#qualitatively it just hits harder

[petrichorium]

sauntering into your inbox to say you were right about witch hat being more emotionally heart-wrenching than jjk—I got to qifrey’s backstory last night and sat in bed in complete shock. currently preparing myself for the inevitable future emotional damage because there’s no way something painful isn’t going to happen in the next 30 something chapters

IT SNEAKS UP ON YOU IT REALLY DOES. And it’s just so much more gut wrenching bc it’s SO GOOD at making u love and care for all of the characters………

Also yeah I’m ngl I wasn’t even talking abt qifrey’s backstory (FOR SHAME bc my friend warned me of the exact chapter beforehand and it still shattered me) I was thinking abt the arc afterwards. Which I still haven’t finished (and might not be done? Idk I’ll catch up tn I think. It’s been like six months) but did in fact make me openly weep. Never did that for jjk sorry

Also I must say that while I Did weep during the arc I’m talking about it also has incredible Oru content so at least you’ll have eye candy while ur heart is wrenched in two 🫶🏻

[masontalo]

"..."

«Falling. It’s too scary… above seems the light, I can’t reach it… the wind is strong. It’s dark. It’s scary. It’s high. It’s deep. Too fast. Too much. TOO LOUD! Why it’s happening again...? why? Why? WHY?!»

The harsh sunlight hit Vayt's eyes, only a couple seconds later he started to wake up. He opened his eyes and sighed heavily.

The boy sat up from a lying position and rubbed his eyes.

«I have headache again…» - Vayt thought in his mind, then got up from the floor he had been sleeping on. He took his backpack in his hand and shoving the other began looking for pills. He can't work with a sore head, there's no telling what kind of people he'll meet. Along with that, the boy was going to the kitchen, he needs to pop these pills. But there was another challenge. It was necessary to reach the kitchen without tripping over bottles and other garbage that those bastards left on the floor. Before he did, he went to the window Vayt had opened wide open and now it was harder to suffocate. Despite the odor of the three mingled smokes that came from the furniture, walls, clothes, and other things, the morning wasn't so bad.

Coming into the kitchen Vayt looked around the room and sighed heavily, realizing that there wasn't even a 0.5 bottle of water left in this fucking apartment.

The boy decided he would buy water at the store and quickly left the apartment, closing the door behind him.

As much as Vayt wanted to enjoy the cool, but sunny, morning, he couldn't enjoy it. First of all, the pain in his head, and secondly, the work wasn't waiting: food shelves, hungover alcoholics, angry people, rude jerks who were eager to insult somebody for their appearance... in any case, it was impossible to work with a headache.

As soon as Vayt came to work, Nicole came right over to him.

- You're almost late, is everything okay? - he asked.

- Do you have some water? – Vayt answered briefly. He wasn't going to stretch the conversation much. Nicole didn't care anyway.

- Of course, I knew you'll ask. – Nicole walked through the back room. Vayt followed him, cursing that sick head in his mind. – The assignment, if anything, has already been given.

He just said nothing.

Luckily, the tablets, water and five minutes fixed the situation. Of course, it was possible to put the goods on the racks without tablets, but otherwise the work was not quite qualitatively done.

All day long he did his work as if on automatic. Of course, in almost three years of work, not getting used to doing it is amazing. So, the day went by, mindlessly and quickly. And so, it was almost every day.

Vayt walked with his head down, wondering where to go. He didn't want to go home. Waiting until four a.m. for the five of them to fall asleep and breathing marijuana, tobacco, and hookah smoke was a bad idea. In addition, Vayt began to notice that he was gradually developing an addiction. He had the principle "It is better to suffer than to live with addiction", so spending all his time in the house of his "friend" was a questionable idea.

It's like this every day. He wakes up early, goes to work, works, walks around until 4 a.m., comes back to his "friend's" house, opens all the windows, goes to bed. Wakes up early, works, walks around until 4 a.m., goes back to "friend's" house, goes to bed. Wakes up, works, walks, comes back, goes to sleep. Wakes up, works- he felled down. Vayt is unconscious.

[notanislander]

I've followed you for a while; I enjoy your content and by all accounts you seem like good, decent person. If anything in my message made it seems otherwise, I offer my apologies.

I also apologize it it seems I was placing "undoing a choice" solely on women. I'm not. It takes two to tango. Both are responsible for creating life. Men should be equally responsible for caring for the child, including all medical pre-natal medical expenses.

But as often happens, once the child is conceived, men are unilaterally cut out of the discussion where there's a disagreement. She wants to keep the baby, he doesn't? He wants to keep the baby, she doesn't? Who wins? Mom.

You're also right that women are raped and some seek abortions. I have some personal experience with just that. A chat for another day, perhaps. But, even the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, born out of Planned Parenthood, says that fewer than 1% of abortions are a result of rape. The reason used least among all reasons for an abortion.

Google "Reasons U.S. Women Have Abortions: Quantitative and Qualitative Perspectives." Guttmacher Institute if you, or anyone else, want to read the numbers.

I don't think we're ignoring maternal mortality, exactly. Remember, the federal government has a limited role. It was designed to defend life and liberty and really not much else. The founding generation came here to escape a heavy handed government that insisted on being involved in and in control of every aspect of King George's subject's lives. Again, thus the intentional focus on liberty, freedom and personal responsibility on these shores.

We could get very deep in the subject of problems in this old world that need addressing. Maternal mortality, for example. Hunger, health care, etc. The problem with getting a government to fix these issues, that wasn't designed for that role, is in order to effect that change they have to assume the role of parent, or supporter if you will, to people who should be supporting themselves. It also requires conscripting other people, and their money, because Uncle Sam doesn't have any of his own. The harsh, blunt answer? If you can't afford a child, including pre-natal care, and all the unending expenses that come for the next (at a bare minimum) 18/22 years, then it's up to the individual to not do the one thing that creates life until they are ready.

As for guns and "common sense" gun laws? We fight them because we don't agree on what constitutes common sense. The "common sense" bipartisan gun law Congress just passed wouldn't have stopped the Uvalde shooting or the Sandy Hook shooting or the Columbine shooting. It also wouldn't stop any of the criminals from getting guns and using them to commit crimes - because criminals don't obey the law. Laws like the one struck down in NY make it harder for regular law abiding citizens to defend themselves. Why don't gun owners just comply with "common sense" gun laws just to see if they'll work? Because liberty, once lost, is never regained. Because government is a horrible steward and an evil meant to be restrained to the maximum extent.

I hope you'll forgive me for leaving this on anon. I appreciate your thoughts and the reasoned discussion but we both know not everyone is so reasoned and I don't feel like dealing with a rash of hysterical hate.

Sorry for the delay in answering. Friday nights are not the same once you hit a certain age, and sleep has become my go-to party, lol!

So, where to begin, where to begin. There is a lot to unpack here.

In my last answer I said pretty much every argument against gun laws can also be used for pro-choice. And you have said it pretty clearly here. Government is a "horrible steward and an evil meant to be restrained to the maximum extent" (your words). So, then, how is it OK for the government to come between a woman and her doctor? And the difference between my opinion about gun safety and your opinion about abortions is- I don't think we should take all guns away. You think we should ban all abortions. And, if you don't, many of the states who are now making it illegal are-even in the case of a woman's life, rape, or incest. And, not only do I not think all guns should be banned, I don't believe all bullets should be banned. But those passing laws right now believe birth control should be!

No abortion laws are going to make abortion go away- they are just going to make them less and less safe, so more and more women and children will suffer. If we want to talk statistics and facts, when abortion is legal, birth control is readily available, and sex education is taught, abortions go down. Before yesterday, abortion rates had continued to decline from the 80s and 90s. But much of this, and much of the excuses like, "just use birth control!" are predicated on birth control being readily available. And, as we have seen with current states rulings against abortion- they are also against birth control. And Justice Thomas said, out loud, that those laws "were in error" too. So, any state that is banning contraception, under this SCOTUS will be given the full rights to do so. Is that rational, in your opinion? If you believe so, we have absolutely no common ground.

Women are being set back 50 years. If this was truly about being pro-life, I will say it again- there would be talk of ending maternal and infant mortality rates, extended family leave, prenatal and postnatal care, on and on. All of those are not only extremely fixable, but also doable. But we aren't. Because "big government bad!" (although I would counter, Universal Health Care isn't the government in charge, it's ensuring that all people have access to health care. That no one should have to choose between eating and going to the doctor. I have been poor in America with underfunded health insurance, I have had to make those choices for myself and my family. I am speaking out of my own personal experience. THANK GOD! For Planned Parenthood and their women's health care and contraception. I thank God every day for them. No, I did not have an abortion, but without them I would not have been able to afford Pap smears, contraception, the whole gamut of women's health and reproductive care).

In Texas, the punishment for seeking an abortion is harsher than the punishment for rape. How is that OK? This is about treating women as if they are nothing but chattel to be used and disposed of. I know that sounds over the top, but it all boils down to that, for me. If a man has sex with 100 women in a year, he can create 100 babies. If a woman has sex with 100 men in a year, she can only have one baby. And, yet, it's the woman who bears he brunt of responsibility in the majority of cases.

People can talk about how we will "honor" women, but the truth of the matter is, without reproductive rights, there go our chances for better promotions in the work place, there go our chances for a better life. If an abused woman is to get out of a horrible situation, how can she if she has 5 babies? If she isn't allowed birth control, she is nothing but a vessel. She has no agency over her life. I treasure my three children. They are the best parts of my life. But I thank God I was able to access birth control, because 3 babies under 5 was a lot! And putting 3 young adults through college was A LOT!

Then, there is also the unspoken after-effect of unwanted children- child abuse, childhood trauma, neglect. The social service systems our severely under funded and have some real harsh problems. As a teacher, I see these things on a daily basis.

