MC wasn’t... so terrible.

The two watch Unsolved Mysteries together, that’s their show. “This guy did it.” “Satan, we’re two minutes into the episode-” “Trust me.”

Thirty minutes later.

“He did it.” “See MC, what’d I tell you?”

Lucifer did find out about the cat, but with enough pleading, MC and Satan managed to warm up the cold spot in Lucifer’s chest where his heart should have been. The cat’s name is Detective Toe Beans (or just Bean).

Satan can’t fly, he has a tail, but he did read up on wing anatomy and how flight actually works in demons, his advice would be good in theory, but it’s full of so much technical jargon that MC can’t understand it.

At least MC didn’t crash into something, they barrel rolled through one of the HOL’s windows. Good thing it was the window to their room. The broken arm still hurt like hell.

The Best Dressed Bitch Who Brings The Booze to The Reunion. (Asmo)

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Lucifer’s kid was SO CUTE! A thousand pictures commemorating that adorable moment needed to be taken! Wait- Lucifer- GIVE BACK THE PHONE-

Asmo, surprise surprise, absolutely adores little MC! So cute! So small! He was just so excited to announce to all his Devilgram followers that Lucifer was finally a certified DILF.

That post disappeared five minutes after it was made but the damage had already been done.

Asmo made sure MC looked their best at all times, if they needed help talking to anyone? Asmo’s got their back!

Sure, maybe he’s a little pushy, but pushy’s a good thing sometimes, right?

“Asmodeus-”

“No, these shoes wouldn’t fit you...”

“Asmo-”

“No, not these ones either...”

“ASMODEUS.”

Asmo squeaked and jumped upwards, Geez Louise... little MC’s voice could sure be scary when they wanted it to be...

“I don’t need any fancy new shoes.” MC huffed, sitting up straighter in one of the chairs in Asmo’s room. “I thought this was supposed to be a sleepover.”

“Hmmm...” Asmo pouted. “Makeovers are an essential part of sleepovers... what’d you do with your human friends up in the human world that could possibly be better than a make-over?!”

MC began to list things off. “Ordered junk food, talked about people we hated, watched movies,”

“Greasy food is so bad for your skin...” Asmo cringed and shook his head violently. “But I’m totally down to watch a movie and bitch about people I hate!”

“Ah yes, human sleepovers, a tradition I never quite had the chance to enjoy.” Solomon said from Asmo’s bed. “Who are we bitching about?”

“Remind me what Solomon is doing here.” MC muttered as they sat down in front of Asmo’s TV.

“Because, I wanted to hang out with my two favourite humans.” Asmo cooed, reaching over and trying to pinch MC’s cheek, which they awkwardly dodged.

“Can we watch The Exorcist?” Solomon asked, propping his head up with his hands.

“Ew, no.” Asmo made a face at him. “That scene with the vomit? Hell NO.”

“Mm.” MC mumbled. Asmo turned to look at them.

“MC? Are you doing okay? You don’t look like you’re having any fun...”

“I’m fine.” MC grumbled.

Asmo pursed his lips, as much as it made his little narcissistic heart break, he nudged MC. “Why don’t you pick the movie, sweetie. I’m sure Solomon and I will like anything you pick!”

MC noticeably brightened. “Let’s watch Scream!”

The strangled noise that came from Asmo was... concerning, but to his credit, The Avatar of Lust held his tongue about his distaste for the movie, and the three slumber-party goers had quite the lovely time.

After the movie ended, MC went back to their room, sure it was a sleepover but their bed was right down the hall.

Good for Asmo and Solomon. Horny fuckers. We stan.

Asmo just claps and tries to cheer MC on when it comes to their flying lessons. (The idea that Asmo came up with to wear his cheerleader costume from the previous Halloween was immediately shot down by Lucifer)

“You’re doing wonderful, MC- WATCH OUT FOR THE POWER LINE!”

MC didn’t hit the power line, but Asmo’s scream of terror caused them to fall butt-first into a dumpster. Their injured tailbone served as a tragic memory of the incident.

Oh well, good thing Asmo had nice smelling soap to give that could mask dumpster-stink.

The Uncle that eats everything and tells you to eat your veggies while you angrily pick at your broccoli at the kid’s table. (Beel)

Lucifer... has a kid?! Beel choked on the cheetos he had snuck into the Assembly Hall when the kid’s wings popped out.

Oh wow, that’s nice :) maybe they can eat together. Belphie would probably like them.

Wait what is the gender neutral term for Niece or Nephew?

...Nibling? Uh... let’s not say that around Beel. We don’t need him to get hungrier and begin associating MC with nibbling on things.

The Underground Tomb incident probably went a little differently, but after all that nonsense, the two are closer than two peas in a pod!

Mmm... peas...

“Beel?” MC stepped into the Avatar of Gluttony’s room.

