#this is one of the things about actual plays I'm worse at parsing -- they work differently than conventional written fiction

[vaguely-concerned]

*fully sweating bullets and thousand yard staring into space as the king of hearts starts to talk about losing the person you love and what you'd be willing to do to get them back* this better not be fUCKING thematic foreshadowing for what this story is meant to head towards eventually (I say, with little hope and great trepidation). we're just going to be thematically microdosing on that in the main krew right folks. no one's going to be lost forever. right??!?!

(though I must admit that the idea of some of them dying and being brough back because that is someone else's heart's desire -- because 'what would even be the point of being given anything else, if you aren't here with me' -- would render me fully incapable of being normal ever again and forever goodnight)

[ipso-faculty]

A review of intersex/intergender flag mashup techniques

I really like it when I can figure out what a new pride flag means just from my knowledge of other flags, and I know I'm not alone on this. For example, here are some flags other people have made that I could immediately figure out were <thing> plus intersex:

So, I've been thinking about how we as intersex flag creators can create hybrid flags in consistent way. I'm most motivated to figure out a recipe for intergender flags: genders that are connected to being intersex.

I assembled a spreadsheet of 66 gender flags, and wrote a Python script to take my csv file, parse it, and use the drawsvg library to draw the different flags in different ways. And then I stared at the results, showed them to friends, and discussed what would be both reliable in terms of producing clear, decent-looking results. (A subset of the results are under the keep reading cut.)

In this post I'm gonna review five mashup techniques that I automated and talk about advantages/disadvantages to each. But first a TLDR: adding yellow border stripes is a simple and reliable way to make an intersex-hybrid flag that is now my favourite (and recommended) way to make a new intergender flag.

For example, here's the interfluid flag (genderfluid in a way that is specifically intersex):

***

Method 1: put a ring on it - advantages: simple to do, simple to understand - disadvantages: incredibly dependent on how well the ring colour works with background stripes, and the number of stripes. Would very roughly estimate only ~20% look decent.

Here's a subset of the results. Some, like genderfaun, look nice, but most look awkward:

A yellow ring is even worse:

I think the purple ring has a bit of potential, but I think it's not really viable for being used as a consistent, procedural way to make intergenders. ***

Method 2: stick a belt on it - advantages: already used for some existing mashups - disadvantages: some other genders are doing similar things, like voidpunk, and a white belt has been used by tons of groups for their mashups (e.g. neurogender).

It looks better than the ring alone, but I was still kinda underwhelmed because of how much it depends on the background stripes to not clash. Very roughly I'd say about 40% of the total results look good. Again, here's genderfae through paragender for comparison:

Using a purple belt helps in some cases but makes for some visually busy results:

The purple ones make me think of pokéballs. Again, there are some nice looking ones, but the effect over the whole group was underwhelming. ***

Method 3: inset into the ring - advantages: it's the most clearly "intersex plus X" - disadvantages: hard to read flags where the stripes are similar to each other; might clash with ring colour

When zoomed out like this the results aren't always super easy to read, but overall I'd say this is a reasonably reliably method - very roughly 60% of the results look good to me.

Playing with lightness and contrast on the inset flag likely would improve that number, but my goal here is to compare methods without tweaks.

Insetting into the intergender flag has similar results:

Method 4: add intersex-coloured stripe to the middle - advantage: seems like it would be simple - disadvantage: yellow middle stripe used for pansexual mashups; purple stripe is used in a bunch of of existing mashups - also disadvantage: turns out to actually be complicated in how to do it. Many flags have an odd number of stripes, not all flags have equal-length stripes, etc. I got buggy results on a whole bunch of flags like hijra and hypergirl and honestly if it takes dedicated debugging to fix it's probably too complicated.

When the original flag has an odd number of stripes, I doubled the original middle stripe up and this only works if there's a symmetry to the flag and all the stripes are of equal size.

The results are kinda busy. It looks good to my eyes very roughly 1/8 of the time (~12%) (I did an alternate version where I doubled the purple stripe around the original middle stripe and it's way worse.)

Purple stripe:

Yellow stripe looks less busy but more confusing:

Method 5: add border stripes with intersex colours - advantages: simple - disadvantages: maybe not as obviously intersex

I honestly didn't expect to like this one, but it has turned out to be my favourite. It works really reliably, like ~90% of the time, and it's distinctive.

Surprisingly, using purple gives a really different vibe. It kinda makes me feel claustraphobic:

Method 6: change the colours

This one I don't have automated results to share (at least not yet). Right now there are flags like how ultergender recolours the trans flag, that could serve as a template for recolouring.

This is much more complex computationally - I spent a bunch of time playing around with different colourspaces (HSV, LCH, oklab, okLCH) to try to do this automatically and have concluded that this actually a difficult computational problem and not feasible as a widescale recipe.

Part of why the ultergender recolouring works is there are just two colours to recolour. How should one recolour the genderfluid flag? The demigender flag? It's possible to create a convention but not something I'm up to this moment.

I think recolouring is better suited to creating entirely new identities (like ultergender) rather than intergenders that are "<gender> but in an intergender way". ***

Discussion

My goal in all of this has been to try and identify some reliable recipes for creating hybrid flags particularly for intergenders.

My entirely subjective and imprecise estimates of how reliably each method yielded a decent-looking result were: 1. Add yellow border: ~90%-ish 2. Inset: ~60% 3. Belt: ~40% 4. Ring: ~20% 5. Add middle stripe: ~1/8-ish

I was honestly surprised at how much I liked the yellow border method and the friends I've shown it to so far have liked it as well!

I'd like to propose adding yellow border stripes as a recipe for creating intergender flags. This is already in use for interfluid (genderfluid in a specifically/uniquely intersex way):

Indeed, it's the only one of the mashup functions I wrote that yields something for genderfluid that I actually like:

Extrapolating, here are examples of some gender coinings that I think would work: Interdemigender: demigender in a specifically/uniquely intersex way and/or demigender in a way linked to being intersex/intergender

Intervaguegender: vaguegender in a way that is specifically intersex, such as in a way that is connected to being intersex (i.e. one's gender is vague not just for being neurodivergent but also intersex)

I think it works well! I hope you like it! Let me know if you have any feedback. If there are other mashup techniques I didn't think of, let me know. :)

[96percentdone]

It is deeply frustrating to me that it is a relatively common opinion that Amame murdering Uru was a moral good because it was "justice", and she "stopped Uru." To be clear, they're right that he needed to be stopped. His plan was evil, whether he has the sanity to parse that or not (and he demonstrably does not), but I think that's entirely beyond the point of the claims about the morality of Amame's actions. Whether or not Uru was in the wrong (he was by every possible metric) is not a worthwhile question to ask when it comes to evaluating what justice is.

