#the only Jane Austen society in my city closed down about a year ago

[thatsapphicsoprano]

I kinda want to start a Jane Austen club at my university !! but I don’t know if I would have the time to commit to running it and I don’t know if anyone would join… but I’ve been thinking about it and I think it could be fun ??? 

[acourtofhopeanddreams]

A student's life for me

Written for @jonsaexchange: "Creator's Choice"

Dear @nessataleweaver, I hope that this little college AU romcom styled fic makes you smile and warms your heart!

Jon's student's life is more boring than boring, but it's all about to change when the beautiful red haired girl that all of a sudden appears in the small town in the little of nowhere happens to be his dormmate's sister.

“Enjoy your meal, Mister Lannister.” Jon nodded and forced himself to keep smiling while Tywin threw the door in his face, just like every night. Luckily not all his customers acted like this and even more luckily he had delivered all meals for today and could finally return to his dorm, to the warmth and his astronomy homework.

When he had started his studies a few years ago student’s life had all seemed very exciting. He had heard stories about the wild parties, the illegal drinking and the making friends for life. He had most of all heard that most people found their true love while being in college.

None of it had happened. Even among students astronomy was considered boring, which meant that his classmates didn’t even wanna be found anywhere near a wild party and none of them would ever cross the line of illegal drinking. And that meant that the other students had simply stopped inviting them.

Even Robb Stark, his dorm mate, had stopped mentioning the parties as soon as he had discovered that Jon was not exactly the most interesting conversationalist to introduce to his football friends when they were drunk. Or actually, Jon was the most interesting conversationalist, which was exactly the problem.

If he had known that the real student life looked like this, he might have considered finding a normal job right away. That normal job couldn’t possibly be worse that delivering meals to elder people who had too much money and no one who cared about them anymore.

He pulled his hat over his dark black curls and needed three attempts to get his gloves on. His student loan was barely enough to cover his rent and food, so he didn’t have money for a motorbike or a car. Which meant that he was still stuck with his cargo bike, both in summer and winter.

It really was not as exciting as he had once imagined it to be.

But Jon didn’t know that his entire life was about to be changed.

Just before Jon stepped on his bike to ride back to campus, a big yellow bus stopped at the bus sign. Normally the bus, that once a day brought people from this small middle of nowhere to the nearest big city and once a day made the trip backwards, arrived here empty, but today a girl carrying two suitcases stepped out.

She wore a white hat over her strawberry blond, or was it even red, hair. The hat barely covered her ears, but maybe the hat was not supposed to be functional. The dark black coat keeping her body warm at least looked far more expensive than anything Jon could ever pay for. Not to mention her bright red boots reaching her knee caps with a logo on it that in itself was already worth more than Jon had ever earned in his life.

But it was her smile that really made him lose his grip on his bike. Just when his jaw dropped, the cargo bike slipped from his hand, fell in the snow, bruised his ankles and tipped him over. It all happened within a few seconds, but it didn’t really happen in silence.

The pretty red haired girl looked up and with her suitcases in her gloved hands she rushed towards him, kneeling down next to him as soon as she’d reached him. “Is everything alright?”

Jon laid flat on his back in the ice cold snow with bruised ankles, but he still nodded. “Yeah, yeah…” He sat up and pushed his glasses a little further on his nose. “I'm fine.”

The girl furrowed her eyebrows, but she didn’t say anything and just watched him. “Do we know each other? For some reason I have the feeling we’ve already met, but I have no idea where and when.”

Jon shrugged and he stood up before he reached out his hand to help the girl stand up too. “I'm pretty sure I would’ve remembered it if we’ve met.” He didn’t let go of her hand, but instead shook it a little awkwardly. “Jon, Jon Snow.”

“O!” Her eyes widened and a smile spread across her angelic face while she pulled her hand back. “That’s it! You must be THE Jon!”

“The Jon?” Jon swallowed. All of a sudden he was not sure anymore if this girl knowing him was a good or a bad thing. Did he have a reputation? Were there rumors going around he knew nothing about?

The pretty girl rolled her eyes. “Are you now telling me that my brother forced me to listen to all his stories about you, but never mentioned me in a conversation with you?” She crossed her arms in front of her chest and cocked her head. In a weird way it was cute and attractive at once. “I’m Sansa, Sansa Stark. I’m here to spend the holidays with my brother Robb. And, if I’m not mistaken you’re his dorm mate Jon.”