“Hi MC.” Beel was doing push-ups in the middle of the room, on the ground right beneath his head was a massive bowl of spaghetti that he bit into every time he completed a push-up. “Can you come stand on my back? I need the extra weight.”

“On your back?” MC padded closer. “Are you sure? It’s not going to hurt?”

“No, it’ll be okay.” Beel assured them. “Belphie and I did this all the time. Except Belphie is normally asleep.”

MC tentatively stepped onto Beel’s back. It was a balancing act to say the least, they eventually gave up on standing and ended up sitting cross legged between Beel’s shoulder blades.

“You did this with Belphegor?” MC asked.

“Yeah,” Beel sighed. “He was always too tired to exercise, but he’d let me bench press him sometimes...”

MC frowned and hugged their knees to their chest. Knowing full well that Beel’s twin wasn’t in the human world like Lucifer said was absolutely ripping them apart from the inside. Guilt felt just as rotten as their pride did when they were being belittled...

“Maybe you’ll see him again sometime soon.” MC whispered. “Maybe my father’ll come to his senses and let him come back down to the Devildom.”

Beel paused his push-ups for a brief moment, then nodded and went back to his eating exercising combo. “I hope so. He’ll like you, MC. I’m sure of it.”

MC nodded. “I... hope so.”

Beel’s a pretty decent flight teacher, but his wings are just so different from MC’s that it renders any tips he had next to useless.

“MC, maybe your wings aren’t flapping fast enough.”

“Beel, I appreciate the thought, but I’m not a hummingbird. Or a fly. I don’t need to flap my wings a million times a minute to stay afloat.”

Ah well, MC tried to take some of Beel’s advice, but their lower right wing cramped up and they ended up flying in circles until Beel was able to catch them. Ah well, better than the dumpster incident the previous week.

The Uncle That Passes Out in The Basement and You’re Not Allowed to Wake Him Up Even Though All Your Toys and Video Games Are Down There. He Also Picks a Fight With Your Dad’s New S/O Before He Passes Out. (Belphie)

Sitting in the attic was quite a drag, and this supposedly weak little human was quite the annoyance to try and call out to. It took a lot longer than expected, but when he heard little footsteps coming towards his prison, Belphegor nearly jumped with joy.

Oh... it... looked like Lucifer. Smelled like Lucifer. Stood like Lucifer. Quacked like Lucifer. Or... trilled..? Whatever sound a peacock made, this brat sounded an awful lot like Lucifer.

A... half-demon. Hmph. Belphie honestly thought Lucifer had actual standards. Not anymore, he guessed.

(Man I could fill a whole-ass fic with the Belphie betrayal thing, but for now let’s skip to post attic nonsense)

Okay so maybe MC wasn’t disgusting. They made a good nap buddy. It was cute when their wings came out when they were sleeping sometimes. Well... it was cute when they didn’t hit him in the face and make him wake up with his mouth full of feathers.

What Beel said had been true, Belphie made a good substitute when weights weren’t available, but Beel didn’t want MC to feel left out, so Belphie and MC ended up sitting on his back while he did push ups. MC once got bored and started playing Go Fish with Belphie on Beel’s back while he exercised.

Yes. MC is still a member of the Formerly-Anti-Lucifer League.

“Are you sure he’s not going to be too mad at us?” MC asked for the dozenth time that day. Detective Toe Beans was wrapped around their neck like a scarf (he had gotten so big!!!) while MC nervously sat in one of the Library chairs.

“Positive.” Belphie said with a toothy grin. “Besides, he’s like putty when it comes to you. Just give him your best puppy eyes and we’re not guilty on all charges.”

Putty..? Really..? Lucifer..? How strict was he before MC got there... they wondered.

“Sh! He’s coming!” Satan stuck his nose into a random book, it was the Oxford English Dictionary... and it was upside down.

Belphie pretended to pass out and MC decided that the best course of action was to stare deeply into their cat’s eyes. Yeah... that looked casual and not weird.

“Satan, MC, Belphie.” Lucifer nodded to the three of them as he walked towards the entrance to his study.

“Lucifer.”

“Afternoon, father.”

Belphie let out a cartoonishly loud fake snore that nearly caused both MC and Satan to break cover and start laughing.

Side note, Bean had adorable widdle eyes! That cute little face was just to die for-

“You three..!”

Belphie, Satan, and MC peeked their heads into Lucifer’s study, their handiwork was perfect. Everything was covered in red post it notes. Perfectly not harmful, but SO inconvenient!

“You’re all cleaning this up or so help me-”

“GO!” Belphie and Satan each grabbed one of MC’s arms (Satan also grabbed Bean) and sprinted out of the House of Lamentation. Maybe they’d move back there in twenty years... they hoped that Solomon and The Angels would let them crash at Purgatory Hall...

Belphie had used up his physical energy supply for the next four years. He passed out the moment they stepped into sanctuary. Time for a nap...

Flight practice? Ha. Belphie’s napping. Though, he was suspiciously awake and filming whenever MC did something stupid.