First, and I cannot emphasize this enough, Amame literally didn't stop him. She just objectively didn't! Yes, he died, but the present day half of the plot plays out fucking anyway because it turns out the genocidal maniac had contingency plans to carry out his scheme! His guys do it for him! He says in his own tapes he planned for this just in case! Is that stopping him? The Nirvana Initiative gets as far as the genocide missile launching before his plan is actually ended. I cannot stress this enough; ya boi straight up almost won at KILLING EVERYONE posthumously. Sorry, but the in universe team "Amame did nothing wrong" is like suffering terminal hindsight bias, which is hilarious, because all of them were literally there when Uru almost killed everyone on the earth from beyond the grave.

Moreover, because Amame (and Gen who is helping her) spend that entire period of time trying to keep the murder a secret, she ends up actively getting in the way of stopping his plan until on the day of the initiative she finally steps forward because she can't take the pressure and the guilt any longer. She keeps critical information about the exact problem they are dealing with--like the fact that the guy they're looking for is fucking dead--a secret on purpose! Whether or not the police would have gotten anywhere faster if he lived is irrelevant; her actions for what actually happened made things worse. And there's a good reason for this! It's the same reason she is utterly ravaged by guilt for her own actions, despite how hard she tries to convince herself and the world she has no regrets: murder is always wrong, and Amame wanted revenge.

Revenge murder really isn't this incredible healing force people can hype it up to be in their heads. Amame says she went because she wanted to hear what he had to say. She wanted closure. Now of course he's severely out of his mind and everything he said in that moment pissed her off, understandable, and she'd have to wait like 100 years for him to maybe parse he was wrong, so okay, but did the revenge work? "I'm going to make you suffer the same pain..." She waits for him to be conscious when she kills him, she is explicitly out to make him hurt, but like...was it actually effective? No, lmao. The funny thing is, that first line we see of that flashback where she kills him is Uru referencing his own torture: "Yes, this world is an imperfect one. I was put through much hardship." At this point, even if he didn't tell her the details, we the players know he was held prisoner in a cell for over two decades and had his organs harvested so frequently anesthetics stopped working on him. We are being deliberately reminded of this fact so that when Amame says her classic one-liner, we'll know it was for nothing.

Revenge isn't justice. You can convince yourself that it will be satisfying, it's what he deserves, it's what you deserve to do, but what's left when it's over? What did you really gain? Amame didn't gain anything. This didn't heal her at all. She still mourns her father the same, only now she has to deal with new, worse problems of her own making. She spends the last of her free days catatonic from fear and guilt, she hates that she betrayed Shouma and Gen and her actions will force her to leave them, because she lost sight of what matters most in the name of punishment. It will never matter that Uru was wrong. Amame killed Uru for the same reasons he killed her father, and Horadori, and Jin; how could she ever be right? The fallout of her actions on her own psyche and on the world at large is the greatest proof of that.

If your definition of justice is just "we destroyed the bad guy most responsible for the problem" your definition of justice is worthless. The world is not meaningfully made better by punishing wrongdoers, but by healing the social and political ills that lead to their creation and that ravage to the victims they left behind.

[thecurioustale]

I got more "deep dive" podcasts about my work from Google's NotebookLM

I've been using some of my downtime this week to play around more with Google's new NotebookLM "deep dive" podcast generator (currently free to use), which I wrote about in a recent post.

I had mentioned at the end of that post that, having sent the AI such a coherent and self-contained excerpt—about a young Silence asking Galavar for a secretary desk—and getting a very reasonable analysis out of the AI, all things considered, I'd be curious to send the AI excerpts which are more difficult to parse, and see what happens.

Well, I've done that! And more. And I've been really enjoying the fun. It is fun. It's a novelty, if nothing else, and may one day have the potential to be more than that. It's a very impressive new benchmark of AI capability. The AI hosts' feedback is usually pretty anodyne or outright dumb; it's cringeworthy like nostalgebraist mentioned; it's sometimes 100% wrong; and it's also spot-on-the-money sometimes; and in any case it's often accurate in picking out important things and talking about them, even if the talk isn't deep. And so it has given me a LOT of insight into how "mundanes" might engage with my work.

And I'd be lying if I didn't also say that "scientific" curiosity isn't my only motivation; this stuff also scratches that itch I mentioned of vanity and masochism to get feedback on my work. Usually I don't like feedback that goes out of its way to not say anything negative, which is how Google has programmed its AI here, but I find that I am finding it quite easy to weight the AI feedback differently from a human's, both in this regard and others.

So, here are my thoughts!

The first thing that I want to mention is that the first deep dive podcast (about the excerpt where Silence asks for a secretary desk) was the most satisfying one to date. I've fed NotebookLM another six excerpts since then (four Galaxy Federal and two After The Hero), and I'd have to say only two of the ensuing podcasts really "stepped up" to demonstrate the AI's capabilities when it works "well" like the original excerpt did. (And neither of them pleased me as much as the original.) The other four were seriously hobbled by mistakes and omissions.

I don't want to draw a stark "good" / "bad" binary here; the three I liked better and the four I liked less well are all relatively close together in the realm of my "approval space." But the three I liked better, and the secretary excerpt especially, left a noticeably better impression on me.

I'm not sure why, though it's something I'm going to explore as I go through my thoughts on the specific podcast episodes. But here is some speculation:

Perhaps Google is updating the tech so quickly, and/or the AI is evolving so quickly given that the deep dive podcast is enjoying a popularity spurt and lots of people are using it, that these updates to the tech are noticeable even within the span of the past few days, and are actually making its outputs worse for my purposes. Or maybe it's that this high level of use resulting from the popularity spurt is requiring Google to deliver a "cheaper" output product. One point in favor of that possibility is that all of the subsequent deep dive podcasts have also been shorter than the original one, despite the source material excerpts sometimes being shorter and sometimes longer (including significantly longer) than the secretary desk excerpt.

Another possibility is that my grading is biased. I'm really proud of the scenes where Silence asks for a secretary; this is some of my best writing for her. But I'm also really proud of the two excerpts out of the new batch of six that produced the best podcasts. Perhaps this makes it possible that any feedback is simply going to be rated more highly by me because I am in a better "mood" about it to begin with. The problem with this theory is that I'm also really proud of at least half of the four excerpts whose podcasts left me wanting. I've specifically been picking only scenes which I really like.

One strong possibility is that the nature of excerpts I picked has changed somehow in a way that I'm not picking up on. I have sent Google a variety of different scenes at this point, on purpose, in a manner that should produce varied results from the deep dives, but perhaps I have biases that I'm not aware of that are causing me to pick scenes which either relevantly or coincidentally lead to podcasts that I don't like as well.