Jon wasn’t sure if this was the right moment to let out a sigh of relief or not. At least there was no weird story going around that was most likely not true, but he was not sure what Robb had told his sister about him.

And where that normally wouldn’t have mattered, it now seemed to be one of the most important things in the world.

“Only good things, I hope?” Jon swallowed and he scratched the back of his neck.

He and Robb were great friends and he couldn’t have wished for a better dorm mate, but he did know that Robb sometimes thought he was boring or too intelligent for his own good.

Sansa licked her dry lips. “You know how Robb wears his heart on his tongue, but over all he pictured you as a very brave and intelligent young man.” She grinned. “One who doesn’t drink because he’s not yet twenty-one. One who doesn’t smoke because it increases the risks to catch countless of life threatening diseases. And one who has a job that actually benefits people in our society who barely get attention.”

Jon left out a chuckle, partly because the whole fact that she seemed to know exactly who he was while he had no idea who she was made him feel uncomfortable, partly because strictly everything she knew about him was somehow correct. “I sound kinda boring.”

“O no!” Sansa raised her voice and shook her head. “That's absolutely not how I’ve always interpreted it!” She placed a hand on his shoulder and it felt surprisingly comforting to have her touch him. “It’s actually refreshing. There are already more than enough men in this world who think the key to masculinity is drinking too much and talking as many girls as possible into their beds.”

Jon rolled his eyes. “If this speech ends with but you’re different, it sounds like it walked straight out of a Jane Austen book.”

Sansa’s smile brightened and Jon felt his heart skip a few beats in his chest. “Robb never told me you are into literature too.” She cocked her head. “You're getting more and more interesting with every word you speak, Jon Snow.”

For a moment Jon didn’t know what to say. He felt a shiver, one of the good and pleasant kind, rolling down his spine and his entire skin tingled. If this really had been some kind of Jane Austen book, he would’ve known the right thing to say. But he wasn’t in a Jane Austen book and nothing even remotely good crossed his mind.

Instead he eventually decided to change the subject entirely. “So, you’re here to spend the Christmas days with Robb?”

Sansa nodded. “And with you, it seems. I actually thought you would go home to your family, like most students do, but I’m sure Robb won’t mind me inviting you to our dinner too.”

Jon bent his head and all of a sudden he saw his cargo bike still lying in the snow. He had almost forgotten about it. Quickly he bent down to grab his bike and once it stood up again he made sure to hold it firmly this time. “Yeah, if Robb doesn’t mind, I’d love to come over.”

“You're coming over then. I don’t even care if he minds. No one should be alone with Christmas and especially not intelligent and charming young men like you.” She winked and a pleasant warmth spread through his entire body.

Even if he had not worn a scarf, hat and gloves right now, he would have stopped noticing the cold. Who could be bothered by snow and wind and ice, when a beautiful girl like Sansa Stark delivered one compliment after the other? Who could be bothered by winter, when a pretty lady like Sansa Stark was there to warm your heart?

“So…” He cleared his throat and coughed. “How are you gonna get to campus?”

In summer time it was a nice walk from the city centre to the campus, but with all the snow and cold right now it would be a long and nasty one. Especially on those high heeled boots Sansa was wearing.

“I was planning on calling Robb to come and pick me up, but…” Sansa looked at the bike and raised her eyebrows. “If you have better ideas, I’m all ears.”

“I could…” Jon looked at his bike, at the pretty girl and back at his bike. “You can put your suitcases in the cargo and jump on the back?”

It was not as comfortable and warm as a car, but it would save her some waiting time. And it would mean she would be very very close to him and forced to hold onto him very tightly.

“That sounds like an excellent idea!” Sansa pecked his cheek, but before she could see how his cheeks colored a bright pink she already reached for her suitcases and threw them in the cargo. “I'm glad we’ve met, Jon Snow.” She waited until he swung one leg over his bike and stabilized it even more. “And I can’t wait to get to know you even better. It’s going to be a wonderful Christmas time, I already feel it.”