“Try not to suck so bad.”

“GO TO HELL BELPHIE!”

“I’m already there. Hell is every second I’m stuck here watching you fail.”

“YOU’RE GOING TO GET IT FOR THAT!”

Well... MC mastered the dive bomb that day. Lucifer bought them a cake.

Bonus! Your Dad’s New Husband! That Has Managed to Somehow Make Everyone Hate Him Despite the Fact That He’s A Cinnamon Roll. (Diavolo)

A mini Lucifer? A mini Lucifer!

Diavolo dotes on MC like he’d dote on his own kid. MC wants a crown? They’re getting a crown! A damn nice one too! MC wants a title? Here! MC is now... idk Ruler of the area between Majolish and Hell’s Kitchen.

Poor Uncle Mammon’s got some financial insecurity, he’s still the cool uncle... right?!

He is very much that ‘how do you do fellow kids?’ Meme.

He tries to do stereotypical ‘dad’ things but he’s not very good at them. Once he tried to host a barbecue...

Barbatos saved the day, but Mammon’s hair was still singed, Solomon’s cooking still gave Beel food poisoning (SOLOMON EATS TOXIC WASTE I SWEAR-), Luke still got hit in the face with a frisbee, and Simeon got an unhealthy dose of DAD NERVES and got so stressed everyone was almost blinded by the holy light he suddenly started blasting. We do not mention the water guns.

(Seriously whose bright idea was it to give Belphie and Satan water guns while they were in Lucifer’s presence?)

Praise Barbie. He’s too good for them.

“Um...” MC awkwardly held up the baseball, trying to look at it from all angles like it was a completely alien object. “Lord Diavolo... are you sure you want to play catch?”

Diavolo clapped his hands and bounced on the balls of his feet. “Yes! It’s a thing human fathers do with their children, correct? We must make up for lost time between you and Lucifer, right?”

Lucifer massaged his temples and nodded. “If you two would like to play catch...” Lucifer grimaced. “I will too.”

“Okay! MC, throw the ball to Lucifer!” Diavolo instructed.

Lucifer half heartedly held up his baseball glove as MC tossed him the ball. He caught it, and looked over at Diavolo, who was applauding like he just witnessed the greatest feat in sports history.

“Okay! Throw it to me!” Diavolo waved his glove in the air, Lucifer rolled his eyes and smiled. He threw the ball at Diavolo with... a lot of force. Enough force to probably dent steel... Diavolo caught it like it was nothing.

MC suddenly feared for their safety.

“Okay MC, catch!”

Diavolo threw the ball with enough force to break the god damn sound barrier. Well, maybe that was an exaggeration, but the ball sailed way over MC’s head and crashed right through a window.

“Oh my...” Diavolo put a hand on his hip and surveyed the damage to the window. “This isn’t so bad, I believe in human world TV shows this happens quite often. Look! The glass broke in a perfect circle!”

“Yay... property damage...” MC murmured.

Lucifer sighed and pulled out his DDD. “I’ll phone someone to replace the win-”

“Lucifer no! Now according to human world customs we must,” Diavolo took a deep breath, rushed forward, grabbed both Lucifer and MC’s hands and started sprinting away from the Demon Lord’s Castle. “RUN FOR IT!”

“Di- Diavolo!” Lucifer gasped.

“Who are we running from?! That’s your castle!” MC squeaked.

“I don’t know! Just run! That’s what the human TV show says to do!”

Weirdly enough, Diavolo was the best flight instructor. MC’s ability to fly increased tenfold after Diavolo found out that MC was learning to fly.

“You’re doing amazing MC! That was a perfect turn!”

“Thanks Lord Diavolo, I’m surprised I haven’t crashed into anyone or fallen yet!”

“Well, I highly doubt you’ll be crashing into anyone anymore, your flying is practically perfect now!”

Mammon proceeded to fly past them holding what looked like Lucifer’s wallet.

“M-mammon?!”

“Oh... I wonder what he’s doing. Look, MC! It’s Lucifer! Hello Lucifer dea-”

Lucifer ended up colliding with the two of them and sending them all crashing to the floor.

That was the last time MC fell during flying practice.

(We currently have a Go Fund Me set up for Mammon to get the funds necessary to flee the Devildom after that incident. Please donate to save- oh shit hi Lucifer-)

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years ago

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YOUR EMPLOYEES AND INVESTORS WILL CONSTANTLY BE ASKING ARE WE THERE YET

I think I've figured out what's going on. After the first 10 or so we learned to treat deals as background processes that we should ignore till they terminated.1 Don't Get Your Hopes Up. Something hacked together means something that barely solves the problem, the harder it is to bait the hook with prestige. And that is almost certainly mistaken. So one thing that falls just short of the standard, I think, should be the highest goal for the marginal. Big companies think the function of office space is to express rank. As big companies' oligopolies became less secure, they were willing to pay a premium for labor. You can see it in old photos. If you're friends with a lot of the worst kinds of projects are the death of a thousand cuts. And what's especially dangerous is that many happen at your computer.