Anyway! Moving on to other thoughts:

I had mentioned in my earlier post that, very much true to real life, the female podcast host was less relevant to and had less ownership over the podcast. That seems to be something Google is actively fixing, suggesting that the reason it was there in the first place is that it emerged organically (unsurprising) and the fix was not trivial (which makes sense). Nostalgebraist's podcasts, generated earlier than any of my own, were the worst offenders; my first podcast, where Silence asks for a secretary desk, was the next worst; and the next six seemed to improve on this over the course of this week, with last night's episodes being the best so far. Now I would say we're at the point where the female host is talking basically half the time (maybe even more sometimes, given that there is variance), and regularly gets to open, close, or even both open and close the episodes. Props to Google for fixing this; it irritated me.

I had seen someone else on Tumblr mention that Google has ordered its AI to avoid let's call them "hot-button" issues at virtually all costs, which has had the dismaying and predictable consequence of erasing queer people, fat people, love and relationships, and sex. I tested this for myself and it's true: The deep dive podcasts go out of their way to avoid this stuff. It never acknowledges that Cherry and Zoë are partners even when that's important to the text. It completely ignores my efforts to raise the visibility of fat characters and fat issues. (Nor is this stuff as preachy or explicit as I am making it sound here.) And one excerpt that I gave it, the longest of them all at about 28 pages, is a sequence of scenes from ATH, two-thirds of which is one big sex scene; yet the fact that sex happened at all is reduced to just one sentence in the entire podcast, with another sentence setting it up and a little bit of talk afterward about people looking for nondescript sources of pleasure in life.

This baffles me. I can't imagine there are many people right now who are using this new podcast tech to organize notes and reports the way Google intended. People are using this for fun, and I can't help but think Google is sitting on a goldmine. But Google needs to let people do with it what they are inevitably going to want to do with it. That means sex and filth and communism and space hentai and you name it. I understand Google's predicament: If they loosen the restrictions then the damn Nazis are going to use it to generate pages and pages of Nazi screeds that the forced-to-be-approving podcasters are going to talk about excitedly. And there'll be graphic violence, and sex abuse, and all sorts of awful things. And that stuff will get "exposed" in the news, and the public pressure will force Google to shut down the project.

But Google needs to do better on this. They need to give us as much functionality as possible in the areas that we're looking for it, especially when it comes to minority visibility, love and sex, and a certain degree of violence. The podcasters need to be allowed to talk about that and analyze it.

(Incidentally, the non-podcast parts of NotebookLM's functionality are comparably good in analytical prowess, and seem to have fewer and/or weaker restrictions on subject matter.)

One strong praise I have for these podcast products is that, because of how the AI works, the hosts tend to use the right names for characters and things. This came up, for instance, in an excerpt involving Silence Terlais (which they managed to pronounce correctly exactly one time!) and a mook you've never heard of named Brock Rudread. And Silence always goes by her first name, Silence, and Rudread always goes by his last name, Rudread, and the AI effortlessly picks up on this because that's how it is in the text.

Sometimes this backfires: For instance, in a Galaxy Federal scene, the hosts describe Cherry as Captain Seresa, because that's what her crew calls her and there are lots of "Captain Seresa" tags in the dialogue. But narratively I always call her Cherry in this part of the story, so when the podcasters then call her Captain Seresa it stands out.

Yet on the whole I like that the AI does it this way, because usually the result is satisfying. In another Galaxy Federal excerpt, the NotebookLM text synopsis of the excerpt ises the name "Basilisk" for the character Mereidi Basilisk, because that's how she usually has people refer to her, even though narratively I usually refer to her as Mereidi or fully Mereidi Basilisk. But in the associated deep dive, this "Basilisk" problem doesn't come up.

The next thought I have is that I am pretty darn confident by this point that I can "see" how the AI works. Like I said last time, it's just a really elaborate mimicry. It's pattern-matching. This is its principal strength but also its chief weakness. The AI cannot internally analyze subject matter to any deep, vibrantly-sapient extent. It can only recognize what the subject matter is in the first place (probably the most impressive feat in the whole process, for my money), recognize that a given subject matter corresponds to a given type of analysis that it has also trained on, and tailor the analysis to fit the subject matter's skin-deep specifics. A trivializing formulization of something deeply nontrivial.

Nowhere is this more obvious than when it causes mistakes. In reference to a Galaxy Federal scene, the podcast hosts mention a fee that comes up in the dialogue at one point. And in Galaxy Federal the space money is called batloos, because I specifically didn't want to use the word credits. The hosts reference by name the batloo (a "five thousand batloo fee"), but then analyze it by saying "That's a lot of credits." I know, by design, that "credits" are never, ever used to describe currency. Same thing when the hosts mention that the Starship Sevenge "comes out of warp" at one point. No it doesn't. There is no "warp drive" in Galaxy Federal. That word is deliberately not used in reference to interstellar travel.

Those are small-scale examples, but this same exact type of mistake occurs when attributing character motives and reasoning, and when sussing out the themes of a work. For instance, the hosts continually err—"get it wrong"—whenever their analysis looks at a situation involving character motivation and reasoning that is outside the mainstream or the norm, or where I as the author am trying to make some kind of particular point. The podcast hosts did that, for example, when they misinterpreted Silence's line about teaching Selish society to become fat as a metaphor for the society growing powerful; Silence really was just talking about normalizing the physical act of getting fat. In these six new podcasts, this same problem occurs over and over again.

The AI has the same problem the healthcare industry does: They identify the subject matter, go to the bell curve of associated analyses, and pick the most frequently occurring ones. What you end up with is a homogenization of worldbuilding, characterization, and plotting.

This is why the new generation of AI that has taken over AI space in recent years isn't really "smart" yet, at least in my book: It can't actually analyze. It can't actually look at situations in and of themselves, and read them and absorb them the way our minds do, to then carry out real analysis. And I'm not sure (because I don't know) if this is even within this kind of AI's sphere of potential. I'm not sure if it's something that's coming in the future or if this will never be solvable under this type of AI and will only be further and further mitigated for with additional refinement, training / data exposure, and processing power. And given that it takes several minutes apiece on deluxe Google hardware to generate these podcasts, I must reiterate what I said before about wondering whether or not this load can be downscaled / "miniaturized" or if there is going to end up being a serious floor to public access of this technology, like with air travel, because of the high resource-expenditure involved in utilizing it.

Many of the most significant mistakes in the deep dives comes from this fundamental weakness in the AI architecture. But there are also other types of mistakes, some of which are pretty interesting.

I'll get to others later, but here's one example: A moment ago I mentioned how the text synopsis of one Galaxy Federal excerpt uses the name "Basilisk," but this same problem doesn't happen in the podcast. Well, that's because that particular excerpt is written in the first-person from Mereidi's point of view, so the name "Mereidi" rarely comes up. But instead of the podcasters calling her "Basilisk" over and over because that's what other characters do, they kind of forget that Mereidi even exists and focus more on another significant character instead, even saying at the start of their deep dive that this story "is all about [this other character]." Which is just bonkers wrong, but in a very understandable way.

