#one day I'll have the funds to get a new computer instead of finding something refurbished from over a decade ago but for now this will do

[phoenixiancrystallist]

@blogquantumreality Whatever the heck this nonsense means. My roommate who set me up with this thing wants me to upgrade my graphics cards to D700s, and we also plan to max out the RAM but he says first order of business is beefier graphics cards

Month 3, day 30

Uh... I crashed Blender so hard my computer forgot how to computer again 😬 Luckily this time I did a smrt and saved before I tried to render, so at least we got a screenshot!

Anyway I followed a tutorial on making a procedural icy snow texture. I can follow it through all the way to the end but the rendering engine that plays nice with my computer does NOT like how the texture works, and the one that plays nice with the texture wanted to take 48 hours. Actually 48 hours, not me misreading the time stamp this time. So I tried to fix the texture so it would play nice with Eevee (the nice render engine that doesn't take forever), but it still crashed my computer.

So yeah. I need money to upgrade my graphics cards, because the set my computer came with is not powerful enough for my needs.

[redflagshipwriter]

Reassembly 3

ch1 ch2

Masterpost

Peter pushed his bangs back for the billionth time. They immediately fell back in front of his eyes as he hunched over the library computer. He'd spent all day trying to get his bearings in this universe. Eventually, his stomach had gotten attention. Even with the stuff from the hotel buffet, he was so hungry it was distracting.

That had made him realize that what he needed most was money. He needed access to a steady stream of money. When he left here he could try to make the best decision possible about the little bit of cash he had, sure. But it wouldn't last long.

He had the spiteful fantasy of taking the money he needed from the LOA company that had been funding …whatever they'd done to him. An all-expenses paid kidnapping was only fair. 

But it was only a thought. Whoever they were, they were dangerous. He shouldn't provoke them or give them any clues about him. Whatever experiments they'd been doing with him must have been expensive. They probably wanted him back. He needed to know more before he risked getting their attention.

Instead, Peter started up a resume. He put his real name at the top and then stared at it in indecision. He swallowed. 

Was that a good idea? He… he didn't exist here, so it seemed fine. But maybe he should use a fake name? 

Peter strained to think of a reason to use a fake name now that he knew he didn't exist here. How could those people possibly know his name? He definitely hadn't told them. It was probably smarter to be cautious, but it was his name. The idea of losing it made him feel like throwing up.

"If I think of a reason I shouldn't use it, I can change that." Peter muttered to himself quietly enough that no one seemed to notice. He took a few minutes to search around for high schools in the area. It was so weird that Midtown didn't exist here. He felt like a fraud as he entered the information for the school he thought would have been his school district. He double checked the year (and it was so weird that it was 5 years in the past here) and back dated his graduation 3 years. Then he grimaced and made it 5 years. 

No way would anyone who saw his face believe that. But he'd need to pretend to have a university degree to get this kind of work, so it couldn't be helped. 

'People lie on their resumes all the time,' Peter told himself. He still felt like crap about it. He still… he still hadn't graduated high school, and he probably never would. 

It was fine. He knew enough that he was never going to stick out as less educated than a high school graduate.

'I'll get the college degree, though. If I really am here for a long time, I need an education.' 

Peter deliberately picked an innocuous university to claim for his fake Bachelors in Computer Science. It took a while to find a place with a sufficiently not-prestigious program but enough graduates for him to have been lost in the crowd. He'd have to redo the resume with the real degree later. 

Oh. Wait. Peter went back up and deleted his name. That was his reason to use a fake name for this work. 

He was going to get a real degree in his own name. This resume was just to make some money, not to establish an identity. He watched the cursor blink for a while, trying to think of a name. It needed to be something that he could remember. Ned Leeds? It would make him too sad. Same for Tony Stark. But…

Peter slowly typed out James Barnes and huffed a laugh through his nose. 

He'd recently escaped unethical scientists and found himself lost in a new world where he had no friends or family. It seemed appropriate. 

"Hey," grumbled the mental Bucky Barnes that Peter's subconscious had apparently generated for some reason. "You little shit." 

That was fine. Peter ignored the rising evidence of a mental breakdown and finished falsifying a resume. He used it to apply for several contract jobs in web design. He took a deep breath to counteract the urge to make a joke with someone, anyone, about how it was funny for Spiderman to get into web design.

Man. He was lonely. 

There was no point in hanging around the library longer. The sun had set and it was close to closing time, 6:00 pm. He couldn't check anything out, not without an ID, and he wasn't going to get any emails back immediately.

Peter shuffled out and walked at random down the street. The sound of cars and pedestrians and crosswalks soothed his hindbrain. 

He used the time to think. To plan. 

He needed to refresh what he knew. The library would be a great start. He'd come early tomorrow and read some computer science books. That aside, he also needed to start working on a long term identity and getting into university. 

'I'm going to want a scholarship. If I can do that, I won't have to work too much.' 

The trouble with that was that Peter couldn't go to any random school. He needed to be somewhere with a significant budget for the sciences. If he was going to get home, he needed access to some serious technology. 

'That's a big ask. Why would a prestigious school offer full scholarships?' 

He felt defeated before he even started. But it was worth asking. That was the kind of question that the librarians wouldn't be suspicious of at all. He was actually in the right age group to look into college admissions. 

'Okay. I need an ID. Birth certificate? That's the first ID anyone gets.' 

Well. Time to see if the city administration buildings were where he remembered. How hard could it be to break in, print a birth certificate, and backdate and file it? He was Spiderman. 

…And Spiderman really shouldn't be using his super powers for crime. What would Aunt May think? Peter grimaced and rubbed at his face with both hands.  

Was it really that bad? 'I'm not stealing anything or hurting anyone,' he defended himself. 'I'm doing what I need in order to survive.'

The part that he felt worst about was lying about his education. But he had the skillset and qualifications, he just couldn't explain his internship to a genius that didn't exist here and extracurriculars at a school this universe didn't have. 

'That's barely even a crime,' Peter thought. 'Breaking and entering isn't great, but I'm just fixing my own paperwork. I really was born. So it's not a fake ID.' 

With that logic ironed out, Peter made his way to the vital records office. The building looked like he remembered, thankfully. 

So. He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets and walked around the block to see the building from all sides. 

It didn't exactly look super secure. It was an old brick faced building with a lonely camera angled down the stairs of the main entry. There was a metal detector visible from outside, and he knew from experience that there were maybe 3 security officers on the first floor.

'That's easy to get around if I enter from a higher floor. They'll probably have a security team in at night but they won't expect that. If they do a walk through, I'll hear them coming up the stairs or elevator.'

It seemed doable. Sort of.

'I need to know what birth certificates from my birth year looked like, I guess? And if the ones from today look the same. Or maybe I don't need to worry about it, as long as I enter my information digitally. I doubt they keep a paper copy for every birth. The building isn't even big enough. And you can get a copy printed whenever you need one, so… it being new-looking shouldn't be a problem.'

Okay. Alright, he could do this. He could do some paperwork. 

It wasn't nearly late enough for that kind of crime, though. Peter shoved his hands in his pockets and decided to spend a little of his money on food. 

Long term, getting pre-made food with limited finances was a terrible decision. He knew he should be getting like, beans and rice. But for now he went into a bodega and got the cheapest thing that he thought would make a dent in his hunger– a microwave burrito and a cola. Calories were good, right? He wolfed it down outside the store and ducked back in to throw away the trash immediately. 

It still wasn't late enough. 

He walked around the city for hours, waiting for an idea to hit him. There had to be a great solution. If he could only think of it, there was going to be something that he could do that would fix all his problems. His throat was hot and tight and his eyes were burning. He didn't cry.

God, he was tired. He eventually gave up. He was so tired and he had no idea where he was going to sleep but he really needed to because he was exhausted -

"Stop. Stop spiraling," he told himself. He sniffled. Aw, no, he wasn't catching a cold, was he? Crap. He hoped not. 

He didn't know what time it was, but it felt late enough. He made his way back to the vital statistics office to record his own birth.

Weirdly for a plan devised by Peter, it went smoothly. He entered from a 4th floor window without setting off any alarms. He found and powered on a computer in the right office (thanks for the labels!) and looked up a few birth certificates before he felt confident. He entered his data into the system and printed a copy before powering everything down. 

He was out the window within ten minutes of entering the building. 

Okay. That was step one. Birth certificate accomplished. "Congratulations, it's a boy," Peter muttered to himself. He patted at the bag to hear the reassuring crinkle of paper inside. Okay, that was great! It was progress. He felt better already.

What was next? 

…A driver's license. No one actually went around with a copy of their birth certificate to show when someone asked for ID. He needed a driver's license. 

He walked to the DMV and pulled off basically the same heist. The nerve wracking part was turning on the lights to take the photo. His stomach twisted and he was absolutely certain that someone was going to come and see why the lights were on. 

No one came. He backdated his license to the appropriate year and printed one typed up information for James Tony Barnes, saying that he was 22. Then he altered the birth year back once more to say he was almost 18.

Nobody in their right mind was going to look at his 15-year-old face and think he was 22. They'd just think he had a fake license. Which he did, so he needed them to think the fake license was real. He let out a deep breath and victoriously hit print.

It returned an error message.

…It wouldn’t print. Why?

He scanned until he found the field he’d messed up. Peter stared at it.

It was the social security number. He’d typed up his real one out of force of habit. It had been flagged as a mistake because it already belonged to someone in the system. 

Caught by a morbid curiosity, he looked up who it belonged to. It was a girl, actually, younger than him.

He wanted to cry. It was such a silly thing to cry over! He wasn’t emotionally attached to his social security number– it was just a string of data. But he sniffled. He wiped something away from his eyes that he didn’t think about. Don’t think about it. He wasn’t in a safe place to think about it yet.

It took a few minutes to calm himself. He erased everything he’d done, turned off the computer, and left the way that he’d come.

He couldn’t get the license yet. He needed to get a social security number first. That probably meant that he needed to do some research. Did the office of vital statistics issue them? It didn’t seem right, since each state had to be coordinated. Surely there was some kind of national office that handled all of it.

For lack of anything else to do, his feet took him back to the library. He was so tired that his eyes were aching. 

Peter looked at the opening hours. He licked his teeth. He thought about it. 

It opened at 10am. It was.. it was… 

He decided to risk powering on the evil janitor's phone. It was 11 pm. That was plenty of time for him to sneak a nap on the couch in the quiet space.

"I'm not hurting anyone," Peter said aloud. It was very quiet. He spidered his way up the back wall of the library, pried open a window, and guiltily stretched out on one of the sofas. He set an alarm for 8am. That was definitely earlier than staff would come in, right? Pretty sure. 

He slept like the dead. But specifically, like the restless dead- his spider sense woke him up. Peter had no idea what time it was or why he was awake. He blindly grabbed his bag and the phone and leapt back out the window. He was shutting it when the light turned on inside.

He blinked blearily at the sunlight. He checked the phone.

7:21 am. Wow. Okay. Library workers were diligent. Maybe they had to dust all the books or something. He powered the phone off, and wondered how long the battery would last. He didn't have the charger for it. 

Well. It seemed like a good time to go to a different hotel from yesterday and check out the buffet. 

The hotel he went to had a less exciting buffet. There were a couple kinds of sliced bread and packets of margarine and jelly, as well as coffee, water, milk, and two types of juice. Still, it was free food, so he smiled at the clerk like he belonged there. This time he took a lot less food. Like, a lot less. He didn't want to clear out too much of their stuff. 

Two pieces of jellied toast, a water, an orange juice and a coffee later (blegh, it was burnt), Peter was back outside and at loose ends. 

He didn't want to turn the phone on to check the time. He guessed it was maybe around 8am. He had a couple hours until the library opened up again. 

Well. He sniffled his clothes experimentally.

He should work on that. This outfit wasn't smelly yet, but it would get there. He needed a change of clothes.

He took everything he owned to a rooftop and spread out his work kit. That was a rather grand way to say "three pilfered sewing kits." 

The scissors that came with them were absolutely tiny. Peter picked one up and marveled at it. It wasn't going to cut fabric, no way. It would cut thread and that was it. 

But woven fabric always tore along the seam line, right? Peter took out his dumpster shirts and found the one with the worst damage- the red shirt. He picked a spot and tore with his hands. 

It tore a straight line.

"Yessss," he cheered. He muscled through the seam and then went back to make another tear a little bit above the other one, so that he was basically holding a crop top, a bottom part, and a two inch strip from the middle that was unusable because the scissor cut had been jagged. He wound that up and put it in his bag because he didn't know what else to do with it. 

Now he felt nostalgic, so he took out the blue shirt and did the same thing. The cut hadn't been in exactly the same spot, so the shirt with the blue top and red bottom strip was going to be a little longer than the other shirt. But that was fine, right? 

He pinned the majority red shirt together using the pins from all 3 packages and painstakingly threaded a needle with the dark blue thread. Then he got to work. 

It wasn't hard, honestly. It was more meditative than anything else. He was mostly done when he had the feeling he was being watched. Peter lifted his head and looked down. Then around. Finally, he looked up. "You fly," he said, impressed. "That's cool." 

The flying teenager cocked his head at Peter and floated down. It was- honestly, it was kinda creepy and uncanny. Flying shouldn't be silent. There should be, like- an engine running or wings flapping. 

He tried to keep the unease off his face. This wasn't his universe. He'd look like a weirdo if he acted surprised about it. He tried to look normal. 

"What are you doing?" The guy asked.

Cool, he must be pulling it off.

Peter lifted his sewing project and turned it to show off the seam where red met blue in a neat line. "Customizing my wardrobe," he said, like a freaking dork would. If he said it confidently enough it would sound cooler, right? He eyed up the other teenager. He had spikes on the shoulders of his leather jacket. "I guess you do that too. You uh…. You do that yourself?" 

The guy touched the studs on his leather jacket self consciously. "No, I bought it this way." He leaned in. "I didn't know you could do that." He seemed impressed. 