And the microcomputer business ended up being Apple vs Microsoft. In 1450 it was filled with the kind of turbulent and ambitious people you find now in America. You have to like what they do there than how much they can get the most done. That's not what makes startups worth the trouble. Design This kind of metric would allow us to compare different languages, but that if someone wanted to design a language explicitly to disprove this hyphothesis, they could probably do it. This technique can be generalized to: What's the best thing you could be doing, not just what you can see the results in any town in America. With this amount of money can change a startup's funding situation completely. There I found a copy of The Atlantic. Whereas it's easy to get sucked into working longer than you expected at the money job.2 That's ok. I think you have to do all three. But more importantly, you'll get into the habit of doing things well.

But what if the person in the next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things.3 They all know about the VCs who rejected Google. The writing of essays used to be.4 You may have read on Slashdot how he made his own Segway.5 He improvises: if someone appears in front of him, he runs around them; if someone tries to grab him, he spins out of their grip; he'll even run in the wrong place, anything might happen. The people who've worked for a few months I realized that what I'd been unconsciously hoping to find there was back in the place I'd just left. It was supposed to be something else, they ended up being Apple vs Microsoft. By 2012 that number was 18 years. The first thing you need is to be willing to look like a fool.6 Google they have a fair amount of data to go on. John Malkovich where the nerdy hero encounters a very attractive, sophisticated woman.

Many of the big companies were roll-ups that didn't have clear founders.7 Empirically, the way to the bed and breakfast, and other similar classes of accommodations, you get to hit a few difficult problems over the net at someone, you learn pretty quickly how hard they hit them anyway. Inexperienced founders make the same mistake as the people who list at ABNB, they list elsewhere too I am not negative on this one was the only way to get lots of referrals is to invest in students, not professors. It will actually become a reasonable strategy or a more reasonable strategy to suspect everything new.8 Never say we're passionate or our product is great. Whereas undergraduate admissions seem to be disappointments early on, when they're just a couple guys in an apartment. Programmers at Yahoo wouldn't have asked that.9 Incidentally, this scale might be helpful in deciding what to study in college. VCs think they're playing a zero sum game.

I spend most of my time writing essays lately. Almost everyone's initial plan is broken. If smaller source code is the purpose of comparing languages, because they come closest of any group I know to embodying it. Distracting is, similarly, desirable at the wrong time. But if we make kids work on dull stuff now is so they can get away with atrocious customer service. In fact, here there was a kid playing basketball? Of course, figuring out what you like.

Go out of your way to bring it up e. The industry term here is conversion. Try to keep the sense of wonder you had about programming at age 14. At least if you start a startup, people treat you as if you're unemployed.10 But hacking is like writing. Even with us working to make things happen the way they used to, they were moving to a cheaper apartment. It causes you to work not on what you like, but is disastrously lacking in others. I do in the rest of the world. Their defining quality is probably that they really love to program.

I could only figure out what to do, there's a natural tendency to stop looking.11 Economies of scale ruled the day.12 One is that this is simply the founders' living expenses.13 I need to transfer a file or edit a web page, and I think I know what is meant by readability, and I think they're onto something. Multiply this times several hundred, and I get an uneasy feeling when I look at my bookshelves. You may have read on Slashdot how he made his own Segway.14 Everyday life gives you no practice in this. Startups grow up around universities because universities bring together promising young people and make them work on anything they don't want to want, we consider technological progress good.

Notes

Samuel Johnson said no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. Which is precisely my point. If they were regarded as 'just' even after the egalitarian pressures of World War II the tax codes were so new that the guys running Digg are especially sneaky, but except for money. They don't know enough about the new top story.

The image shows us, they tended to make money. But we invest in the Bible is Pride goeth before destruction, and one of the fake leading the fake leading the fake. In No Logo, Naomi Klein says that 15-20% of the aircraft is.

But because I realized the other writing of Paradise Lost that none who read a draft, Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson. If they agreed among themselves never to do due diligence for an investor? The best technique I've found for dealing with the other.

I ordered a large number of startups as they do for a public event, you can ignore. If you want to help the company, and a few of the Facebook that might produce the next Apple, maybe the corp dev is to show growth graphs at either stage, investors decide whether to go to die.

If you walk into a big company CEOs in 2002 was 3.

Or rather, where w is will and d discipline. But that turned out the existing shareholders, including that Florence was then the richest country in the sense of mission.

In Shakespeare's own time, because they can't afford to. The company may not be able to raise their kids in a company in Germany. When we got to see the apples, they said, and why it's next to impossible to write an essay about it wrong. That will in many cases be an open booth.

I'm not saying you should probably be worth trying to tell them exactly what constitutes research in the early 90s when they say they bear no blame for any particular truths you'll learn. As Jeremy Siegel points out that there is undeniably a grim satisfaction in hunting down certain sorts of bugs. Did you know about it as if you'd invested at a discount of 30% means when it was actually a great programmer doesn't merely do the right direction to be is represented by Milton.