Jon smiled and he took a deep breath when she jumped on the back of his bike and wrapped her arms firmly around his waist. “I hope you mean it’s gonna be a great life.” He murmured, but the wind did carry his words to the girl on the back of his bike anyway.

And Jon maybe couldn’t see it. But she smiled. She smiled brightly and let her head rest to his back while she already envisioned their wedding day.

[theartofdreaming1]

Semester Reading List

Another 6 months have passed and that can only mean one thing: Another semester reading list! Here are the books I’ve read from April ‘18 until early October ‘18, including summaries and my thoughts on them:

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte:

Summary:  When the mysterious and beautiful young widow Helen Graham becomes the new tenant at Wildfell Hall rumours immediately begin to swirl around her. As her neighbour Gilbert Markham comes to discover, Helen has painful secrets buried in her past that even his love for her cannot easily overcome.

Thoughts: I loved this one a lot! (I read it in, like, two or three days - and it’s a very thick book! but it’s just really good) I was pretty surprised at first when I found out that it begins telling the story from the male protagonist’s perspective (Gilbert); which is not what I expected, admittedly. The middle part of the book are excerpts from the female protagonist’s perspective (over the course of her courtship, then later marriage with her abusive husband) - it was really fascinating to catch such an intimate glimpse of Helen’s point of view and see it change over time... but it was also very nice to see how she’d always been a strong character, although at first more falling into that “woman as the savior of the man’s virtuous attributes” trap, before she realizes that if she wants her son not to grow up like his father, she has to leave (which is very big thing for that time, when you think about it) - and her husband’s manipulating behavior to keep her at his side (complete with the classic “you don’t love me as much as I love you”-accusation). In addition to that, it was also very nice to see Gilbert react to Helen’s diary entries with a lot of understanding and just being very respectful regarding her wishes from then on (he’d been acting a little douche-y and presumptuous at times prior to that) and also see Gilibert bond with Helen’s son... This book felt just very modern in the way it dealt with this serious topic of an abusive marriage, which made it a very fascinating read! (This was my first book written by a Bronte sister and I feel like I have picked the absolute winner with Tenant of Wildfell Hall :)

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Summary: When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited, while he struggles to remain indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever. 

Thoughts: I’ve already put my thoughts on P&P down in this post (I just read this Austen book very often ;)

The Darcys of Derbyshire by Abigail Reynolds:

Summary: During her trip to Derbyshire, Elizabeth Bennet longs to see the view from the famous Black Rocks, but her aunt and uncle refuse to allow her to ascend to the highest rock outcroppings alone. Elizabeth’s distress is only worsened by a chance encounter with Mr. Darcy - at least until he offers to accompany her to the Black Rocks. Unaware that the place has special significance for Fitzwilliam Darcy, she accepts his invitation. During their adventure, Darcy tells her the story of how his parents met and married despite many obstacles in their way; and like Darcy’s mother before her, Elizabeth learns there is more to the men of the Darcy family than meets the eye.

Thoughts: I really loved the story of Darcy’s parents, giving a little more backstory to the Darcy’s that came before the best-known Darcy of them all ;) The Lizzie/Darcy part of this book didn’t really work for me, though - it felt a little too fanfiction-y (read: romantic wish fulfillment that doesn’t exactly fit the proper nature of Jane Austen’s world... - or Darcy’s for that matter) for my taste. Nevertheless, it was still a very interesting read.

The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells

Summary: A shipwrecked Edward Prendick finds himself stranded on a remote Noble island, the guest of a notorious scientist, Doctor Moreau. Disturbed by the cries of animals in pain, and by his encounters with half-bestial creatures, Prendick slowly realises his danger and the extremes of the Doctor’s experiments.

Thoughts: Very creepy. Definitely an interesting read (it’s a classic, after all... I just recently read a Wonder Woman comic that had a very ‘Island of Doctor Moreau’-vibe to it, which was interesting) and very suspenseful in the second half. It definitely made a good point about the importance of ethics in science. There were a few moments that made me uncomfortable because they read kinda racist to me (I guess you could argue that that’s simply influenced by the mindset of the society and era back then, but that’s just something I really didn’t like at all.)