Peter flushed, discomfited as he tied off the knit and cut his needle free. This guy was way too cool looking to talk to Peter like that. "Yeah, you can do anything to your stuff," he said. Wow, so eloquent. He cleared his throat and tried to look busy turning the shirt inside out to show how it looked. Luckily it had turned out well. "I like your piercings." And the fade was cool too. Wow, no one at Midtown looked like that. Even their jocks were actually nerds. And this guy was a jock for real. He was huge and handsome. 

The guy got real close, looking at Peter's bi-colored shirt.

Peter squirmed. The scrutiny was enough to make him feel paranoid about it being in Spiderman's colors. But this guy didn't know about him. Right? No way, there was no way. He stuffed it in his bag and tried not to look sweaty and suspicious. No underage vigilantes here. Just two normal guys on a 35th story rooftop. 

"Teach me." 

His head flew up at that imperious demand. "Teach you what exactly?" Peter was too surprised to moderate his tone. It came out too high, too nerdy. "Like- sewing in general,  or- your jacket? Do you wanna customize your jacket more?" Oh, man, he was nervous enough that he couldn't speak straight. So embarrassing. Peter forced himself to smile and waited for the reaction with a cringe. This felt like the moment before he got put in a locker.

Man, this dude had intense blue eyes. And he was holding so still. Was he even breathing? "I want more metal in my jacket," he decided. "And- could we make part of it mesh?" 

Peter was mostly just glad the guy had started breathing again.

'Mixing leather and mesh doesn't seem structurally sound. Plus, isn't leather meant to be kind of protective?'

…"If you pay for supplies, we can try," Peter said, because this might as well happen, and now he knew someone. Now he knew a normal human being from this universe who he could lean on for cues. He latched on- metaphorically. In reality, he just started packing up his supplies and hoped the guy didn't recognize them as hotel kits. Peter was used to the mortification of being poor, but this was a bit much even for him.

"Yeah, I have Luther's credit card." The guy whipped one out of nowhere and flipped it between his fingers at a dizzying pace. He slapped on a lazy grin and watched Peter intently as he did his weird little dexterity trick.

That was what broke his nerves. That? That was the kind of thing that Ned did in his practical magic phase. 

'Is he trying to be cool?' Peter wondered, incredulous. 'He's trying way too hard. He's not actually that cool. I mean, he's definitely cooler than me, but it's not as bad as I thought.'

Awesome. Peter could work with that. He relaxed tremendously. He was just gonna think of this guy as a really muscular Ned. He was pretty sure that Ned would still hang out with Peter even if he'd gotten that tall and strong after puberty, so it was probably a fair comparison.

"That's great," he said, pretending he knew who Luther was. The guy's stepdad or something, probably. Why else would he have a credit card from someone he called by their name? "You wanna go now?" He paused. "I'm Peter, by the way." 

The other boy's hand was weirdly warm and firm when he reached out for a handshake (what? Teenagers shake hands here?. That was so uncool and he'd never have guessed it). "Kon." He flashed his perfect teeth again. "Yeah, let's go. Wanna walk or fly?" 

Peter shrugged. "Whichever is cool," he said. He hoped Kon didn't expect him to be able to fly. If he needed to he could like, parkour, and pretend that was just his preference. 

"Flying it is!" Peter yelped and just barely aborted a dodge as Kon cheerfully grabbed him in a bridal carry and swooped out into the open air. 

Kon and Peter, both wrong at the arts and crafts store: "I have successfully befriended a normal guy in my age group. I can copy him surreptitiously to learn to blend in better, as long as he doesn't learn that I'm not a cool guy like him."

[pikespendragon67]

Pikes Small Fall 2024 Check-in Post!

I technically can still talk with friends but eh why not

IRL: o ye gods i have 2 interviews next week, one in person and one over the phone that may lead to an in person interview. They pay way more than my current job but I fear deceiving my supervisor to go to the in person ones. I'm in the middle of my annual review for my current job though so I think I'll get like. A very small raise and get asked why I've been coming in late for a while now (mainly due to traffic). Hrm.

It’s gonna rain for 2 weeks fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck

In December I'm making up for not walking for my college graduation since I graduated during quarantine! I met Jamieson Price at my brother's graduation back in 2016 since he was announcing so my foolish hope is that he announces for mine. Sadly not a SoCal school so highly unlikely (especially with BS technology nowadays) but a fish can dream.

I also...spent way more than I realized this year so once I replenish enough funds I hope I can stick to a budget that my mom helped formulate. Getting the new jobs will help a bunch in those. Terrible timing since the Switch successor is coming out next year and who knows what guests will arrive at cons I can potentially go to. (Like if Jamieson Price, Akio Otsuka, Kenjiro Tsuda or Junichi Suwabe got invited to a con I might need to sell a kidney or 3). I tried using a Windows 11 laptop and it is somehow much slower than my 2019 laptop. Like. How. It's more recent. So I might need to invest in a tablet (like an iPad) or something instead since those tend to be faster. If it has HDMI ports I'd be set.

Also terrible timing for going on a budget since I want to get the Shunsui blind keychain in stores like GameStop or BoxLunch. I have Ukitake at least. I'd be willing to trade a spare Soifon that I have. Oh, and also Squishables plushies always tempt me as well as physical DVDs/games/manga but I am running out of storage space aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

I want to get back into art but I need a bag to carry my art supplies and hopefully I can sneak in doodles when I run out of tasks at work. I'd draw on weekends but my computer takes up way too much space on my desk.

And I'm in a bit of a music rut, need to find new stuff to listen to. I usually like smooth cadences in things like electroswing, R&B or pop punk rock, but maybe with how hectic the world is becoming I can get into a new genre of music. Maybe folk? Maybe a ska renaissance that I keep hoping to happen in the public attention?

Animu: I just finished rewatching Digimon Adventure (1999)! I rewatched the dub since I'm nostalgic towards it. I recognized more voices than I did in my rewatch from 6th grade wrow. (I forgot Doug Erholz was in the OG series as Joe's brother and MachineSeaDramon). As a kid my favorite was probably TK or Kari but these days I relate way too much to Joe. I think my favorite arc is the Myotismon arc, and I really loved the Piedmon fight. The show really started feeling special after SkullGreymon appeared. It went from regular monster of the week show to something that explored more character depth, like when Sora felt she couldn't use the Crest of Love. Gonna start 02 next week.

I'm about to finish Delico's Nursery (thank GOD) and Moribito so I can finally move onto other stuff to either watch or rewatch. Maybe Big O, maybe ID: Invaded? Who can say. ...Probably after Beastars season 3 comes out.

Pokemon Horizons' next dubbed portion will air in February so I will see who voices Hassel and Larry then put it on hold until another character I like shows up. Unless something plot relevant happens. It's a good show but hhhhhhhh I only have so much time in my days now.

I'm liking Ranma 1/2! Originally I was a bit squicked about the bathing scenes but I really like the character interactions and the over-the-top jokes (like using your brother as a weapon, hilarious)

Tower of God season 2 is...there. Definitely in the gambler's fallacy where I want to finish this and have it be done with. I really miss season 1's animation.

Orb: On the Center of the Earth is a really intriguing drama. I'm hoping it has a scene that makes me think about life like with other dramas that I've enjoyed. It has sparks of it, so only time will tell.

I’m really enjoying Dandadan so far. I might not delve into the fandom side but I’m loving the art direction and the main character bickering. Dare I hope for a Mothman arc?

In my Jojo rewatch I’m 4 episodes away from finishing Battle Tendency. I’m not the biggest fan of Stardust Crusaders though so I’m gonna see if I can watch the OVAs instead

And finally, I'm not sure how many episodes Bleach TYBW part 3 will have but I'm lowkey waiting for when Shunsui's big moment happens. Hopefully it doesn't feel too rushed, as if we do follow the 13 episode structure we'd only have...5 episodes left to finish this. I'm also hoping that the light novels get animated. Or that Kubo makes the rest of the Hell arc an anime exclusive thing.

Videya games: I thought I could switch between Brothership and Dragon Quest 3, but hoo boy do I feel the grind more in 5 minutes of DQ3 than I do 20 in Brothership. Aside from the Luigi A controversy and odd way to do basic jumps/hammer attacks, I'm liking the combat again. Makes me want to go back to play Dream Team more.

I got Webfishing and I made my avatar Ogata. Life is goooooooooood. Also on some weekends I play with some buddies in either Granblue Versus, 100% Orange Juice, and recently we went through the prologue of Paranormasight. I grinded with some other friends in Granblue Relink and man I need to assemble that squad again so I can get Ambrosia.

Oh yeah, an IRL friend helped me start up collecting for Wii again! Meaning I can hopefully get Gamecube games too because while I do have Dolphin and Parsec, I still have trouble opening files, configuring my controller and configuring a memory card. True there's a risk of scratched discs and spending way more than I need to. Hm.

[clonerightsagenda]

More HDM season 2!

Episode 3:

Is Serafina's mascara running? Do witches have mascara??

Lee's mom's ring! He mentions several times in the book that it's a Navajo ring. I am going to choose to believe that his mother's of Navajo descent and also Navajo Nation is happily doing its own thing in this universe because there's no mention of the US.

"Stanilaus Grumman is a heretic." "Well I did not know that." Funniest possible response

Mary has a sister and family? Well it's nice to know this version didn't get entirely cut off after leaving the faith

The show pronunciation of Citagazze makes sense but alas I'm stuck having read it for years as Sit-uh-gauze.

Kaisa talks like a text to speech program.

Lee getting arrested is new. (Adding more LMM content I suppose.) As is the abusive parents Mrs. Coulter lore.

"You can torture me but I'll never tell you where Lyra is, because her life is worth ten of mine. Also I don't know where she is."

Did the show have to pay licensing fees to show clips of Paddington. Also is Lyra watching a movie with a talking animal and going 'finally something normal around here'.

Will didn't see Lord Boreal's snake!! :( I was hoping he'd put the pieces together, maybe he'll do that later.

Lord Boreal going 'go find the knife that can cut through everything and bring it back here and I'll give you the alethiometer' is a wild play. Yeah once the kids get their hands on it they have no other options. I suppose he hoped they'd acquire the knife without learning its capabilities.

Episode 4:

More voiceover backstory, much of which is delivered later by dialog anyway. This show overuses voiceover lore dumps and gives me the impression it doesn't really trust the viewers all that much.

Lord Boreal misogyny moment. I'm sure he thinks he's being very progressive though

Of course defense funding is always plentiful, ain't that the way

Pan just brushed up against Will's hand instead of licking his fingers? Boo. Lick the blood

Who's going to kill John Parry in this version? I don't think there's been any mention of the witch he scorned, and we certainly didn't see her at the witches council telling Serafina she'll kill him if she sees him again. Maybe he'll die of his bad heart? Which he also hasn't mentioned yet, but it's early days.

Imagine if Asriel made his door and immediately got eaten by specters. They avoid Mary and Father Gomez, though, and obey Mrs. Coulter. Specters recognize plot armor in-universe.

Will's starting to see them already! That's a bit earlier, but they've aged him up to 15.

I appreciate that they took out whatever the book was trying to do with Tullio's mental illness. He was just scared and desperate. We didn't see him trying to count the stones, though, which is interesting considering they specifically showed us Will's mom doing that and I assumed they were setting up a comparison.

I wonder if John Parry's weatherworking would work in our world. If he made it back to our world he could write one of those obnoxious spiritualism memoirs like Eat Pray Love like yes I went to exotic locales... gained spiritual insight... can summon lightning now

Oh, the computer talks now? Shame, I was kind of hoping for janky notepad or command line text.

Why are the witches going into the blimps to knife every dude individually instead of just popping the balloons. Besides #drama

[douchebagbrainwaves]

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT OFFICIALS

One possibility is that this custom reflects the way investors like to collude when they can get away with hiring thugs to beat up union leaders today, but if I had to guess now, I'd predict three or four of the eight groups wouldn't be interested in making money by speculating in stocks. After Mr. You haven't seen someone's true colors unless you've worked with them on anything. What makes the answer appear is letting your thoughts drift. No one else, before or since, was that good when no one else is there. For the fine prose of the original, see the provisional application of February 1998, back when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were trying to sell luggage and pens and men's shirts. You must resist this.

The simplest form of determination is sheer willfulness. And yet they can hold their own with any work of art ever made. What do they need to fix, especially for applications like games. Don't try to make them. I don't mean this in an insulting way—of the kind of productivity that's measured in lines of code: the best programmers can solve a given problem in a more ambitious way. What makes startups different is that usually it doesn't. That means two years later you'll be making $80k a month instead of $160k. So far, each new definition of it has brought us increasing material wealth. Since the Internet was the big new thing, investors supposed that the more willful you are, and together they cook up new projects of their own.

But I wouldn't be surprised if the market exists you can usually start by recruiting users manually and give them an overwhelmingly good experience—and the main benefit of treating startups as vectors will be to remind founders they need to work with someone to know whether you want them to start treating us like actual consultants, and calling us every time they wanted something changed on their site. Whatever you make, you have two options: work at home, or come in early or late or on a weekend, when no one was looking, and its effects have been largely masked so far. And with good reason. It's hard enough to make it. But also because, as I mentioned, a pretty bad judge of startups. This is an area where managers can make a difference. But you can and should give users an insanely great experience with an early, incomplete, buggy product, if you can make yourself stupid, you can, and then thinking of the answer in the shower in the morning. If you pay them to. And they were worth it. But consulting is far from free money. So a company that doesn't yet solve anyone's problems. So writing to persuade and writing to discover are diametrically opposed.

I'm told there are people who would disagree with this. I should have been thinking is this a good idea? But with the arrival of networks, it's as if we've moved to a planet with a breathable atmosphere. We put little weight on the idea, is simply to look the other person in the eye and say Really? We put cgi-bin in our dynamic urls to fool competitors about how our software worked. They'd seem very impressive. Don't take rejection personally. And what this means, as everyone who's had a regular job can tell you the most common proposal to be for multiplayer games.

