#torture for what means? what end goal? there is no end to internet popularity. only a slow fade out of existence. to be an obscure internet

[idiotshriek]

tumblr no one is seeing my posts anyways. exactly how i like it. i dont want to reach a bigger audience. do not ask me to add tags if i dont add tags its bc i had nothing more to say on the subject. sorry my work is concise.

[randomizepoem]

Yeah sorry this will be long a fuck.

I'll be honest and say I'm guilty of being an ass to people a lot on the internet. It's a bad behaviour I'm trying to correct.

We're reaching a point in this conversation where I don't have much else to contribute: I don't live in the US, I don't know you or your life, I cannot possibly give more specific ideas. More so, I can't really tell you to do stuff I believe is useless in general.

I'm a brazilian non-binary communist, organized in a party. Brazil is a country that had less years in a "democracy" than it spent under various dictatorships, and is one of the countries that most kills trans woman in the world.

This is what I meant at the end there: being trans in Brazil is already dangerous by itself. They'll come for us even if we do nothing wrong, nothing against them, just existing is dangerous enough.

And yet, we live. And yet we fight. In our last congressional elections we elected two trans woman to federal congress. One of them fights like hell for everyone and everything that is important to the minorities and working people of Brazil.

There are absolutely things that can be done under the current system. My party is new, can't participate directly in the municipal elections this year, but we have a set agenda, and by these guidelines we'll support some candidates.

But only the candidates that align with our goals. The goal of revolution? Preferably, but no: the goals of the working class and the oppressed minorities of our country.

Do we believe that's enough? No. We're leninists, we believe that the participation on elections and even in the government itself serves only to expose the system for what it is and whose it's for. We understand that even if we elect a true communist as president, that won't bring the revolution alone - but signals that were very close.

However, I understand that you don't believe a revolution is possible in the US, and is afraid of losing people during one. That fear is not unfounded. It's true: revolutions tend to be violent and the US bourgeoisie won't go down passively. Yes, being a organized communist in the US is a dangerous thing.

Though luck, guys.

Have you noticed how the system reacts to even tame reforms, political programs that don't even aim to change the system, just improve it a bit in favor of poor folks?

Brazilian last dictatorship was in response to a fucking land reform much like the ones the US did. Nothing socialist about it and yet we lived 20+ years under a very brutal regime because of it.

I jumped into this conversation because I see the you guys - and when I say you all, you guys, I'm not taking about you especially, in talking about US leftists and liberals in general - going into the same stupid soft lock that the militants of the Workers Party (PT) here are in right now.

In 2002 Brazil elected Lula as president. You might have heard of him. In the 70's and 80's, during the dictatorship,he was a big radical union guy. A big leadership on general strikes in the heart of Brazilian capitalism. In the 00's, he became very liberal. Progressive, yes, but liberal, in the correct sense of liberalism. His first two terms were great, Brazil became very rich and he lifted a lot of people from poverty.

In 2010, we elected his protegee, Dilma, first woman president of Brazil. During the dictatorship she was a guerrilla warrior. Got arrested and tortured by the regime. In the 10's, she was even more liberal than Lula. She did everything the bankers and political elite wanted and she still suffered a coup d'etat for it.

It was a perfect shit storm: In 2013 the bus fares got raised by 20 cents, prompting a huge movement of protests across the country that quickly got out of control and became a very bland "against everything" protest. Regardless, it plummeted dilma's popularity and she did absolutely nothing about it. By 2016 she was seen as the devil incarnate and got impeached, which in Brazil actually means something, as she immediately got booted out of the presidency.

She did everything the bourgeoisie wanted and got impeached for it.

This was extremely traumatic and we did not recover from it at all as a nation - be it emotionally or economically. Temer, her vice, ruled for two years. In 2018 we had our first "the most important election of our lives": Bolsonaro, a extremely shirt literal fascist got immensely popular by then and absolutely demolished the Workers Party candidate, Haddad, on the second turn of the election.

The Bolsonaro years where absolutely hell. He managed to be actually worse than trump, his idol, as during the pandemic he refused to act in any sensible way. He tried to corrupt even the process of buying vaccines, trying to make Pfizer charge MORE for the vaccines just so he could pocket some of the money. Because of him, over 700.000 Brazilians died due to Covid.

And still, Lula barely beat him in 2022.

Mind you, Lula got arrested in 2018 in a very shady decision by a judge that later became Bolsonaro's ministry of justice. So even with Lula having everything going for him - he was the most popular president ever, 80%+ approval rating, a strong political case for democracy after being unjustly removed from the 2018 race, and going against a literal genocider, Lula still almost lost.

So now, the workers party militants (petistas) became almost the same as the Maga people, absolutely cult like around Lula. Everything Lula does is great, he's our savior, and can do nothing wrong.

To the point where absolutely ANY debate about the past and current failings of his government is quickly derailed and locked up by petistas who absolutely forbid you of criticizing him. It has even become a mantra: you can't criticize Lula or else Bolsonaro will be elected. This behavior already existed during his first terms, but it ramped up to absurdity now. They'll actively cancel you for criticizing him.

And he's doing very shitty! Inflation is under control but prices keep rising. He's trying to privatize our already shitty and overcrowded incarceration system, among other national companies. His gov proposed a ceiling for his own public spending. He makes promises that he legally cannot make real under this spending limitations. Come 2026 he'll lose so fucking hard because no one is happy with him in an already polarized political climate.

And you're not allowed to criticize him.

Does this all ring a bell? It should, Brazilian politics is heavily influenced by US politics, be it with the US interfering here or by us copying the US. Bolsonaro's son even tweeted this: "It happens in there, it will happen here".

How do we combat this? Brazil has like, 30-50 parties and still since our redemocratization the presidency has always been a dispute between the two giants: PT (workers Party) or PSDB (party of the Brazilian social democracy, in name only).

Well, Bolsonaro wasn't elected by PSDB. In fact, Bolsonaro's election (by the PSL -Social Liberty Party, in name only) actually destroyed PSDB, they're utterly irrelevant now. And still: Bolsonaro hopped to another party in 2022, the PL - Liberal Party (in name only. Yes, it's a different party).

Do you see the pattern? The alt right has this power: they don't need the party, they need the personality. In fact the alt right here is currently in crisis because Bolsonaro was deemed unelectable by the supreme court. Since he cannot run in 2026, they don't have a strong name to go against Lula yet.

Translate it to the US: if trump ran under the Tea Party, do you think he wouldn't be as much of a threat as he is now? Of course he would! He could run independent and still win against Biden.

Now, ask yourself: is Kamala a strong name by herself, or is it because of circumstance? Are you voting for HER, or AGAINST TRUMP? Isn't the reason Biden dropped out the fact that even in this scenario - against the return of fuckin trump - no one wanted to vote for him? It what happened in Brazil: even against Bolsonaro, no one wanted to vote for Haddad. Even against Trump, not enough people wanted to vote for Hilary. Even against Bolsonaro AFTER Covid, half the Brazilians didn't want to vote for lula. And our vote is mandatory.

Kamala has better chances than Biden did, but are you sure that she will have a organic support? In this political climate, where the teens just spent months protesting for Palestine,and her first response for the protest against Netanyahu's visit was to condemn the protestors? Like, if we spend some time on YouTube and Google we can find some pretty shitty thing she said as a vice president. Like her anti immigrant stance, her pro incarceration stance, har tip tapping around Palestine, etc.