And, you must realize that this ruling goes way beyond abortion rights. You must realize that this is also about contraception, gay rights, interracial rights, even education rights. This is about everything that was passed in the last 75 years or more. That part has been said out loud, too. So, if we don't stand up for this right being taken away, we will see even more rights gone. I am going to assume (and, yes I know what happens when we assume) that you are a straight, white, male. So maybe those things don't bother you because they, 'Don't impact you'. But, sooner or later, something will. And there will be no one left to defend your rights.

I am sure I have only scratched the surface here. I know I could say more, and say it more eloquently with time. But I will end it here, because it's very long, and I miss the pretty pictures I usually post. If you want to continue this discussion, as I have said before, message me privately. I promise to not judge you, or anything like that. I like measured discussions with people who respect others' opinions. I understand your desire for anonymity, that's what makes the private messaging feature of Tumblr nice- only you and I can see that discussion. Or, you could message me here under your Tumblr name and I could answer privately. But I think it's time to dust my feet and move on from this post. So I will close with this:

I am pro-life, that is why I am pro-choice.

Thank you.

[mimeparadox]

The New Half-Truths about Corsets

As true as it is that corsets are often misrepresented in audiovisual and written media, and as glad as I am to see people defending them, GOD, am I annoyed by the current discourse.  Not because the defenders are wrong —they’re not, in general terms—but because Twitter, Instagram, and their incentivitization of easily digestible sound bites over nuance haves stripped the conversation from all the complexity inherent in a subject as big as corsets. In seeking to be more accurate, corset defenders have often just muddied the water further, with a brand-new set of half-truths.

Here are my favorite (least favorite) talking points.

“Corsets are literally just bras!”

As a cis dude, I’ve never had reason or occasion to wear bras. I have worn corsets, though, and let me tell you, things like having to take off one’s boots after one has been out in the snow while wearing a corset is work—moreso, I imagine, that if I’d been wearing a bra. Actually putting on boots before a corset? Even harder, enough that “boots before corsets” is a common bit of advice. Corsets aren’t torture, but they do force one to rethink how they interact with the world, in ways different than bras do.

To be less glib though, yes, corsets could and did provide the sort of breast support that is now provided by bras. This doesn’t render the multiple differences irrelevant! For one, breast support is the one thing bras are meant to do: with corsets, it is secondary or even inessential, evidenced by all the corsets that do not provide breast support, such as corsets for men, old-timey corsets for kids, and underbust corsets, which are still definitely corsets.

(Megan Fox in Jonah Hex, wearing a corset that is doing exactly the same thing as a bra. Yes, I know it’s not historically accurate; that is not the point.)

What most miffs me about this argument is that it is exceedingly reductive, and displays simplistic thinking regarding both corsets and bras. Because yes, corsets were like bras…and? What is this argument trying to say, given that bras their own baggage?  Is the argument that corsets aren’t torture because corsets are bras? Plenty of people find bras uncomfortable, and something to be abandoned as soon as it becomes feasible. Corsets were purely practical because corsets are bras? Plenty of bras exist for primarily aesthetic purposes—some even do a fair amount of shaping. In the end, both garments have complicated, multifaceted, and distinct features, histories, and semiotics, and trying to equate them in a single sentence says nothing useful about either of them.

“Stays are not corsets!”

Amusingly, this argument seems somewhat incompatible with the previous one, given that stays have much more in common with corsets than with bras, but here we are.

Yes, 18th- and early 19th-century stays are significantly distinct from the corsets that we see later in the latter century, and if someone wants to don Bridgerton-inspired looks that accurately reflect Regency fashions, they should not look at Victorian corsets to obtain it.  And yes, one can make the case that stays and corsets were entirely different animals.

Here’s the thing, though: historically, that’s not a case that people made. Corsets are we know them weren’t considered to be a completely different thing from stays, but rather a different style of stays—two different breeds of dog, perhaps, but dogs all the same. Once the term corset entered regular parlance, the two terms were usually used interchangeably, as can be seen in multiple 19th century documents, including technical ones where differences between the two, if they existed, would have been noted.  

The Duties of a Lady's Maid: With Directions for Conduct, and Numerous Receipts for the Toilette (1825)

English Patents of Inventions, Specifications, 1865, 3186 - 3265 (1866)

----

What’s more, it’s not until very recently that people began treating stays and corsets as altogether different things. Gone with the Wind, the book? The terms corsets and stays are used interchangeably.  The Oxford English dictionary? Describes stays as a sort of corset.  The longest-lasting site dedicated to corsets on the internet calls itself the Long Island Staylace Association, with no indication that doing so represented an inaccuracy on its part.  Sure, Elizabeth Swann should have properly said “You like pain? Try wearing stays”—at least it one wanted to be more accurate (if not good: good writing is partly about making oneself understood). But speaking here, and now, looking backwards? Very few people are trying to be that precise.  

Additionally, it’s worth noting that corsets have had a variety of styles and features throughout history, and the term is by no means exclusive to what we most often see as corsets. The S-shaped corsets from the Edwardian era are very different from Victorian corsets, as are the more girdle-like garments that followed. While not everything is a corset, I’ve yet to see a convincing argument that the term isn’t broad enough to include 18th-century stays.    

Tightlacing, Part 1: “Almost nobody did it”

Statements about tightlacing annoy me more than most, largely because they involve clearer instances of wrongness, but also because they hit closer to home.

Tightlacing has always been an imprecisely defined term: Lucy Williams, one of the best-known contemporary champions of corsetry, talks a little bit about the various ways the term has been used in her post “Waist Training vs Tight Lacing – what’s the difference?” found on her site. Usually, it refers to a quantitative measure—your corset must reduce X amount to be considered tightlacing—although recently, the discourse appears to have adopted a more qualitative definition, applicable to any instance where someone is shown displaying discomfort at being laced into corsets, regardless of how tightly they are (or aren’t) being cinched.

(Left: Moi, wearing a custom corset from The Bad Button Corsetry; Right, Upper: Scene from Bridgerton; Right, Lower: Scene from Enola Holmes)

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Take, for example, the scene that has most recently caused a stir, from Bridgerton, where the character Prudence Featherington is seen grimacing as she is laced into her corset stays corset, while her sisters wince in sympathy and their mother, Portia, insists that she be laced tighter. Others have raised objections to this scene, focusing mainly on the fact that Portia’s mania for a smaller waist is anachronistic and makes little sense given fashions that de-emphasize the waist, but fewer have noted that for all the hemming and hawing that is being done by the characters, Prudence’s figure is ultimately not all that compressed, and seems perfectly in line with everybody else’s. Is what is been done to her tightlacing? A lot of people appear to think so! And yet, that assertion carries some implications. If Prudence is being forced to tightlace here, is everyone else with a comparable silhouette (again, pretty much everyone) also tightlacing?  The answer is kind of important, especially if one also wants to claim that tightlacing was rare.

It’s worth noting that Valerie Steele’s The Corset: A Cultural History, one of the seminal works on corsetry throughout history, doesn’t actually attempt to make a case for the rarity of tightlacing. What it does attempt is to determine the accuracy of claims that women regularly laced down to 18 inches, 16 inches, or even smaller measurements, which is not quite the same thing. When exploring the question by looking at collections of surviving corsets from the era, the book has this to say: "Statistics from the Symington Collection [...] indicate that out of 197 corsets, only one measured 18 inches. Another 11 (five per cent of the collection) were 19 inches. Most were 20 to 26 inches.” While Steele readily admits this is hardly conclusive evidence, she took it as a sign that women with 16-inch waists were nowhere near as common as accounts suggested they were.  Case closed, asked and answered, no one tightlaced, right?  

Well, no.  

Again, it comes down to definitions. Even speaking quantitatively, very few people define tightlacing as “lacing down to nineteen inches or fewer” (certainly no woman in Bridgerton is that tightly laced). The consensus, rather, is that tightlacing is not about the size of the corseted waist, but about the size of the reduction. How much people cinched, however, cannot be determined by looking only at corsets, because doing so requires not only those corsets’ measurements (and even those don’t tell the whole story, given that they don’t necessarily indicate how tightly they were worn) but also the starting measurements of the people wearing them.

In other words, say someone with a 33-inch waist uses corsets to reduce their waist measurement to 25 inches. This, according to most definitions, would be considered tightlacing—a 24% reduction!—and yet the absolute measurements would be nothing to write home about. How is that reflected in Steele’s sample of corsets? Impossible to say. A 25-inch corset could also be worn by someone with a natural 27-inch waist.

What, then, can we say about the frequency of tightlacing? Well, if we’re talking about dramatic reductions of, say, more than four inches (a two-inch reduction, by the way, can look like this—again, more dramatic than what we see in Bridgerton) one can say, with a fair level of confidence, that it was probably not the norm. And yet, “not the norm” is itself a very broad category, and given the numbers involved, “a minority of people” can easily still be “loads and loads of people”, as seen, for example, with COVID-19. Even if two percent of the population who wore corsets tightlaced, that’s still hundreds of thousands of people—hardly “almost no one”, as some argue. And if wearing corsets as seen in Enola Holmes or Bridgerton counts as tightlacing, the number becomes even higher.

Tightlacing, Part 2: “Tightlacing is bad”

Perhaps not coincidentally, another element of the current corset discourse involves taking all the baggage usually assigned to corsetry in general and applying it to tightlacing instead. Corsets are not painful, goes the argument, but tightlacing is. Corsets are not unhealthy, but tightlacing is. People could do everyday things in corsets, they’ll say, but not when tightlaced. Arguments made against corsets in the 19th century were slander made by people who just hated women (another half-truth I have little time for), but are apparently utterly unobjectionable when applied to tightlacing. This, as many modern-day tightlacers will tell you, is bullshit, but it feels like an especially odd argument to make in light of everything else.