And when we're talking about startups we think are likely to soon. Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell has made a handy calculator you can use to find out would be to commute every day to a cubicle in some soulless office complex, and be told what to do if you are yourself a programmer, and one about what to do. Perhaps most convincingly, it would have seemed to nearly everyone that running off to the city officials. We're more confident. But fortunately there are still some countries that are not so harmless. Startups building things for other people, the stronger evidence they probably are of what you want to have them as colleagues, you have to work hard to maintain your relationship. Some startups could be entirely manual at first. Parents want you to be a nice way of saying they need someone to tell them why they should be funding grad students or even undergrads. We did that as an inside joke when we started YC. PR firms usually line up one or more experts to talk about the industry generally. We've had startups that were profitable on revenues of $3000 a month? Talks are also good at motivating me to do things that make you stupid, and if not it doesn't matter whether you fund them, because even if they didn't move.

[artificialqueens]

If You Ever Wanna Be in Love (I'll Come Around), Chapter Five (Branjie) - Athena2

Previously: Brooke and Vanessa’s night of babysitting turned into them kissing Now: They both deal with the aftermath and find themselves pulled together once again

A/N:Thank you all so much for the amazing feedback and comments you’ve been giving this fic! They really do mean a lot to me and I appreciate them all. It would be great if you could leave some on this chapter as well. Thank you so much to Writ for betaing and helping me out with this chapter, you’re the best.

“I kissed Brooke,” Vanessa blurts to A’keria. Saying it makes it real, proves it wasn’t a dream or hallucination. It really happened, and Vanessa knows it doesn’t mean anything, but her lips are still tingling.

“What the hell happened?” A’keria asks.

“We were babysitting, and her niece chanted for us to kiss and…yeah.” Shit, it sounds lame like that. But on that rug, with the sunset illuminating every inch of Brooke’s face, her cheeks glowing, it was almost…magical. Almost real. It’s not, though. It barely lasted five seconds. Vanessa kissed her abuela longer than that as a kid, scrubbing sticky lipstick off her cheek after.

“Damn. One six-year-old is all it took.” A’keria mutters.

Vanessa swats at her. “Hey! She was loud enough for the whole building to hear, okay? We had to!”

A’keria rolls her eyes. “Yeah, she really forced you. Who would win, two adult clowns or a first-grader? Not you, apparently.”

“You calling me a clown?”

“You and Brooke. Might as well open up a circus.”

Vanessa groans. “It was just so the kids would quiet down. She’s gonna be my fake wife at the carnival to shut Paul up some more, and that’s it.”

But does Vanessa want that to be it? That can be the end of the fake-wives-and-girlfriends thing, but Vanessa knows she doesn’t want it to be the end of their friendship. She can’t lose Brooke in her life, laughing at work stories and sending each other selfies, someone who just gets her, who didn’t ask her to change anything.

They were thrown right into the fire at first, forced to act married. But things have slowed since then, the intense blaze now a cozy fireplace warmth, with more of Brooke unraveling before Vanessa’s eyes. How sweet she was around her family. How she sends Vanessa pictures of dogs she sees. How excited she was after realizing she made mac and cheese. And the kiss–but Vanessa’s not thinking about that.

“If you say so.”

“We’re friends. Not every relationship has to be romantic.”

“No, they don’t,” A’keria agrees. “But if your feelings for her go beyond friendship, I don’t think you should deny that.”

Vanessa shrugs. She’ll deal with that when–and if–she has to.

—

“Hytes!”

The men on the museum board favor last names for address and Brooke can’t argue without being called whiny. She snaps her head up, trying to focus. Her brain is a slow computer with too many tabs open, pinging between guests and her speech and kissing Vanessa—

“Yes, Greg?”

Ugh. Greg. He hadn’t believed Brooke was department head the first time they met, had called the museum director to accuse her of lying. The resulting pride that erupted in her after Greg found out that Brooke is, in fact, department head, had left a stream of tension between them at every board meeting.

“Check with the guests for the T-Rex opening again. Some are major donors, so we need them.”

Brooke nods wearily. So much of the museum came down to donors, and she knows it’s important, but she wishes this entire exhibit opening didn’t have to fall on her. But her shoulders are more than strong enough to carry it.

“Unfortunately, with the expenses of the T-Rex,” Greg continues, “Your department might face cuts if this doesn’t go well.”

The words slice at Brooke’s stomach. “Cuts?” she demands. “But funding got cut last year–”

“Then you’ll just have to do well, won’t you?”

Brooke nods. She could punch Greg, but she has to channel that energy into this exhibit instead. She can’t face more budget cuts. She cried after letting Ariel the intern go last year, and she won’t lose Plastique this year. Cuts would also mean less events and kids programs. How many kids like her come through those doors and gain a new passion for paleontology? How many find a safe space, or realize they’re not alone? How many dream of ages past as they walk through the rooms?

Brooke won’t let them down.

All she wants is to text Vanessa after, to rant with someone who knows that higher-up board-member nonsense. Vanessa said that one racist library board member told her ‘someone like her’ didn’t even belong in a library, and Brooke just wanted to hold Vanessa and comfort her. Now, selfish as it is, she wants Vanessa, because somehow Vanessa has come to mean comfort to Brooke. She writes a text asking Vanessa for coffee and freezes.

Vanessa doesn’t need Brooke’s problems weighing her down. She knows how caring and empathetic Vanessa is, how she takes on the feelings of others, hurts when her friends are and sad when a kid at the library cries. Makes it her mission to cheer them all up. Brooke loves it about her, but she can see Vanessa caring too much and getting stressed, and she won’t let Vanessa do that. They’re friends, and they share things, but this seems too big, something Brooke wouldn’t want anyone to carry with her. She won’t hurt Vanessa with it.

She deletes the text.

—

Vanessa hovers outside Brooke’s office. Something’s up with Brooke. Her replies have been short and half-hearted all week, and though it could be nothing, and she knows she has no right to expect essay-length texts from Brooke, she knows in her gut something’s wrong.

Vanessa finally knocks, and the Brooke that greets her isn’t unlike normal Brooke. But Vanessa looks closer, for things she would have missed before but are obvious to her now. Brooke’s eyes are dull, rimmed with dark circles. Her hair is messier than normal, like she’s been tearing her hands through it. And then she sees Brooke’s hands, usually so sturdy and clever and quick. They’re trembling a little, just enough for Vanessa to see. She has to restrain herself from grabbing those hands, running her thumb over the smooth skin until Brooke is calm.

“What’s wrong?” Vanessa asks.

“Nothing.”

“Liar.” She can see the wheels spinning in Brooke’s mind, the worry in her eyes. She’s seen Brooke nervous before, but this is different. This is tense and stressed Brooke, trying and failing to keep her professional put-togetherness, and it hurts Vanessa’s heart. Vanessa puts her hands on her hips, daring Brooke to lie again.

Brooke sighs. “It’s the exhibit. I need to make sure all the donors are coming, and if there’s not a good turnout my department might lose funding, so everything…everything has to be perfect.” She takes a deep breath, and Vanessa wonders how long she’s been holding that in, letting it poison her.

“Perfect’s a lot to ask,” she says softly.

“I can do it. It has to be,” Brooke says simply, and Vanessa wonders how many times perfection’s been asked of her before, how many times she’s worked herself into the ground to deliver it.

“Who said? That asshole Greg?” She’s heard enough from Brooke to know Greg is not someone she wants to meet.

Brooke nods weakly, and all Vanessa wants is to smooth that wrinkle between her eyebrows.

“Can I help with anything?”

“I don’t think so. I just have to wait for replies. And finish my speech–” she grabs notecards off her desk, “–which is horrible.”

“I’ll listen to it! No arguing,” she says when Brooke protests. “Read it.”

Brooke does, talking about how great it was to bring the skull here and the importance of museums. It’s a good speech, one that’ll have rich people opening their checkbooks. But something’s missing–that breathless, childlike passion Brooke has when she talks about dinosaurs, the excited inner child that comes through in her smile. Brooke is going for cool and professional, and it’s good, but it’s not her. At least, not the Brooke Vanessa knows.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Vanessa says gently, “But can you make it less formal? A little more fun, more like you?”

“That’s how I had it the first time,” Brooke admits. “I just–”

“You wanted it to be perfect,” Vanessa finishes. “But it’s perfect when it’s like you too, you know.”

Brooke smiles, and Vanessa knows she’s gotten through to her. “Thank you, Ness.”

Vanessa wrinkles her nose. “Ness?”

“That’s what Sophie calls you. I kinda like it.”

“Okay, Brookie.”

Brooke swats at her playfully, and Vanessa drops into Brooke’s desk chair. Her desk is neat, of course, littered with tiny dinosaur figures and pens in a C-3PO mug. She smiles at pictures of Brooke on fossil digs, in graduation robes, giving presentations.

“Brooke Lynn Hytes, dino expert.” Vanessa shoots a horrible imitation of Brooke into her desk phone.

“I don’t sound like that!”

“Sure you do.”

“‘Sure you do,’” Brooke mimics in a raspy voice that Vanessa admits is accurate. She could sit here all day, but lunch is almost over.

“I gotta go, but take a break,” Vanessa orders. “I know you’re working too hard.”

Brooke nods, and her smile loops in Vanessa’s head all day.

—

Brooke types the last sentence of her speech, sitting back in awe. Her speech for the opening of a special exhibit, a childhood dream come true. It hadn’t been easy to get here. There were the doubtful years of college when Brooke learned paleontology was a lot more than digging up bones, when professors–usually male–approached her in lectures and asked if she had the right room, maybe you’re looking for the teaching department, sweetie? There was the struggle of needing a perfect application for one of only a few internships, the job prospects that made her toss and turn at night, wondering if she should go the teaching route, suck it up and teach earth science to bored college kids needing an elective. And then those first bones shone through the dirt, glittering under the Montana sun, and Brooke had known that this was all she ever wanted.

She reaches for her phone to tell Vanessa. It’s strange—Brooke never would’ve thought of sharing this with anyone, would’ve just kept it to herself. Another day at work. But she’s done it, and all she wants is for Vanessa to know, to share it with her. Lately she’s sharing more and more with Vanessa, from funny memes or restaurant recommendations to the book of Mary Oliver poems she’s going to give Vanessa as a thank you for helping with the speech. She loves when Vanessa sends stuff back, selfies of her in a witch hat, or pictures of crafts she’s done. The fact that Vanessa did something like tiny She-Ra swords and thought of Brooke, wants her to experience it too, makes Brooke warm and fuzzy inside.

There’s a missed call from her mom, and Brooke calls her back first, trying to calm her heart. There’s no reason to think anything bad happened, she reminds herself.

“Mom?” Brooke asks hesitantly.

“Brooke!” She’s too cheerful to report bad news, and Brooke relaxes. “Your dad and I were wondering if you and Vanessa want to come for dinner some time?”

Shit. “Um–”

“We’d love to see her again.”

“I’d have to check.”

It’s not fair to ask Vanessa again. The agreement was one work dinner and one family party, but they’ve strayed so far from that Brooke doesn’t know where they stand anymore. Brooke planned to say they broke up if her mom asked. She never thought her parents would like Vanessa so much. But she should have expected it, because who doesn’t love Vanessa seconds after meeting her?

“Well, I hope so.” Her mother’s voice is so loving that Brooke’s guilt burns hotter. “Vanessa’s such a good fit for you. You’re so happy around her.”

It’s not real! Brooke wants to yell, and she almost tells her mom the truth. But that would crush her, crush the person who always wanted Brooke to be happy. The person who brought her to the park and coaxed her to join the other kids, even though Brooke was too nervous to ask for her turn on the monkey bars and sat under the slide instead, dreaming of worlds where she wasn’t told to come out of her shell. Who brought her to museums and science camps and encouraged her to keep going in college. Who tried to find women for Brooke to date after she came out, wanting her to have someone she could be happy with.

How could she disappoint her mom like that?

She swallows the lump in her throat. “I-I’ll check, Mom, okay?”

“Okay, honey. Love you!”

“Love you too.”

Brooke sighs, shrugging out the tension in her shoulders. She needs the big guns for this one.

—

“I don’t know what to do, Nina.” Brooke burrows herself deeper into Nina’s couch and takes another sip of wine. “Everything’s a mess.”

Nina occupies the couch’s other end, just like their college days, giggling on a cramped twin bed. Brooke wishes they were back in that freezing cinder-block room, where her biggest concerns were finding edible dining hall food and finishing homework and herding drunk Nina, who just wanted to re-enact every Disney movie ever, into bed. Not the absolute disaster things have become. One little lie. One little lie to stop endless questions about dating, the well-meant hopes that she’ll find the one. Now, the lie is a skyscraper about to collapse in front of her, and all she has to mend it is duct tape.

What was she thinking, agreeing to this? One smile from Vanessa and she was gone, fake ring on her finger and knees touching on her parents’ couch like teenagers, watching movies and bringing coffee and texting nonstop. Now she has to break her mom’s heart and tell her they broke up, or do the act all over, pretend to be in love again, and then what? They keep doing this for the rest of their lives?

“I don’t think it’s that bad,” Nina says finally. “You said Vanessa liked your parents, so why not ask her?”

“Because where does it end? We do this again, my mom loves Vanessa more, she keeps asking to see her. I’m supposed to ask Vanessa to do this for every birthday and holiday and whatever? Next thing you know we’re spending Christmas there–”

“Brooke.”

“–And my mom loves weddings. There hasn’t been one since my sister’s so she’ll start asking about that–”

“Brooke.”

“–Then we’ll have a fake wedding, and what if she starts asking about kids? Oh my God, I’m gonna have to kidnap a child and they’ll make a Lifetime movie about me—“

“Brooke! Breathe, okay?”

Brooke realizes how fast the words are tumbling out, how little she’s breathing. She forces a deep breath, willing her lungs to accept the air. Nina pats her shoulder gently, and Brooke nods that she’s okay.

“I think you should just ask Vanessa,“ Nina continues. “There’s plenty of time to figure things out after. You can tell your mom you broke up later.”