I also want to talk about the verisimilitude of the vocal styles. I think it was nostalgebraist who mentioned that humans are not going to listen to two robots talk to each other for ten minutes, so Google had to get the human speech patterns right—and succeeded wildly in doing so. I agree that Google succeeded at this very well. But there are also still plenty of artifacts: volume drop-offs, weird interruptions, phatic tics and cues and murmurs that don't land correctly and aren't spaced correctly with respect to the following dialogue, instances where the same host is talking but there's a clear cut at one point as if two different takes had been spliced together, and so on. These kinds of errors remind me of the errors in picture-generating AI, like hands with the wrong numbers of fingers, or lines that don't spatially map to objects correctly, etc. All AI outputs are empirical simulations of (standardized, homogenized) approximations of reality, and so sometimes the details are wrong in ways that the AI has no problem with but which stand out instantly to humans. Some of these errors are habitual; the female host twice (out of seven excerpts I sent Google) gets a lot quieter (not in her actual voice loudness but in the volume of the podcast itself) when she is the one closing a podcast episode. I wonder where that comes from.

Another thought I have is that, now that I'm seven podcast episodes deep with them, I am noticing that these AI podcasters run into the same limitation that many human content creators face: sameishness. Most content creators have a "formula" for how their content looks and feels, what it covers, what it's like to consume, etc., but what separates the appealing creators from the forgettable ones is the difference between whether their formula serves as a focal lens and/or a part of the human charm factor on one hand, or as a confining pen or even a straitjacket on the other. It takes personal charm and/or (but usually "and") the ability to create a wide variety of experiences within a formula in order for a content creator's formula to serve them well. Otherwise, the content starts to become boring and repetitive—sometimes very quickly.

I'm not at the point yet where I feel like the NotebookLM deep dive podcasts are "boring and repetitive," but I think most of this resilience is because I keep feeding new material into it—my own work no less, which I am obviously interested in. But the personalities of the AI hosts, and the ways in which they go about their "deep dives," are pretty superficial. Hell, the podcasters don't even have names yet; this is undoubtedly by design on Google's part—ever the Achilles' heel of social media companies and tech companies in general, trying to decide for us how we should experience their products and services rather than letting us control our own experiences like how it used to be.

For all the trouble that Google has gone to in order to make these virtual personalities sound human, they are entirely missing huge swaths of the human equation with regard to the hosts' personalities, preferences, opinions, defining traits, life histories and experiences, senses of humor, and pet issues. These podcast hosts are disarmingly friendly, which goes a long way toward masking the fact that they have no personality at all. Sort of like the Corporate World, in that respect. But this only succeeds in making the podcasts listenable; not in making them compelling. With an agadmator chess analysis video on YouTube, you just live for those moments when he has fun with a game, being delighted by something in the action or by one of his own thoughts or actions. That's as much a part of the appeal as his analysis or visual aesthetic is. But with these "Google NotebookLM AI-generated virtual deep dive podcast hosts" who don't even have names and thus must be referred to purely by functional labels, there's just no onramp for connecting with them on a personal level. And I don't know how much of this is the tech not being there yet and how much is the result of Google deliberately holding back on us, but over time it's going to increasingly become the latter.

Okay; that's all the stuff I was itching to talk about off the top of my head. (Though I'm sure I forgot some general points and will make them later.)

Now let's get into some specific episode-by-episode reviews.

I struggled mightily with whether or not to share these podcast episodes with you. Unlike the excerpt last time, where the actual story text was previously published, all six of these podcasts are about story excerpts which I haven't published yet. I'm not gonna just spoiler-post six giant blocks of story, many of which are in the 20-page range, for the sake of this discussion. Even discussing some of these scenes at all, without explicitly posting them, would be pretty spoilery in a couple of cases.

But it would also be pretty weird for me to post the podcasts here without publishing the story excerpts that they're doing their "deep dive" on. Yet it would be completely suboptimal for sure for me to not post the podcasts here and then go on to analyze them.

🤔🤔🤔

Here's what I have decided to do: I'm obviously not obligated to discuss any of these podcasts, let alone all of them. I just think they're interesting, and I want to write about them, so that's the why of that.

What I'm going to do is tackle these podcasts in subsequent posts. This post is already getting a bit long anyway. Maybe I won't cover every podcast. Maybe I'll generate new ones yet to come. Regardless, in each subsequent post on this topic I will either post or not post both the deep dive podcast and the underlying text scene. It's very unlikely that I'll post more than one actual scene, if any. And I'll probably share the podcasts in no more than half of the cases. And, whether or not I've posted the story excerpt and whether or not I've posted the podcast for you to listen to, I'll then get into my analysis.

And it'll all work out, in nice, neat little packages, because I am a smart and clever human who can do that sort of thing!

[blackjack-15]

"what's going on?" oh we're not gonna hear that almost gentle tone again for the rest of the episode are we. maybe the rest of the season

"i quit. is what's going on." y'all can't see me, by the grace of God, but i am throwing things

there were so many ways to handle this, i want to congratulate syd and marcus for choosing the worst ones!! that takes real vision!!

i get it. i do. but there are things you just don't do, and running away after causing problems (marcus seriously???? the doughnuts right now???) is something you don't do

"right now?? you quit right now??" yeah the anxiety and anger there...yeah that's gonna be the top of the iceberg huh

"what are you doing. what are you doing." he really can't quite parse it and the fear in his voice is really exquisitely well-played. syd's the person he hired, the person he did the background check on, the person he had confidence to put in a position of leadership, and -- 'outside' of regular work, the person he's talked to, confided in, and worked on a relationship with. this is probably going to Not Be Great. my anxiety pillow might not be enough

"you are an excellent chef. you are also a piece of shit." yeah i mean girl that was obvious when you were hired. like he's being a bit shitty right now, but like....this is not even mostly on him

and she knows it, it's why she's running. she's seeing visions of sheridan road in her head, and she's running. it's fine, it's good character work, i'm happy about it in a larger plot sense, but the dumb monkey part of my brain wants to shake her by her shoulders and prolly slap marcus upside the head

"this isn't on me. good luck." well. oof.

is carmy gonna have a heart attack?? is his actor gonna have a heart attack?? those veins are worrying me

what did syd grab on her way out? why'd she go over to the other part of the kitchen before leaving?

carmy throwing the sharpie where syd had been a moment ago is really well done, because it makes him walking to the door seem like he might actually go after her and call her back

but he doesn't

oh off the floor carmy really?? i mean it's no worse than anything else he does to his body i guess

that smile at how good the doughnut is, then the slapping of the preorder receipts, and his marching out to the front -- that's the repression in full force babe!