As in, what is the point? It feels a lot like saying “I’m not sex-negative, but having sex with more than X partners is icky.” And given the history-focused slant of the current discourse, it’s safe to believe that most people arguing against tightlacing are not people who have attempted it. There is, however, an existing community that will happily tell you, based on personal experience, what tightlacing is actually like.

So from personal experience: tightlacing may not be like wearing a bra, and there are definitely some considerations that you have to take while doing it— getting dressed, sitting down, and eating are all done differently when tightly laced—but this is more logistical than anything, and also applies to other things—running in steel-toed boots is much different from running in sneakers, and the advice when doing the former is often “don’t”. Additionally, the margin for error decreases the more tightly laced one is, but corsets aren’t special in that regard: proper care is much more important when one is flying a commercial jet than when one is flying a one-seater. But yes, you can do physical activity while tightlaced. Not necessarily the sort that you could do in exercise clothes, but then, the fact that suits are not optimized for running doesn’t make suits bad.

Tightlacing, in the end, is not really different from wearing a corset. Some people will like it, some will not, but ultimately, how pleasurable or how unpleasurable it is (it’s very pleasurable, in my book) depends on what you put into it, and that’s something quite a few people—not a majority, but also not “almost nobody”—who are often far more tightly laced than people in movies, would attest to, if people listened.   

[splitsofseconds]

Horniness, and my thesis

I am sitting here in my attempt to comprise something smart. Something coherent for the thesis, but nothing is coming. I do not know anything. I feel dumb. My mind drifts off to sex, a sacred place that allows me to follow in pleasant feelings. I can feel the tingling, the rush of excitement, and lust pumping through my veins, as I imagine myself being pounded against a wall with a man I am close with. I am imagining it with one, and then with the other. As I bite his neck, he passionately groans, and thrusts harder in me. Our bodies melt into a bottomless pit of love, fused by irresistible lechery. Both men make me climax just by penetration. We subside into one another, feeling each other's heavy breath that echoes the empty room. I am happy, and so is he. Idealisation is the delicate mechanism that maintains my sanity. Do I make sense? I don't think so, and frankly, I don't have to. I know, I cannot let myself go this way in the real world, in the actual world. Because any action that deviates from my cinematic imageries splits me into feeling deep repugnance of you even touching me. How dare you not follow my imaginary protocol? How dare you not pleasuring me the way, I have painted you in my vivid dreams. Your sexual ineptitude repels me, and now I am disgusted by letting an amateur of a man enter my body. I immediately feel used, and ashamed, as I feel your drops of sweat running down my cleavage. Now I have your disgusting bodily dirt on me. My love for you is gone, as all I feel is shame, disgust, and emptiness. I have slept with somebody of vast lowliness because I cannot stand to be alone. I need to prove my worth by sleeping with people. I need this, otherwise I do not know who I am, and would not know how to measure my worth. As I wake up from this daydream, and recollect myself from the distant reverie, I simply want to hit my head against the wall until I would knock myself unconscious– everything to escape this unfathomable disgust towards self, and the accompanying compunction at just having 'wasted' one hour of qualitative work on useless fantasies.

[thatsapphicwriter]

Dear probably-gay reader,

I know, weird start but it’s getting harder to find new intros lol. 

Anyways, on topic, in contrast to my last post I have come up with my goal for my novel. I want my book to be the wlw book. I want it to have the same status in the wlw community that girl in red, Hayley Kiyoko and non-milk milk has. And yes, that is quite the goal, but the scariest part is that I don’t control wether that dream comes true. 

So, the title is sorta relevant ‘cause my demographic is literally The GaysTM and usually the women and enbys at that. AND it includes trauma, but not in the boring oh-no-my-mother’s-homophobic trauma ‘cause it’s set in the 1700′s c’mon, y’know? It’s in the narcissistic mother (who hit her like- once) kind of trauma, and the character - Catherina - has PTSD (but like, it’s not diagnosed ‘cause, again, 1700′s) which gives me a lot of research to do, of which I have started, dw, however I’d like some.. qualitative information on this so just, yk, DM me if you have a similar expirience and it doesn’t trigger you to describe your “flashbacks” ‘cause all I can do is imagine, and I really don’t wanna misrepresent this like most writers usually do. 

Anyways, we need a moral of the story here, which is funny ‘cause I haven’t found a moral of the story for my novel. And thus begs the question, “Does every story need a moral?” and personally I think it gives some sort of satisfaction when you’ve read it y’know, ‘cause then it wasn’t for nothing and you learned something. (I know what you’re thinking and yes, my teachers are quite fond of me, but on the other hand I get away with everything). Buuuut does my story need one? I think I’m gonna do the sensible thing with this issue, and procrastinate. Ahah, sometimes it works and you learn from the silence, don’t mf’ing @ me ok. No but for realzies, I haven’t written my first draft yet and I feel like that’s when I’ll get a better idea of the meaning of everything, so, postponing. 

This post is very messy, and I apoligize, however I just wanna circle back to the goal thing, ‘cause I do find it very important to set goals for ourselves. Mostly because it works for me, and it motivates me, and this particular goal doesn’t have a deadline and thus, doesn’t stress me (time and I have a complicated relationship, it’s best not to ask questions) so I guess that’s the moral of this story, set a goal. It’s ok if you don’t reach it, but set it and work for it. 

Love, The Sapphic Writer

[therobotmonster]

It took me 30 years, but I finally beat Battletech: The Crescent Hawks Inception for MSDos.

Was it worth it? On a qualitative level? No. But in terms of nostaliga and as a reminder of what CRPGs used to be? Yes.

Note: Kiddos are encouraged to read this post as a “uphill both ways” rambling old man yarn about “back in my day”

Battletech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception was an RPG for MSDos and a bunch of other ancient computers. It’s old enough that 3-color CGA is a startup option.

This is CGA, for the kids out there:

And yes, that is a Pre-Lawsuit Pheonix Hawk on the title screen, or, as everyone else knows it, the Valkyrie/Veritech from Macross/Robotech. Also, the Crescent Hawks are a group, so it should be “Crescent Hawks’ Inception’. Get it together Infocom from 1988!

Hilariously, the stolen Valk design pops up throughout the game, from its start screen above to the animated mini-cinemas you get in combat...

To, in a beautiful stroke of irony, the copy protection quiz you take each time you do a training mission.

A copy protection scheme that may have been the easiest to guess in history. For example, the part highlighted in the above screen? That’s the “Foot Unit”

The one place the Pheonix Hawk doesn't appear is as a playable mech or enemy. You find one at the end of the game, and you don't get to use it, as its a sequel-tease. I forgot to take a screenshot, and ts behind a massive door puzzle I didn't save after... so, not gonna.

The game plot is pretty basic. You start off as a cadet training to be a Mechwarrior, the planet gets invaded by a rival house looking for a cache of lost tech on the planet put there by your missing-presumed-dead-father, and you have to gather up his old Mechwarrior buddies the now-defunct Crescent Hawks, and find the cache and get it off world before the baddies get it. 

You do this by wandering around a lot fighting random encounters until you hit a couple of story triggers that lead you into a massive locked door puzzle in an underground complex that’s nothing like the res tof the game. 

It was a pioneer in making very little gameplay seem huge by throwing a giant map of nothing at you, a tradition that continues to this day. Though the map might have been a form of copy protection, as without the in-box map you'd find stuff by luck alone. In fact, the game is fascinating just in how it weaves the illusion of a lot from very little.

The sprites are charming, at least. All three of them. Yes. There are exactly three character sprites. One human, recolored 3 times, and 2 battlemechs, recolored 0 times apiece.

The Battlemech sprites are charmingly vague, one for the Locust/Jenner non-humanoid mechs, one for everything else. The red mech doesn’t just walk, it STRUTS, and when you get multiple mechs in your squad, they walk in unision, amplifying the effect.  As for humans, they had to be to scale (roughly) with the mechs, and at 320x200....

Meet Jason (our hero) and all other humans. Your other party members are red, all other NPCs are gray. This is one of the things I love about this game. He's so delightfully vague in his chubby little... environment suit. When I was 11, this guy was the perfect neutral mask, a bumbly tic-tac man upon whom I could project myself.

That little blue tic-tac man is probably why all ASCII-based games I tried to make in BASIC used the omega symbol as the main character.  

For reference, this is Jason from the cinematics, in his EGA red-pink glory. Sadly, he is not a barrel-shaped blue cyclops w' a yellow eye.

The map is, as previously stated, irresponsibly large, as the only random encounters are combat with various combinations of mechs and humans on foot. Humans that will attempt to charge a 30 foot tall war robot with a crossbow. But there's a lot to love in the game: 

While deeply exploitable with the save feature, you could invest your money in stocks at the bank, so that while you wander from town to town you make some scratch. 

There's a play mechanic where recruits are randomly double-agents that you find out by watching them with the scan option in combat. 

The dozen or so mini-cinematics are charming and evocative. 

What seems like a pre-programmed loss at the end of the tutorial area can be escaped with some clever piloting, netting you an early Battlemech. 

And while it won't dump you into a loss state like tons of games of its time, screwing up by getting your mechs destroyed can make the game substantially harder by forcing you to play the game on foot.

Moreover, it doesn't really have an experience system, you raise in skills with training and use.

You max your pilot skills early and thus you aren't incentivized to fight for XP. Fighting nets salvage, but the parts can only repair your mechs up to normal health, and the scrap-metal monetary rewards are minor. So if you don't need cash you can dodge combat with no reprocussion, and unless you greatly overpower the enemy combat is a matter of attrition. As you're on the run and are being hunted, this makes sense, even if the "mechanic" is probably accidental. 

Conclusion:

The game is one of those in-between games, when gaming was moving from early 8-bit pure-play-mechanic style games and inscrutible text adventures to the NES/Shareware era reinessance. Impressive in an era when games came on individual floppy disks, and elaborate pack-ins/manuals  mainly existed to make up for hardware limitations. 