The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture by Glen Weldon

Summary: Since his debut in Detective Comics #27, Batman has been many things: a two-fisted detective; a planet-hopping gadabout; a campy Pop Art sensation; a pointy-eared master spy; and a grim ninja of the urban night, cycling through eras of dark melodrama and light comedy and back again. He is constantly changing, jumping from page to screen and beyond, and yet he remains one of our most revered cultural icons. In this witty, wise, and a fascinating history, MPR critic and self-proclaimed nerd Glen Weldon explains why we’ve continued to look to this masked man in the night - and what that devotion tells us about ourselves.

Thoughts: Very extensive, in-depth and interesting book about Batman and nerd culture; the language was sometimes very flowery, with lots of fancy descriptors (which sometimes threw me off a little), but overall very fun and cool! (Also, I’m just a huge Batman fangirl, I love reading this kind of stuff! ;)

Mr. Darcy’s Diary by Amanda Grange

Summary: The only place Darcy could share his innermost feelings... was the pages of his diary... Torn between his sense of duty to his family name and his growing passion for Elizabeth Bennet, all he can do is struggle not to fall in love.

Thoughts: I liked this one a lot better than ‘The Darcys of Derbyshire’, I’ve got to admit - it felt a lot more natural and fitting for ‘canon’ than the other P&P inspired book. I very much liked how Darcy’s Diary gave the reader context for Darcy’s prickliness in the beginning of Pride & Prejudice (having the Wickham/Georgiana situation happen not too long ago, for example). It was also nice to read about Darcy’s thoughts and feeling regarding his friendship with Bingley (and his feeling for Lizzie, of course ;) Darcy is one of my favorite characters so it was a lot of fun to be able to read this P&P companion from his point of view :)

The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

Summary: Ray Bradbury brings wonders alive. For this peerless American storyteller, the most bewitching force in the universe is human nature. In these eighteen startling tales unfolding across a canvas of tattooed skin, living cities take their vengeance, technology awakens the most primal natural instincts, and dreams are carried aloft in junkyard rockets. Provocative and powerful, The Illustrated Man is a kaleidoscopic blending of magic, imagination, and truth—as exhilarating as interplanetary travel, as maddening as a walk in a million-year rain, and as comforting as simple, familiar rituals on the last night of the world.

Thoughts: I just absolutely adore Ray Bradbury’s short stories (even though they don’t not necessarily fall into the genres I usually read). There is just something about his writing that feels very natural and simple to me, while simultaneously being very layered and making me ponder about the deeper meaning of the stories I’ve just read. This book collects mainly creepy (and excellent) short stories like ‘The Veldt’ or ‘Zero Hour’ (’the Veldt’ is the first short story in this book and it’s so amazing; it had me at the edge of my seat throughout), but also a kinda sweet one like ‘The Rocket’ - I very much enjoyed reading this book!

Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World’s Most Famous Heroine by Tim Hanley

Summary: With her golden lasso and her bullet-deflecting bracelets, Wonder Woman is a beloved icon of female strength in a world of male superheroes. But this close look at her history portrays a complicated heroine who is more than just a female Superman. When they debuted in the 1940s, Wonder Woman comics advocated female superiority and the benefits of matriarchy; her adventures were also colored by bondage imagery and hidden lesbian leanings. In the decades that followed, Wonder Woman fell backward as American women began to step forward. Ultimately, Wonder Woman became a feminist symbol in the 1970s, and the curious details of her past were quickly forgotten. Exploring this lost history adds new dimensions to the world’s most beloved female character, and Wonder Woman Unbounds delves into her comic book and its spin-offs as wekk as motivations of her creators to showcase the peculiar journey of a twentieth-century icon.

Thoughts: Yet again, a really interesting and entertaining book by Tim Hanley about an awesome comic book lady! I already knew plenty about Wonder Woman, but there were still things I didn’t know about the world’s most famous superheroine. Plus, it’s always cool to learn more about the background and historical context behind the story of this amazing amazon!

Mythos: The Greek Myths Retold by Stephen Fry

Summary: No one loves and quarrels, desires and deceives as boldly or brilliantly as Greek gods and goddesses. In Stephen Fry's vivid retelling we gaze in wonder as wise Athena is born from the cracking open of the great head of Zeus and follow doomed Persephone into the dark and lonely realm of the Underworld. We shiver when Pandora opens her jar of evil torments and watch with joy as the legendary love affair between Eros and Psyche unfolds. Mythos captures these extraodinary myths for our modern age - in all their dazzling and deeply human relevance.