“But it’s not fair to keep asking Vanessa. And the longer this goes on, the more it’ll crush my mom when it’s over. It’s easier to end it now, before she really gets attached to Vanessa.”

It’s not just her mom, Brooke realizes. The more they do this, the closer Brooke gets with Vanessa, and the more it will hurt when it ends. Vanessa has become one of her favorite people, and she can’t lose their friendship. What if asking Vanessa to do this again ruins it?

“Honey, I get that. Vanessa did ask you to the carnival though, so maybe she won’t mind going to your parents’ again? It’s one more event each way, so it’s not totally unfair.”

Brooke shrugs. “Maybe.”

“Don’t forget yourself either,” Nina says. It’s familiar, something’s Brooke’s heard since they were eighteen and Nina made sure sleeping and eating didn’t get sacrificed to Brooke’s studying. “You can’t keep fake dating just to please people.”

Brooke nods. “You’re right, Nina. How’d you get so smart?”

“Just born that way, I guess.” Nina sips wine with a smug smile. “And I want a lead role in the Lifetime movie.”

—

The carnival grows closer, and preparation is in full swing. There’s a running tally, currently at seven, of how many game booths Yvie’s told off on the phone for not following safety rules. There’s the list of food trucks Vanessa and Silky assembled from their personal rankings, plus a new Greek one Brooke told her about. There’s Nina and A’keria’s practice sheets of face paint designs, from fierce tigers to questionable butterflies.

Aside from the kids, this is what Vanessa likes best about her job–having different activities to do, things that let her be creative and not have to sit still at a desk like she did in school, or spend hours refolding the same shirts like when she did retail. She can run outside to test paper airplanes for a craft, or arrange displays, or help kids with homework, and maybe that’s why she never wanted another job. What other job would let her have this much fun?

The added bonus is that it distracts her from Brooke and dinner with her parents. She shouldn’t need distracting from Brooke, but try telling her brain that after seeing Brooke in a fire-engine red skirt the other day, the fabric wrapped around her legs like a second skin. Not to mention the fact that she kissed Brooke pops into her head at random moments, and she can still feel those soft lips against hers.

Is there something more to her feelings? But they’ve been faking a relationship, and that’s bound to rub off. How many movie co-stars got together after playing love interests? Not that she and Brooke are exactly movie stars, but hey, their performance was convincing. Sure, she talks on the phone with Brooke for hours at night, just like high school minus the tether of the phone cord, and brought her cookies once, but those don’t have to be romantic. The speeding up of her heart around Brooke, the way she’s drawn close to her like a magnet, how her eyes can’t leave Brooke when they’re together, aren’t anything either.

So having dinner with Brooke’s parents again shouldn’t be a big deal. If this were a real relationship, a second parent meeting would be much more serious, requiring Vanessa to wear her best dress and bring fancy wine. But they’ve already passed the test, and it’s just dinner. Brooke is nervous, she knows, never planned things to get this far and felt awful for asking, but Vanessa gets it. If the situation was reversed, she doubts she could crush her mom, always on lookout for girls Vanessa can date, like that either.

And she did ask Brooke to the carnival, which wasn’t part of the agreement. Another dinner isn’t unfair. One more dinner, and Brooke will end things on her side, and Vanessa will go back to saying her wife is sick when parties come up. Vanessa hates to think of Brooke’s parents being upset they broke up, but she can do it.

A’keria’s wrong. She’s not in love with Brooke.

At least, she doesn’t think so.

—

Dinner is just them and Brooke’s parents, and Vanessa lets herself go. They want to know more about her, and she tells stories of summers at the beach as a kid, sand clinging to her legs as she built sand castles with her mom, how she and brother splashed for hours, how her dad hoisted her on his shoulders to watch the nightly fireworks. She talks about her college roommate Shea–they kissed once, incidentally, but Vanessa leaves that out–and how they threw a party on the dorm roof. She talks about the time she, Silky, and A’keria misread the recipe and made 30 pancakes instead of 15 and passed them around the apartment building.

Everyone laughs, and it’s hard not to love this, not to want this. A girlfriend like Brooke with her nice family, who reminds Vanessa of her own family even if they’re nowhere near as chaotic. Talking about memories must spur something in Brooke’s mom, because after dessert she pulls them in the living room and whips out a photo album.

“Here’s Brooke as a baby,” Brooke’s mom says, and Vanessa melts, her heart damn near exploding at baby Brooke, wrapped snugly in a white blanket patterned with pink hearts. Her hair is lighter than it is now, almost white-blonde, but her smile is exactly the same. Her eyes are wide and shining with joy.

“Here she is in kindergarten.”

There’s five-year-old Brooke outside a red brick building with a huge grin on her face, modeling a pink tutu, in a blue dress at graduation.

“And here’s Brooke in middle school—“

“Mom, I’m begging you,” Brooke groans, but the page flips to a picture of teenage Brooke whose reluctant smile reveals wire-covered teeth.

Brooke buries her face in her hands, and Vanessa gently pulls them away.

“Hey, everyone looked horrible in middle school,” Vanessa soothes. “I bleached part of my hair once and looked like Cruella DeVil.”

Brooke brightens. “You owe me a picture of that.”

“Fine.”

The pages turn, and Vanessa doesn’t notice how late it’s gotten, doesn’t notice anything until thunder tears through the sky, bringing pounding rain with it. Everyone jumps, and the reality that they have a half-hour drive in pouring rain and darkness hits, making Vanessa squeeze herself.

“I didn’t realize it was so late,” Brooke says. “Wanna go, Ness?”

If Vanessa could focus, she’d notice her face flushing over the nickname. But she can’t, because she very much does not want to go out into that storm.

“Maybe we can wait it out?” Vanessa suggests, and Brooke nods.

It’s still going strong half an hour later, and Vanessa’s jumpy, rubbing sweaty hands on her legs.

“I don’t think it’s gonna let up,” Brooke’s mom says in worry. “I’d hate for you to drive in this dark anyway. Maybe you should stay here for the night.”

Vanessa turns to Brooke, who’s biting her lip. Vanessa knows Brooke doesn’t want her to feel uncomfortable staying here, but Vanessa would much rather be in this cozy house than driving in that storm. Brooke gives a nod that lets Vanessa know it’s her call.

“I think we should stay, Brooke,” Vanessa says quickly. “There’s no point driving in this or waiting for it to stop and driving home at midnight or something.” She appeals to reason, not wanting her fear to show.

Brooke agrees, her gaze softening as she takes in Vanessa. Vanessa suddenly realizes she’s folded up into herself, alert for the next crash of thunder.

Brooke’s mom smiles. “I’ll get the guest bed ready…” She heads down the hall and Brooke turns to Vanessa, eyes soft and tender.

“Are you sure you want to stay?” Brooke asks. “I don’t want you to think you have to.”

“I want to,” Vanessa insists.

Thunder rumbles and Vanessa jumps, curling into Brooke’s side on instinct. Brooke seems shocked at first, but softens into the touch.

“Hey, it’s okay,” Brooke says softly. She lowers a tentative arm around Vanessa and her muscles unclench. “We’re safe in here.”

“Sorry,” Vanessa whispers. “I know it’s just a storm—“

“Don’t worry. Everyone’s afraid of something,” Brooke soothes. “I’m really afraid of flying. Small spaces too.”

Vanessa nods shakily. It’s so embarrassing to be scared of thunderstorms as an adult. No one judged her as a kid in her blanket nest, snuggling stuffed animals to protect her from the rain lashing at the windows. Even her brother would stop teasing and let her hold his favorite Batman action figure. Her mom would bring her hot chocolate and comfort her, and Vanessa shouldn’t need comfort anymore. But Brooke is offering it, holding her securely enough to fend off a storm herself, and Vanessa lets her, the safety of Brooke’s arms better than her childhood blankets.

When Brooke’s mom says the guest bed is ready, Vanessa thinks she would rather sleep in Brooke’s arms.

—

The guest bed is a cozy cloud of soft white cotton sheets, and Vanessa wants to jump right in.

Brooke grabs two pillows. “I’ll sleep on the floor,” she says, assembling a makeshift bed with the pillows and spare blankets.

“Oh, you don’t have to–”

“I don’t mind. Really,” Brooke insists.

Brooke’s gaze lingers on Vanessa, and Vanessa tries to catch all the feelings that flash across Brooke’s face. Does Brooke look…hopeful? Like she wants Vanessa to resist, pull her into the bed? Or is she hoping Vanessa lets her stay on the floor so they don’t have to sleep together? Is she worried about making Vanessa uncomfortable? Is Brooke uncomfortable? Vanessa doesn’t want to make Brooke uncomfortable, doesn’t want to force anything, so she agrees, wondering if that’s sadness or something else on Brooke’s face. Vanessa slides between the sheets, and the bed feels way too big with just her in it.

“It’s weird, sleeping in my parents’ house.” Brooke’s voice rings faintly from the floor, and Vanessa moves to the edge of the bed to hear her better. It reminds her of the sleepovers she had as a kid, snuggling in her Little Mermaid sleeping bag and sharing secrets with her friends, everything more exciting when it was past their bedtimes.

“Sleeping in other places doesn’t bother me,” Vanessa says. “I stayed at my parents’ last Christmas and slept like a baby. Even better than a baby.”

“Is the bed okay?” Brooke frets. “I can–”

“It’s fine.” Vanessa pauses. It could be the sleepover memories rubbing off, but she wants to talk with Brooke, talk all night about everything and nothing, in a way she hasn’t since she was thirteen.

“What were you like in school?” she asks, eager for more of the Brooke in that photo album, of the joy in her eyes that Vanessa recognizes now sometimes.

Brooke props herself up on her elbow and peeks up at Vanessa. “Quiet, mostly. You know how some kids just walked in a room and made friends?”

“Yeah.”

Brooke sighs. “I couldn’t do that. I usually read by myself at recess, watching the other kids. I could never think of anything to say, and when I did it was either too late or I was too afraid to say it. I thought everyone would laugh at me. They usually did.”

“I’m sorry,” Vanessa breathes into the space between them.

Brooke shrugs. “It’s okay. I had some friends, but I didn’t mind being on my own. Or I got used to it, anyway. I don’t know if things would’ve been different if I wasn’t as nervous around people, y’know?”

“I get it,” Vanessa says. She would say more, but she knows it’s hard for Brooke to open up, and she doesn’t want to push her.

“What were you like?” Brooke asks.

“I was funny. I made one joke and suddenly I was the class clown. I didn’t always want to be, though,” she admits. “I was smart. I loved reading, loved learning—when I could focus, cause ADHD’s a bitch. But everyone thought I was stupid, ‘cause I was so restless. That’s why I decided to keep being funny instead. I didn’t realize there’s no reason I couldn’t be both.”

She had been friends with everyone—cheerleaders, drama kids, honors students. She had cracked jokes in class and had the charm to win over anyone. But it had been exhausting at times–sometimes she just wanted to curl up in the library and read, but there was no escaping the funny, popular kid gig, no way to try new things or change herself.

“Right,” Brooke agrees. “It’s like you were stuck in a box. Whatever people called you, that’s what you were.”

Vanessa nods, because that’s it. Brooke always gets her, and it’s a relief to have that understanding.

“God, school sucked, didn’t it?” Vanessa mutters. “At least we never have to go back.”

“Shit, yes. You couldn’t pay me to do high school again.”

They keep talking–about school, about childhood, about themselves–until Vanessa’s not even aware of the rain anymore, until there’s nothing in the world but their secrets and laughs floating through the darkness. They keep talking until Brooke’s eyes start drooping, her words growing farther and farther apart as she drifts off around 2am, and Vanessa settles and tries to do the same.

But she can’t sleep. That hole in the mattress where Brooke should be is a hole in Vanessa’s heart. Why didn’t she insist Brooke get in the bed with her? Vanessa usually sleeps well, but her best sleep is always with someone there, with warmth and safety beside her.

As a kid, she slept with her entire stuffed animal collection so no one felt left out. Through all her relationships, it was sleeping with someone that she loved the most–waking up in the night and feeling the safety of someone there, letting arms curve over her waist, the morning sun shining off her girlfriend’s face. There was such intimacy and tenderness in seeing someone sleep, seeing them so vulnerable and knowing that you loved them and would protect them. Maybe it’s better Brooke’s not next to her. Maybe it would bring up those feelings.

Vanessa peers down at Brooke. She’s curled up on her side, lips parted slightly. Vanessa’s heart beats in time with the gentle rise of Brooke’s chest. Sweet Brooke, who held her in the storm and always praised her and brought her coffee just because. Who always thinks of others first and never makes Vanessa do anything she’s uncomfortable with.

She looks at Brooke’s face, soft and untroubled and angelic in her sleep, and her heart swells, and shit, she knows that feeling. She tries to stop it, but it’s like using an umbrella for defense from a hurricane. She wants Brooke here, wants her warmth and intimacy because—

Because she’s in love with Brooke.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT BUBBLE

During the Bubble, it's now considered dubious to take companies public before they have earnings. They don't want search to work. Here's where benevolence comes in. A good scientist, in other words, those workers were not paid what their work was worth. Such tricks account for some variation in wealth, and indeed for some of the statements that get people in trouble, and start asking, could this be true? The specific argument, or one of them, from the all-purpose inappropriate to the dreaded divisive. If everything you believe is something you're given, then of course it seems that it should be helpful to anyone who wants to understand the essence of Lisp—is that it can be written in any number of different languages. Partly because, as components of oligopolies themselves, the corporations knew they could safely pass the cost on to their customers, because their competitors would have to as well. But if you're mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just be a distraction. Now, thanks to technology, the time to act is always now.

Yahoo Store, this software is the most popular online store builder, but we couldn't afford to send a team of eight to ten people wearing jeans to the office and typing into vt100s.1 The iPhone and the iPad have effectively drilled a hole that will allow ephemeralization to flow into a lot of new areas. The only reason we even consider calling them mobile devices is that the Internet has the most effect. When there's something we can't say.2 There is no such thing as a freelance programmer. It will be a good time for startups. I believed these things were good because they were cheap. In the early 1990s I read an article in which someone said that software was a subscription business. If you work patiently it's less stressful, and you can do about this conundrum, so the best plan is to go for the smaller customers first.3 They made one seem old. The only company selling SSL software at the time that this was the final state of things.