With some polish, it could have been a great game. If there were more sprites and more mechs (there’s only a handful), more varied random encounters and a lot more stuff to find in the world it would probably have been a landmark game, but it was hamstrung by hardware limitations and overshadowed by the flashier Mechawarrior game, a first person combat sim that featured primitive 3d graphics.

Still it was a game where you piloted a giant robot that came out when I was 11, so the magic was going to be there. 

You can play it online for free, here.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

IN 1958 THERE SEEM TO BE A PROMISING COLLEGE APPLICANT

I think most hackers know what it means for a language to feel restrictive. Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to say explicitly that I am not claiming to be good to think in rather than just to tell a computer what to do once you've thought of it as something they do for standardized tests? I discovered that one of our habits of mind you invoke on some field don't have to remember anything, and that's what you need to take care of. A media company should be run by a committee for a mainstream audience, hyped to the skies, and beloved of the DoD, happens nonetheless to be a media company. Would it be so bad to add a spoonful of sugar to make the kind of productivity that's measured in lines of code. It's more a question of self-preservation. DH6 response could still be a bad move, because macro definitions are harder to read than ordinary code. It's exhilarating to overcome worries. But there is no great demand for them. A programming language is how well it achieves its purpose, then the contribution of the most useful skills we learned from Viaweb was not getting our hopes up. If it is not all they're for, then what else are they for, and how important, relatively, are these other functions?

If you tried now to create a giant, public company, and act surprised when someone made you an offer. This is just an explanation of why I don't find that I'm eager to learn it. It seems like the subject's life was a matter of implementing some fabulous initial idea. Ordinary programmers write code to pay the bills. That realization hits most people around 23. The quote I began with mentions two other qualities, regularity and readability, not readability. They have little discipline. And the boneheads who designed this stove even had an example of what I mean by habits of mind to invoke. Not simply to do well in school.

If I remember correctly, the most accurate measure of the power of something is how well it achieves its purpose, then the contribution of the most boring applications imaginable. Wodehouse may have begun with simple atoms, but the most important of which was Fortran. If someone had launched a new, spam-free mail service, users would have flocked to it. If it takes years to articulate great questions, what do you wish someone had told us. It's hard to predict what will; often something that seems interesting at first will bore you after a month. But while DH levels don't set a lower bound on the convincingness of a reply, they do set an upper bound. Don't worry if a project doesn't seem to pay. And since a startup ought to have multiple founders who were already friends, a possible explanation emerges. And they're full of exactly the right kind of friends. I'm interested in how things work.

Those three used the English language like they owned it. If it turns out to be real stinkers. At any given time, there are only about ten or twenty places where hackers most want to work with him liked it so much they stayed. The mediocrity of American public schools has worse consequences than just making kids unhappy for six years. You can hold onto this like a rope in a hurricane, and it is no fun to be at the bottom, nor noblesse oblige at the top. What you need to be working on hard problems. If there's something wrong with the system; it's just inevitable that kids will be miserable at that age. We now know the answer. That's why people proposing to destroy it use phrases like adult supervision. In general, to make great things. Taking a shower is like a ride in a Ferrari.

They may have to use the macro ten or twenty places where hackers most want to work on boring projects unless your family will starve otherwise, and in their own blog posts. In other words, those workers were not paid what their work was worth. But correct? But the idea is much older than Henry Ford. He told me that at the time what we were practicing for. When IBM introduced the PC, they thought they were going to make it that far and then get shot down; RPN calculators might be one example. And you don't even get paid a lot. One of the startups we funded were able to raise money after Demo Day. But if you make something dramatically cheaper you often get qualitative changes, because people start to use it, and c spends countless hours in front of it. Are there languages that force you to write code that's short in elements at the expense of overall readability? And I agree you shouldn't underestimate your potential.

Thanks to Marc Andreessen, Geoff Ralston, Emmet Shear, Sam Altman, Fred Wilson, and Robert Morris for reading a previous draft.

[palmtreepalmtree]

Alright guys, it’s time for a new edition of...

The Worst Movie on Netflix Right Now!

Let’s just say when this (Falling Inn Love) popped up in my feed on Thursday, I watched it immediately.  Like --- I heard the opening bars of the promo music and my eyes dilated like I’d taken a deep hit of nitrous-oxide and I hit PLAY.  Yup, it’s like that.

The Premise

So this falls into the pretty well-known category of made-for-TV romances I like to think of as “City Girl Rehab.”  In these movies, whether they’re Christmas-time or whatever time, an ambitious urbanite is forced out into the country for some contrived reason and learns to value what’s really important.  HINT HINT -- it’s not her job or her ambitions!

This particular story centers around Gabriela who works for some Chad at an internet start-up (that’s literally the character’s name) before things go entirely wrong.  Within minutes of the movie starting, Gabriela loses her job and her boyfriend in a quick one-two punch.  In a fit of rosé-drunk (a totally appropriate reaction to the shit-show of her life) she enters a scam-email contest to “Win an Inn!”  

And of course, she does win the inn.  Or at least that’s what an email tells her.  And seemingly, that email is enough for this competent woman to pack a small suitcase, buy an airline ticket, and get on a plane to fucking NEW ZEALAND (hey kudos to New Zealand’s film commission board for enticing this production).  

Anyhow, against all fucking odds, Gabriela has in fact won an actual inn.  As in she now owns real property.  

And that’s the end of the story!  Gabriela is now a property owner!  Happy ending!  Woo!  

...

...

No?  Okay.  Anyhow, the inn in question is in rather poor shape (that was a fun sentence to say in my head).  So here comes a handsome contractor, Jake (I think?  Fuck if I remember), to help her turn this money pit into a moneymaker! 

From there, the movie continues to follow the usual tropes of small-town romance.  A little bit of fish-out-water, a little bit of house-flipper, a little bit of love-hate, and we’re in business.

The Good

So, guys.  I gotta confess.  I made a fatal mistake on this one. I watched it twice.

I was falling asleep towards the end it felt unfair to review a movie I hadn’t entirely seen.  Damn my conscience.  Once you’ve seen a movie twice, it’s a lot harder to avoid finding things you like in it.  And shit.  There’s actually some decent stuff in here!

Decent is high praise in the land of made-for-TV romances.  But here are some of the highlights:

First, the screenplay does a decent job of capturing the alienation of our current economy.  Gabriela is stuck in a job where she can’t advance, in spite of her competence, because she’s blocked by techbro Chads and Kyles.  Then the job dematerializes over-night for reasons the employees only learn about through Twitter.  And when she tries to find something else, she jokes with a potential employer that she knows she’s overqualified, but they don’t have to tell anybody, right? Haha!?!?  

Yeah.  It sucks.  And even though it’s played for breezy laughs by the director, it lands.

It’s obvious that the two writers of this movie, Elizabeth Hackett and Hilary Galanoy, actually thought about some of their choices in this story.  Gabriela is a surprisingly proactive protagonist.  For example, although the writers contrive for Gabriela to hit rock-bottom in a cliche way to kick this movie off, they’ve done so at least partially on her terms.  When she realizes that her relationship isn’t progressing the way she wants, she ends it.  When she realizes the inn situation isn’t exactly as she imagined it, she pivots to make the most of the opportunity for herself.  This movie isn’t happening to her, she’s happening to it.  

In addition, some of the tropes don’t quite end up where you would expect.  I sighed at the appearance of a female rival---but it’s a rival for the property not the man.  And that rival relationship doesn’t quite wind up where you expect.  Same thing with her off-again boyfriend---when he returns in the final act, his response to Gabriela’s rejection isn’t misogynistic cruelty, but understanding and acceptance.  If only all guys just nodded and smiled with acceptance and walked away.  That’s the dream, ladies.  That’s the dream.

I also wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t call out the occasionally witty bits and one-liners in this script, like: “Chad and his buddies are like a free-range bachelor party.” or “Finish up your Habitat for Hobbits and get on a plane.”  It’s... not terrible?

The Bad

Now that I’ve been complimenting the film for about 20 paragraphs, you’re probably wondering why I still put this in the “worst” category.  

It’s cause once they set their genre-twisting goals up high, they crashed through every fucking cliche on the way back down before landing with a fucking SPLAT.  

First of all, what’s with the hate-him-before-you-love-him trope?  Gabriela meets Jake with open hostility for reasons completely unknown either by the actress or the script.  This is a good-looking guy with a nice smile.  What’s the fucking problem!?  Nobody knows.

Gabriela’s hostility to assistance in general seems strange and inconsistent.  As if the writers/director are trying to make some sort of comment about female independence.  But who gives a fuck?  This isn’t a Destiny’s Child song. 

Also, why does every director have to undermine a competent female character by forcing her into slapstick absurdity?  It’s not relateable and it’s not particularly funny.  Christina Milian, the actress playing Gabriela (you may remember her from pop stardom????), is under pains to behave in a way that few women would.  She screams at a goat three times in this movie.  It’s not fucking funny (although the goat is cute as hell and can stay).  She rolls out of bed twice (in goat-related incidents).  She physically hides from Jake at least once.  She goes from doing a yoga headstand (impressive!) to not being able to do a tree pose (what!?).  

Fucking hell, JUST LET THE WOMAN BE COMPETENT FOR ONCE.

But mostly, more than anything, Gabriela is a cardboard cut-out character here.  She is every-woman, and thus, she is no one.  All the other characters in this cliche little movie have at least something going on with them (even the owner of the hardware store has a cute running joke about never having had a nickname before but always wanting one).  But with Gabriela, there’s nothing.  

We don’t know anything about her.  About her childhood or her family.  Her education.  Her passions.  Jake prods her to open up at one point, and she responds by recounting the events from the first part of the movie: things in San Francisco sucked, so I applied for a win-an-inn contest.  As if she never existed before the beginning of the movie.  We know nothing about her.  