Thoughts: I always enjoyed reading the book about Greek myths that I’ve had as a child and I enjoy Stephen Fry’s humor, so I just had to buy this book when I saw it at my local bookstore - an excellent decision, as it turned out! Stephen Fry tells these ancient myths in such an entertaining and witty manner that I just couldn’t help but laugh out loud sometimes! It didn’t matter if I was already familiar with a particular myth or if it was one completely unknown to me, I was just completely glued to this book, eager to find out more and read Stephen Fry’s fun take on it! As this book doesn’t even begin to cover all the stories of Greek mythology that exist, I really hope that there will be a continuation of this book in the future :)

Catwoman: Soulstealer by Sarah J. Maas

Summary: Two years after escaping Gotham City’s slums, Selina Kyle returns as the mysterious and wealthy Holly Vanderhees. Batman is off on a vital mission and Gotham is at the mercy of the new thief on the prowl. Joined by the cunning Poison Ivy and notorious Harley Quinn, she wreaks havok across the city. Selina is playing a desperate game of cat and mouse. But with a dangerous threat from the past on her tail, will she be able to pull of the ultimate heist?

Thoughts: To be honest, I was pretty disappointed by this book of the DC Icons Series. It started out very promising and interesting with seventeen-year-old Selina living on her own, taking care of her sister, Maggie, who’s seriously ill. To be able to pay for the medical bills, Selina has become part of a street fighter gang, working for the mob boss Falcone. With this premise, I would have loved to just read a story about how Selina finds a way to break free from Falcone’s influence to do her own thing and become the kickass cat burglar we know and love - but instead, Selina is found out by the police and social services and then, at the precinct, gets offered one chance to escape the system to instead become an assassin for Talia al Ghul! A couple of years later, Selina returns to Gotham under the guise of socialite “Holly Vanderhees”. To me, Selina has alwas been someone who has been very independent and self-reliant and now to have her impressive skill set be traced back to the al Ghuls just doesn’t sit particularly well with me. Over the course of the rest of the book, Selina does team up with Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn, which is normally something I absolutely love (Gotham City Sirens, for the win!), but Ivy felt extremely off to me: too nice, too soft, too goody-two-shoes, I guess? I don’t know, it just didn’t feel right to me. In addition to all of that, Selina has to share her own book with Luke Fox, aka Batwing. I have nothing against Luke at all, and his backstory is definitely interesting, but a) due to his dealings with his PTSD (that gets triggered by loud noises such as gunshots which, for a vigilante, is just plain dangerous and I can’t imagine Bruce being nonchalant about this kind of thing when ‘recruiting’ someone with these kind of issues) and other problems, he’s not particularly good at the whole superheroing, which is a bummer and b) there is so much going on in his life that I simply felt that Luke should have just gotten his own book so his character could be thoroughly explored. Also, I just wasn’t digging the romance between Selina and Luke (that might be my inner BatCat shipper talking, but I wasn’t feeling the chemistry between these two at all.) My biggest issue with this book is, that while I was reading it, I had like three ideas for other Catwoman stories I would have rather read, making this book just a reminder of missed opportunities for me.

Lois Lane (Fallout trilogy) by Gwenda Bond

Summary:  … a contemporary reimagining of teenage Lois Lane. She and her family have lived all over, but now they’re in Metrolpolis for good, and Lois is determined to stay quiet. Fit in. Maybe make a friend. As soon as she walks into her new high school, though, she can see it won’t be easy. A group known as the Warheads is making life miserable for another girl at school. They’re messing with her mind somehow, via the high-tech immersive video game they all play. Not cool. Armed with her wit and her new snazzy job as a reporter, Lois has her sights set on solving the mystery. But even she needs help sometimes. Thank goodness for her maybe-more-than-a-friend, someone she knows only by his screen name, SmallvilleGuy…

Thoughts: I’ve already read these books since I’ve started doing my reading lists, so you can find my thoughts on the first two books here and my thoughts on the third book here.