Do you think that acting like she has good politics will work? Will "brat Harris" work? Is "the first black woman president of the US" really a win? Do you believe she will stop Israel?

To me and to a lot of people, the answer is no.

And so they won't vote for her, nor for trump. They will either vote third party or not at all. Because it's 2024 and we're all tired of the same old politician lies, we're tired of the "lesser evil" scare, we're tired of "the president has no real power".

Well, if Haris doesn't have the power to do good, why would Trump have the power to do evil?

You're at the end of the line for the democrats. They can't keep their bullshit anymore, and the fascists are only getting more powerful. It's time to ditch the Dems and bring up something new. As Gramsci said once: the old is dying and the new is struggling to be born. In this interregnum, we find morbid symptoms.

Biden and Harris are the left's morbid symptoms.

*this is the most important thing to understand*

Electing Harris is better then electing trump, but won't solve anything. Won't solve Palestine and won't solve trans and reproductive rights. It's not Trump alone attacking you and it won't be Harris who'll defend you; only you and your comrades can defend yourselves.

Sorry for the log ass post

You motherfuckers yes I hate Kamala too but when she is announced to be the Democratic candidate we are all going to shoot fireworks and go to the goddamn polls

[randomclam24]

Let me lay down some rap honkey white boy. In non Japan, if you invoke either of the major titles by Teriyaki Tomato, they will fully invoke the more Japanese-oriented Siren games on *you* absolutely all the way if you invoke them on leftists seriously in a way that even conceptually exists - and look at that wording - out of that uncanny valley of address came the title which makes the impression like it *could* be French but that could be gay, "Alliance Alive", translated meaning I'm a big fat idiot, can't you see (This was the most popular game in Japan when it came out on 3DS) This is why we say these are just people who want to be ruled

The underlying production of the title was as followed, conceptually exist (thus founding the premise for the theory of Elon Musk virtual existence) - the powers over America are coming from consensus overseas and saying, we need ourselves to live with PRIDE

3/17 The Alex Kister drama - I learned about it by not actually watching any of them but downloading them all so I would have the feng shui of the titles which predefines the conclusion of the viewers

The last video Kister made was basically fashioned in conclusion after the wad Unloved, where in the second-floor room map link, the introduction starts by showing an abyss into a hallway. That's all there is to this. By doing these explanations, I've been rationalizing the way for people whose existence is limited by the scope of doing your homework(, as it is a means by which, following the legends and conscriptions of people past, you can emulate human salvation without actually having to do the human salvation). People like Nick Fuentes are just mad they can't even do this. They're all idiots.

Anyway once you get the red key by spamming resurrect a whole bunch of times since I know no one in this drama is trying, since the author of this wad is jewish, uniquely, I figure that's what this new level is about once you get either the red or yellow key. This is what you associatedly inherently turn *into* when you're alt-righter. It's a bad word.

3/17 In the heat of being unable to meaningfully outlet their urges for five thousand generations, Trump supporters became The Ultimate Torment and Torture, especially by the open area of Beyond the Dark Portal, which is basically every Hollywood movie climax of all time definitively like go sit there and be its bitch for like five years

3/19 The Internet has been out on my main computer about since the time of the last posting.

Trying to actually beat the normal ending of this thing without extra lives - by the way I'm using a PS3 controller for this to deliberately work through possible inconvenience in order to preserve the sense of challenge that has left since I have gotten experienced at modern mouse and keyboard: the master sensitivity had to be set to .3 with the actual aiming controller stick set to 1.7 - specifically This gameplay has reminded me, back when I learned the Doom editing programs, one of my higher goals was to recreate Link to the Past in Doom - I had already done so with the entire overworld of the original game So what's that? That's a high I couldn't sustain

Update Unloved 2, only on Hurt Me Plenty, not Ultra-Violence I haven't felt the effects of gangstalking personally because like Mario 64 was actually at this level from childhood, unlike most other people, I've limited the amount of people that can get into me personally by a selectivity process. But back from childhood, whenever I was with the cousins playing, eventually they would dogpile me and after a certain point, I would stop fighting because it would get too rough and let them walk all over me If it came down to a procedure, I would let it go wherever it wants

3/22 I finished the beta with the last outburst of Faded City left unaffected You really don't - it still holds total precedence Hence the rest of the game is not made I have 'liminally' just not enough stars to get to fabled sacred Wario Apparition sector >Suddenly at the verge of not attention span, le reversed stair Everything would be cold(and misty) - unloved2beta1 is still our bottom-line backdrop, with no defense.

3/23 night By now it's become clear this playthrough's purpose has been to be true to proving what has already been known that I didn't want to think about, and ignoring any stars that would give the usual runaround sense of carefreeness what-so-ever. By this point, it's become conscious that the people in question would want people like myself dead in the streets because they'd cause too much trouble: so what 'meaning' you want to interpret out of the ripples in the Wario Apparition sector, it's completely out there you see, this is what deeper interpretable meaning they never went any further into

3/23 I installed Func Map Jam 2 and Arcane Dimensions in the new release of Quake - It worked easily enough In Arcane Dimensions, I activated active spawns mode and entered The Realm of Enceladus Right from the bat, aside from feeling weird from the Eastern religious symbolism in the start area, right outside, there being just one floating enemy It's not the thing itself, but the fact of the atmosphere Even if you had this kind of atmosphere in games, people would not appreciate it They're obviously preoccupied

3/24 Introducing myself to that level reminded me of the spirit of Spongebob and Patrick making a snow fort in their yard just to have Squidward not appreciate it The entire world is looking at us |Trump supporters| like the meme about ||Republicans||:- "I'm a Republican, and I'm just gonna wall everything off and have muh guns because I'm made of--**beef jerkey**"

5/11

After the memes of kids' shows from 2009, you can't just tell people the not Taylor Swift song but that other girl isn't just what every black thinks driving you by with le bass boost

5/12 Essentially forming the origin for the mandatory introductions "I'm a this, I'm a that", (9) from Touhou means at this point you have to emulate a jew like "have to hand it to them". That's not not mandatory, our ability, like the thing in the eye of TNT 2, to justify beside, is by leaning

Edit - it's not an edit. What comes when? We don't have a culture we're *barren*

5/18 Alright as coroporate executives, we have to do something Within the public graces of what salvation constitutes, it can only be within the bounds of eraudica, um probably Senran Kagura Burst Renewal, and I don't know Kangaroo Jack or someshit(*get* to it

5/19 crack of midnight- I will not accept a Freddy Frekker remix without audio distortion like the battery-dead Homer Simpson bottle opener etc. But back in the day I looked at one actually like that and just said fuck that

[sweet-honey-ape]

CW: monkey abuse, pet trade, institutionalized animal cruelty

I posted this monkey conservation rant on twitter which I DO NOT trust for archiving purposes anymore so I'm reposting it here:

I'd like to make an important post about something you'll find me talking on twitter about, referenced sometimes as "monkey domestication exploitation" "pet monkey abuse" or "domestication torture". What I mean is an increasingly prevalent genre of 'cute' internet content featuring pet monkeys in abusive domestic situations. 

The most common videos that get the most engagement is videos of monkeys being handled by humans, bathed in sinks, wearing human clothes, or eating human food. This type of content is inherently abusive and actively counterintuitive to conservation and protection goals for primate species, and harms these animals and the communities of their species they come from.  