The Ugly

So there’s a lot of not great stuff in this movie as described above.  But some of the worst of it is just the cringe-factor shit.  The poorly landed jokes.  The dialogue that’s entirely too earnest.  The stuff that makes you say aloud to no one in the room, Oh no.  

Like when Gabriela refers to Jake as “Crocodile Dundee.”  YIKES.  Or a little sing-a-long number during a jeep ride that does not unfold in a way that it ever possibly could in real life (but hey, good job on securing some music licenses, Netflix!).

Or when someone starts a speech with, “I’ve learned that...” not once, but twice.  

And then there’s the occasional moment where the directing is moving in perfect contradiction to what’s happening on screen like this exchange:

Shelley: It’s very rural.  It’s incredibly... quiet.

Oh, really?  It’s quiet? 

There are cocktail party sound effects going behind Shelley’s dialogue here, and there are six extras, not including the two main characters, moving in and around the frame throughout this exchange.  The effect is that it’s actually a pretty lively place.  What the fuck?  Is everyone shopping at the gardening store on the same day at the same time!?  This is the whole town right here, right!?

This probably seems like nit-picking, but it’s an example of a weird disconnect that happens throughout the film, where the script is saying one thing, but the directing, either in tone or visual communication, is saying something entirely else.  

When a movie is about a small town, there can’t be people in every single shot.  You have to find a way to communicate that sense of remoteness visually.  The town itself should be a character.  It’s such a missed opportunity here, especially since it’s obvious they actually filmed in New Zealand!!!

In Conclusion

The overall message of this movie---which is the same in every movie of this little subgenre---is that people who live in small towns are kinder and more caring than people who live in the city, and that small-town life is qualitatively better.  And you know what, they may have a point.  I don’t live in a small town, but I sure fantasize about it a lot.  Which is why this subgenre is so fucking effective.

And let’s be real.  If someone were to give me free property pretty much anywhere, yeah, I’d probably move there too.  

But no matter what these movies are trying to sell me, I’m pretty sure everywhere you go there’s assholes.  Different place, different problems, different assholes.     

And that’s why this is the Worst Movie on Netflix Right Now.  

[junck-ritter]

What is “Intent?”

There are two principal aspects to assessing a fencing action - the quantitative (was a hit made) and the qualitative (was the hit good?).

It is a matter of ongoing grief for many fencers when their hits are not recognised on the opponent. Many believe more “objective” measures, such as applying chalk to the blade to leave a mark on the opponent when they are struck, or electric scoring methods, would relieve this problem.

We need to develop beyond the mentality that the physical occurence of a touch is the most useful thing in determining the outcome of a fencing exchange. To this end, more “objective” measures of the touch might prove extremely successful - finally people will stop arguing over what they believe they saw, and the focus can rest where it should be… On the decision making which lead to that point.

A fencing match is not a simulation of a real fight. It is an assessment of the decision making capabilities of a fencer. For example, in the chaos of a real fight, deliberately making a “double-hit” can very well be a risk which pays off for an individual. Objectively, we may well have survived an impalement and gained the advantage of cleaving the opponent’s head in half. But it is not a very intelligent decision to make, so we never reward that decision in a fencing match.

And that is what intent really is - decision making. It’s not often that we explain this - it is usually learned by example, with a junior referee observing a poor strike, hearing the senior referee call the action lacking in intent, and wrongly learn that the strike was not “hard” enough.

We ought to look to reward intentional actions. If a fencer #1 scores a thrust in opposition on her opponent, and the opponent #2’s blade slumps down on the fencer’s hands, this action lacks intentionality. It isn’t the point that the strike wasn’t “hard” enough - it’s that the action of #2 was not intentional. The thrust in opposition may not have been made perfectly - which is something a ruleset or training paradigm may or may not choose to recognise, but this was certainly not due to the actions of fencer #2, whos decision making was barely evident.

A strike landing stoutly can be indicative of intent, but it is certainly not the same thing as intent. To determine the intent of an attack, we would be better off asking the question: What was the fencer trying to do, and did they achieve this? If a fencer blindly undulates their weapon out in front of them, there is a decent chance it might touch part of their opponent. However, we should not reward it as an achievement on the part of that fencer.

We ought to do what we can to correct this. Not just referees, but every fencer needs to understand the meaning of the word intent. Nobody should be incentivised to hit harder to make their point. From a sporting perspective, we would also gain by focusing more on decision making than the simple observation of touch-or-no-touch.

[whattoreadinsteadofdrinking]

fuck the patriarchy

The title is self explanatory, but I’m going to explain anyways

I feel like I am deep in a forest of rage and the path that brought me here, to the middle of this angry angry forest, where the trees are screaming with frustration and I am simply adding my sympathetic screech to their general cacophony, is the patriarchy.

My thesis statement here is, that toxic masculinity make it so that men in general are allowed to be, if not bad, then very mediocre, with no consequence and no expectation to change.  And it is agonizing to be a woman in a world of mediocre men.  Agonizing.  It is painful to watch my female friends settle for men who contribute nothing to their household, nothing to their relationship, and they are happy because “he doesn’t cheat and he doesn’t hit me” (in more or less words.)  I had a conversation with two of my female coworkers today and this was what they were saying about their husbands.  I cannot.  I cannnnnnoooooooooooooooooootttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt

I wrote above that men are allowed to be “very mediocre.”  That seems like a weird word choice because isn’t mediocrity by its very nature, not something that can be described with a qualitative adjective/adverb?? Something that is mediocre just....is.  It shouldn’t be able to be VERY average, right?  Well you’re wrong.  I mean VERY mediocre.  I mean that toxic masculinity has normalized male-on-female violence and oppression to the point that a man can have the actual personality of tapioca pudding and little-to-no emotional intimacy, and still find a wife.  A wife who will do the vast majority of all household chores and be expected to rear his offspring and do so for free, or if she works, make less than him.  Literally men do not even have to be attractive to get women because society has conditioned us to expect women to be beautiful, and to value us based on patriarchal racist fat-phobic beauty standards, and has conditioned women to value men based on....what?? Their ability to earn money?? I don’t know.  But I do know it’s not physical attractiveness-- or rather, if it is, the expectation for being physically attractive as a male is much more attainable.  That’s part of what I mean by “very mediocre.”  The bar is SO LOW, y’all. 

 My two friends today talked and talked about their lazy husbands who literally do nothing at home despite them both working full times and doing 90% of the child rearing, and their husbands are not conventionally attractive but like everyone has their own standard for that so who am I to say, and so I asked “what made you know that he was the one you wanted to marry??” and they both said “Oh he was really a family man.  I could tell right away.  He always talked about how he wanted a family.”  I just sat there aghast because both these men have 1) cheated on their wives 2) not contributed to the family emotionally and 3) one of them, who is expecting their first child, told his wife he was not excited to have a baby once they finally got pregnant after trying for years.  When she told me that I didn’t even know what to say and I tried to comfort her.  She wasn’t worried.  She didn’t want my comfort.  She replied, “Oh, he’s just being a guy.”  And that reply is what I mean. That’s what I mean by “Very mediocre.”  That is the most mediocre thing I can think of and it hurts to see that she thinks this is fine. I don’t think that guys are that way in general-- but I think toxic masculinity has made it so that when they are this way, we expect it, we excuse it, and by doing that we really condone it.

My coworkers then went on to pity me openly for being single and to make fun of me for having so many dating stories.  I wanted to say, the reason I have so many dating stories is because I am still looking for a man who I can be with and have some sense of equality.  what I did not say to them is, “I’d be embarassed as FUCK to be seen with the men you have chosen and I would never allow myself to stay with someone who contributed so little to our relationship.”  But I didn’t say that because I felt sad for them.  They think I’m lonely and sad being on my own.  I’m not.  It does not occur to them that I love having my own life, with friends and dogs and an apartment decorated how I love it and time to pursue my interests and time to date men who truly interest me until they no longer do or I no longer interest them.  That life seems sad to them.  I wanted to say, “I’m free, and I know my worth, and I wish I could show you yours and that it’s so much more than being an unpaid Babysitter to grown men who are like another child in your household” but you can’t say that.  So I didn’t.

“I wanted to say something but I didn’t”  is another way of saying “I wanted to say something but I felt like I couldn’t,” which is how I feel when it comes to stuff like this.  One of my friends basically just always tries to hook me up with his friends on dates.  Sometimes he tries to set me up with our mutual male friends, while they are in the same room.  I’ve said a lot of times that this makes me uncomfortable and asked him to stop doing it and he hasn’t.  Last night at Bible study he tried to tell me he knew that this summer when I go to Spain I’m going to come back with a husband.  I said I wasn’t interested in marriage and he just kept going on.  This is literally days after reprimanding me for turning down our mutual friend for a date.  

Said mutual friend, let’s call him Joe, asked me out almost a year ago now.  We had gone to dinner in a big friend group and someone had asked me about online dating, and I had shared openly that I was not interested in dating right then. Then the next day, at Bible study with the same group of friends, I shared (in what I felt was a safe, confidential setting) that I was not dating because I was in a season of really working on my relationship with myself and with God.  Joe heard me say those things, then waited til we left the building and called me aside “to talk real quick.”  He proceeded to ask me out.  I laughed out loud and said “you must not have heard me.”  But then I demurred because I didn’t-- surprise surprise!!-- feel like I could say anything about how wildly inappropriate it was for him to ask me out after I had just shared what I had shared. 