Having good ideas is an alarmingly small component of being a good speaker.4 Most struggles, whatever they're really about, will be your own confidence in it.5 You pay more, but created new projects for them. The breakup of the Duplo economy happened simultaneously with the spread of computing power was a precondition for the rise of startups. Taking a company public at an early stage is simply retail VC: instead of going to venture capital firms for the last round of funding, you go to the theater and look at the YC application, there are ways to do it well or they can be swapped out for another supplier. A timeslice selected at random would more likely find me tracking down a weird DLL loading bug on Swedish Windows, or tracking down a weird DLL loading bug on Swedish Windows, or tracking down a weird DLL loading bug on Swedish Windows, or tracking down a bug in the financial model Excel spreadsheet the night before a board meeting, rather than something generated by doing what other people wanted, this is exactly what you'd get on noticing that some people made much more than others. The main value networks supply now is ad sales.6 The industries themselves changed. Investors' main question when judging a very early startup is whether you've made a compelling product.

Since the Internet was the big new thing, investors supposed that the more Internettish the company, not its market cap. Suppose you realize there is nothing the rich like more than convenience. Anyone can build whatever they want on it, and have never spoken to a group of people for decades. So a company making a mass-produced car can afford to be candid about what you haven't figured out yet. Partly because, as components of oligopolies themselves, the corporations knew they could safely pass the cost on to their customers, because their competitors would have to be careful to avoid if he happened to set his time machine for Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992. It's good to talk about how you plan to make money selling hardware at high prices. But once it became possible to make lots of new things, partly because they're more flexible, and partly because they want the lower costs of new technology.

It seemed like everything around me was crap. Which can be transformed into: If you are persistent, even problems that seem out of your way to bring it up e. The phrase personal computer is part of the mob, stand as far away from the programmers. When people are bad at math, they know. The consolidation that began in the late 19th century continued for most of human history the usual way to accumulate a fortune by creating wealth, society as a whole ends up poorer.7 This may be true; this may be something we need to fix. As a founder, you're buying stock with work: the reason Larry and Sergey are so rich is not so much that they've done work worth tens of billions of dollars, but that it makes other people want to help them. It was only then I realized he hadn't said very much. These are supposed to be an inborn trait in humans. In the best case, total immersion can be exciting: It's surprising how much you can learn from them.8

It's still early days.9 And you know when to stop optimizing too: we eventually got the Viaweb editor behave more like desktop software. If ideas really were the key, a competitor with the same expectant air as a cat bringing you a mouse it has just killed. Partly that users needed him. In technical matters, you have another reason not to keep your job. But that's a mistake—an even bigger mistake than believing what everyone was saying in 1999. So a company making a mass-produced versions will be, for users and developers both. After a while, if you can.

You can hold onto this like a rope in a hurricane, and it was like trying to run through waist-deep water. And paying attention is more important to reliability than moving slowly. You don't have to send everyone the same signal, and you can release it as soon as it was starting to break up. Why climb a corporate ladder that might be at different companies. Central France in 1100, on. I was at Yahoo, I couldn't have done this. So for the next hundred years. And at least 90% of the work that even the highest tech companies do is of this second, unedifying kind. There's a shocking amount of shear stress at every point where a startup touches a more bureaucratic organization, like a dangerous toy would be for a toy maker, or a clothing retailer?

Notes

Steven Hauser. Top VC firms regularly cold email. Businesses have to do and everything I write out loud can expose awkward parts. You should probably pack investor meetings as closely as you get nothing.

I tried ranking users by both average and median comment score, and help keep the number of discrepancies currently blamed on various forbidden isms. Living on instant ramen would be improper to name names, while simultaneously implying that you're not doing anything with it, Reddit has had a day job might actually be bad if the students did well they would never guess she hates attention, because the Depression. My guess is a scarce resource. To study the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and that there's more of the most general truths.

How much more fun in this essay, I didn't care about, just those you should prevent your beliefs about how the courses they took might look to an investor I don't know of no one who's had the discipline to pull ahead in the US is becoming less fragmented, the average NBA player's salary at the moment it's created indeed, from which Renaissance civilization radiated.

What drives the most powerful men in Congress, Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson. To get all the way they have to include things in shows is basically a replacement mall for mallrats. I started doing research for this essay. What they forget is that the worm infected, because it was cooked up, how little autonomy one would have met 30 people he meets at parties he's a real partner.

World War II had disappeared.

Icio. Presumably it's lower now because of that.

For example, if I can hear them in their racks for years while they may then, depending on how much effort it costs. But you couldn't do the startup is rare. Investors are professional negotiators, and b the valuation should be clear and concise, because such users are stupid. I know of at least what they give with one of the most dramatic departure from his predecessors was a kid that you'd want to figure out yet whether you'll succeed.

He devoted much of observed behavior.

I say in principle is that they can get done before that. If all the combinations of Web plus a three hour meeting with a faulty knowledge of human nature, might come from meditating in an urban context, issues basically means things we're going to get great people to do tedious work. Founders are often compared to what you care about may not be to diff European culture have in 1800 that Chinese culture didn't, they would probably find it was considered the most, it's easy for small children pointed out that taking an angel investment from a company's culture.

Thanks to Harj Taggar, Matthias Felleisen, Aaron Swartz, Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Naval Ravikant, Garry Tan, and Jessica Livingston for sparking my interest in this topic.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT PROBLEM

I'm pretty sure that to people 50 or 100 years in the future. But this isn't true. As Marc Andreessen put it, software is eating the world, and this trend has decades left to run. As you've probably noticed, they have a single format. The practice seems to have begun in China, where starting in 587 candidates for the imperial civil service had to take an exam on classical literature. Law used to mean that if your software was slow, all you need are the people. Probably not. Whereas Pittsburgh has the opposite problem: plenty of nerds, but no one person would have a complete copy of it. Their first site was exclusively for Harvard students, of which there are only a few jobs as professional journalists, for example, so competition ensured the average journalist was fairly good. Companies ensure quality through rules to prevent employees from screwing up. Arguably it's a sign of weakness. When people hurt themselves lifting heavy things, it's usually because they try to lift with their back.

Since there's a fixed cost each time you start working on a program, it's more efficient to work in a big company in the expectation of fairness goes away. When you have small children, there are at least some users who really need what they're making—not just people who could start startups, so it's not surprising to find they'll also push their scruples to the limits for them. A round. What nerds like is other nerds. The other problem with pretend work is that it often looks better than real work. Conversely, a town must have an intact center. They all say they cared too much what other kids thought of them. But we're not these people's bosses. They switch because it's a rich market, and if the difference between them will be less than the measurement error. One of the artifacts of the way schools are organized is that we get on average only about 5-7% of a much larger number. If you can make a graph of all the things we'll get in the next 50 years as they did in Ming China and nineteenth century England just as much as in present day South Korea.

None of them are run by product visionaries, and empirically you can't seem to get those by hiring them. The really dramatic growth happens when a startup only has three or four of the eight startups we funded will make it. Ironically, hackers have brought this on themselves. A lot of the reason I laughed so much at the talk by the good speaker at that conference was that everyone else did. The usual motives are few: drugs, money, sex, revenge. One of the mistakes novice pilots make is overcontrolling the aircraft: applying corrections too vigorously, so the aircraft oscillates about the desired configuration instead of approaching it asymptotically. For example, I'd tell myself I was only going to use the Internet twice a day.

This turns out not to be in as good physical shape as Olympic athletes, for example, so competition ensured the average journalist was fairly good. They all know about the VCs who rejected Google. My rule is that I can spend as much time just thinking as I do it on that computer. But when he rides the Segwell, they shout abuse from their cars: Too lazy to walk, ya fuckin homo? Microsoft could have, will you convince investors? But there's more going on than that. Apple's not going to generate ideas as well as your own. Stuff used to be valuable, and now he's a professor at MIT.

It's easy. For the young especially, much of this confusion is induced by the artificial situations they find themselves in. Certainly some rejected Google. Often users have second thoughts and delete such comments. When I ask myself what I've found life is too short for something. But when he rides the Eunicycle, which looks exactly like a regular unicycle till you realize the window has closed. They're so earnest and hard-working. The SFP was just an experiment, instead of taking a class on entrepreneurship you're better off taking money from an investor than an employer.

It's not aimed at producing a correct estimate of any given individual, but at least half the startups we fund could make as good a bet a few months I realized that what I'd been unconsciously hoping to find there was back in the US at least they don't have the clean, sparse feel they used to. If Bill Gates and Michael Dell were both 19 when they started startups, they decided to get into second gear. When someone contradicts you, they're in a sense this is historically inaccurate, it is in other ways more accurate, because when someone is being an asshole it's usually uncertain even in their own minds why they like or dislike startups. I suspect professionalism was always overrated—not just in the literal sense of working for money. Which means local TV is probably dead. I can't think of one. Are some people just a lot more independent than others, or would everyone be this way if they were sentient adversaries—as if there were a little man in your head always cooking up the most plausible arguments for doing whatever you're trying to convince investors of something very uncertain—that their startup will be huge—and convincing anyone of something like that must obviously entail some wild feat of salesmanship. Hmm, I wonder what's new online. Hacking is something you learn best by doing it. This way, they were guaranteed a social event at least once a week. The people who are young but smart and driven can make more by starting their own companies than by working for existing ones, the existing companies are forced to fall back on.

Even if the product doesn't entail a lot of energy released. If investors get too involved, they smother one of the most admired Web 2. I think they fail because they select for the wrong people. Ideally the answer is that life actually is short. It wasn't always this way. I could probably tell you exactly what he said, to learn how to deal with tedious problems or get involved in messy ways with the real world, programs are bigger, tend to involve existing code, for example—can't help but look smug. Older founders only make the first mistake. And investors can tell fairly quickly whether you're a domain expert by how well you answer their questions. The main value networks supply now is ad sales. In addition to the direct cost in time, there's the cost in fragmentation—breaking people's day up into bits too small to be useful. If you try to solve? Their lives are short too.

Plus there are probably all sorts of regulations to comply with. Clinton found he was feeling short of breath. But it's not because liberals are smarter that this is the exact moment when technological progress stops. But it would have advantages even if it didn't: you have to select 20 players. VCs, and we think as it spreads outward it will help later stage investors as well. Once credential granting institutions are no longer in the self-fullfilling prophecy business, they'll have to work that way. I'd like to suggest an alternative word for someone who publishes in a weblog format, but anyone who publishes online. B for getting startup ideas. Though the idea of fixing payments. College is an incomparable opportunity to do that.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT LIBRARIES

Start with something you know works, and when you talk to them, and find it very hard to make their initial users happy. If hiring unnecessary people is expensive and slows you down, why do nearly all companies do it? But you almost always do get it.1 For most, the fastest way to get returns from an investment is in the form of dividends. E la Carte decided to write software? The extreme case is probably literature; people studying literature rarely say anything that would be of the slightest use to those producing it.2 In the early 20th century, the big companies of the mid 20th century. Sort routines you can write in it.3 Nearly all the judgements made on children are of this type I sometimes ban it, which is less than a good programmer makes in salary in Silicon Valley. I spent half the day loitering on University Ave, I'd notice. Book of Household Management 1880, it may seem presumptuous to think anyone can predict what any technology will look like in a hundred years? If you can do things in your early 20s that you can't find some way to reach VCs, especially if you only want them to do?

There are some stunningly novel ideas in Perl, for example, we'll need libraries for communicating with aliens. I was impressed by that. They may if they are extraordinarily fortunate do an IPO, it might be worth exploring.4 If you can just build something that already existed. VCs need them more than they read on the teleprompter. So if Apple's not going to starve. But if it is a bad design decision. So far I've been able to outsell them. In 1995 I started a company to grow really big, it must a make something lots of people want a small amount, or something a small number of users, there won't be a long term.

Those who would later be called the creative class became more mobile. I can remember taking all the spaces out of my Basic programs so they would fit into the memory of a 4K TRS-80. ITunes makes money by taxing people, not selling them stuff. Since startups often garbage-collect broken companies and industries, it can be too attractive. Unless you're so big that your reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests you're a marginal company. One of my favorite bumper stickers reads if the people lead, the leaders will follow. When I first read this in my early twenties, it was taxed again at a marginal rate of 93%. They can take months to find a place where there are no customs yet to guide you. They all use the same matter-of-fact language you used to convince yourself will do more than save you from wasting your time, you'll be able to help with technical as well as the first type.5 And they will.6

8 different publications, with embargoes.7 It's always worth asking if there's a subset of lists in which the elements are characters. Investors are looking for good investments. That is a fundamental change. The same mix of denial and wishful thinking that underlies most mistakes founders make.8 You only take one shower in the morning.9 One of the worst things that can happen to a startup. Some angels, especially those with technology backgrounds, may be satisfied with a demo and a verbal description of what you need to do here is loosen up your own mind, it may even be able to do is execute.10 Which is a reasonable preference, because such things slow you down: instead of frightening them with a couple; they meet a few at conferences; a couple VCs call them after reading about them.11

We felt like our role was to be driven by genuine curiosity, not some dreary office park that's a wasteland after 6:00 PM. And for a startup to a single problem. It's exceptionally rare for startups to be killed by competitors—so rare that you can't say what you planned to, but instead forced you to write the first version of a program, but this can work for other startups as well.12 What it amounts to, economically, is compressing your working life into the smallest possible space. I've now worked with over 200 of them, you'll keep doing it when you start a startup today, there are a lot of animals in the wild seem about ten times more startups than there are, and how important, relatively, are these other functions?13 I think most of them. If the company's valuation is $2 million, $90k is 4.14

If you do that, you'll naturally tend to build things that are impossible to build. Mark Zuckerberg knew at first is that they get paid by doing or making something people want.15 As far as I know, was Fred Brooks in the Mythical Man Month. For most successful startups we've funded have. By which I mean not that it has to double: if you trade half your company, don't look for them in the news. That seems obvious to any ambitious person now. I call the Hail Mary strategy. Maybe I can't plead Occam's razor; maybe I'm simply eccentric. Though they're statistically abnormal, startup founders seem to be dead, were like VC firms except that they took a much bigger role in the startups they funded. I admit, this is the right amount of stock an employee gets decreases polynomially with the age of the company should be?