It is abusive to keep monkeys and other primates as pets. Not only is it illegal in most states and many countries, but even seemingly harmless activities like eating, bathing, or dressing up are stressful and traumatic, especially given that many of these animals seem isolated in human conditions without members of their own species around. This, again, is abuse. 

You may have seen this image around, encouraging the end of using memes that glorify abusive practices. The pet trade is one of the major causes of the massive threat to monkey species around the world. The reason we criticize the use and spreading of 'memes' like this is because social media clout translates to real-world dollars. 

These dollars, combined with social media engagement and popularity, continue to condone and glamorize the keeping of monkeys as pets by influencers, celebrities, and naive families. Viral 'pet' monkeys like George on Tik Tok continue to promote this insanely abusive and lucrative practice. Consider that next time you post a sweet monkey meme. I always like to stop and consider whether the monkey pictured seems as pleased with its circumstances as I am with the image. 

[sserpente]

So um I saw this twitter post on how the main reason the loki series was created in the first place was to make loki the first main character in the mcu to be bi, is this true? I mean I thought the reason it was created was because marvel wanted to continue on where loki went after he escaped in endgame. I know I shouldn't just belive everything I read on the Internet that's why I'm asking you about this. I kinda belive it for a second cuz ever since ep 3 of loki came out, Kate herron has been kinda pushing the fact that loki is bi in everybody's throats in a twitter post of hers and I quote "it was very important to me, and my goal, to acknowledge loki was bisexual." So yeah, I just need a second opinion on this cuz lately marvel has been kinda woke if you know what I mean if you know about the whole controversies on their new comics. I really don't want any of this to be real. I'm really looking forward to your response.

*blinks* Okay, first of all, I'm flattered you want my opinion on this because I didn't even work on the show and I am, in fact, just another Loki girl on the Internet, haha! Okay, so here me out:

The main reason? I really doubt that! The reason we got a Loki show is because Tom Hiddleston has been stealing the show for years. In fact, I strongly believe that it is OUR passion for this character and HIS incredible talent and commitment that Marvel went ahead with his own series. If Tom's Loki wasn't this popular, I'm pretty sure he would have stayed dead after TDW. So don't worry about that. ♥

As far as I'm concerned, Kate is bisexual herself. She loves Loki as a character, so her passion for this is understandable. I support the LGBTQ+ community with all my heart, so I too cheered when Loki cheekily went "A bit of both". They worked this lovely aspect of his character into the show and given that it's always been there both in the comics and in the myths, it was only a matter of time in the show, I guess. After all, they didn't really have the time to focus on that in the Thor films.

But, and this is very important now: Loki being bisexual doesn't define him. It's a meaningful aspect of him (an aspect that resonates with many fans which is great), part of who he is, sure--but it doesn't define him as a fictional character. He is Loki, the God of Mischief, not Loki, the MCU character who is a bisexual. A friend of mine is a lesbian but if I pointed this out to her every time we met or only referred to her as such, she would go mad. And she certainly wouldn’t keep talking about her being a lesbian every time we met either. It doesn’t define her. It’s part of who she is but it doesn’t define her entire being, let alone reduces her to that. Just... let people love whoever they want, you know?

In other words, I remember there being a few discussions on whether the show should include Loki’s sexuality or even love interests before it came out and I understood that worry to some extent simply because Loki has a lot on his plate right now. Think about it:

The last thing that happened to him was him finding out that he is a Frost Giant, why Odin favoured Thor all these years and that his entire life is a lie, him starting a desperate attempt to gain his adoptive father’s recognition, failing, trying to commit suicide, ending up with Thanos instead, getting tortured and being forced to invade New York City, failing again (presumably even intentionally) and now being about to be brought back to Asgard expecting Odin to execute him (which is not far-fetched—Odin said ‘Frigga is the only reason you’re still alive and you will never see her again’ in TDW so I’m sure Loki was almost certain to be executed by Odin). So when the Tesseract landed at his feet, he saw his chance so he took it and escaped and now the TVA is telling him that he shouldn't exist and forces him to work for them, else he will be disintegrated and he learns that he can't return to his own timeline, has no home. He is struggling with his identity and finding his place in the world, figuring out who he is and what he wants. Now imagine making all that only about his sexuality and gender identity and disregarding everything else or shoving it in the background. Doesn't make sense, right? Loki must learn to love himself first before anyone else, regardless of their gender identity, can love him. If he ever gets love interests in the future, I'm pretty sure it'll be a process full of angst and hurt. I don't know anything about those alleged controversies concerning the new comics though, so I wouldn't be able to comment on that.

A lot of people are staining society with their negativity and try to find negative aspects everywhere which is why I never interact with such posts on here or elsewhere, it’s not worth my energy. It starts with bisexuals who happen to end up in a relationship with the opposite gender and are being judged for it even within their own community and as of right now it continues where some individuals on the Internet insist that we all must now use "they/them" pronouns for Loki when even in the show, they use "he/him" pronouns for him and "she/her" pronouns for Sylvie--not every non-binary/genderfluid person exclusively uses “they/them” pronouns.

Most importantly, I really doubt that every future episode now will keep reminding the audience that Loki is bisexual. You’re probably not familiar with her but Alex, the winner of this year’s season of Germany’s Next Topmodel is transgender--and, at some point in the season, when she was asked by an interviewer about what she thinks about a transgender model winning Germany’s Next Topmodel, she said in her opinion, simply a woman would win Germany’s Next Topmodel because that is what she is, meaning that society should stop pointing out how “different” the LGBTQ+ community is by constantly pointing it out but instead to finally start acknowleding it as normal. She told her story once and that’s it--she wants to be considered a female model, not a transgender model. Being transgender is a part of her but it doesn’t define her entire being.

Puuh, now that was a very long answer. Please, anyone, feel free to add things, I’m happy to learn more about what you guys, especially if you’re in the community, think about it. ♥

[bakug0stw1nk]