okay onto the last episode. can i breathe, please? i think some apologies are needed all the way around -- excepting Tina, Fak, Manny, Angel, Ebra, Gary, and Louie, of course, who should go out for drinks and a long weekend after this. i am blowing kisses to chicago for louie

oh and before i forget, the episode asks at the start, when is it the Ship of Theseus? the answer it presents is that when all the pieces are there, working together -- and right now, all the pieces are gone, and the ship is sinking in the water

RIP richie's ass i hope he gets stitches

[wufflesvetinari]

hello! i was blown away by your fantastic astarion/tav fic and this is how i found you, hope that's okay. :) you say dnd is about being a cleric to you, and i was wondering if you'd ever be open to expanding on that? i'm interested in playing a cleric in my next campaign, but i'm a little gunshy

(the fic, for reference)

hi yes hello!! i'm so glad you liked the fic, first of all, i had never written anything quite like it (essentially canon/oc fic. video game fandom is weird. i love it)

secondly i am so glad you've given me an excuse to talk about this!!! i love playing clerics for a few reasons. in order of simplest to most complicated:

1). on a purely mechanical level i love their versatility; that you can both deal heavy damage and protect your friends. i think the existence of Healing Word makes clerics 100x more fun than they would be otherwise, because then you can both attack and heal in the same turn. i am someone who LIKES feeling that responsibility for the party each turn, and feeling like each choice involves sacrifice: thinking through who can make it through the next turn without healing vs. needing it now, whether to remove a status effect (using a full action) or let it wear out, etc. you do get the fun of essentially fireballing your enemies while also doing powerful utility stuff (that plants the seeds for interesting character relationships too imo)

2). god the roleplay potential??? it's so good??? you have a very strong "type" you're playing against: the stereotype of a "person of the cloth" existing makes it twice as fun to be, like, a little nihilistic or a little sexy or a little angry, but always always driven by that core of Belief inside of you. all the better if the belief system doesn't naturally fit with the character's personality, and you have to reconcile those things. it builds someone complex

also like. roleplaying a cleric (or a paladin) is marinating yourself in the midpoint between human fallibility and divine "infallibility," wherein actually sometimes it's the human fallibility that needs to win out over the inflexibility of dogma. it's a bit warlock-y in that you are making decisions both for what the character wants to do and what they feel they MUST do per the voice in their head. but it's still flavored differently because, in theory, the cleric has opted into this for moral/belief reasons! and those reasons get to be challenged or reinforced through the campaign

3). world building! you get to parse out how a belief system works in the day-to-day. rn i have two clerics who are driven by a belief in how they need to ethically act in the world (lash as well as duna, an ornery old lady grave cleric--spoiler, they have very different definitions of "ethical") but also an alien cleric in a homebrew campaign whose gods actually dont give a shit about how he interacts with outsiders because that pantheon’s entire existence is built around protecting and saving one specific alien species. the decisions that cleric makes are going to be extremely different than the first two, but i'm always going to be thinking about how those belief systems affect his actions, and when he pushes back (and how much he is ALLOWED to push back).

ngl the psychological element is twice as interesting to me as someone who grew up in a religious environment. what do i appreciate about that kind of person that could be amplified? what Makes Everything Worse?

anyway i hope some of this was helpful!!

[bestworstcase]

I'm sold on some sort of detente with Salem being part of the godbros' reckoning, but wonder if this series' Tolkienish beats (gold macguffins, fellowship, Cinder & Salem's Sauron-Morgoth parallel, etc) are causing *tons* of fans to write the notion off as Saruman-style undermining of The Cause-especially with Raven & Leo's examples for Team Oz pundits to point at.

ok so full disclosure this:

plus being able to identify gandalf, orlando bloom, That One Dwarf, and gollum in stills from the peter jackson films, represents the sum total of what i know about LOTR. i remember, vaguely, reading a rwby meta post along the lines of “cinder is getting worse because tolkien themes” but i’m afraid i did not retain any of the actual argument because, as i recall, the analysis of cinder’s arc up to the point when the post was written did not strike me as terribly insightful or, like, accurate as to what was going on with her narratively.

all of which is to say, there very well might be a connection that is staggeringly obvious to actual,, LOTR fans. but 1. tolkien bores me to absolute tears so i’m working off the LOTR wiki pages which i have just skimmed and 2. my general impression is that large swaths of the rwby fandom do not know how to distinguish between “common genre conventions” and “deliberate, meaningful allusion to another story” and 3. two out of three things in that list are, um, stock fantasy tropes, and nothing in the wiki pages for morgoth or sauron seem… remotely like salem or cinder? so my inclination is to conclude this is another winter-is-jadis situation. gfbfjc sorry

honestly i think the degree of fandom-wide resistance to the possibility of salem (or cinder, to a lesser extent) undergoing a villain -> hero arc mostly comes down to the expectations of the genre. the looming implacable evil sorceress doesn’t… negotiate. the heroes don’t decide she maybe has a point about the gods who sent the chosen one to go to war with her. like this is not how the story is supposed to go—and of course rwby is playing with that deliberately in order to criticize the simplicity of the moral framework undergirding the genre, but i think a lot of fans saw the familiar surface and took for granted that salem (and cinder) would function in the narrative in an archetypical way.

[which, to be fair, i did too—lost fable completely blindsided me because i also kind of went, yeah okay evil manipulative ancient witch, sure, i know this song—but then to be less fair, i also paid attention to lost fable.]

and then on top of it there’s also, like, this is an… unusually vindictive and bloodthirsty fandom. i don’t think i’ve ever encountered a fandom with so many mainline, high-profile bloggers who participate in the humiliation fantasies about the main villain getting taken down a peg, ideally in the most emotionally sadistic way possible, on the grounds that she’s a spoiled brat throwing a tantrum.

it’s… weird, and the constant repetition of that reading by the otherwise mostly reasonable mainstream has really profoundly distorted the fandom’s ability to like… parse what’s happening on screen, to the point that things like salem using the normal, universally-agreed-upon term for a type of magic gets twisted into “proof” that salem doesn’t think modern humans are people. hfghvs like this fandom is SO determined to interpret everything salem does through the most batshit, extreme lens imaginable, for… some… reason. and with that being the normal background radiation for discussions about her, like, of course “salem villain -> hero arc imminent” sounds absurd. don’t you know she kicks puppies and eats the hearts of babies for breakfast??

[rot8erconex]

[ID: photo of tags that read "tbh i read this and still didn't get half it since i still have no good idea what 'vtubing' actually is/looks like/how it functions. but even w/o that…GODDAMN. current events. all who live to see such times. the contracts that knit together civilization (for better or worse). every now and then a post comes along like a gargantuan eldritch shadow under the ice." /end ID]

For those in this particular situation, VTubing is a bizarre intersection between gaming live streamers and anime-infused idol culture. I have more - including a repeat of the previous sentence but with some interjections - beneath the "Keep reading". Also, a little update from the past three days' of events.