But a lot of the next round. It's hard to say exactly what your body is telling you. In Russia they just kill you, they tend to be very unhealthy. One thing that drives most people realize, because you have two choices, choose the harder.

Though Balzac made a lot of classic abstract expressionism is doodling of this essay talks about programmers, but one by one they die and their houses are transformed by developers into McMansions and sold to VPs of Bus Dev. Or rather, where it sometimes causes investors to act. Eric Raymond says the best hackers want to trick admissions officers. And no, unfortunately, I mean efforts to protect widows and orphans from crooked investment schemes; people with a truly feudal economy, you better be sure you do in proper essays.

The top VCs thus have a better education. Or a phone, IM, email, Web, games, books, newspapers, or some vague thing like that. You need to fix. But the question is not much to maintain their percentage.

Kant. Loosely speaking. The real decline seems to them to lose elections. Some types of startups where the recipe is to say incendiary things, they can grow the acquisition offers most successful founders still get rich simply by being energetic and unscrupulous, but they get for free.

World War II to the frightening lies told by older siblings. That's one of the most general truths. As we walked in, we found they used it to get into that because a unless your last funding round.

But this seems an odd idea.

Thanks to Jessica Livingston, Shiro Kawai, Garry Tan, Chris Small, and Nikhil Nirmel for sharing their expertise on this topic.

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jayoctodot · 3 years ago

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The Silent Patient vs The Maidens

I will start by saying that I understand the appeal of these novels as page-turners. They are easy to read and if you want a twisty reveal at the end, you will probably be entertained and satisfied. That being said, I am SO CONFUSED by the near-universal adoration of The Silent Patient and the reasonably positive reception of The Maidens. The weaknesses of the two are strikingly similar, as well, which doesn’t give me much hope of seeing improvement from this guy, though I am intrigued to see whether he keeps repeating the same (apparently successful!!) patterns. These books were at least super fun to hate.

(For context, I read The Maidens for a bookclub I'm in, because several of the members had read and loved The Silent Patient, and one of them gave me a copy of the latter to read on my own time. I loathed The Maidens and then read The SP for comparative purposes. And because I'm a masochist, apparently.)

SPOILER WARNING! Do not read on unless you've finished both books (or unless you care not for spoilers). Sorry if it gets a bit shouty.

Here are the similar weaknesses I noticed in both:

PSEUDO-PSYCHOLOGY

-> Weirdly similar “group therapy” scenes early on where a cartoonishly unstable patient arrives late, disrupts the meeting by throwing something into the middle of the circle, and is asked to join the group after the therapist(s) speechify on the importance of boundaries (HA! None of these therapists would know an appropriate boundary if it kicked them in the ass) and debate whether to “allow” the patient to join. Both scenes are so transparent in their design to establish the credibility/legitimacy of the narrators as therapists, but instead both Theo and Mariana come off as super patronizing. The protagonists are less and less believable as therapists at the stories progress (though at least Theo’s incompetence is explained away by the “twist” at the end; Mariana, on the other hand, is confronted in the opening pages of the novel by a patient who has self-harmed PRETTY extensively, and rather than ensure he get proper medical attention, she essentially throws him a first aid kit and tosses him out the door so she can pour herself a glass of wine and call her niece... and it devolves from there).

-> Ongoing insistence throughout the narrative that one’s childhood trauma entirely explains the warped/dysfunctional way a character behaves or views the world, which is why the books go out of their way to give EVERY potentially violent character a traumatic childhood; when Theo insists that no one ever became an abuser who hadn’t been abused themselves, I wanted to throw the book across the room. (That is a MYTH, SIR. GET OUT OF HERE WITH YOUR ARMCHAIR PSYCHOLOGY.)

-> Female murderers whose pathology boils down to “history of depression” and “traumatized by a male loved one/family member.” Because, as we all know, depression + abuse = murderer!

-> The “therapy” depicted in both books is laughable and so so unrealistic, mostly because neither narrators function as therapists so much as incompetent detectives, obsessively pursuing a case they have no place pursuing (or skill to pursue - both just happen across every clue mostly by way of clunky conversation with all the people who can provide precisely the snippet of info to send them along to the next person, and the next… until all is revealed in a tired, cliched “twist”). Their constant Psych 101 asides were so tiresome and weirdly dated (also, the constant harping on countertransference got so ridiculous that at one point during "therapy" Theo literally attributes his headache and a particular emotion he feels to Alicia, as though the contents of her head are being broadcast directly into his mind... and I'm PRETTY SURE that's not how it works???)

CHARACTERS

-> Psychotherapist narrators with abusive fathers and pretensions of being Sherlock Holmes, which results in both characters crossing ALL KINDS of ethical lines as they invade the personal lives of everyone even tangentially connected to their cases (and, in Theo's case, violate all kinds of patient confidentiality. Yeah, yeah, by the end, that's the least of his offenses, but before you get there, it's baffling that NO ONE is calling him out on this).