Hello, everyone! This is the LONGEST TEXT EVER! I was inspired by the various other "longest texts ever" on the internet, and I wanted to make my own. So here it is! This is going to be a WORLD RECORD! This is actually my third attempt at doing this. The first time, I didn't save it. The second time, the Neocities editor crashed. Now I'm writing this in Notepad, then copying it into the Neocities editor instead of typing it directly in the Neocities editor to avoid crashing. It sucks that my past two attempts are gone now. Those actually got pretty long. Not the longest, but still pretty long. I hope this one won't get lost somehow. Anyways, let's talk about WAFFLES! I like waffles. Waffles are cool. Waffles is a funny word. There's a Teen Titans Go episode called "Waffles" where the word "Waffles" is said a hundred-something times. It's pretty annoying. There's also a Teen Titans Go episode about Pig Latin. Don't know what Pig Latin is? It's a language where you take all the consonants before the first vowel, move them to the end, and add '-ay' to the end. If the word begins with a vowel, you just add '-way' to the end. For example, "Waffles" becomes "Afflesway". I've been speaking Pig Latin fluently since the fourth grade, so it surprised me when I saw the episode for the first time. I speak Pig Latin with my sister sometimes. It's pretty fun. I like speaking it in public so that everyone around us gets confused. That's never actually happened before, but if it ever does, 'twill be pretty funny. By the way, "'twill" is a word I invented recently, and it's a contraction of "it will". I really hope it gains popularity in the near future, because "'twill" is WAY more fun than saying "it'll". "It'll" is too boring. Nobody likes boring. This is nowhere near being the longest text ever, but eventually it will be! I might still be writing this a decade later, who knows? But right now, it's not very long. But I'll just keep writing until it is the longest! Have you ever heard the song "Dau Dau" by Awesome Scampis? It's an amazing song. Look it up on YouTube! I play that song all the time around my sister! It drives her crazy, and I love it. Another way I like driving my sister crazy is by speaking my own made up language to her. She hates the languages I make! The only language that we both speak besides English is Pig Latin. I think you already knew that. Whatever. I think I'm gonna go for now. Bye! Hi, I'm back now. I'm gonna contribute more to this soon-to-be giant wall of text. I just realised I have a giant stuffed frog on my bed. I forgot his name. I'm pretty sure it was something stupid though. I think it was "FROG" in Morse Code or something. Morse Code is cool. I know a bit of it, but I'm not very good at it. I'm also not very good at French. I barely know anything in French, and my pronunciation probably sucks. But I'm learning it, at least. I'm also learning Esperanto. It's this language that was made up by some guy a long time ago to be the "universal language". A lot of people speak it. I am such a language nerd. Half of this text is probably gonna be about languages. But hey, as long as it's long! Ha, get it? As LONG as it's LONG? I'm so funny, right? No, I'm not. I should probably get some sleep. Goodnight! Hello, I'm back again. I basically have only two interests nowadays: languages and furries. What? Oh, sorry, I thought you knew I was a furry. Haha, oops. Anyway, yeah, I'm a furry, but since I'm a young furry, I can't really do as much as I would like to do in the fandom. When I'm older, I would like to have a fursuit, go to furry conventions, all that stuff. But for now I can only dream of that. Sorry you had to deal with me talking about furries, but I'm honestly very desperate for this to be the longest text ever. Last night I was watching nothing but fursuit unboxings. I think I need help. This one time, me and my mom were going to go to a furry Christmas party, but we didn't end up going because of the fact that there was alcohol on the premises, and that she didn't wanna have to be a mom dragging her son through a crowd of furries. Both of those reasons were understandable. Okay, hopefully I won't have to talk about furries anymore. I don't care if you're a furry reading this right now, I just don't wanna have to torture everyone else. I will no longer say the F word throughout the rest of this entire text. Of course, by the F word, I mean the one that I just used six times, not the one that you're probably thinking of which I have not used throughout this entire text. I just realised that next year will be 2020. That's crazy! It just feels so futuristic! It's also crazy that the 2010s decade is almost over. That decade brought be a lot of memories. In fact, it brought be almost all of my memories. It'll be sad to see it go. I'm gonna work on a series of video lessons for Toki Pona. I'll expain what Toki Pona is after I come back. Bye! 'm back now, and I decided not to do it on Toki Pona, since many other people have done Toki Pona video lessons already. I decided to do it on Viesa, my English code. Now, I shall explain what Toki Pona is. Toki Pona is a minimalist constructed language that has only ~120 words! That means you can learn it very quickly. I reccomend you learn it! It's pretty fun and easy! Anyway, yeah, I might finish my video about Viesa later. But for now, I'm gonna add more to this giant wall of text, because I want it to be the longest! It would be pretty cool to have a world record for the longest text ever. Not sure how famous I'll get from it, but it'll be cool nonetheless. Nonetheless. That's an interesting word. It's a combination of three entire words. That's pretty neat. Also, remember when I said that I said the F word six times throughout this text? I actually messed up there. I actually said it ten times (including the plural form). I'm such a liar! I struggled to spell the word "liar" there. I tried spelling it "lyer", then "lier". Then I remembered that it's "liar". At least I'm better at spelling than my sister. She's younger than me, so I guess it's understandable. "Understandable" is a pretty long word. Hey, I wonder what the most common word I've used so far in this text is. I checked, and appearantly it's "I", with 59 uses! The word "I" makes up 5% of the words this text! I would've thought "the" would be the most common, but "the" is only the second most used word, with 43 uses. "It" is the third most common, followed by "a" and "to". Congrats to those five words! If you're wondering what the least common word is, well, it's actually a tie between a bunch of words that are only used once, and I don't wanna have to list them all here. Remember when I talked about waffles near the beginning of this text? Well, I just put some waffles in the toaster, and I got reminded of the very beginnings of this longest text ever. Okay, that was literally yesterday, but I don't care. You can't see me right now, but I'm typing with my nose! Okay, I was not able to type the exclamation point with just my nose. I had to use my finger. But still, I typed all of that sentence with my nose! I'm not typing with my nose right now, because it takes too long, and I wanna get this text as long as possible quickly. I'm gonna take a break for now! Bye! Hi, I'm back again. My sister is beside me, watching me write in this endless wall of text. My sister has a new thing where she just says the word "poop" nonstop. I don't really like it. She also eats her own boogers. I'm not joking. She's gross like that. Also, remember when I said I put waffles in the toaster? Well, I forgot about those and I only ate them just now. Now my sister is just saying random numbers. Now she's saying that they're not random, they're the numbers being displayed on the microwave. Still, I don't know why she's doing that. Now she's making annoying clicking noises. Now she's saying that she's gonna watch Friends on three different devices. Why!?!?! Hi its me his sister. I'd like to say that all of that is not true. Max wants to make his own video but i wont let him because i need my phone for my alarm.POOP POOP POOP POOP LOL IM FUNNY. kjnbhhisdnhidfhdfhjsdjksdnjhdfhdfghdfghdfbhdfbcbhnidjsduhchyduhyduhdhcduhduhdcdhcdhjdnjdnhjsdjxnj Hey, I'm back. Sorry about my sister. I had to seize control of the LTE from her because she was doing keymash. Keymash is just effortless. She just went back to school. She comes home from school for her lunch break. I think I'm gonna go again. Bye! Hello, I'm back. Let's compare LTE's. This one is only 8593 characters long so far. Kenneth Iman's LTE is 21425 characters long. The Flaming-Chicken LTE (the original) is a whopping 203941 characters long! I think I'll be able to surpass Kenneth Iman's not long from now. But my goal is to surpass the Flaming-Chicken LTE. Actually, I just figured out that there's an LTE longer than the Flaming-Chicken LTE. It's Hermnerps LTE, which is only slightly longer than the Flaming-Chicken LTE, at 230634 characters. My goal is to surpass THAT. Then I'll be the world record holder, I think. But I'll still be writing this even after I achieve the world record, of course. One time, I printed an entire copy of the Bee Movie script for no reason. I heard someone else say they had three copies of the Bee Movie script in their