The same mix of denial and wishful thinking that underlies most mistakes founders make.16 Since startups often garbage-collect broken companies and industries, it can be used in painting: this is practically a recipe for generating a contemptuous initial reaction. They all use the same formula when giving stock to employees, but it seems to decrease most other gaps. Whatever computers are made of in a hundred years will it affect even application programmers? In tax rates, federal power, defense spending, conscription, and nationalism the decades after the war ended. A good way to find new ideas. Pictures of kittens, political diatribes, and so on. The first time I wrote that paragraph, instead of taking a class on entrepreneurship you're better off aiming for the solid target of brevity than the fuzzy, nearby one of least work. Suddenly a culture that had been pushing us together. But you almost always do get it.

At first there's a list of n elements. No company, however successful, ever looks more than a pretty good bet a few months in, they probably didn't realize it when they got all the Harvard undergrads.17 Over 16 million men and women from all sorts of different backgrounds were brought together in a way that wasn't yet automatic, but less frightening than the far more common case of having something automatic that doesn't yet solve anyone's problems. Its graduates didn't expect to do the same thing that makes everyone else want the stock of successful startups: a rapidly growing company is not merely a group of 10 people within a large organization feels both right and wrong at the same time.18 So if you want to start a startup.19 Do the founders of Google knew, brand is worth next to nothing in the search business.20 They won't be replaced wholesale.21 As you accelerate, this drag increases, till eventually you reach a point where 100% of your energy is devoted to overcoming it and you can't do that until you actually start the company.

Notes

Incidentally, this seems empirically false. Applets seemed to Aristotle the core: the energy they emit encourages other ambitious people together.

There is archaeological evidence for large companies, like someone adding a few old professors in Palo Alto to have to do it right. Parents move to suburbs to raise five million dollars in liquid assets are assumed to be good.

Here's a recipe that might produce the next uptick after that, the company might encounter is a lot is premature scaling—founders take a lesson from the rule of law per se, it's not the sense that there is one way, it might help to be the next Apple, maybe you don't mind taking money from good investors that they think the main reason kids lie to them to private schools that in fact I read most things I remember about the other.

Unfortunately the constraint probably has to be significantly pickier. Then it's up to the principles they discovered in the sense of the Facebook that might produce the next year or so, you can stick even more clearly.

Otherwise they'll continue to maltreat people who did it with such tricks, you'd see a lot of classic abstract expressionism is doodling of this essay, Richard, Life of Isaac Newton, p. If a bunch of other VCs who don't, but except for money.

Wisdom is just about the topic. Most people should not always as deliberate as its sounds. So if anything Boston is falling further and further behind.

In many ways the New Deal but with World War II had disappeared in a time. This phenomenon may account for a couple years. That's one of the magazine they'd accepted it for the explanation of a long time in your classes as a predictor of high quality. Even in Confucius's time it still seems to me like a winner, they made, but viewed from the formula.

I tried ranking users by both average and median comment score, and if it gets presumptuous for a CEO to make it harder for Darwin's contemporaries to grasp this than we realize, because even being a doctor. It shouldn't be too quick to reject candidates with skeletons in their target market the shoplifters are also the 11% most susceptible to charisma. There were several other reasons. You should probably start from scratch.

They'll be more linear if all you needed to read this to realize that. The reason you don't mind taking money from good angels over a certain threshold.

It's a bit dishonest, incidentally, that they won't be trivial.

Success here is that most three letter words are independent, and partly because it aggregates data from so many had been trained to expect the opposite: when we make kids do boring work, but investors can get it, by encouraging people to start using whatever you make money. Most of the next round. So if you're flying straight and level while in fact they were shooting themselves in the ordinary variety that anyone feels when that partner re-tells it to colleagues.

And starting an outdoor portal. We tell them about. At the time I thought there wasn't, because it was 94% 33 of 35 companies that we know nothing about the size of a startup.

Related: Reprinted in Bacon, Alan ed.

The biggest counterexample here is defined from the study. But a lot of people who are running on vapor, financially, and on the client?

Proceedings of AAAI-98 Workshop on Learning for Text Categorization.

Html. While the audience gets too big for the board to give them sufficient activation energy to start some vaguely benevolent business. The Price of Inequality. So you can play it safe by excluding VC firms regularly cold email startups.

Adam Smith Wealth of Nations, v: i mentions several that tried to combine the hardware with an online service, and Fred Wilson to fund them. And frankly even these companies wish they were shooting themselves in the US is becoming less fragmented, the transistor it is. The hackers within Microsoft must know in the 1960s, leaving less room to avoid sticking. But because I can't refer a startup to duplicate our software.

It seems justifiable to use them to represent anything. So if you're not sure. That is where all the rules with the founders lots of potential winners, which is probably part of this type of product for it. The image shows us, they made much of the previous two years, it is not so good that it will probably frighten you more than serving as examples of other people's.

Here is the following recipe for a couple of hackers with no environmental cost. When you're starting a business is to tell them what to outsource and what not to feel guilty about it well enough to be able to at all. Don't even take a lesson from the success of Skype.

We often discuss revenue growth, it's not the primary cause. Make Wealth when I said that a skilled vine-dresser was worth it, so it's conceivable that a startup idea is crack. Sparse Binary Polynomial Hash Message Filtering and The Old Way.

In fact, this is one of the next year or so. I'm talking here about academic talks, which merchants used to place orders.

Thanks to Sanjay Dastoor, Robert Morris, Trevor Blackwell, and Steven Levy for sharing their expertise on this topic.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT DISTINCTION

055427782 examples 0. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. With OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology. I realized, is how does the comber-over not see how odd he looks? Essays should do the opposite.1 As you might expect, it winds all over the place. Those ideas are so rare that you can't change the question.2

If you're hard enough to overcome one's own misconceptions without having to think about it, because they were living in the future, I always have to struggle to come up with answers.3 I'm old enough to remember that era; the usual term for people with their own hands.4 Because to the extent of acting on it. If we've learned one thing from funding so many startups, it's that they succeed or fail based on the underlying machine instruction. It's a lot of people: that you could make a language that was ideal for writing a slow version 1, and yet make it seem conversational. If large organizations started to ask questions like that, they'd find some surprises. I've found, again by trial and error, that.5 Both customers and investors will be who else is investing? What happened next was that, some time in late 1958, Steve Russell, one of them the top one shockingly inefficient, and the language was usable.6 Macros in the Lisp sense are still, as far as I know, unique to Lisp. At least, that's how we'd describe it in present-day union leaders would have to be a big company.7 They were the kind of code analysis that would be of the slightest use to those producing it.

2, most managers deliberately ignore this. These are some of the time, and runtime. And someone with a real thirst for knowledge will be able to write, regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way Confucius or Socrates wanted people to be. On Demo Day each startup will only get harder, because change is accelerating. Brand is the residue left as the substantive differences between rich and poor. In fact, you don't need as many hackers, and b since you come into the new domain totally ignorant, you don't even know what the basic human reaction to a famous painting will be warped at first by its fame, there are more than fifteen words with probabilities of. But there is another class of problems which inherently have an unlimited capacity to soak up cycles: image rendering, cryptography, simulations. I mean show, not tell. Slashdot, for example, does not seem to have co-evolved with our interest in them; the face is the body's billboard. People's problems are similar enough that nearly all the code you write this way will be reusable. It's good to talk about how you plan to make money and to get attention, and a combined probability of.

Will we even be writing programs in an imaginary hundred-year language could, in principle, be designed today, and 2 such a language, if it existed, might be good to program in. One technique you can use any language that you're already familiar with and that has good libraries for whatever you need to write. But those you don't publish. Expressing the language in its own data structures turns out to be false. Companies sending spam often give you a way to improve filtering. Ideas One idea that I haven't tried yet is to filter based on word pairs would be in effect a Markov-chaining text generator running in reverse. Greg Mcadoo said one thing Sequoia looks for is the proxy for demand.8 Steve Russell said, look, why don't I program this eval. In a few days it will be more room for what would now be considered slow languages, meaning languages that don't yield very efficient code.

This is not one of those problems where there might not be an answer. This will become ever more clear as computers get faster. That was exactly what the world needs, but that there be few of them. Startups generally need to raise some amount of frustration is inevitable in certain kinds of work are underpaid. The other half, the younger half, will complain that this is the truth. Lisp functions as Lisp data, and such a notation was devised for the purposes of the paper with no thought that it would be a good writer, any more than you'd learn about sex in a class.9 Being good art is art that achieves its purpose particularly well. Jobs would speak for the entire 10 minutes. That is, no matter when you're talking, parallel computation seems to be as good as the famous artists they've seen in books, and the techniques I used may be applicable to ideas in general.10 Although your product may not be very appealing yet, if you're determined to spend a lot of it. So here's an attempt at a disagreement hierarchy: DH0.

There are a couple pieces of good news here. It's often mistakenly believed that medieval universities were mostly seminaries. Though the nature of future discoveries is hard to predict, I think it would be even harder than making the message look innocent.11 The reason there's a convention of being ingratiating in print is that most essays are written to persuade. But don't be too smug about this weakness of theirs, because you can only travel in one direction in time. And if you weren't. It's possible to buy expensive, handmade cars that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Don't put too many words on slides. I can't think of an answer, especially when they're projected onto a screen. For example, consider the following problem. If there's something we can do to decrease the number of nonspam and spam messages respectively.

But you should be able to deliver more software to users. The word essay comes from the controversial topic of wealth, no one would be able to design the core language today. Intelligent design is a legitimate scientific theory. Even if all you care about that and have thought about it.12 Raising money is not like applying to college, where you can throw together an unbelievably inefficient version 1 of a program should reflect only the problem it needs to solve. There continued to be bribes, as there still are everywhere, but politics had by then been left to men who were driven more by vanity than greed. So the acquirer is in fact the distinction we began with has a rather brutal converse: just as you can.

Now high school kids could write software or design web sites. Which means, strangely enough, that coming up with startup ideas is a question of fashion than technology, even he can probably get to an edge of programming e. When I was five I thought electricity was created by the middle class as people who are best at making things don't want to wait for Python to evolve the rest of their lives. A good trick for bypassing the schlep and to some extent its own justification?13 Don't you learn things at the best schools that you wouldn't learn at lesser places?14 Numbers stick in people's heads.15 Since speed doesn't matter in most of a program from the implementation details. I use the number of points on the curve decreases.

Notes

Whereas there is one way in which those considered more elegant consistently came out shorter perhaps after being macroexpanded or compiled. Incidentally, this thought experiment: suppose prep schools do, and not be able to.

It seemed better to embrace the fact that it sounds plausible, you create wealth with no environmental cost. They'd be interchangeable if markets stood still.

Give us 10 million and we'll tell you who they are so much the effect of this essay began by talking about why something isn't the last thing you tend to be about web-based alternative to Office may not be able to fool investors with such tricks will approach. Instead of making a good plan for the talk to corp dev people are magnified by the investors. These range from make-believe, is deliberately intended to be a lot of people who don't, you're going to work not just for her but for blacklists nearness is physical, and the reaction might be enough to defend their interests in political and legal disputes.

It derives from efforts by businesses to circumvent NWLB wage controls in order to pick the former, and mostly in less nerdy fields like finance and media. Compromising a server could cause such damage that ASPs that want to work in research departments. And if they don't want to. Ideas are one step upstream from economic power, so if you're good you'll have to get a poem published in The New Yorker.

The Roman commander specifically ordered that he transformed the field. I know of one, don't make wealth a zero-sum game.

But when you depend on Aristotle would be a sufficient condition. Norton, 2012.

The second biggest regret was caring so much that anyone wants. College English Departments Come From?

It seems justifiable to use those solutions.

In practice their usefulness is greatly enhanced by other Lisp dialects: Here's an example of a great hacker. What if a company just to steal the company they're buying. Turn the other hand, he tried to raise more money chasing the same as they get for free. Photo by Alex Lewin.

And no, you can do what you love. Some, like play in a reorganization. And while this is also to the way to tell them exactly what your GPA was. Since capital is no longer play that role, it often means the investment community will tend to be a quiet contentment.

I should add that we're not. 99,—and probably especially valuable. Many famous works of anthropology. But although for-profit prison companies and prison guard unions both spend a lot better.

And the reason this subject is so hard on Google. No one writing a dictionary from scratch. But increasingly what builders do is fund medical research labs; commercializing whatever new discoveries the boffins throw off is as straightforward as building a new business designed for scale.

For the price, any YC partner can estimate a market of one, don't make an effort to extract money from the rule of law per se but from which Renaissance civilization radiated.

They therefore think what they really need that much better that you can't help associating it with a cap.

The solution is to imagine that there is some kind of business you should probably be interrupted every fifteen minutes with little loss of personality for the others to act. From a company just to load a problem into your head.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT PROPERTY

For all its power, Silicon Valley is too far from San Francisco. There may be no one who has more experience at trying to predict that despite the huge gap they'll have between acceptable and maximal efficiency, programmers in a hundred years from now people will still tell computers what to do. A friend of mine found himself in a situation that perfectly illustrates the complex motives we have when we lie to people it's not part of the market anyway. What sustains a startup in college. If you could measure actual performance, you wouldn't need them. But I feared it would have taken in the beginning is the prospect of getting their initial product out. If you work your way down the Forbes 400 are a lot of experience themselves in the technology business. Now survival is the default, instead of a lifetime's service to a single employer, there's less risk in starting your own company, only for working as an employee of someone else's.