For those in this particular situation, VTubing (short for Virtual YouTubing, though it's also done on Twitch so the name is partially a misnomer) is a bizarre intersection between gaming live streamers (Nijisanji uses the word "Livers" and I specifically avoided using the term because I know that screen readers would parse it as the plural of a human organ rather than the intended pronunciation of "lie-vurz") and anime-infused idol culture. People who play video games, or cook, or just read chat on live streaming on Twitch or YouTube, but instead of having a face cam, they will have a virtual avatar - usually heavily anime inspired, though I have seen straight up 3D models of the streamer's fursona - which mimics the facial expressions made by the actual person behind the gameplay.

This affords a level of anonymity while still allowing viewers to see the streamer's genuine reactions to things. Additional benefits, obviously, exist for people who are uncomfortable with their own body - such as trans people being able to style their model the way they wish they were, but also, I know of one YouTuber who does VTubing when she streams because she suffers from chronic pain and doesn't want to have to deal with looking nice when she hangs out with her fans. Her model is a highly-stylized version of her actual appearance, but with horse ears attached because she's a horse enjoyer.

There are a lot of "indie" VTubers, but there are also two major companies (and a few smaller ones) who run entire outfits of multiple VTubers. Hololive, run by Cover, and Nijisanji, run by AnyColor. Both companies will perform auditions every so often, and then a few months later, will release a batch of three-to-five VTubers which will be referred to as a "generation" - numbered in sequential order but also labeled with the language that this generation is targeted at. Selen Tatsuki was, IIRC, part of Nijisanji EN gen 2.

The VTubers in a generation largely work independently from one another, but can do collab streams - even with other generations, languages, or (though this requires more effort) other companies' streamers.

Each VTuber - at least all of them in the corporate sphere and many indies - has lore behind their character. With Hololive EN gen 1 - what I'm most exposed to - we have:

Gwar Gura, a shark girl from a subaquatic Atlantis who came to the surface because she liked human video games.

(I'm not gonna try spelling her full name, so let's just call her Ina) who is a normal girl that has become the priestess for an eldritch horror.

Calliope Mori, the grim reaper come to the realm of the living because she wants to write music. Personality-wise I think she might be my favorite, but she rarely plays games I want to watch.

Kiara, a phoenix who teaches her viewers and co-commentators German

and Amelia, a time-traveling detective (descended from John Watson) who is in the current era to make sure that she does come into existence.

This lore is usually not used to put on an act, but rather to help obfuscate the streamer's real-life details. Gura, for example, can tell stories about her childhood and claim that they happened in Atlantis. Calli can refer to her real-life home as "the Underworld". Etc.

As for the update? Nijisanji has been quiet in the past few days, and Doki has not said anything else past what she said would be her final public statement. The day after my post, a few fans tried to put together a document poking holes in Doki's story but their own document misrepresents the facts of the case (such as the fact that it was Niji, not Doki, who first made the bullying allegations public knowledge) so many people are disregarding it. A Redditor who works in the PR team of a different company has put together a thread in which they detail what they think happened behind the scenes to cause this shitshow, and if they are right, then this is the last we will hear publicly on the matter from either party, because the shitshow was caused by a huge misunderstanding by Nijisanji's lawyers as to what Doki planned to do with the document that she had compiled, but now that misunderstanding has been cleared.

Apparently the Nijisanji situation is so bad, it's being used in REAL TIME as part of law school lessons and mock trials. Actual lawyers are pointing out that this violated several Canadian, Japanese, and possibly more countries's privacy and disclosure laws as well.

Like holy fuck. They have fucked up big time.

There's entire threads on Twitter and 4chan where lawyers are going over the specific violations Doki's lawyers could have a field day with, using Niji/Elira/Vox/Ike's "our side" video as very easy evidence to site some violation or another.

And for the third time, I'm not really into Niji and keep getting into talents right before or after they announce graduation or are reborn elsewhere, strange habit, but 1. I hate companies mistreating their employees, 2. I hate bullying, 3. This is now, honestly and truthfully, one of those literal garbage fires you can't ignore once you gaze at it. Every day so far the hole Niji keeps digging gets dug deeper and deeper-

We're watching a corporation collapse in real time and pay severely for the mistreatment of its employees. Honestly I'm invested and need to see how this shit ends. This has ramifications for the vtubing sphere and even sets precedents for how similar cases like this will be handled in the future.

Doki, I hope you can live a happy life, because I respect the shit out of you, and I hope you get a lot of money out of this that you can do wonderful things with. Thank you for surviving and being alive

[phoenixyfriend]

Disaster Lineage on SpaceTube

With help from @atagotiak.

AU where Anakin, to destress during the war, starts making SpaceTube videos (Ahsoka likes video editing and uses this for practice, she's very excited to help).

But all of them are Knife Guy style of slightly threatening ASMR that goes in strange directions without ever being actually ominous but still make you feel like there's SOMETHING about to just. What.

Less knives and more... Weirdass junkyard electronics. Something more to do with droids or engines, while still providing plenty of opportunity to just go ham with polymers and whatnot.

Ahsoka: You're cool if I put these up on the holonet, right?

Anakin: Sure, if there's nothing that indicates who we are or where we're going. Opsec is important!

Ahsoka: Great!

[several months later]

Mace: Knight Skywalker, please tell me you're not the one giving people nightmares about old-fashioned radios.

Anakin: I'm what?

Anakin knows what's in the videos before they go up, specifically for the aforementioned opsec reasons, but he didn't know people were getting nightmares about it.

Ahsoka's also been playing director and keeps telling him to do something The Weird Way, so he knows she's going with 'no voice, just exaggerated ASMR' and absurd tangents to get things they could have just bought at a store, but he didn't know they were getting popular or were that unnerving.

Obi-Wan has established himself as a weirdass nerd. Often lit but occasionally zoology and also biology (brainworms anyone?) so he maybe also helps with weird stuff. He does a guest spot on the channel showing how to do an old-fashioned book-binding but it's done in the same "how the FUCK did that make an adhesive???" way as Anakin's.

(No faces, but they know it's a different person, because Anakin always wears gloves. His prosthesis is too distinctive to show. There are many, many theories about this.)

Snips specifically challenges them on how to explain something using minimal words (like how knife guy will explain why a certain process works with one chemical and another chemical, but that it works best with both chemicals plus heat, using only visuals, their chemical names, and a hardness meter).