 He said he heard what I said and respected it (FALSE) but that he felt he “had to ask me out anyway or else he’d miss a great opportunity.”  OPPORTUNITY FOR WHAT?  An opportunity to show that you respect none of the words coming out of my mouth or the boundaries I’m setting?  An opportunity to make me feel like I can’t share openly in my faith-based community without having it be seen as a challenge to change my mind about romantic relationships?  I said no and explained why again (this is the third time he had heard my explanation now.)  He said we could get coffee as friends instead and I said that is fine, but it would be just friends, like if I got coffee with a woman from the group (I am not bisexual so implying that it would be totally platonic.)  Even after saying the phrase “totally platonic” he said “great.  We can meet at Starbucks.  It will be good to get a drink and talk and just explore if there could be something between us.”  HE STILL DID NOT UNDERSTAND.  I could not believe it.  It’s worth mentioning at this point that it was 20 degrees outside with an even lower windchill and I was freezing my ass off trying to explain in words this man could understand that while I was uninterested in dating in general, I was specifically uninterested in dating him, when he had just shown me he would never listen to me or take my words seriously the first, second, or third times.  You think I’m going to put myself in situations alone with you when you won’t hear me say “no” on something as innocent as a coffee date?? Hell nah bro.  I said no coffee date even as friends and now it’s been a year, and his friend in the group is reprimanding me for not going out with him and telling me to give him a chance.  No.  No. No

So now I feel really uncomfortable at Bible study which is a big deal because that’s supposed to be a safe space.  That’s supposed to be a place, and a people, that help me connect with God.  And it is-- but it’s harder now.  I know what I have to do-- I have to make this guy, who won’t leave me alone about dating and keeps trying to hook me up with his friend, really uncomfortable.  I have to say in a clear firm voice in front of everyone that I don’t want these comments being made anymore.  And I know already that everyone is going to think I’ am being a bitch.  Just for saying my feelings.  Just for speaking up.  I’m the one who will end up looking like the bad guy even though this will be the 5th time I’ve asked him to stop doing this and he has never respected it.  OH, and Joe?? A year later, almost to the day of my rejecting him initially, he asked our friend group to one of those Painting with a Twist nights.  I said no and he asked why so I said the truth which is 1) I don’t want to pay money to have someone tell me what to paint and 2) I don’t drink, so the whole thing is a waste of 30 bucks for me.  He said he understood and then immediately followed up by saying we could hang out some other time-- maybe go salsa dancing together.  I just can’t.  What do I have to do to  be understood?? 

In conclusion, here’s this short story, which is beautiful and sad and poignant and tells all of how I am feeling, so much better than I just did. Men are being cheated out of the ability to function in a way that is healthy and leads to mutually edifying relationships-- and that is tragic.  It’s tragic for them and for us.  It makes me sad.  Maybe my anger forest is really just so sad and being angry is safer.  Sadness slows you down but anger keeps you warm.  I don’t know where to go from here but I’ll tend to these feelings and see what happens.  I’ll feel the feelings til I don’t anymore, or til I still do but they are manageable.  In the meantime, read this.

“Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenian

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-person

[the-keionbu]

I’m sure to nobody’s surprise, I find creating content for this blog incredibly hard nowadays.

Quite honestly, I’m pretty sure my peak hit a couple years ago, and as each season passes, and K-ON becomes older and ages, this sentiment is going to become more and more true. It’s a sad thing to reflect on, but true, nonetheless.

Coming up with ideas to expound on has caused me to hit a roadblock with original content here. My will to put out something I deem as ‘perfect,’ lacking any out-of-character-ness, something compelling and relatable,  or something I’m even PROUD of (which is harder to feel) triumphs over being willing to explore new ideas, or trying to answer someone’s ask on something I don’t know a lot about, or don’t feel strongly about.

When I was in college, in my marketing classes, we were taught to create marketing campaigns or ads AFTER we do research, both quantitative and qualitative, on what demographics we should be appealing to. What’s the point in making something if no one would be willing to look at it? This was another factor that led to me kind of, stopping here.

I had/have not the best grasp of who’s still trying to consume K-ON related content, for a series that ended nearly 7-8 years ago. Which makes it that much harder for me, someone who wants to have good reception in the product I produce, that want of being ‘perfect.’

A few (?) months back-- I don’t remember the context of why this was brought up-- but @myonlypen once told me that maybe instead of me just trying to talk into this void about the girls, go back to the literal beginning days of the blog and reach out and learn more what YOU ALL think (LMAO I DUNNO IF YOU RMEMEBER THIS PEN)

So, with that being said, I want to pose a question:

What makes K-ON special to you?

What emotional connotations does it bring, what times in your life does it resonate importance with you, how has this series helped you, etc?

For example:

Just before posting this, I had a whole different question written up about what specific emotional timeline connotations does K-ON resonate with a person. And in my for example, I tried writing about prominent times in my life where I felt the theme of these girls’ bond mirrored a lot of my relationships at highschool graduation time, a group I was/still am really close to during college, etc

But it felt so. dang. fake.

Sure, I saw how the themes of the series held significance in my life-- and if that’s what’s special for you, that’s great!! I think this show tells a realistic portrayal of friendship few shows are able to achieve; it’s no wonder that theme helps people and is important!!

But for me, as I was writing out what it could’ve been in my own life, which is a story I’ve told many times in different contexts on this blog, I was just not feeling it?? And I striped the question down, to a simple, why is this series SO special to me? Why have I tried to keep my interest in it for the past 5-6 years? Why do I keep trying to come back to it after being exposed to so many different medias, experiences, etc?

And as cheesy as it sounds, K-ON is special to me because of this dang blog.

I am so, SO proud of things I’ve achieved and gained by running this blog.

It helped me become a better writer, a better content creator, it transformed me from a passive consumer to someone who scrutinizes media, it’s helped me to understand why things are special to me specifically, it’s cocky, but I’m proud of the impact I’ve left from this blog, and above all, it’s given me friendships and memories that I’ve cherished so much over the years. That, even though I admit I’m MIA from 90% of the time, are people that have encouraged me, challenged me, and comforted me in times I’m sure they don’t even realize.

I would not be trying to come back to K-ON, writing this post, if not for this blog.

K-ON is special to me because it’s the medium that helped me understand certain aspects of myself better FROM running this blog.

So, with that being said, why is K-ON special to you?

[marshub]

How to Choose the Right Language Service Provider?

The global world is changing since time immemorial. It is affecting the various parts of the world according to its vulnerability and change. With the advent of globalization and digitization, the global market has changed rapidly. Now the business is not limited to the native citizens. All thanks to globalization, even small companies now have access to the global market and consumers. To expand the business swiftly in this contemporary world, it is pertinent to thoroughly understand one another's languages. As millions of people demand to work together, they are unable to understand one another’s language effectively. From medical diagnosis to business deals and from educational purposes to weather forecasting, everything needs interpretation and translation.

In this regard, language service providers (LSPs) play a pivotal role to make this task accessible and beneficial for the global business communities as well as for the customers.

If you are running a firm and holding a vision to expand your business ideas to the global business world then LSP is the right choice to make this happen. Because if you are aiming to hit the global audience, you need to work on communication skills. Because failure in localization and translation data can damage the firm reputation. Moreover, people and customers like to understand the business idea in their local language to avoid misconception and to maintain their country’s culture. So, choosing the Right Language Service Provider is the utmost responsibility of enterprises for the sake of their business growth.

Following are the criteria which any enterprise should keep into consideration while choosing the right language service provider:

1. Language Criteria

The first and foremost step in choosing the right Language service provider is the language criteria. As this requirement is to fix the language gap, it is pertinent to choose the right LSP. If any company wants to work at the smaller level it can work with a small language vendor but for the large business and to work within various languages then multiple language vendors are required. The more proficient the translator, the more the impact on the local audience. Further, he should be deeply familiar with specialized domains. For instance, if your company is dealing with software localization, your LSP must have deep insight into the software language or domain. That is how he will be able to keep an accurate record of translation. Besides specialized domains, it is vital to choose the LSP who is well familiar with the industrial requirements and local jargon of different areas. In short, the right LSP is the one who finds no difficulty in conveying your services to the customers.

2. Considering Technical Capabilities

As the modern world has taken its road to technical revolution and digitization. So, accordingly, LSP capabilities are not limited only to language services. If you are choosing the right one for your enterprise, you must be fully aware of your enterprise’s recent advancement and technicalities.

Some aspects can be taken into account briefly:

Is the LSP continuously initiating and updating the technology and its services?

Is the LSP able to provide an easy and accessible platform to manage the translation?

You have to make sure that your LSP is using the right technology to provide services. For instance, Translation Management tools are likely to be followed in this domain. Because the translation management system allows accessible communication. So, measuring the technical capacities of your LSP is another requirement in choosing the right one.

3. Ensuring the Quality

In the business and technical world, quality matters rather than quantity. After all, looking for LSP is only for qualitative assurance. It is good for any company if LSP is certified then it is unlikely to hurt your reputation. Because with the rapid advancement, their responsibilities have grown also. It is quite pertinent to inquire about and train the LSP and that should be according to industrial standards. As your LSP acts as the bridge between customers and your company. He must have the ability to deal with all inquiries swiftly and right on time.

4. Functionality tools

To combat errors and to ensure quality, a company needs to ensure which integrated tools will be used by the language service provider. On what programs do they have command and on which tools or software do they rely? Owing to the advancement and technicality, relying solely on dictionaries and language skills, time has gone. Currently, for instance, Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) tools help translators to facilitate the company with upgraded productive results. LSPs must have the knowledge and know-how about modern integrated tools for their proficiency. These criteria should also be considered by the companies in choosing the right language service providers.

5. Meeting Business Needs

LSPs have become crucial for business development. By being a cornerstone, they must know the customers’ needs and demands. Via expanding business globally, cultural variations must be taken into respect. So, it’s up to the LSPs how efficiently they engage a global audience consistently. Because your LSP can improve the vision of the local audience by effectively appealing, that can give enormous profit to your brand. His connection to the audience should be loyal and convincing. Your business requirements must be dealt with swiftly by him because he acts as a bridge. All in all, all these tenets must be looked at while searching for the right language service providers.