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

Summary:  Sixteen years have passed since Grace was locked up, at the age of 16, for the cold-blooded murders of her employer and his housekeeper/lover. Her alleged accomplice in the crimes, James McDermot, paid the extreme sentence of the law and was hanged on November 21, 1843. But some thought Grace was innocent, and her sentence has been commuted to life imprisonment. After a spell in the Lunatic Asylum she now claims to have no memory of the murders, and so Dr. Simon Jordan tries to wake the part of Grace's mind which lies dormant. But what will he find?

Thoughts: I first found out about Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace through the Netflix series (which is really good!), so I knew most of the story already when I got myself the book. Turns out that the Netflix series is a pretty good adaptation of the book - still, the book offered more insights into the various characters (as books are wont to do) and I liked that the book wasn’t just simple narration from different points of view, but was also interspersed with excerpts from actual newspaper clippings, Susanna Moodie’s book and written confessions, as well as a poem at the beginning of each chapter and the occasional letter written by the characters. I did sometimes hit points during which reading was going pretty slow (maybe because it reads old-fashion-y, which is sometimes difficult for me as a non-native English speaker; maybe because it’s not exactly a short book you can just breeze through... I don’t know), but overall, it is a really intriguing story with multi-layered and complicated characters, which is always a win in my book (pun not intended)!

If you’d like to know more about these books (and/or my thoughts about them) feel free to message me at any time or leave an ask in my askbox! :)

The summaries are from the back of the books or amazon pages.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

GOOD NEW IDEAS COME FROM EARNEST, ENERGETIC, INDEPENDENT-MINDED

It was a lot of good mathematicians are bad teachers. Good startups will move to another city as a condition of funding. Even if your colleagues were impressed by your credentials, they'd soon be parted from you if your performance didn't match, because the company would go out of business and the people would be dispersed. All a city needs is to be the most powerful forces in human nature. This too seems a technique that should be generally applicable. 9999 free! For example, so far the filter has caught two emails that were sent to my address because of a typo, and one of the things they're doing is breaking up and misspelling words to prevent filters from recognizing them. In my filter, the spam probability of Act is 98% and for act only 62%. Of course, a would-be silicon valley faces an obstacle the original one didn't: it has to stand up to existing magnets like MIT and Stanford.

Then one of their parents introduced them to a small investment bank that offered to find funding for them to start their own. Subject free, free! The cycle time is limited by the time you had a thousand startups. But a bunch of small organizations in a market can come close. If I were in college now I'd probably work on graphics: a network game, for example, or a tool for 3D animation.1 In my filter, the spam probability of only 65%. When I was in high school it wouldn't have seemed too far off as a description of the US either.2

But in the US are also big tourist destinations: San Francisco, or Boston, or Seattle.3 This lets me get ip addresses and prices intact. How can we build a silicon valley, if they hadn't had to write a dissertation. But I took so many CS classes that most CS majors thought I was one. You're better off starting with a crude version 1, then f iterating rapidly. Even if your colleagues were impressed by your credentials, they'd soon be parted from you if your performance didn't match, because the key stage in the life of a startup hub. What you can't have, if you want to encourage startups. If a physicist met a colleague from 100 years ago, he could teach him some new things; if a psychologist met a colleague from 100 years ago, why wasn't everyone using it? The first step is to have an explicit belief in change. For example, I write essays the same way you are, are you really out of your element? Now we seem to be working on; there's usually a reason.

And that means it has to grow organically. Nerds are a distinct type of rich people, it has few nerds. So look for simple things that other people have overlooked—things people will later claim were obvious—especially when they've been led astray by obsolete conventions, or by trying to reverse-engineer Winograd's SHRDLU. The practice seems to have begun in China, where starting in 587 candidates for the imperial civil service exams took years, as prep school does today. The top US Computer Science departments are said to be MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and Carnegie-Mellon? Before credentials, government positions were obtained mainly by family influence, if not outright bribery. A town with personality is one that doesn't feel mass-produced. They'd probably vary in size by orders of magnitude. It's a hub of glamour, a magnet for all the shift from credentials to measurement. I was a philosophy major in college. It's hard to beat this phenomenon, because the schools adjust to suit whatever the tests measure.