backpack, and I got inspired. But I only made one copy because I didn't want to waste THAT much paper. I still wasted quite a bit of paper, though. Now I wanna see how this LTE compares to the Bee Movie script. Okay, I checked, and the Bee Movie script is 50753 characters long. Not as long as some of the LTEs I mentioned, but still longer than mine and Kenneth Iman's combined. This LTE is getting close to 10000 characters! That means it'll be half the length of Kenneth Iman's LTE. That's pretty exciting. Also, going back to the topic of the Bee Movie Script, I tried to write the entire thing out by hand once. But I never finished it, especially since I'm focusing on this thing now. Maybe I should write this LTE out by hand. Nah, I don't think I will. Yay, we're at 10000 characters! Let's celebrate by talking about MUSIC! Music is cool. That concludes our celebratory discussion about music. Thank you, and have a good rest of your day. Hi, I'm back now, and I got a book! It's a dictionary for a language called Elefen. It's like Esperanto, but better. Now I can learn Elefen even without internet! That's pretty cool. I will now write something in Elefen. See if you can understand it! Here goes: Si tu pote leje esta, tu es merveliosa! Elefen es un lingua multe fresca! Did you understand that? Maybe you can't speak Elefen, but you still understood that because of your knowledge of other languages. Elefen is cool because it's an actual language, not an English code like Pig Latin or Viesa. Oh, I forgot to mention that my sister is back from school. She's blasting Rhett and Link songs right now. Have you seen that picture of Rhett and Link standing with a bunch of *******? Sorry, I almost said the F word there. That would've broken my rule of not saying the F word. I wrote something in Elefen, so I will also write something in Toki Pona. See if you can understand it now! sina sona e toki mi la sina pona mute a! I can speak Toki Pona fluently, by the way. It's also a pretty cool language. My sister is still playing annoying songs. It's hindering my focus right now. But it's fiiiiine. Okay, luckily she's run out of songs to play. At least for now. She's trying to think of another annoying song to play. Now she's playing a song by Green Day. Not NEARLY as bad as the other songs she just played. I should go for now. Goodbye! Hello, I'm back once again. I don't know why I feel obligated to say that every time I come back. But I'll keep doing it anyway. My sister stopped blasting annoying songs, so that's good. She's cooking something in the microwave. I'll go check to see what it is right now. Nevermind, it's already done cooking. Right, I remember! It's mac and cheese! Now she just started singing "I have a tongue, you don't, because I cut it off yesterday". I don't know what goes on in her mind when she does stuff like that. I've been messing around with my Elefen dictionary for a while, looking up whatever random words I can think of. By the way, the whole reason I'm doing this longest text ever is because of pointlesssites.com. That's how I found the Flaming-Chicken LTE, which inspired me to start writing this LTE. So thanks, pointlesssites.com! I check that website every day to see what new pointless websites they add. You know, I could double every letter I type so that this text would be twice as long as it normally would be. But nah, that's kinda cheating. So I won't. Also, SUBSCRIBE TO PEWDIEPIE! There, I did my part. Not that anyone will read this, but still. 'Twould be nice if you subscribed to PewDiePie. That's another word I invented. Actually, I looked it up, and I didn't invent it. Someone came up with it before I did. That's pretty sad. Also, LEARN VIESA TODAY! IT WILL CURE YOUR DEPRESSION! Seriously though, learn Viesa. It won't actually cure your depression, but I'm desperate for speakers. I only have one other person to speak it with. I should go now. Goodbye. Hi, I’m back. I just came up with an idea: SIMPLIFIED ENGLISH! Or, in Simplified Engish: Simifid Enis. It’s where every group of consonant letters is reduced to the first consonant in that group of consonants, and same goes with the vowels. If a word ends up being just a single consonant with no vowel, put ‘a’ at the end. So “I like eating my waffles” becomes “I like etin ma wafes”. Isn’t it the most amazing thing ever? Nah, it’s not quite as amazing as Viesa. Actually, Viesa isn’t a real language, so it’s less amazing then Elefen and Toki Pona, both of which are cool languages. I kinda figured that half of this text would be about languages. Oh well. I just really want this to be the longest text ever, without using copy and paste, keymash, etc. If you remember, my sister did a little bit of keymash in this text a while ago. I would’ve deleted it, but nah, I didn’t feel like it. And besides, it’s not like it took up half this text. I have an estimate for how long it’ll take me to be the world record holder: about one month. I think I can manage one month of writing this. You know what? I’m just gonna break my rule of not saying the word “furry”. There, I said it. Now I’m allowing myself to write “furry” whenever I want. So with that out of the way, let’s talk about how I first became a furry. For some reason, I have the exact date when I became a furry memorized. It’s May 4, 2018. At that time, I discovered that I was a furry by watching some furry YouTube videos. I knew about the existence of furries years before this, but I didn’t know much about it until this time. I said to myself, “You know what? I’m a furry now,” and that’s what started it all. And I’ve been slowly learning more about the fandom ever since. I would like to participate more in the fandom when I’m older, but I’m too young for most of it right now. Guess I’ll just have to wait. But in the meantime, I can write about it in this text. I should sleep now. Goodnight. Hello, I'm back once again. Happy Pi Day! I memorized a bunch of digits of Pi once, not sure how many I still remember... I have literally nothing to write about now. I've been trying to come up with something for the past 10 minutes, and I still have no idea. Literally nothing is happening right now. It's pretty boring. My sister is watching Friends, as usual. Okay, since there's nothing for me to write about, I should go now. Bye! Wow, it has been a while since I last added to this. It is now July 10, 2019. Last time I edited this page was Pi Day, which was March 14. Those 4 months of this thing being untouched end today! Wait... 4 months? That means I was supposed to get this past the world record three months ago. Oh well. I have put many things into this text. A lot of them were cringy, like how I keep mentioning furry-related things. You know, I should stop putting things in here when I know I'm gonna cringe at them later. I'll try not to do that from here on out. I just know I'll fail though. I'd hate to be aware of someone reading this entire thing... like, if I had to sit and watch a family member or something read this entire text, I would cringe so hard. I would not want that to happen. I am currently pasting the entirety of the FlamingChicken LTE onto a page on OurWorldOfText. The frustrating thing about pasting stuff there is that it pastes one letter at a time, so it takes forever to paste long text. And when the tab isn't open, I'm pretty sure it just stops pasting, so you have to keep the tab open if you want it to continue. Why am I even doing this? No idea. I might not even paste the whole thing. I probably won't. Hey, I just had a thought. What if, in the future, students are reading this for a class assignment? What if this LTE becomes part of the school curriculum? If so, hi future student! I hope you're enjoying reading my CRINGE. What is my life coming to? That's enough writing for now. Goodbye. Hey again. Might as well continue writing in here for a bit. Hey, have you ever heard of 3D Movie Maker? It's a program from the 90s (that still works on modern computers) where you can make 3D animated movies. It's pretty cool. I've made a few movies with it myself, and many other people use it to make interesting stuff. In case you want to try it for yourself, I'm sure if you google "3dmm download" or something like that, it will take you somewhere where you can download the program. It's kinda aimed at younger children, but hopefully that doesn't stop you from making absolute masterpieces with this program. I have a keyboard in my room (the musical kind, not the one you type words on), and I don't really know how to play it properly, but I do it anyways. I can play a few songs on the piano (albeit with weird fingering because like I just said, I have no idea what I'm doing), including HOME - Resonance and PilotRedSun - Bodybuilder. You might not know one or both of those songs. If you don't know one of them, why not google it? You will have discovered some new music, and it will all be because of me. Why are you reading this, anyways? How did you even find it? Were you like me, and you were browsing pointlesssites.com, eventually finding the FlamingChicken LTE and going down a rabbit hole of discovering random LTEs? Literally the only reason I'm writing this right now is because that happened. I just discovered a new LTE: the RainbowFluffySheep LTE. I'm gonna see how many