6. Testimonials

Do you buy any online products without reading reviews? Do you arrange an annual dinner without knowing about the main course? Certainly, no. Does not the same procedure apply while choosing the right language service provider? Certainly, Yes.

In this online era, your happy customers expand your business opportunities. Likewise, in choosing the right LSP a company must look at the customer reviews and its portfolio. His social media profile must be taken into account and the reviews in the comment section show how he relates to clients. Moreover, just by only relying on the websites, a company can also approach LSP’s previous clients to know about their actual performance. This is an important step in choosing the right Language service provider whether he is worth hiring or not.

7. Pricing Quality

Like the content, you should not compromise the pricing. There is no denying the fact that the budget, sometimes, gets low down and you are bound to hire a language service provider who offers a low price. As the old saying goes, you get what you pay for. The handsome payback can enhance your team to work harder, likewise, low pricing LSP may give less than average work. Although one solution for all can save plenty of money yet hampers the quality of the translation. So pricing should be convincing and according to the competitive market demands. You should not look for an all-in-one solution because it is your brand reputation that is at stake.

8. Turnaround Time

It is important to understand the operating capacity while choosing the right LSP. Can your LSP handle frequent pressure? This should be asked first. Because every company works according to its requirements and circumstances. Some days can be easy and some can be tough. For this reason, operating capabilities and frequent pressure should be clarified at the start. Because clients’ satisfaction is above everything. Just to meet the deadline, the quality of the work should not get compromised. So, the right LSP should have the ability to give productive results on time. You can truly expand your business if you can meet the requirements of your clients within time. It's up to the LSP to provide work within a given time. All in all, while choosing you must keep that in mind whether your Language service provider can manage the deadline pressure or not.

Conclusion

It is a need of contemporary advancement to find the right language service provider in the right direction to avoid any kind of misinterpretation. Above mentioned steps are pre-requisite in choosing the right language provider that includes the language criteria, assurance of technical and business capabilities, transparency in pricing and reviews methods, use of integrated tools, and keeping deadline assurance. For localization or more precisely any business success, the selection of the right Language Service Providers is a challenging task. LSPs should be chosen in a precise manner for the sake of business. Knowing them, according to needs, before hiring is a wise option. Because by acting as the bridge between your company and the local audience they can target the global market. Summing up the entire discussion in one idea: the more you know about your LSP the more you get the benefit.

[wmshappen]

How are those resolutions going?

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

At the start of every year, nearly everyone eagerly runs to set up new year’s resolutions, whether it’s to cut back on meat or start running more. Some people will not set them, as maybe they think they are setting themselves up to fail, but perhaps a better way to look at new year’s resolutions would simply be – ‘what are your personal goals right now?’…and what better time to reset, and reassess these goals, than with the resetting of the calendar?

But the question is, 3 months into the year…have the WMSH team stuck to their resolutions (official or otherwise)? If not, why not? Also, if they haven’t stuck to them…are they going to restart this month? There is still 10 months left of the year, so why not?! So I asked the WMSH team if they had any new year’s resolutions, and how they were going…

Alice

Around new year, I did start thinking about ways to re-ignite my fitness regime. Pre-Covid I played netball twice a week, as part of a local league, and got into working out for the purpose of improving my game play - getting those killer intercepts by generally being harder, better, faster, stronger (as Daft Punk would say). But I grew to really enjoy working out for itself. I find it great for my mental health, and regularly working out at home has been one of my main hobbies since Covid hit, and Netball has been off.

I did however, before Christmas, start struggling with the lack of direction my workouts had. Once it became clear netball wasn't going to start again anytime soon, I was just kind of fumbling about, and starting to lack the motivation to work out as often as I was, despite always feeling better when I did do it. So since new year’s - I decided to pick a workout plan, and commit to it. My new goal 'Become Captain Marvel' (aka - get strong/toned/pumped). My new trainer - Jeff Cavaliere of YouTube's 'Athlean X'. It gives me a plan to stick to, he tells me what to do at each workout session, and how to progress. Aside from my lofty and somewhat vague desire to be as strong as a superhero, right now I'm focusing on a few simple, more specific goals - workout 3 times a week, every week, work towards being able to do a pull up, and work towards being able to do 30 press ups in a row. So far I've managed to stick to my 3 times a week goal...which should set me up to meet the other ones over the next few months.

I would say my one tip for keeping new year’s resolutions or working towards personal goals - to paraphrase Tim Michin - "be 'micro-ambitious'...focus on the "passionate-dedication to the pursuit of short-term goals". Now you might rightly ask, is being able to do a pull up going to change my life? Honestly - probably not. My ultimate, underlying goal is to ‘stay fit and stay sane’…but that has no parameters to work towards. It’s not very motivating. It's the short term goal, that motivates me along the track towards the overarching goal - stay fit, stay sane...and become Captain Marvel.

Lewis

My new years resoloutions were quite simple I think and were things such as, drink more water which will help me look after my skin and also things such as eating healthier. Most of my resolutions fit well together and to make me eat healthier I also said I wanted to start to learn how to cook, so I am not eating takeaways all the time or just frozen food. On top of this I want to run half a marathon by the end of the year, which means I have to start running to work up to it.

I would say I have done relatively well with sticking to my resolutions, as I have been cooking most nights and also drinking lots of fluids to keep me hydrated but I did not run in January, so I am going to start this month to make sure I don’t break my new year’s resolution of running half a marathon. I have only ordered 3 takeaways in the last 4 weeks, which is a lot better than what I was doing last year so I would also say I have done pretty well with keeping that resolution so hopefully I can stick to that for the rest of the year. One month down and ten more to go!

JD

I don’t make resolutions but I do spend the period between Boxing Day and NYE engaging in ‘romjul’, which is a Norwegian concept based on enjoying the slower pace of life and embracing the cosiness of the longer nights, reflecting on the year that’s been and thinking about intentions for the year to come. I use this to remind myself of things like ‘yoga helps me be less stressed’, ‘get out in nature when you can, it makes you feel better’ rather than setting qualitative goals, otherwise meeting objectives during my leisure time starts to be a source of anxiety. This year I decided to spend more time reading philosophy. A lot of mental health advice is rooted in stoicism and I’ve found it full of surprisingly practical advice for, among other things, living through a pandemic (Derren Brown’s Happy is a fantastic starting place and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations is also more accessible than you think it would be, if you go into it reading it as if it’s his blog rather than a classic philosophy tome). Slow start on that owing to a lot of too-tempting fiction. I also decided to devote more time to writing. So far (thanks to lockdown and not much else to do) I’ve written 90,000 words which feels a bit over-achievey and if I keep that pace up I’ll definitely wear out my laptop keys.

Forest app is great for helping diminish the power of distractions like doomscrolling. You set a timer and grow trees when you put your phone down, and I make patterns with my forests to help me stay motivated. You can also donate real trees when you rack up enough focussed time, I’m about to get my first one.

Megan

I never make them for fear of disappointment if I break them.  Overriding focus of the year though is just to be happy and healthy.

Lorna

My New Year’s resolution was to get back into yoga. I think are all a bit stiffer than normal after a year of living and working from our houses. So far, I have stuck to this resolution and do feel a lot better for it!

Some tips I would give for keeping up this resolution, and others, is to not be too hard on yourself, especially this year. If I have a day where I really don’t feel like pulling the yoga mat out, I jump on to the sofa and chill out instead, then try again the next day! For me, keeping a routine with my yoga resolution has made me keep it up. I use YouTube yoga videos to help me, a tip I have here is to find a yoga instructor on there that you like, some of them can be rather annoying which is not encouraging!

Lewis Forster

[khalilhumam]

America faces a substitute teacher shortage—and disadvantaged schools are hit hardest

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/america-faces-a-substitute-teacher-shortage-and-disadvantaged-schools-are-hit-hardest/

America faces a substitute teacher shortage—and disadvantaged schools are hit hardest

By Jing Liu Substitute teachers are an important (yet oft-ignored) group of educators in the U.S. school system. The reason is simple: Substitute teachers spend substantial time with K-12 students. Like other professionals, teachers are absent from work for various reasons, such as sickness, professional development, or personal issues. Based on one estimate drawn from a sample of large U.S. metropolitan districts, teachers miss an average of about 11 days out of a 186-day school year. This means that students spend, on average, approximately two-thirds of a school year with substitute teachers during the entirety of their K-12 schooling—not a trivial amount of time. Teacher absences are not only common, but also detrimental to student learning. Based on one study, 10 additional teacher absences lead to 1.2% and 0.6% of a standard deviation decrease in math and English Language Arts test scores, respectively. Several other research papers using data from multiple contexts reached similar findings. Higher-quality substitute teachers may be able to mitigate some of the negative impacts of teacher absences. Indeed, one study shows that certified substitute teachers are more effective than their uncertified peers. However, many school districts nationwide had already been facing severe shortages of substitute teachers before the COVID-19 pandemic, and early evidence suggests the pandemic has exacerbated staffing problems. The Madison district in Ohio, for example, reported having less than a third of the substitute teachers needed to cover classes. In Michigan, districts were using billboards to attract potential substitute teachers, given shortages that were prevalent across the state. The inability to find a substitute teacher might not seem problematic initially, as another teacher or administrator with spare time can often cover a classroom when a substitute teacher is not available. Yet repeated occurrences can quickly become burdensome for staff who are frequently called upon to cover a peer’s classroom. In a recent paper published in Education Finance and Policy, my co-authors, Susanna Loeb and Ying Shi, and I set out to provide the first systematic description of the prevalence of the substitute teacher shortage, how it varies across schools, and how various factors drive the distribution we see. We used detailed administrative data covering school years 2011-12 to 2017-18 from a large urban school district on the West Coast to evaluate the extent to which schools might have difficulty sustaining a substitute teacher workforce. We also administered surveys to both regular teachers and substitute teachers in school year 2017-18 to gauge their perceptions of substitute teaching. On average, teachers in the sample district were absent for about 11.8 days, or 6.6% of the time, which is commensurate with previous research. Of the 11.8 teacher absences per year, an average of 10.9 days were covered by a substitute teacher. When an absence was not covered by a substitute, students were split up into other classrooms with permanent teachers about 37% of the time; a teacher with a prep period covered the class 35% of the time; a school administrator covered the class about 12% of the time; and other forms of coverage took place for the remaining 16% of the time. A teacher’s non-covered absences can affect their colleagues and students across the school, not just those in the absent teacher’s classroom. Many factors are associated with whether an absence receives substitute coverage. For example, the course subject, the timing of when a substitute job gets advertised, and teacher experiences are among the strongest predictors of substitute coverage. Schools had a harder time finding substitute teachers in math, special education, bilingual, and foreign-language classes than in other subjects. Relative to novice teachers, the more experienced a teacher is, the higher coverage rate the teacher tends to have. How early a substitute job gets posted plays another major role in absence coverage. As Figure 1 shows, the rate of improvement in coverage rates associated with an additional hour between listing and job start time is especially high through the first 24 hours, suggesting that last-minute postings are unlikely to yield high coverage. After the initial 24 hours, the coverage rate is approximately 90%. The findings are more concerning regarding the distribution of substitute coverage across schools. To categorize student need and staffing challenges faced by schools, we used the following four dimensions:

achievement level

proportion of Black and Hispanic students

average poverty rates of students’ residential census tracts

the school district’s classification of hard-to-staff institutions, which have the greatest difficulty recruiting and retaining teachers.

In general, we found teachers in disadvantaged schools had the same number of, or slightly more, absences than teachers in more-advantaged peer institutions. By disaggregating absence types, we found that the small differences are largely driven by more absences due to professional development days at the higher-needs schools. In contrast, disadvantaged schools exhibited systematically lower substitute coverage rates. For example, schools in the lowest achievement quartile, schools with the highest shares of minorities or students from lower-income census tracts, and hard-to-staff schools had between 0.9 to 1.3 more non-covered annual absences per teacher than do schools in the most advantaged categories. For example, a higher-needs school with 50 teachers is expected to have 65 to 80 non-covered absences annually, compared against 16 to 33 non-covered absences in an advantaged school of the same size. Our survey data confirm this finding: Teachers in higher-needs schools are much more likely to expect non-covered absences than their peers in other schools. For example, nearly half of teachers in schools with the highest share of Black and Hispanic students reported that their schools are not able or probably not able to find a substitute teacher when they are absent, while only 9% of teachers in schools with the lowest shares of Black and Hispanic students expressed such concern. Clearly, teacher absences do not drive the unequal distribution of absence coverage. Additional analysis suggests that teacher demographics account for 3% to 5% of the overall disparities, while teacher credentials and experience explain an additional 6% to 9%. Absence characteristics, such as the timing of job postings, make a statistically significant contribution to the school disparities in some cases, with magnitudes up to 10%. The substantial variation unexplained by school, teacher, and absence characteristics suggests that factors not captured in administrative data drive the distribution we see. Our survey administered to substitute teachers unveils many of the drivers. In the survey, we asked the respondents to nominate their most-preferred and least-preferred schools at which to work, and to write down the reasons why. Three main findings emerge.

First, substitute teachers consistently preferred one subset of schools while avoiding another subset. The least-preferred schools were middle schools that have significantly lower average achievement, a higher concentration of Black and Hispanic students, and higher suspension rates.

Second, the number of times a school was nominated as a most- or least-preferred school accounted for a large share (40% to 50%) of the cross-school variation in substitute coverage rates.

Lastly, in their qualitative comments, substitute teachers often cited student behavior as an important factor in their determination of certain schools as least preferable (Figure 2), but mentioned a wide range of factors that can make a school desirable, such as the colleagues, well-behaved students, and familiarity with a school (Figure 3).

Given the heightened health concerns due to the COVID-19 pandemic, finding substitute teachers might become an increasingly challenging task for school leaders. On one hand, teachers might incur more absences because of various physical, psychological, and financial stressors they have been experiencing in the pandemic. On the other hand, it is unclear how willing a potential substitute teacher is to serve in a school, typically with a less-familiar working environment and unknown students. Our work shows that schools with higher needs and fewer resources had a harder time finding substitute teachers before the pandemic. These schools may now have an even greater difficulty finding substitute teachers. Thus, designing policies to address inequality in access to substitute teaching should be an integral part of school staffing plans, and merits close attention in school reopening plans. Our findings suggest that certain strategies—such as planning around the posting of absences to avoid last-minute substitute jobs—may help close substitute coverage gaps. More importantly, given student behavior and the presence of support services from a school’s staff and administration are key determinants of whether substitute teachers favor working in a particular site, schools should ramp up their institutional efforts to provide more support for substitute teachers. This could include initiatives that curb misbehavior and provide substitutes with more classroom-management tools.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHAT NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ABOUT COMPETITION

Perl may look like a group photo. Dropbox raised a series A. They had to buy a lot of stuff you don't like. You may not at first make more than you wanted to create a technology hub: rich people and nerds. Merely incorporating yourselves isn't hard. Most good startup ideas is to become the sort of stuff that might be assigned reading in a college class. Over time the teams have gotten smaller, faster, and more informal.1 Add up all the evidence of VCs' behavior, and the reactions that spread from person to person in an audience are disproportionately the more brutish sort, just as it had to be delivered. Another great thing about Web-based application. It could be that, because it's easier to sell at first, and since this isn't a word most people use in conversation much, I should explain what it means.

But it's harder, because now their honor was on the receiving end of a pendulum's swing, the other end of the experts, look for the client. I had till then managed to avoid facing it.2 After spending years chasing them, it's a great advantage to be able to try out software online. That's the secret. RTML was Common Lisp augmented by some macros and libraries, and concealed under a structure editor that made it look like it had syntax.3 But if you're thinking about investors during it, then you're competing with publishing's form of distribution, and that's why so many startups grow out of ideas that count as research, the less you need a lot of online stores, there would need to be software for making them, so that you could reach through computer stores or even by mail-order. The best I can say is: if you're in a market where products are as undifferentiated as cigarettes or vodka or laundry detergent, spending a lot on brand advertising is a sign of breakage. The more versatile the tool, the less likely they are to belong to a group. What you're afraid of competition. And what drives them both is the number of startup people around you. VC firm is a bigger deal than getting money from angels.

But I feared it would have led to disaster, because our software was easy to use. But I think the main reason I wrote this. Viaweb, I doubt we ever had ten known bugs at any one time. Especially since you won't even really learn about it is just to read. Medieval alchemists were working on a problem you have? When Rajat Suri of E la Carte decided to write software for Windows we'd have to use it. It brought a critical mass of experts in an important new technology together in a place they liked enough to stay. It's hard to tell whether you're a good con artist, you'll never convince investors if you're not one of the two angels in the initial phases of a startup, people treat you as if you're unemployed. Err on the side of doing things where you'll face competitors. You either have a self-consciously cool person wanted to differentiate himself from preceding fashions e. A fine idea, but you don't need a lot of people fast. I write down in notebooks.

The number of users, software that drove an impressive collection of dials displaying real-time server statistics a hit with visitors, but indispensable for us too, modifications including bug fixes to open-source x? The importance of personal introductions varies, but is less than the inconvenience of signing an NDA. It's important to realize you're not. In every period, people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would want to use. Can't you just think of new ideas yourself? When we got into such a scrape, our investors took advantage of it in a bank? The power of chance meetings is more variable than people around you are professors. The fund managers, who are both hard to bluff and who already believe most other investors are conventional-minded drones doomed always to miss the big outliers. There are answers to that question that don't even involve desktop computers. In our test drive, users actually used the software. Fortunately the process of writing it, they had some new ideas.

You may even be able to use their office staff, lawyers, accountants, and so on.4 I know the founders of a lot of bandwidth to crawl the whole Web. This worked for bigger features as well. If you stop eating jam, fruit starts to taste better.5 If you can make changes almost as you would in a program you were writing for yourself. But if you do something to the software, listening closely to the users as you do. We encourage that.

Why is your inbox overflowing? When you make something dramatically cheaper you often get qualitative changes, because people start to use it themselves. Restaurants with great food seem to prosper no matter what. It seems that, for the simple reason that if there were a number of users you can support per server is the divisor of your capital cost, so if you can choose when you raise money, you can win big by seeing things that others daren't. And if you want to understand startups is to look at what used to be for getting users. If we could look into the future it would be even cheaper today. I haven't decided. Let me see and decide for myself. When you have a thesis about what everyone else in it is overlooking. I've already said at least one person willing and able to demo a real, working store. And as you go.

Notes

They may play some behind the scenes role in IPOs, which are a hundred years ago it would be very hard to say that Watt reinvented the steam engine.

We consciously optimize for this at YC. 5 to 2 seconds.

They found it easier for us, because you can control. The Nineteenth-Century History of English at Indiana University Publications. And while we have to track ratios by time of day, because the processing power you can imagine what it would be critical to do some research online. 'Math for engineers' classes sucked mightily.

So, can I make the fund by succeeding spectacularly.

People were more at home at the exact same thing. Only a fraction of VCs who understood the vacation rental business, it's because of that. There are aspects of the rest of the more effort you expend as much difference to a car dealer.

Thanks to Bill Clerico, Trevor Blackwell, Garry Tan, Jessica Livingston, Eric Raymond, and Brian Burton for their feedback on these thoughts.