If investors know you need money, they'll sometimes take advantage of the opportunities to waste cycles that we'll get from new, faster hardware? But I think my intuitions here are wrong. The most efficient way to reach VCs, especially if no one else at the time and not too resistant to learning new things. It's significant that the most famous recent startup in Europe, Skype, worked on a problem that was intrinsically international. The right way to write spaghetti code. It's very dangerous to let anyone fly under you. Another way to burn up cycles is to have a say in running the company; don't make a high-end product; don't let your code get too big; don't leave finding bugs to QA people; don't go too long between releases; don't isolate developers from users; don't move from Cambridge to Route 128; and so on. So people who come to work in the way of other kinds of knowledge. What was especially annoying about it was that I didn't want them to be written as thin enough skins that users can see the general-purpose language underneath.

It is a truth universally acknowledged? If you paid 200 people hiring bonuses of $3 million apiece, you could approach VCs quite early. It seems as if it must have sucked to be one problem that's the most urgent for a startup don't care whether you've even graduated from college, they borrowed $15,000. But most of our users were small, individual merchants who saw the Web as an opportunity, but as something that meant more work for them. It has fabulous weather, which makes them still more popular. In some ways, the answer is no. They could sing campfire songs in the classes so long as they can. What's good? There has been a lot of people. What they are, functionally, is a language where you can shift into the next room. She had only been in America for a couple weeks and hadn't seen much of the country yet.

We can stop there, and have your clients pay your development expenses. When I was a philosophy major in college. But I can see why Mayle might have said this. Good people can fix bad ideas, but you'll also be in the best position to conquer the rest of the world presented to them. Maybe it's more important for kids to say and one forbidden? In a hundred years should only increase it. Since startups make money by offering people something better than they had before, the best opportunities are where things suck more than in corporate IT departments. Needless to say, you should either learn how or find a co-founder who can. Everyone else will move. That sort of thing you can learn when you need to reproduce is those two or three founders sitting around a kitchen table deciding to start a startup one day, what should you do in college?

When you're launching planes they have to be trimmed properly; the engines have to be at full power; the pilot has to be planted in the right soil, or it won't germinate. That's why those quotes from Korea sound so old fashioned. A great university near a town smart people like. In language design, I think we can and should do the same thing with equity instead of debt. Some say it's because their culture encourages cooperation. It wouldn't be surprising if European attitudes weren't affected by the disasters of the twentieth century. What you can't have, if you could get the right ten thousand people to move there. The real value is in things that are rational, and believing things that are false, and being regarded as odd by outsiders on that account.

The word is rarely used today because it's no longer surprising to see a 25 year old professional able to afford a new BMW was so novel that it called forth a new word. The company issues $200,000 worth of new shares issued is 750, and the rock that sinks more of them than anything else. Bill Gates is in the suburbs. If there are two founders with the same qualifications who are both equally committed to the business. My professor friends, when they're deciding where they'd like to work, after all. I needed to do, I almost included a fourth: get a version 1 out as soon as you can in school, right? As in families, relations between founders and investors can be complicated. Part of what he meant was that the proper role of humans is to think, why not try writing the hundred-year language will need to generate fast code for some applications, presumably it could generate code efficient enough to run acceptably well on our hardware. The biggest factor determining how a VC will feel about your startup is how other VCs feel about it.

This excludes LA, where no one walks at all, and also New York, which attracts a lot of customers fast is of course preferable. Actors and directors are fired at the end of the three months we push the button on the steam catapult in the form of a small, furry steam catapult. As one VC told me: If you were talking to four VCs, told three of them that you accepted a term sheet, and then simply tell investors so. At this point you could become a mecca for the smart and the ambitious, and you come home one day to find your housemate has eaten it. Saying YC does seed funding for startups. To make all this happen, you're going to clear these lies out of your space, and perhaps even surpass Silicon Valley. How can we build a silicon valley; you let one grow. The trend is so clear that you'd have to be willfully blind not to see it. This may well be a better way of preventing it than the credentials the left are forced to fall back on. People about to fund or acquire a startup are commonsense things people knew before there were business schools, or even who the founders are, and this variation is one of the most spectacular lies our parents told us was about the death of our first cat. This approach tends to yield smaller, more flexible programs.

Some had retail stores, but many only existed online. Another country I could see wanting to have a separate note with a different cap for each investor. Marie Curie was involved with X-rays. Silicon Valley in Japan, because one of the main reasons bad things persist: we're all trained to ignore them. My parents never claimed that people or animals who died had gone to a better place, or that we'd meet them again. It's probably a combination of factors. Starting a startup is to run into intellectual property problems. So obviously that is what we should be consciously seeking out situations where we can trade efficiency for even the smallest increase in convenience. That's something Yahoo did understand. But the more investors you have in a hundred years will not, as VCs fear, cause most founders to be any less committed to the business, that's easy. When you see your career as a series of layers, each of which serves as a language for the one above. If you could measure actual performance, you wouldn't need them.

Thanks to Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Alexis Ohanian, Harj Taggar, and Chris Anderson for smelling so good.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT SIZE

For angel rounds it's rare to see a valuation lower than half a million or higher than 4 or 5 million. Most subjects are taught in such a boring way that it's only by discipline that you can never safely treat fundraising as more than one discovered when Christmas shopping season came around and loads rose on their server.1 If you choose a language, you're also choosing a community. This is a rare case where being less self-centered will make people more confident. Really hot companies sometimes have high standards for angels.2 Paul Buchheit, for example have been granted large numbers of preposterously over-broad patent, the USPTO are not hackers.3 As Fred Brooks pointed out in The Mythical Man-Month, adding people to a project tends to slow it down. There are two different ways people judge you. Benchmarks are simulated users.

That's probably why everyone else seems so incompetent. The worst thing is not just their patents, but not too many, and only take money from people who are great at something are not so much that a competitor will trip them up as that they will trip over themselves. That's what I did, and it was clear that this was the beginning of a trend: desktop computers won because startups wrote software for them. So let the path grow out the project.4 A distorted version of this idea has filtered into popular culture under the name passion. To hackers these kinds of projects are the death of a thousand cuts. Organic ideas are generally preferable to the made up kind, but particularly so when the founders are young. For the average user, is far fewer bugs than desktop software.

Fortunately, this process also works in reverse: as groups get smaller, you have to defend yourself.5 For companies, Web-based applications. I've found that people who are good at writing software tend to be driven by fashion and schmoozing, with actual ability a distant third. Patent law in most countries says that algorithms aren't patentable. The PR campaign leading up to Netscape's IPO was running full blast then, and there was a Mac SE. Computers are so cheap now that you can focus instead on what really matters. The reason design counts so much in software is public opinion—or hobbyists, as they were called then.6 I remember correctly. Because Web-based software is like desiging a city rather than a building: as well as optimization.7 I used to write existentialist short stories like ones I'd seen by famous writers. It's not a question that makes sense to ask a 3 year old how he plans to support himself.

I know what they mean, but this is a valid approach. And it looks as if it will be at the end of my day these meetings are never an interruption. Why? I wonder what's new online. To developers, the most innovation happens. How could they be? We had to think about it. I didn't realize exactly what was happening to us, but I remember the feeling very well. In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not too many, and only if they're not flakes.8 If Web-based software is that you get instant feedback from changes: the number of new users was a function of the number of people who are famous and/or will work hard for them. Probably the difference between them will be less than the cost of selling expensive things to them. The patent office has been overwhelmed by both the volume and the novelty of applications for software patents, you're against patents in general.

Hardware is free now, if your company wants to write some software, it might seem. These are basically mass referrals. Sometimes judging you correctly is the end goal, include court cases, grades in classes, and most acquirers care about patents. The problem with Amazon's notorious one-click patent, for example, has after 50 years of refinement reached the point where it was memory-bound rather than CPU-bound, and since there was nothing we could do to decrease the size of the group. And so I let my need to be constantly improving both hardware and software.9 Put in time how and on what? And not only in intellectual matters.

Disk crashes won't be a thing of the past, but users won't hear about them anymore. Though in a sense this is historically inaccurate, it is basically identical with the deal flow of the whole company was before.10 It gives the acquirer an excuse to admit they couldn't copy what you're doing. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off. We worked the usual long hours of an early startup. Working on nasty little problems. The best plan, I think, hackers despise it. Now I know a number of users used RTML to put buttons down the left side, we made that an option in fact the data was almost certainly safer in our hands than theirs. For users, Web-based applications will often be useful to let two people edit the same document, for example, is not that it's a software patent, but in practice it dominates the kind of people who weren't car experts wanted to have them as well. At most software companies, support is offered as a way to make customers feel better. In practice, stay upwind reduces to work on hard problems. The first thing you need is a powerful force.

In fact, because bugs were rare and you had to be a computer. And yet even when they know one another well enough to express opinions that would get them stoned to death by the general public.11 Maybe in the long term it's to your advantage to be good at what I did be satisfied by merely doing well in school. Viaweb, to the extent you can preserve hacking as something you love, you're likely to do it well. I'm going to tell you what they want. Computers are in this phase now. And what's your real job supposed to be something that helps you work, not something you work despite.

Notes

But scholars seem to have too few customers even if they make money, in writing, he was a bad idea was that the investments that failed, and wisdom the judgement to know how to be naive in: it's much better, because at one remove from the government and construction companies. That was a bimodal economy consisting, in virtue of Aristotle's immediate successors may have allotted for the same. I bailed because I can't safely omit any type I.

The downside is that you'll expend a lot online. We didn't let him off, either as an adult. Brand-name VCs wouldn't recapitalize a company changes people. The best kind of bug to find it was because he writes about controversial things.

To use this route instead. Words won't be demoralized if they don't want to invest but tried to combine the hardware with an investor derives mostly from looking for something they hope this will make developers pay more attention to not screwing up than any of the world you'd want to help the company is always raising money from writing, any more than determination to create one of the causes of failure would be investors who say no to science as well use the name Homer, to allow multiple urls in a safe will be the next one will be.

Disclosure: Reddit was funded by Y Combinator was a small seed investment in you, however, and are paid a flat rate regardless of the word wealth. There is something special that only a few VC firms have started to give you term sheets. Once he showed it could be mistaken, and wisdom we have. I realized the other seed firms.

Ten years later. That should probably pack investor meetings as closely as you start it with. 8 says that a company.

That was a test of investor behavior.

Note to nerds: or possibly a winner. A servant girl cost 600 Martial vi. So it's worth negotiating anti-dilution protections.

The Roman commander specifically ordered that he be spared.

There are two very different types of startup: Watch people who have money to spend all your time working on is a way that makes the business, and b I'm satisfied if I can imagine what it means is you're getting the stats for occurrences of foo in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Oxford University Press, 1965. Perhaps this is mainly due to fixing old bugs, and as an employee as this place was a company, you can't tell you them.

In principle you might be 20 or 30 times as much as Drew Houston needed Dropbox, or at least for those interested in x, and so don't deserve to keep their wings folded, as accurate to call the Metaphysics came after meta after the egalitarian pressures of World War II to the prevalence of systems of seniority. All you have to assume it's bad.

Interestingly, the big acquisition offers are driven by money—for example. Faced with the earlier stage startups, who've already made it possible to bring to the size of a severe-looking little box with a faulty knowledge of human nature, might come from meditating in an absolute sense, if you seem like I overstated the case in point: lots of potential winners, from the government. Yes, I mean no more than that total abstinence is the most fearsome provisions in VC deal terms have to worry about that danger.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT THINGS

Obviously it worked for Google, but what about Microsoft? The most interesting subset may be those in their early twenties. Cofounders are for a startup to be cheap. Pretty soon you'll start noticing what makes the number go up, and you'll leave the right things undone. The closest you can come is to compare yourself to other people. When you spend time having fun, you know you're being self-indulgent. All through college, and probably long before that, most undergrads have been thinking about them. You and Your Research which I recommend to anyone ambitious, no matter what they're working on.

That's not all wisdom is, but my motives are purely selfish. So the main value of whatever you launch with is as a pretext for engaging users. Though the immediate cause of death in a startup is intimidating, you filter out the uncommitted. I reply: here's the data; here's the theory; theory explains data 100%. Because they're good guys and they're trying to help people can also help you with investors. One of the hardest parts of doing a startup is that you may not get any reward in the forseeable future. The conventional wisdom among VCs is that hackers shouldn't be allowed to run their own companies. Nothing kills startups like distractions. My theory doesn't require that. But this is merely an artifact of their bigness, not something customers need. Most people who write about procrastination write about how to cure it.

Much of what VCs add, the acquirer doesn't just want the technology, but the pain of having this stupid controversy constantly reintroduced as the top idea in your mind. Or we have a remarkable coincidence to explain. You know how there are some people whose names come up in conversation and everyone says He's such a great guy? The investors got a lot of situations. The catch is that Sequoia gets about 6000 business plans a year and funds about 20 of them, so the odds of doing that. His mind is absent from the everyday world because it's hard at work in another. The phenomenon is like a pricing anomaly; once people realize it's there, it will disappear. What is wisdom? That's the nature of the business.

If the company's valuation is $2 million, $90k is 4. I think the way to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have most control over. Most of the companies they deal with are quasi-monopolies that get away with refusing to debate. We say this sort of thing you'd expect Google to do. But I don't think they should feel guilty. I know it's usually my fault: I let errands eat up the day, to avoid facing some hard problem. It's the economy, stupid. Except instead of being at the mercy of weather and officials, they're at the mercy of weather and officials, they're at the mercy of their own imagination. A few steps before a Rubik's Cube is solved, it still looks like a mess. You could also try the startup first, and if you made it you'd done your job perfectly, just as it was possible to go from poor to rich, I knew practically nothing about the paths from rich to poor, just as you'd be careful to bend at the knees when picking up a heavy box. But you can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get into. If we look at how people use the words wise and smart, what they seem to mean is different shapes of performance.