characters long it is. 75,957 characters. Pretty long, but not as long as the top two LTEs (FlamingChicken and Hermnerps, both with around 200,000 characters). I wanna write as much as possible into this text today. I'm gonna see how much LTE-writing I can do in one day. Hopefully it's a lot, because I wanna hold a world record! Imagine having a world record. Well, would it really be a world record? Because I don't know of any world record books that have "Longest Text Ever" as a record. Oh well, I just hope this LTE passes exactly 230,634 characters. That's all my goal is. I'm not even a tenth of the way there yet, but give it a month and I'm sure I'll get there. Hey, remember last time I said it would only take a month? That was four months ago. I should just stop promising things all together at this point. Forget I said anything about that. Did you know my sister has an LTE? That's right! It's not very long, though, and you can't read it because it's on her phone. She made it while bored at the library. That library was where I used to have web design classes. Those were fun, but I don't do them anymore. Now all I do it sit at home and write stuff in here. Well, I'm exaggerating. I go to the convenience store with my sister sometimes. But that's pretty much it outside of being bored on a computer. I should be a less boring human being. One day, I should translate this entire LTE into Viesa. That would be a big waste of time, even bigger than writing the LTE itself. But I could still do it. I don't think I ever will. This text is simply too long, and it'll be even longer than that by the time I pass 230,634 characters. By the way, if you think I'm gonna stop writing this once I pass 230,634 characters, you're wrong! Because I'll keep writing this even after I pass that point. It'll feel nice to be way ahead the record. My sister's alarm clock has been going off for half an hour and I haven't turned it off. Why? Because LAZYNESS! Actually, I really should turn it off now. There, I turned it off. First when I tried to turn it off, it started playing the radio. Then I tried again, and it turned off completely. Then I hurt myself on the door while walking out. So that was quite the adventure. I'm gonna go sleep now. Goodnight! Hey, I'm back again. My computer BSOD'd while writing this, so I have to start this section over again. That's why you save your work, kids! Before I had to start over again, I was talking about languages. Yes, I decided to bring that topic back after a while. But I no longer want to talk about it. Why? Because it'll probably bore you to death. That is assuming you're reading this at all. Who knows, maybe absolutely zero people will read this within the span of the universe's existence. But I doubt that. There's gotta be someone who'll find this text and dedicate their time to reading it, even if it takes thousands of years for that to happen. What will happen to this LTE in a thousand years? Will the entire internet dissapear within that time? In that case, will this text dissapear with it? Or will it, along with the rest of what used to be the internet, be preserved somewhere? I'm thinking out loud right now. Well, not really "out loud" because I'm typing this, and you can't technically be loud through text. THE CLOSEST THING IS TYPING IN ALL CAPS. Imagine if I typed this entire text like that. That would be painful. I decided to actually save my work this time, in case of another crash. I already had my two past attempts at an LTE vanish from existance. I mean, most of this LTE is already stored on Neocities, so I probably won't need to worry about anything. I think I might change the LTE page a little. I want the actual text area to be larger. I'm gonna make it a very basic HTML page with just a header and text. Maybe with some CSS coloring. I don't know. Screw it, I'm gonna do it. There, now the text area is larger. It really does show how small this LTE is so far compared to FlamingChicken or Hermnerps. But at least I made the background a nice Alice Blue. That's the name of the CSS color I used. It's pretty light. We're getting pretty close to the 1/10 mark! That's the point where we're one tenth of the way to making this the longest text ever, meaning all I have to do is write the equivalent of everything I've already written so far nine more times! Not gonna make any promises, though. How come every time I try to type "though", it comes out as "thought"? Why do I always type the extra T? It's so annoying that I have to delete the T every time. Okay, only mildly annoying. Not as annoying as I previously described. I apologize for my exaggeration of the annoyance level of me typing "thought" instead of "though". I just realized that most of the games I play are games that I've been playing for at least six years. I started playing Garry's Mod in 2013, Minecraft in whatever year version 1.2.3 came out. Now I have to look that up. March 2, 2012. So I started playing Minecraft approximately during that time. Wow, seven years ago! Coincidentally, I was also seven years old then. I remember the days of 2012-13. That was when I still played Roblox and made terrible YouTube videos. I was called "Infinite Budgets" back then. I also remember the days of 2016. A lot of people thought that was a terrible year, but for me personally, it brings me a lot of nostalgia because I talked a lot with my online friend at the time, and I did livestreams on YouTube and stuff. It was fun. 2016 was also when I got the phone that I still have to this day. Yup, my phone is three years old. My life was completely different when I got this phone: I was 11 years old, my YouTube channel actually had activity, and I wasn’t writing this text. I’m currently writing this in the car. We are on out way to the dollar store. And since I’m writing this on my phone, I’m making a lot more typos than usual. Some of them might make it through, so be prepared for that. Anyways, we appear to be getting close to the dollar store. I have a gift card for that place. I think so anyways, it might be for a different store... Yup, this dollar store is different. Oh well. My sister has an obsession with sponges. I’m sure she’s gonna find the sponges and go crazy over them. Why does she like sponges so much? No idea. She just found a bag of tiny baby dolls, and she wants to put them in ice cubes and call it “Ice Ice Baby”. She is truly a strange human being. My sister also has an obsession with stuffies. She has such an addiction, that she’s banned from them. Now she found the wigs and she’s considering buying one. She’s been looking at them for quite a while now. We’re out of the dollar store, and now we’re going to the computer store. I have no idea why we’re here. I guess we just are. Now we’re going home. Welp, that was a fun adventure. Stay tuned for more fun adventures as you read through this LTE. I should go now. Bye! Hello again. I made a private world on OurWorldOfText for my sister and I, but she doesn't want to join it. She doesn't think it'll be fun. Now I'm just editing it alone. How sad. But oh well. Now I’m here adding more to this text. I once made a Discord server specifically for a language called “Bo”, where the only word is “bo”. I made it almost four months ago, and somehow, it’s still going. People are still spamming nothing but “bo” there. It’s great. I also once made a server where you’re not allowed to use any vowels. It was a very strange server. I deleted it after some time though, so all that insanity is no more. I also used to own a Pig Latin server, but it got inactive so I deleted that too. We had some good memories in that server though. Now there’s a new Pig Latin server, but it’s not owned by me. Dang, my YouTube channel has been dead for so long. I haven’t posted a video in a year. I want to revive it, but I don’t know what to post there. I’ll figure it out. I doubt my channel will ever go back to it’s 2016 legacy, but I’m sure I’ll post something eventually. Random fact of the day: there are thirty-nine question marks so far in this text. Am I about to make it forty? Yes, I just did. Now the fact I initially stated is no longer true. Or is it? Because I said “so far” in the fact, that implies that we’re talking about the moment that fact was said, disregarding any future events. Now I’m pretty sure that fact is still technically true. Welp, I guess I should just accept that I’m editing that world of text alone for the rest of my life. I originally put a bunch of complaining in there, but I deleted it all. The thing is, now that world will never be same without all of that complaining about my sister not being here. But that’s fine. Hey, I just had a cool realization. Basically, there’s this conlang (constructed language, for those not in the know) server where we have a Sentence of the Week activity. In this activity, someone posts a text with a maximum of nine sentences, then people translate it into their own conlangs. My realization is this: if we take nine sentences from this LTE every week, there would be a whole year of sentences for people to translate. There are approximantly 523 sentences in this LTE. Divide that by 9 sentences each week, and you get 58 weeks worth of sentences, which is approximantly the number of weeks in a year. Quick maths. I actually suck at