Every dozen or so videos there's a completely voiceless GoPro helmet video of Ahsoka doing parkour through a major metropolis. Usually she does Coruscant, but sometimes she does her runs through a big city that any person with some disposable income or a job that requires travel (or, say, the daughter of someone who does long haul space trucking and tags along on school breaks) could feasibly end up in. Between that and the staggered upload dates, nobody can parse that she's following army deployments.

(She can't do it in the Wild because if she does that, someone might be able to doxx her as part of the 501st based on the vegetation.)

The Council does find out but like. As weird and confusingly ominous as it all is, at least it's a safe and harmless way to de-stress without breaking the code. Very "let the kids have their fun."

The 501st clones start their own channels (still going through Anakin or Rex or one of the scouts for OpSec) doing similar Silent Horror Crafting and lbr I feel like at least one of the guys in demolitions WOULD be, specifically, Knife Guy. They can't share any REAL weapons, obviously, but stupidly weird knives? Hell yeah.

Hardcase would be the equivalent explosives guy, but... all the same sharing a step by step way to make unconventional explosives is much much worse than sharing how to make weird knives. Sure the information is probably already available but lets not make it more available. A weirdass chocolate knife is no more dangerous than a normal kitchen knife.

So he goes "Well, I know a decent amount about materials engineering, nobody cares that much about knives, and the general can tell me if anything I use is impossible for Coruscant Civvies to get."

Ahsoka's videos always end with her stepping somewhere she can cast a shadow against a wall and give a thumbs up. There's just enough detail to confirm she's a Togruta, but she's wearing gloves and full sleeves so they don't even know her skin shade or anything.

Just shadow on a wall, giving a thumbs up.

That's probably the channel profile image. One of these, just with montrals:

There are debates on whether the three sets of always gloved hands are the same person and/or what species they are. Four sets, bc there's at least one clone contributor.

I feel like, after the war is over (we are going for a HAPPY ENDING), and opsec is no longer quite the worry it was, they do a video of three side-by-sides that all play into each other (e.g. Ahsoka's runs involve picking up ingredients that she passes into the next frame just as Anakin needs them, the weird tiny oven that Anakin makes in part one of his video is passed along to be used for the baking of an adhesive for Obi-Wan's bookbinding).

And then the final bit is the screens melding as Ahsoka runs into the workshop they'd rented and the three of them posing at a mirror with whoever the clone cameraguys for Anakin and Obi-Wan's projects were.

FINAL REVEAL but only after the war is over.

There's a lot of screaming from people who were adamant that ONLY A JEDI could make that speeder jump because THEY WERE RIGHT.

After the big reveal there are now group parkour runs where Ahsoka takes one of her usual paths and lets Anakin and Obi-Wan go ahead of her so they're on camera. One time they land on a speeder for a few seconds, and Aayla leans out of the window below to give them a grin, just to make it clear that she volunteered to help with the bullshit.

Anyway, Knife Guy Anakin rights.

[the-bloody-masquerade]

End of Year ask! So I'm playing Amanda, the Ventrue PC in Coteries. It's my first time playing a Ventrue, and I never realized how difficult their bane is. What's the most difficult Ventrue bane you as a player have taken on, and/or given one of original Ventrue characters?

Also from baddass-at-cuddling: Second end of year ask is what do you think LaCroix's Ventrue bane is? Maybe he can only feed from handsome mobsters like Mercurio? 🤔 [I’m gonna throw both your asks in one because the second answer is gonna have a lot to do with my first answer.]  And heads up trigger warning for mention of rape and slavery as I discuss a couple of White Wolfs more *edgy* character arcs.  How about post-first-week-of-the-year ask. That’s about all the quicker I move with these asks. 😅 So! The Ventrue! I love them so much and they are my favorite clan. A lot of people with project their frustrations of the real-world “top 1%” onto the Ventrue and tend to treat them scornfully, or worse yet, project those frustrations onto the people who like the Ventrue. Its just make believe folks! There are numerous reasons to be fond of the vampire aristocracy and not all of them automatically equate “I want to lick the boots of harmful capitalists in real life.”  Anyway, the Ventrue bane can be tricky but I think it is also one of the more appealing aspects of the clan due to how it is springboard for creativity and character development. There is no official “rhyme or reason” to why a certain Ventrue gets a certain Bane but I wanna take a little time to explain my personal pitch for how a Ventrue gets their Bane.  Its not really a singular cohesive idea but I cannot fathom not making a Ventrue character’s Bane relevant to their personality or backstory. Something that explores some aspect of their psyche. Maybe constructs that sense of “personal horror” that vtm says it so loves to cultivate.

I actually know of very few canonical ventrue banes and a lot of them are... dicey. 😬

On the completely innocuous end of the spectrum you have characters like Victor Temple from LA by Night who’s preference appears to be people who “know who he is” ie recognize his fame. Its simple, and not at all difficult as long as he stays in LA or its culture sphere where he as a music industry mogul and social media personality is well known. Pretty easy to tie this to Victor psychologically, he craves recognition and maybe a human aspiration was transformed by supernatural Ventrue ambition upon his embrace. Sure would be an interesting challenge for Victor to travel to an area of the world where his music empire wasn’t well known...

Then there’s Alexander of Paris who’s blood preference only allowed him to feed from women who were in love (but not married). Devilishly specific, perhaps tricky, perhaps not if the Toreador-level-pretty Alexander could just make his blood dolls fall in love with him. I don’t know enough about this character to say if this is backstory-relavant to him. 

On the dicey side you have things like our dear Jan Pieterzoon’s canonical blood restriction to only feed from rape survivors. Sort of recently I’ve seen people tossing about the headcanon that this could be made less stereotypically “White Wolf edgy dark shock value bullshit” if this was a reflection Pieterzoon being a survivor himself, and then exploring the aspects of a “personal horror” how having a blood restriction that reflects that. Because as far as I know, canon never does that, his restriction is just that way in canon to be edgy.  On the other hand, yet another canonical Ventrue with a... squicky blood preference would be Andrew Seneca, a former black American slave who found out after his embrace that his blood preference was in fact, slaves. 😬I am not equipped to parse out the handling of this storyline so I won’t try but he’s got a listing on the white wolf wiki if you want to know. Without getting into it, his backstory and blood preference certainly seem to be made for a very hardcore impactful case of “personal horror,” especially regarding what he was going to do as the ages marched on, but again, I can’t really speak to how it was handled. 

So by now you’ve figured out that I have a preference for Ventrue whos blood preferences speak to something intrinsic to their backstory or character arcs. I actually have something of a mini-dynasty of Ventrue OCs who’s blood preferences I’ve put a lot of thought into. I’d love to go into that but I’d prefer to do it on my personal project blog. So I’ll do that and tag you in it, okay Badass? But I will answer the question of my speculation on LaCroix’s blood preference here (finally, lol). I’ve seen a few people in fandom take a pass at it and many of them do wrap it into psychological aspects of LaCroix that they’ve explored in their own works. 