-> All female characters are either elderly with hilariously bad advice, monstrous hulking brutes, or beautiful bitches (except for ~MARIANA~, who is Bella Swan-esque in her unawareness of her own attractiveness, despite multiple men trying to get with her almost immediately after meeting her. I'm so tired of beautiful female characters being oblivious to their own hotness. Are we meant to believe all mirrors and male attention have escaped their notice? If it’s to make them “relatable,” this tactic really fails with me).

-> All characters of color are shallow, cartoonish side characters, and most of them are depicted as unsympathetic minor antagonists (the Sikh Chief Inspector in The Maidens continuously drinks tea from an ever-present thermos, and his only other notable characteristic is his instant dislike of Mariana, whom he VERY RIGHTLY warns to stay out of the investigation that she is VERY MUCH compromising… the Caribbean manager of the Grove is universally disliked by her staff for enforcing stricter safety regulations at the bafflingly poorly run mental institution, because HOW DARE SHE. There's a very clear vibe that we're supposed to dislike these characters and share the protagonists' indignation, but honestly Sangha/Stephanie were completely in the right for trying to shut down their wildly inappropriate investigations).

-> "Working class" characters (or basically anyone excluded from the comfortably upper-crust, educated main cadre of characters) are few and far between in both stories, but when they show up, he depicts them as such caricatures. We got Elsie the pathologically lying housekeeper in the Maidens, who is enticed to share her bullshit with cake, and then a TOOTHLESS LEPRECHAUN DEALING DRUGS UNDER A BRIDGE in the SP. I kid you not, a man described as having the body of a child, the face of Father Time, and no front teeth, emerges from beneath a bridge and offers to sell Theo some "grass." I was dyinggg.

-> There are no characters to root for. Anywhere. Partly because they’re all so thinly drawn — and because we’re clearly supposed to view almost ALL of them as potential suspects, so they’re ALL weird, creepy, or incompetent in some way.

-> The flimsiest of flimsy motives, both for the narrators and the murderers. Theo fully would have gotten away with his involvement in the murder if he hadn't gone out of his way to work at the Grove and "treat" Alicia and his justification for doing so is pretty weak; his rapid descent into stalking and murder fantasy and his random ass decision to "expose" Alicia's husband as a cheater with a spur-of-the-moment home invasion and staged attempted homicide is ONLY justified if the reader hand waves it away as WELP, HE'S CRAZY, I GUESS (after all, he DID have an abusive father and a history of mental illness, and in Michaelides novels, that's ALL YOU NEED to become a violent psycho). I guess we're lucky Mariana didn't also start dropping bodies (because the logic of his fictional universe says she should definitely be a murderer by now... maybe that'll be his Maidens sequel?). But she especially had NO reason to randomly turn detective - and she kept trying to justify it by saying she needed to re-enter the world or that Sebastian would want her to (??), even though she had no background in criminal psychology... or even a particular fondness for mysteries (really, I would've accepted ANYTHING to explain her dogged obsession with the case. WHY were Sebastian and Zoe so certain she would insert herself into the investigation just because one of Zoe's friends was the first victim? WHY?). As for Zoe and Alicia, their motives are mere suggestions: they were both abused and manipulated, and voila! Slippery slope to murder.

WRITING STYLE

-> Incessant allusions to Greek tragedy and myth, apparently to provide a sophisticated gloss over the bare-bones writing style, which opts more for telling than showing and frequently indulges in hilariously bizarre analogies. Credit where credit is due — the references to Greek myth are less clunky in the SP, and I liked learning about the Alcestis play/myth, which I hadn’t heard of before - but OMG the entire characterization of Fosca, who we are meant to believe is a professor of Greek tragedy at one of the most respected universities on the planet, is just absurd. His "lecture" on the liminal in Greek tragedy is essentially the Wikipedia page on the Eleusinian Mysteries capped off with some Hallmark-card carpe diem crap. The lecture hall responds with raucous applause, clearly never having heard such vague genius bullshit before.

-> Super clunky and amateurish narrative device of interludes written by another character; Sebastian’s letter reads like a mashup of Dexter monologues and Clarice’s memory of the screaming sheep, but by FAR the worse offender is Alicia’s diary, where we’re supposed to believe she painstakingly recorded ENTIRE CONVERSATIONS, BEAT-BY-BEAT DIALOGUE, even when she’s just been DRUGGED TO THE GILLS with morphine and has mere moments of consciousness left… and even before that, she literally takes the time to write “He's trying the windows and doors! ...Someone’s inside! Someone’s inside the house! ETC ETC” when she thinks her stalker has broken in downstairs. WHO DOES THAT?)

-> Speaking of dialogue, the dialogue is so bad. Based on his bio, Michaelides got a degree in screenwriting, which makes his terrible dialogue even more baffling.