math, but that’s besides the point. I should go now. Goodbye! Hello, I’m back again. I really need to come up with different hello and goodbye messages, because I’ve already said “Hello, I’m back again” once before. Same with the “I should go now. Goodbye!” I said at the end of the previous section. I was going to explain what a “section” is, but I’m terrible at explaining things, so I’m not going to anymore. I guess you’ll just have to figure it out yourself. It’s probably not very hard to figure out, anyways. I guess I can just say that a section starts with me saying hello, and ends with me saying goodbye. That should be enough explaination, now that I think about it. Hey, do you ever feel like you never have any idea what you’re talking about? That’s my entire life. I just summarized it all in one sentence. On an unrelated note, I feel like half this LTE is just me talking about the LTE itself. I mean, press CTRL+F on this webpage, then type “LTE”. Look at all the times I use it in this text! Not counting the ‘lte’ in the word ‘multe’, of course. Dang, now the search results will include that, too. Anyways, half of this text is just me talking about how I’m trying to get this text to be the longest. Well, the longest LTE, anyways. I still have a long way to go. I’m only 12.7% of the way there. I mean, minus the four month gap, my estimation is that I’ve only been writing this for not even two weeks. So it makes sense that this LTE isn’t very long yet. Whenever I look at this webpage, it looks long at first glance, but the longer I look at it, the more I realize how short it actually is. It’s something that I can’t explain. For real this time. I just realized that none of this is helping the fact that half this LTE is about the LTE itself. I should bring up a new topic, but I don’t feel comfortable talking about much else. Why? Because, like I said, I never have any idea what I’m talking about. Most of this LTE is just me talking about LTEs or languages. Sometimes furries, but I don’t wanna go back into that territory at this point. But it doesn’t matter, because I’m still gonna write this LTE for as long as possible, even if it means talking about the same things half the time. Also, LEARN VIESA! Haven’t said that in a while, so I might as well bring it back. The documentation for Viesa is on this very website, so go ahead and read it! You might need to know some linguistic knowledge to understand it, though. In fact, you probably won’t understand most of it unless you know some amount about lingusitics, so you have been warned. If Viesa is too much for you, Pig Latin will probably be better for you. If it's so easy that kids can learn it, you can too! It's a language you can learn in probably five minutes, so why not give it a try? You may also enjoy Ubbi Dubbi, where you place 'ub' before every vowel sound. It's also a very easy language to learn, although not quite as popular. The thing is, none of these are even real languages. They're just codes, and very simple codes at that. You could probably crask Pig Latin or Ubbi Dubbi rather easily. Viesa too, actually. But I still enjoy them occasionally, even if Pig Latin and Ubbi Dubbi are inefficient and easy to crack, and Viesa is easy to crack yet unneccesarily difficult. I do make real languages, but I never put in the effort to learn them to fluency. At least I make them at all. Here’s a fun game: I will open up a random page from a book, and tell you the first word I see. English. That’s the word. Stay tuned for more fun games as you read through this LTE. We’re back, and we’re gonna play the same game as before. Ready? Subject. Now we’re gonna do it again. Reading. And again. Itself. Constituent. Grammar. Colloquial. Black. Outline. Add. About four of those words were language related. You’ll never guess why! (Spoiler alert: it’s a conlanging book). I’m running out of ideas now. I’m just gonna generate a random word and try to talk about it. Forbid. That’s the opposite of “allow”, I’m pretty sure. I don’t really know what else to say. Well, I guess I failed at generating a topic I could talk about. You know what's weird? My favorite word hasn't been used once in this entire text. I'm about to change that forever. Epic. Yup, my favorite word is "epic". I use it on a regular basis. I say "That's epic" all the time. It's a word I can't live without. Hey, I've now written more of this text after the 4 month gap than before it! Just thought I'd share that fact. Also, I'm gonna try and write as much as possible in this LTE today. I've already written more today than the day I first said I was gonna write as much as possible, so that's a good sign. The thing is, I don't know what to write about. I need to write about something, otherwise I won't write at all and I won't accomplish my goal. Wait, what goal should I set? How many characters should I write today? I'm gonna try and get 10,000 characters. I've already written almost 5,000 today, so from here I just have to write the equivellant of everything I've already written today. I'm just gonna try it and see if I make it. Maybe sometime in the future I'll do a bigger goal, like 15,000 or even 20,000 in one day. Actually, I don't know if 20,000 would even be possible for me. It might be, but it sounds like somewhat of a stretch for me to write that much in a single day. We'll see how long 10,000 takes, though. I'm already doing a bad job at this. I haven't typed anything here in several minutes. I need a topic. Um, Vabungula, I guess? Basically, it's a conlang created by Bill Price in 1965. It amazes me how one can work on a single conlang for that long. Most of the conlangs I start making die after 15 minutes. Anyways, I really like it because... um, I don't know, actually. There's not really anything about it that's super interesting (other than how long it's existed), it's just his personal conlang. Maybe it's the amount of development that went into it. It has over 5,000 dictionary entries and several texts written in the language. I'm sure most people reading this don't care about my language related talk, but I gotta make this long. I'm desperate to reach my 10,000 character goal. I've got 4,000 to go. I just found a website that generates random art from a seed. I just put this entire text as the seed, and it generated something quite nice. I would put the picture here, but I want this LTE to be nothing but text, so I won't do that. I've been playing with this for a while now. Many of the seeds produce boring pictures, but some of them are nice. For example, I just used "e" as the seed and it produced a nice looking picture. "a" looks nice too, arguably nicer. I've been using nothing but the word "nice" to describe these pictures. Maybe it's time to get a bigger vocabulary? "b" looks, um, good? I don't have the right vocabulary for this. I also don't feel like doing every single letter, because the pictures take some time to generate. But if you want to do it for yourself, just go to random-art.org and try it out! By the way, this is another website I found through pointlesssites.com. You know, the same website that lead me to the FlamingChicken LTE, which lead me to begin writing this whole thing. But what made me discover pointlesssites.com? Vsauce mentioned it. But what made me discover Vsauce? YouTube Reccomendations, probably. But what made me discover YouTube? As far as I remember, my dad showed it to me when I was 6. So I would like to thank my dad for being the reason I started writing this. He's the one who showed me YouTube, which reccomended me Vsauce, which mentioned pointlesssites.com, which brought me to the FlamingChicken LTE, which inspired me to start my own LTE. If he had never shown me YouTube, I wouldn't be here writing this text, and you wouldn't be reading it. Well, that's probably not true, because I probably would have discovered YouTube by other means, thus leading me to Vsauce, leading me to Vsauce, leading me to pointlesssites.com, leading me to the FlamingChicken LTE, leading me to... okay, I really need to stop now. I've gone too far. But you know what I haven't gone too far with? This LTE. I don't think I even can go too far with writing this text. Unless this text gets so long that it surpasses the 1GB storage limit of Neocities. In which case, I'll need to upgrade to Supporter in order to get a 50GB storage limit. But what if the text gets so long that is surpasses that? I don't think I'll ever make it there. I mean, 50GB is about 50 trillion characters. So I think we're good. I still need to get to 10,000 by the end of today. I've got 1,500 to go. Currently watching a livestream. It's reminding me of when I used to livestream back in 2016. I still kinda miss those days. But at the same time, I was quite awkward and had zero social skills, so I'm not sure if I'd want to go back. At this point, everything I've written today is longer than what can fit on the screen at once. At least on my computer screen. It probably changes with different screen resolutions and devices. But anyways, it's pretty unusual for that much of the LTE to be written in a single day. I don't want to pressure myself into writing this much every day, though. Last time I forced myself to complete a certain amount of something every day, it was overwhelming and I ended up