I have seen a version of LaCroix where his blood preference is blood that is laced with alcohol and/or opium, ‘old timey comfort drugs’ speaking to his 19th century wartime backstory. 

I’ve also seen a take in which LaCroix’s blood preference is dominant women, setting up an accidental embrace and romance that the author wanted to explore.  The take that I use for my own fics is that LaCroix’s blood preference is real down to earth kind of people. Peasants, working class, to put it one way, but not because it contrasts with LaCroix’s presumed aristocracy. No, in my version LaCroix was born a common citizen into a family with only fair means. His vampiric blood preference for low-born hardworking folk is a reflection of almost all the people who surrounded him in life, family, hometown friends and soldier buddies. The kinds of people he remembers fondly from life. And our favorite even-tempered salt of the earth smuggler Mercurio fits that bill for LaCroix.  Another thing I’ve always pondered is if a Ventrue’s ghouls are necessarily a “tell” as to their blood preference. I think for young Ventrue it would be, since traditionally you gotta feed on the person you’re going to ghoul to ghoul them so they have to fit their blood preference. That and one of the primary purposes for a ghoul is a quick easy snack. I suppose older Ventrue could acquire ghouls who aren’t their preference by going out of their way. To make a ghoul you just gotta exsanguinate them, you don’t necessarily have to drink it. [Edit, I mixed this up, the only difference between a ghoul and embracing a new vampire is a ghoul drinks vampire blood while in a state of good health, a new vampire is created when they drink blood while having barely any other blood in their system, ie being exsanguinated. I ALWAYS get the methods of ghouling/embrace confused] So yeah, there’s a whole big barf of my thoughts and ideas about Ventrue. I just kinda tend to do that, take a relatively simple ask and be like “WANNA SEE HOW LONG I CAN TYPE???” When I get there I’ll post about my Ventrue OCs’ blood preferences on my personal project blog. Until then thanks for reading!

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHY I'M SMARTER THAN HOME

It drives me crazy to see code that's badly indented, or that uses ugly variable names. When you're deciding what to do. If you and they have started to use it themselves. If a super-angel has some of the partners, tell them no, if you're not profitable. I could imagine doing? But you can do. But that's not the same as opting in. Startup School. A, keep taking smaller investments till they actually give you a set of rules here that will get you through this process if anything will. It gives us an excuse for being lazy.

This conference was in London, and most VCs weren't interested in investments so small. In fact, they're lucky by comparison. If they're real problems, fix them. 055427782 examples 0. While you shouldn't chase high valuations? On the average trip I bring four books and only read one of them, don't raise money. When it comes to deals, you have to do, your best bet may be to choose a type of work that could turn into either an organic or two-job career. If you can't find an exact match for a token, treat it as an upper bound on how big you can get rewarded directly by the market. The word is rarely used today because it's no longer surprising to see a 25 year old with money, but in phase 2 will be the money burning a hole in your pocket, but I learned, without realizing it at the time was that the valuation cap of the note will be determined by the next investors you raise money. At some firms it's over 50%. Otherwise I just worked.

When you order online, I think. I seem. It hasn't occurred in a single one of my 4000 spams. At YC we spend a lot of these accidents, and they have enough. There is a lesson here for filter writers: don't ignore data. Pay was based on seniority. You could do it for you. Imagine picking out apples at a grocery store.

So if you have the potential to go public, and the odds that anyone will pay in your lifetime for what you want to make ambitious people waste their time on errands, the way they did. When a startup does return to working on something else. Facebook was started in Boston. I needed to remember, if I don't find a probability for it. Because Boston investors were so few and so timid, we used to ship Boston batches out for a second, and said that I just wanted to hack. Which means you should avoid doing things in earlier rounds that will mess up raising an A round. When I read the papers I found out why. Being turned down by investors doesn't mean much. Our offices were in a wooden triple-decker in Harvard Square. It's harder to judge startups than most other things, because great startup ideas tend to seem as if they're saying something important.

Even if you sent a crawler to look at the site before the user looked at the email mentioning it. Startup ideas are ideas for companies, and pay you your proportionate share. If you offend investors, they'll leave in a huff. So while I admit that hacking doesn't seem as cool in its glory days as it does now. It was from someone in Egypt and written in all uppercase. Once a company shifts over into the model where everyone drives home to the suburbs for dinner, however late, you've lost something extraordinarily valuable. It would be safe to be default dead if you could hire someone to manage the company for 20. And it turns out. Actually they've been told three lies: the stuff they've been taught to regard as work in school is not real work; grownup work is not necessarily worse than schoolwork; and many of the current super-angels and start to screw up. By inverting this list, we can study the way people beat them and try to plug the holes. Why? You have to start with just one.

9734398 paul 0. And the boneheads who designed this stove even had an example of a spam must be several hours at least, so it should be easy to detect: among their portfolio companies. But if you find yourself packing a bottle of vodka just in case. Whatever the outcome, the conflict between VCs and super-angels and VCs. For a long time I felt bad about this, it is not just a heuristic for finding the work you love. I know most won't listen. You can convince yourself, I don't mean play mind games with yourself to boost your confidence. I was in high school know about this strange world. How many corporate lawyers would do their current work if they had more time. Restaurants with great food can be expensive, crowded, noisy, dingy, out of the doldrums that had afflicted it for most of the difficulty of raising money at too high a valuation may just make a good outcome, not the exception. A Plan for Spam filter wouldn't have caught it.

Also, startups are a good example. That's what you're addicted to. Startups do to the relationship between the founders what a dog does to a sock: if it can't contain exciting sales pitches, spam becomes less effective as a marketing vehicle, and fewer businesses want to use it. The mathematicians don't seem bothered by this. But can you think of one that had a massively popular product and still failed? So now there are two threshold values. Com, which their friends at Parse took.

I make? And yet it never occurred to me till recently to put those two ideas together and ask How can VCs make money by investing in stuff they don't understand—tends to make investors very skittish. It's hard to say what the overall false positive rate of Bayesian filtering. Though computationally expensive in the general case, it is possible to raise too much. I encourage founders to follow whichever path is most immediately exciting to them. So far we've cut the Standard Graduation Speech down to, what someone else with your abilities can do, you don't have to be disciplined about assigning probabilities. By putting you in this situation. Big companies are biased against new technologies, and the number of investors increases, raising money will be quick and straightforward. But still the case for guilt is stronger. The fact that hackers learn to hack by taking college courses in programming. If investors are impressed with you as founders, they say they like what they do, you have to impress to get into grad school in economics, but if so this is a bad idea till it wasn't. And at Y Combinator.

Thanks to Joshua Schachter, Trevor Blackwell, Eric Raymond, and Jessica Livingston for reading a previous draft.