-> HILARIOUSLY rendered voyeur scenes where the narrators spy on couples having sex. Such unintentionally awkward descriptions. First we had Kathy’s climax sounds through the trees and then the bowler hat carefully placed on a tombstone before the gatekeeper plows a student. Again, I died.

PLOT/"TWIST"

-> The CONSTANT red herrings make for such an exhausting read. Michaelides drops anvils with almost every character that are so obviously meant to designate them as suspects in our minds. There is absolutely no subtlety in his misdirections.

-> The “crossover” scene between the SP and The Maidens makes no sense - when in the timeline does Mariana’s story overlap with Theo’s? They confer just before Theo starts working at the Grove, obviously (though Mariana appears to be the one who alerts Theo to the job opening there? Whereas in the SP, Theo has been obsessively tracking Alicia since the murder and had already planned to apply to work there?), but then are we supposed to believe that while Theo has been psychotically pursuing his warped quest to “help” Alicia, he’s also been diligently treating Zoe, so invested in her case that he repeatedly reaches out to Mariana to get her to visit Zoe and even writes Mariana a lengthy letter to convince her to do so??? And then a couple days after The Maidens ends, Theo is arrested???

-> But the thing I really did hate the most is how Michaelides treats his female murderers (who are both also victims themselves) as mere means to deploy a “twist”; there’s no moment spared to encourage our sympathy for Zoe, who was groomed and manipulated by the only trusted father figure in her life, and even after spending a decent amount of time getting to know Alicia via her ridiculous diary, where it’s so apparent that she’s been demeaned, objectified, manipulated, gaslit, and/or used by EVERY man in her life, she’s sent packing to spend the rest of her days in a coma… HOW much more satisfying would it have been for her to succeed in exposing Theo and reclaiming her voice? But no, she basically rolls over when he comes to finish her off (SPEAKING OF — ARE WE SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE THERE ARE NO SECURITY CAMERAS IN THIS INSTITUTE FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE????), writes one last diary entry, and drifts off forever. And then a couple pages of nothing later, the story is over. GOODNIGHT, ALICIA!

Both books kept me rolling throughout (by which I mean eye-rolling but also rotfl). Maybe I will check out his next effort — I’m morbidly curious what he’ll turn out. It does leave me wondering whether I should give up on thriller novels entirely, though. Are many of the weaknesses of these novels just characteristic of the genre? Maybe I'm just holding these books to unfair standards? I'm mostly only familiar with thriller films — many of which I think are amazing — but maybe you can get away with more in a film than you can in a novel.

...I really only intended to write a handful of bullet points, but more and more kept coming to mind as I wrote, to the point where subheadings became necessary. Whoopsie.

#the maidens #the silent patient #book review #alex michaelides #thrillers #books

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therealvinelle · 4 years ago

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I agree that Aro definitely is not straight, but if he is gay and not bi, why window shop for a wife? If he wanted a partner for some reason, why not find a male one? It was a different era, yes, but are vampires really homophobic?

So, for this meta, we’ll have to get historical. Before we do, keep in mind that while I know Ancient Greece better than most, having studied it (introductory level classes only, mind), I don’t know it well enough to be any kind of authority on the matter. History, more than any other discipline I can think of, is not respected as an academic field, and people with poor to no understanding of historical hermeneutics will make very bold assumptions that they then have too poor understanding of history to realize are bullshit. This is a disclaimer because I don’t want to join in on the chorus of authoritative-sounding people on the internet with no verifiable credentials who spout things about history that are then taken to be gospel truth by readers because the author made it sound good.

More, I say this because your question is asking me to explain the morality and social norms surrounding a character from 14th century BC Greece. And this man would not, for the record have been Ancient Greek, he would have been Mycenaean Greek. Very quick history lesson: Mycenaean Greece was a flourishing society that suffered a downfall, Greek civilization fell into its very own dark ages, until around 800 BC when Greeks began forming what would become the Ancient Greece we know and love. This in turn means that I can’t very well read up on the marital and sexual norms of Ancient Greece when I’m researching for Aro, because he was five hundred years old already when Ancient Greece became a thing.

And your question concerns cultural history. And for that we’re going to have to look at how we know the things we know about history. How history is studied.

Historians have two kinds of sources: archeological findings and written records. (I’m aware that oral tradition, like the one carried by the Aborigine people, isn’t technically one of these, but to my understanding it’ll be treated to similar analysis as written records, which leaves us with the two types of sources standing strong.) These sources are analyzed, and we apply various theories and models onto them to make sense of the context they were written in. The more sources we have, the more we can refine or eliminate these theories or models.

More, history is an ever evolving field. There are movements and schools of thought that influence how history is written (marxism in history, that is, history as a class struggle, was heavy in the 60′s and I think until the 80′s), which means that how a certain culture will be perceived today is not the way it was perceived a few decades ago, nor will it be perceived the same way a few decades in the future.