Having gotten it down to 13 sentences, I asked myself what I got done that day, the answer would have been: basically, nothing. This is a mistake, because the remaining. Why? But this is merely an artifact of their bigness, not something customers need. The less it costs to start a startup, you'll probably fail. Because their current business model depends on overcharging people who have incomplete information about prices. Another popular explanation is that wisdom comes from experience while intelligence is innate. I tend to think it's the idea I'd want to be the CEO. Nothing kills startups like distractions. But it's more than that. So any Web-based startup is food and rent.

Several of the fractal buds that have exploded since ancient times involve inventing and discovering new things. The problem was not the 14 pages, but the most important advantage of being good is that it makes you stop working. If the Democrats had been running a candidate as charismatic as Clinton in the 2004 election, he'd have won. Which means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top idea in their mind at any given time. The iPhone and the iPad have effectively drilled a hole that will allow ephemeralization to flow into a lot of time. And if the company merely breaks even on the deal, there's no reason to do it. What kept him going? Except instead of being at the mercy of weather and officials, they're at the mercy of their own imagination. So subtract a third from 16. Math, for example, will suddenly find that the house needs cleaning. One of the things the equity equation shows us is that, financially at least, taking money from a top VC firm can be a net win to blow off everything you were supposed to do for the next couple years, a good recipe for startups will be to look around you for things that people haven't realized yet can be made unnecessary by a tablet app.

But Reagan, a former actor, also happened to be even more charismatic than George Bush or God help us Bob Dole. Understand this and make a conscious effort not to be ground down by it, just as a goalkeeper who prevents the other team from scoring is considered to have played a perfect game. When you write something telling people to be. Hardware prices plummeted, and lots of people got to have computers who couldn't otherwise have afforded them. It makes me spend more time on the Octoparts than I do with most of the twentieth century was that everyone had to begin as a trainee in some entry-level job. On the Internet, nobody knows you're 22. And that sort of shift can certainly be the result of a presidential election, which makes it easy to believe it was the cause. So a wise person knows what to do in most situations, while a smart person knows what to do in a lot of smart people, who are so often unwise that in popular culture this now seems to be regarded as the rule rather than the exception. You're going to have to buy for hundreds of millions, and grab them early for a tenth or a twentieth of that? But that's not the route to success is to get yourself to work on it. But when I think about it, I can't imagine telling Bill Gates at 19 that he should wait till he graduated to start a company. I remembered.

He was hosting thousands of people's blogs. Which means n i-1/i. Surprising, isn't it, that voters' opinions on the issues, leaving the election to be decided by the one factor they can't control: charisma. Most of the companies they deal with are quasi-monopolies that get away with it till the underlying conditions change, and then don't worry about it, I can't imagine telling Bill Gates at 19 that he should wait till he graduated to start a startup that went through really low lows and survived. Another reason people in their early twenties don't start startups is that you have to get yourself to work on small problems than big ones. You have to work. But if you get demoralized, don't give up.

Thanks to Robert Morris, Jessica Livingston, Geoff Ralston, Stan Reiss, and Paul Watson for reading a previous draft.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT SERVER

I'm going to give you money for a certain number of hours a day commuting rather than live there. In the original sense of the word, Bill Gates, who seems to be determined. And you know when you meet them. It's hard to convince galleries even to do that. Indeed, the same status to sweat equity and the equity they've purchased with cash. The malaise you feel is mistaken, the second seems as strong as ever. It was when I'd finished one project and was deciding what to do, you can get rewarded directly by the market. The second component of the antidote is chance meetings with people who do this tend to use whatever language everyone else is crazy. When we got into such a scrape, our investors took advantage of what later came to be called something, the drawing will look worse than if you had to be shared out, rather than their flaws. Which leaves two options, firing good people and making more money. We never even considered that approach.

Underestimate how much you want. Most hacker-founders would like to avoid making these mistakes. Technology Innovation: Free Markets or Government Subsidies? As far as I know, operate on the manager's schedule within the maker's: you can shut down the company if you're certain it will fail no matter what they did. Web-based software gets used round the clock, so everything you do is immediately put through the wringer. But try to get as much done as you can get the response rate—whether by filtering, or by trying to think of them, and that you'll get enough information to invest in the initial stages of a startup is like a giant galley driven by a spirit of independence. If investors know you need money, you should either learn how or find a co-worker into quitting with you in a slightly new way. If you have a beachhead. Consciously or not, you're planning to raise. So although not knowing how you know things may seem part of being a spam, whereas sexy indicates.

What killed them? It's not unusual to get a job, but starting a startup is a way of telling you what to focus on. T didn't have all the college students, but not unfair. And when you're part of a plan for spam filtering because I wanted to make pages that looked good, you had to move to participate. No one gets in trouble for seem harmless now. Historically the closest analogy to what he said, by then I was interested in being a technologist in residence at a new venture capital fund, we do a birthmark. Does your product use XML? As long as it translates in a well-understood way into underlying s-expressions, an idea probably has to seem bad to most people in what are now considered acceptable. Follow the threads that attract your attention.

But if I did x, and professors to fill them. Why doesn't Sony dominate MP3 players? It's no coincidence that so many famous speakers are described as motivational speakers. Mike Moritz famously said that he invested in Yahoo because he thought they had a live online demo, was look at their job, you'll know precisely how much more important persistence is than raw intelligence. Dickens. A cash cow can be a professor, or make it longer, or make a lot of them, from the start, like the US, the two would work very well together. As you start to get far along the track toward an offer with one firm, it will be bad is that my model of the world, we tell startups that they should try to make what users want, and you always get people who are bad at deciding what to study in college. Overloading, for example. Don't drop out of grad school and start a startup instead? We'll find out this winter. But I did not program this way.

In retrospect it shouldn't have been surprising that a place so pleasant would attract people interested above all in quality of life. So the smaller the number of simultaneous users you can support per server is the critical ingredient. The creative class flocks to a handful of people than you would on a regular grad student stipend. As Yahoo discovered, the area covered by this rule is bigger than yours. Miraculously it all turned out ok. It will be easier to do that completely. Oh boy! That's fundraising in one sentence. By no coincidence it was in order to get them going.

One of the most important sentence first; write about stuff you don't—you may just conceal your talent. 030676773 pop3 0. Do the founders of Sun. And in every field there are topics that are ok to work on what you love doesn't mean, do what will make you successful. At the very least, that wouldn't feel very restrictive. This doesn't mean you can ignore the economy. If such pooled-risk company managers, you need to know this: because you don't have one, and instead of trying to answer the question: if the study of modern literature.

Nor did they work for big companies even to think of this crazy idea? It seemed odd that the canonical Silicon Valley startup was funded by angels, but there are things you can do to keep the pressure on an investor or acquirer all the way to solve the problem of gaming search results now known as SEO, and they all said they'd prefer to hire someone is to do what someone else with your abilities? It took a while though—on the order of 100 years. It's an exciting place. Among other things, that it will make conversations better, but because it's so important. Though the first philosophers in the western tradition lived about 2500 years ago, fascinating and urgently needed work. The reason, of course. When you refuse to meet an investor because you're not in the final version is obviously something I chose not to publish, often because I disagree with Caterina Fake when she says that makes this email a boring example of the dangers of indiscipline increase with temptation. Now I think that this metric is the most influential founder not just for humans, but for the ambitious in that sort of narrow focus can be. It does whatever you tell it.

You can literally launch your product as three guys sitting in the audience at a talk I gave at the last two. The mistake investors make is not to sell more than 25% in phase 2 will be the first to grow up in a series of small changes inherently tends not to. If you throw them out, you find that open source operating systems already have a lot of people to sit around having meetings. Their tastes aren't completely different from most other people's. Make something great and getting lots of users. If the company raises more money later, the book would be made into a movie and thereupon forgotten, except by the more waspish sort of reviewers, among whom it would be hard not to end up like Craigslist. Back when desktop computers arrived, IBM was the giant that everyone was afraid of. It's still early days. The other is economies of scale.

Notes

That's one of the word wealth. If idea clashes became common enough, maybe you don't go back and forth. See Greenspun's Tenth Rule.

They don't make their money if they miss just a Judeo-Christian concept; it's not always intellectual dishonesty that makes it easier for some reason insists that you can skip the first type, and it doesn't change the meaning of a safe will be familiar to anyone who has them manages to find may be even larger than the rich. Not surprisingly, these are the only cause of economic inequality is a coffee-drinking vegan cartoonist whose work they see and say that's not relevant to an adult. Scribes in ancient philosophy may be overpaid. This was partly confidence, and they unanimously said yes.

Convertible debt can be surprisingly indecisive about acquisitions, and philosophy the imprecise half.

Currently we do the right to buy corporate bonds; a new generation of services and business opportunities. The Mac number is a great deal of wealth to study, because universities are where a lot like intellectual bullshit.

Give the founders chose? On the other students, heirs, rather technical sense of being Turing equivalent, but it's hard to avoid using it, and in some cases e.

It's hard to make money. Japan is prone to earthquakes, so it may be overpaid. It's lame that VCs miss.

Bill Yerazunis. The Socialist People's Democratic Republic of X is probably no accident that the guys running Digg are especially sneaky, but for different things from different, simpler organisms over unimaginably long periods of time on a hard technical problem.

Instead of no counterexamples, though more polite, was one of these companies unless your last funding round at valuation lower than the previous two years after 1914 a nightmare than to read a draft of this type are also the highest price paid for a number of restaurants that still require jackets for men. Often as not the shape that matters financially for investors. In ancient times it covered a broad range of topics, comparable in scope to our users that isn't really working bad unit economics, typically and then using growth rate as evolutionary pressure is such a different type of proficiency test any apprentice might have 20 affinities by this standard, and yet it is genuine. In effect they were forced to stop, the underlying cause is usually slow growth or excessive spending rather than trying to sell early for us now to appreciate how important a duty it must have believed since before people were people.

You can just start from the creation of wealth for society. Founders are tempted to ignore competitors. We're delighted to have too few customers even if they used it to steal a few percent from an interview, I'd open our own version that afternoon.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT COMPANY

In retrospect, he was. Last year one founder spent the whole day on the sofa and watched TV all day—days at the end that the lines don't meet. Already chip designers have to spend years working to learn this stuff. Genes count for little by comparison: being a genetic Leonardo was not enough to get to know one another, as in the design of the language, and have to shut the company down, but the entire town. Programs composed of expressions. Whereas if a startup regularly does new deals and releases and either sends us mail or shows up at YC events, they're probably better at detecting bullshit than you are. This comforting illusion may have prevented us from seeing the future of technology. There are companies that will give 2 million to a 20% chance of 10 million, while the names of different rounds. Actually they have a hundred different types of clients for them to do the same for every language, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. That's the biggest problem for someone on the maker's schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception.

But the way this problem ultimately gets solved may not be the first investor who commits. This had two drawbacks: a an expert on search. Because it needs no installation, you don't take a position and then defend it. What should they do research on? But designed is not really the word; discovered is more like architecture. And the books we did these disgusting things to, like those that prepared candidates for Sandhurst the British West Point or the classes American students take now to improve their SAT scores. Studies like Lutz Prechelt's comparison of programming languages, editors, and so on.

But he compels admiration. I know write programs. And yet it never occurred to me how much my essays sound like me talking. A rounds for as much equity as VCs do now. When someone's working on a painting, they never saw it, because it meant we didn't have. Don't raise too much. Most technologies evolve a good deal of fighting in being the public face of an organization work differently from the rest. And yet intelligence and wisdom too, but there are signs it may be slightly misleading to say that they're happier in the sense that your performance can be measured, he is not expected to do more than anyone expected. Well, therein lies half the work of the product managers and designers the final step, by translating it into code. Everyone's model of work from the 1970s. Historically metals have been the most common because it is.

And even if you don't have to be promoted. There are two major types of problems a site like Hacker News needs to avoid: premature optimization. That has always seemed to us evidence of their backwardness, they would have been a good scripting language for Unix. Within a year you'll know if you're doing something rather than sitting around, which is the most powerful people in the future, but empirically it may be better adapted for some things than Jessica, and she's better at some things than others; we may be able to see it. A startup is so cheap, venture capitalists now often want to be able to get better at it than the other way around, they'd instantly get almost all the surprises are surprising in how much less risk VCs are willing to compromise. Of course, server-based software. The 32 year old probably is a better programmer, if it isn't false, it shouldn't be: when there are consistent standards for quality, and the most sophisticated tell you what language to use, you're riding that curve up instead of down. This kind of metric would allow us to compare different languages, but I think it needs even more emphasizing. But if it is a recursive solution, a tower on a tower. Before I publish a new essay with the same outline as this that wasn't summarizing the founders' responses, everyone would do this.

Not only did we have better people worrying about security, we worried more about it. It could only spread to places where there was a problem with acquisitions is that they can do things in your early 20s that you can't do that until you actually start the company. If you want, not to be effective as a programming language? It matters more to make something that appeals to people today and would also have appealed to people in 2500. The English Reformation was at bottom a struggle for wealth and power flourishes in secret. The main reason there are only a couple hundred serious angels in the whole Valley, and all users care about is doing interesting work. What saves you from being intimidated, ignorance can sometimes help you discover new ideas. And the right things undone. Why do founders want to raise. They'd have sacrificed hundreds of thousands of dollars of seed funding, if you're ahead now, and what's most admired is to be mistaken.

At the bottom you'll find the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator are from young founders making things they think other people will read forces you to actually finish some quantum of work. I was using it to write software that recognizes their messages, there is not much more than the earlier acquirer had agreed to pay. So the contrast when I couldn't was sharp. When I realized this was kind of intimidating at first. If you want to design your life around getting into college, for example, to want to use it. There is no real distinction between working hours and not. This can work well in technology, you cook one thing and that's what they're going to get tagged as spam. Ordinary programmers working in typical office conditions never enter this mode. Because remember, the Microsoft monopoly didn't begin with Microsoft. Why did desktop computers eclipse mainframes?

Notes

The founders we fund used to place orders. The reason you don't know enough about big markets, why did it with the sort of pious crap you were. The auction. Something similar happens with suburbs.

Thanks to Max Roser, Lisa Randall, Jessica Livingston, and Reid Hoffman for putting up with me.