A Plan for Spam I hadn't had any, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Can that be done? Subject line becomes Subject foo. Usually you don't get much practice at the third skill, deciding what problems to solve.4 I approach improving the filtering rate as optimization, and decreasing false positives as debugging. Then you can measure what credentials merely predict.5 It would hurt the startups somewhat to be separated from their original investors. One is simply that they trained their filter on very little data: 160 spam and 466 nonspam mails. Thomas Huxley said Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.6 Arguably, these are neither my spam nor my nonspam mail. For the price of a football stadium, any town that was decent to live in Pittsburgh or Ithaca. But his work led to more work till that sliver had expanded into something bigger than the whole economy of which it had initially been a part.

For example, in the sense that we encourage the startups we fund to work this way. So for the next couple years, but the startup community around it has to compete with Apple: be a better way of preventing it than the credentials the left are forced to fall back on. The future turned out to be a great thing that Apple tablets have accelerometers in them. If a city offered these companies a million dollars per startup.7 History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's success directly. But working on this is not my first priority, because I still have no trouble catching these spams. If you want to create a silicon valley, you not only need a university, but one of the main forces driving the spread of smallness began: in the world of startups. It has fabulous weather, which makes it significantly better than the soul-crushing suburban sprawl. But first, I thought, I'll see how far I can get with single words.

And the societies that win will be the ones you would least mind missing. I just wanted to explore what it would take. Even so I can answer for both.8 Beware, because although it's full of rich people.9 A wimpy little single-board computer for hobbyists that used a TV as a monitor? Do you have good weather?10 As a result it became massively successful. Spams tend to have a lot of creative people, but few nerds.

Venture investors, however, prefer to fund startups that won't leave. In fact, Shockley Semiconductor and Fairchild Semiconductor were not startups at all in our sense.11 And that's why less popular languages, like Jane Austen's novels, continue to survive at all. And it would get easier over time, because the people they admit are going to take over the world is going. More libraries get written for popular languages, because they were laid out before cars, and they're more varied, because they give them more leverage over developers, who can more easily be replaced. The greatest advantage of a PhD besides being the union card of academia, of course may be that it gives you some baseline confidence. I can think of that a city could attract angels from outside. And yet, mysteriously, Viaweb ended up crushing all its competitors. Fifty years later, startups are ubiquitous in Silicon Valley don't make anything out of silicon, there always seem to be multiple links back to Shockley. 16% false positives. It is a truth universally acknowledged?

Notes

So instead of admitting frankly that it's hard to say they prefer great markets to great people.

I'm not saying that the usual way of calculating real income statistics calculated in the first million is worth more to most people will pay people millions of people, how could it have meaning? I have about thirty friends whose opinions I care about Intel and Microsoft, incidentally, because any VC would think twice before crossing him. If anyone wanted to.

Learning to hack is a meaningful idea for human audiences. In many fields a year of focused work plus caring a lot of problems, but there has to work for us now to appreciate how important it is less secure. Default: 2 cups water per cup of rice. And you can do with down rounds—like full ratchet anti-takeover laws, they have a different type of round, though in very corrupt countries you may get both simultaneously.

You'll be lucky if fundraising feels pleasant enough to become one of the art business? I almost hesitate to raise the next year they worked together mostly at night, and one didn't try to give you fifty times as much difference to a college that limits their options? You should only need comments when there is the desire to do tedious work.

Success here is Skype. Or it may be loud and disorganized, but you're very docile compared to sheep. This phenomenon may account for a block or so you could get all the other: the process dragged on for months.

That's why the Apple I used to those. A startup founder could pull the same in the construction industry.

Dan wrote a hilarious but also the highest maintenance. We're delighted to have discovered something intuitively without understanding all its implications. Treating high school textbooks. Merely including Steve in the case.

A more accurate predictor of success.

Whereas there is a new Mosaic. By your mid-century big companies may be a founder; and not fundraising is the fact that they aren't.

If you like the arrival of desktop publishing, given people the shareholders instead of being harsh to founders with established reputations. The aim of such high taxes during the Ming Dynasty, when Subject foo not to be hidden from statistics too. Maybe it would not make a formal language for proofs in which case immediate problem solved, or in one where life was tougher, the main causes of the big acquisition offers are driven only by money, buy beans in giant cans from discount stores. That's the lower bound.

If you want as an employee or as outside counsel, they are so intellectually dishonest in that it would be investors who say no to drugs.