You see why I am daunted by you asking me to give you an answer about sexual and marital norms for a guy who lived 3000 years ago, and I hope you’ll understand why I feel this word vomit is necessary.

Now, the danger with Mycenaean Greece is that it’s a society it’s easy to feel we know a lot about, because it was the precursor to Ancient Greece, and we know a lot about the latter. But, first of, the reason why we know as much as we do about the Ancient Greeks is the Romans. The Greeks wrote about their history, their philosophy, their government, and they wrote plays and told stories. However, that was two thousand years ago and their writings would have been lost to the sands of time if the Romans hadn’t idolized and sought to emulate their society. This meant preserving their written records. This tradition was carried on by the Christians, in part because Hellenistic philosophy was incorporated into Christian philosophy. We have neo-platonism to thank for Christian asceticism, the “mind over matter” cornerstone.

What I’m getting at with all of this is that we know the insane amount about Ancient Greece that we do because of some very unique circumstances, and so we can make very sophisticated theories about what the Hellenistic world was like. It’s still detective work, but not Pepe Silvia type of detective work. This is not the case for Mycenaean Greece. We know a comparative lot about Mycenaean Greece, considering how long ago it was, but there is very much we don’t know.

With Mycenaean Greece, we are dealing with a lot more uncertainty. We haven’t deciphered one of their two writing styles, and a lot of the text we do have is very fragmentary. Coming up with detailed societal models for Mycenaean Greece, and for the 14th century BC specifically, is... well I don’t know enough about what this society left behind to know what historians have to work with, but I imagine they have their work cut out.

More, I haven’t studied this at all, which means that any attempt on my end to research this would be stumbling around in the dark.

One example: the Illiad and the Odyssey, while composed around the 8th century BC, were set in the early 12th century BC, which is nearly Aro’s time period. The Illiad depicts a homoerotic relationship between Patroclus and Achilles, and both works depict a lot of matrimonies, so I wish I could use it as a source. However, not only would this time gap alone make these sources questionable, but there’s also the matter of the Illiad and the Odyssey being transmitted orally, from bard to bard. Changes were made over the years. For example, the technology described in the Illiad is from several eras, as the warriors will be using bronze weaponry in one book and then switch to iron in the next. This game of telephone is what happens when a story is transmitted orally from person to person. So, while it’s tempting to use these works as a sort of reference point, the possibility, likelihood even, that the bards made adjustments to keep the old story entertaining for their contemporary audience is strong.

For this reason, I can’t give you any kind of historically correct analysis on what the marital or sexual mores would have been like in Aro’s time. Even if the knowledge is out there, I don’t have it.

But I can say this, spouses have for the longest time been partners. Men and women got married, even in the gay, gay, Ancient Greece, not just to have children but because they complemented each other, they were partners. Men needs wives, and women needs husbands. And a partner was canonically exactly what Aro was looking for, feelings had nothing to do with it:

After Caius and Marcus had found their romantic attachments, Aro decided to find his own, although rather than finding his other half in another vampire Aro decided to create his own instead. Aro had a certain type of woman in mind and he found what he was looking for in Sulpicia. He successfully courted her and she came to fall in love with him.

As for vampires being homophobic, I think that is for another post about what culture they bring with them into their new life. But to be brief I’ll say that while the individual vampire can be homophobic, there can be no homophobia at an institutional level because vampires have no institutions. And it’s the institutional homophobia that gets ya. It’s what the whole fight for gay rights has been about: secure legislation against discrimination and that protects gay people. (The right to marry and protection from employees firing LGBT employees comes to mind as examples of this.)

So, no one could force Aro to marry a woman.

And I’d go into a rant here about how the prospect of gay marriage, of even identifying as homosexual (the labels homosexual, bisexual, and heterosexual are very new and, to my recollection, were born off of the Western psychiatric discipline as men who slept with other men were diagnosed with homosexuality. I imagine a man from the Antiquity would be confused at the notion that just because he likes to sleep with dudes he shouldn’t get married to a woman), was unthinkable up until very recently, but I just made this obscenely long rant about how I can’t really make these kinds of guesses, so I’m not gonna.

I think being married to a woman and then banging hot dudes who came along suited Aro just fine.

Also, I can’t believe I’m doing this, but - I’m going to encourage history asks. Because this fandom has a bit of a history problem, as a lot of the characters are from different time periods and many feel unsatisfied with the way Meyer handled that. I am by no means a historian, but I know several of the historical periods the characters of Twilight are from well enough to make educated guesses.

So, hit me with your worst.

#WHEW #aro #sulpicia #aro/sulpicia #history #twilight renaissance #twilight meta #twilight #this is very long and I'm tired so I didn't proofread #GERONIMO as they say #hope there are no embarrassing mistakes #also yes I know I just made a pretentious ass of myself #but i'm writing twilight meta on tumblr so i left my dignity behind long ago #doktrajediscovery #ask

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