losing motivation, thus letting down all my fans who were anticipating the August 30th, 2016 release date. Okay, the amount of eager fans was probably a number you could count on one hand, but still. By the way, if you're wondering what this "something" was, it was GoAnimated Garbage: The Movie, which was supposed to be an hour long episode of a series I made to make fun of random GoAnimate videos. In case you're not the type of person who knows what GoAnimate is... hoo boy. Basically, it's a drag-and-drop animation website infamous for the "grounded videos" that people made with it, among other types of videos. It's this whole community that I neither can explain nor want to explain. But I had somewhat of an association with that community back in the day. On my YouTube channel, I used to make a genre of GoAnimate video known as the "OS video". Typically an OS video is where some sort of hated character within the GoAnimate community forcefully installs their operating system onto a user's computer, and the user has to deal with this OS until they eventually find a way to "destroy" it. I made five of these videos. In chronological order: Caillou OS, Boots OS, Franklin OS, Little Bill OS, and Crap OS X. Caillou OS is the most viewed video on my main channel, which is unsurprising since Caillou is pretty much THE character associated with the GoAnimate community. When I made that video, it was a big transition for my channel. The channel's name was changed from Infinite Budgets, which had been my name since 2013 when I made crappy Roblox videos, to Allisima. All of my old videos were deleted, with the exception of my "Barney Errors", which was yet another genre of GoAnimate video. Basically, a Barney error is when a user's computer/console/whatever session is interrupted by a "Barney Error", a message informing the user that Barney has been killed, and the device must not be turned off because it's an "important message". There's also a bomb that's placed in Barney's "lair", the timer for which is displayed in the error. The user gets some amount of "chances", and every time the device is turned off, the user looses a chance and the time until the bomb explodes decreases. Eventually, the user turns off the computer enough times that there are no more chances left, the bomb explodes, and some sort of punishment happens. These punishments can range from having to downgrade your operating system, to having your computer destroyed, and in extreme cases, even to death. I once made a whole channel for Barney Errors, where I made about twenty of them before quitting. After that, I eventually quit GoAnimate all together, but I still made Crap OS X, an OS video made with Powerpoint. I also made an interactive OS parody called Windows Poop Editon, again with Powerpoint. Before that, I also made one called "Atch OS" using my old Windows XP netbook. I just checked to see if my old Weebly website still exists, since there's an Atch OS download on there and I wanted to see if it dissapeared from existence or not. Appearantly it does! I'm getting so much nostalgia from this website. It's like a window into 2016, when I had fun making these videos on a regular basis. I'm way past my 10,000 character goal now. I'm kinda glad I set this goal, but again, I'm not gonna force myself to do it everyday. I think I'm gonna stop writing for today. Bye! Hey, I'm back. Yes, that hello wasn't original either, since I already said it once. Specifically, after my sister seized the LTE and started spamming. You remember that, right? I hope you read through this whole thing instead of just picking a random part (which just happened to be this part) and reading only a tiny bit. Nah, I'm just kidding. Read this text however you want to, it doesn't matter if you read this entire text from start to finish or not. I mean, I did put some cringy stuff in here, as I keep mentioning. But it's on the Internet, and since recently, on my homepage, so I know people are gonna read it. Really the only reason I'm making this is because I have a weird obsession for writing giant walls of text. Guess what? I just added translations of this LTE into various conlangs on my website! But they're all very incomplete, and I probably won't finish them ever... I mean, if I'm gonna finish any of them, 'twill probably be the Viesa translation since it's the easiest to do. Hey, 'twill's back! I remember the very beginnings of this LTE, when I first mentioned 'twill. That was 40,000 characters ago. Appearantly I'm measuring time with characters now. Hey, what's the average amount of text I write per day in this LTE? The four month gap probably significantly drops that amount. Let's see! The trouble is finding out when I started writing this LTE, because I don't know the exact date. I'm just gonna estimate that it was March 12, based on the amount of times I said goodnight before I said "Happy Pi Day". It's not a very accurate measurement, though, because sometimes I stop writing for the day without saying goodnight. But anyways, from March 12 to today, July 16, is 127 days. As of that previous sentence, there are 42,549 characters in this LTE. 42,549 characters divided by 127 days equals about 335 characters per day. That's not very much at all. To get an idea of how short that is, the first 335 characters of this LTE consist of about 64 words and 8 sentences. As I predicted, the four months of no activity had a big impact on this number. But what if we ignore the 4 month gap, which was from March 15 to July 9, I've only been working on this LTE for ten days. 42,549 characters divided by 10 days is about 4254 characters. That's much better. It might be that big because of the 12,600 characters I wrote yesterday. I said I wouldn't do it every day, but honestly, I'm feeling like doing a goal again today. I think I might even go a bit higher than yesterday. Let's do 15,000 characters! I have zero life outside of this LTE, anyways, so I think I'll make it. As long as I keep typing about random stuff for the entire day, I'll probably get past 15,000 easily. I think I'm insane. Literally all I do anymore is write this LTE. My mom is almost certainly concered for me, because I was in my room pretty much all of yesterday and my sister told her about how I'm trying to write the longest text ever. But enough about my descent into insanity for now. Let's get this LTE to over 55,000 characters today! This is probably the most meta LTE in existence. Like I've said, I talk about the LTE itself as much, if not more than anything else. By the way, if I were to write as much as I did yesterday every day, I would reach my goal in just 15 days. Now I'm tempted to do that, even though I said I wouldn't set a goal like that every day. I think I might end up doing it subconciously. I kinda wanna convince some other people I know online to start their own LTE. Wouldn't it be fun if we all had our own LTEs? They would probably all die within a day, but at least I wouldn't be the only one writing an LTE in 2019... The most recently updated LTE I've seen is the RainbowFluffySheep LTE, which I believe was last updated in late 2018. That wasn't really that long ago, but still, I don't think it's being updated anymore. Now let's do an LTE Timeline! The original FlamingChickens LTE was probably started sometime in 2004, and Hermnerps was started the same year. The FlamingChickens LTE stopped in 2005, while the Hermnerps LTE actually lived on until 2009, although edits after the end of 2004 were rather sparce. The Kenneth Iman LTE was started in 2013 and was last updated in 2015. The RainbowFluffySheep LTE both started and was last updated in March 2018. And of course, the WhileTrue LTE was started in March 2019 and is still being updated today. Wow, 15 years of LTEs! I think my LTE is the only one still being updated. It would be nice if someone else was writing their own LTE along with me. But 'twill be hard to convince other people to waste their lives writing a useless wall of text. You never know, maybe an LTE that stopped being edited years ago will come back from the dead. That seems kind of unlikely though. Very strange fact incoming. A certain word has not been used since the very beginning of this text. Ready to learn what it is? I shouldn't tell you, actually. Of course, that would ruin it. Unless you want me to ruin a really cool fact. Surely you wouldn't want that to happen. Okay, I'll just tell you, because I'm probably gonna end up using it again someday or another. The word is "various". If you search for "various" in this LTE, you'll only find it at the very beginning as well as here. And I was gonna keep this a secret, but just now I did this thing where if you take the first letter of each sentence, it spells out "VARIOUS". Kinda clever... I guess? Anyways, for those who are insane enough to be reading this entire thing from the start Wow, you have quite the dedication. My LTE isn't even the longest yet, but perhaps in the future, when it is the longest, people will be challenging themselves to read the entire thing. And maybe you're one of them! Perhaps you're reading this long after I've passed my goal, in which case you still have quite a bit to go. So I wish you luck on your Longest Text Ever reading adventure! I've been talking about LTEs all day. For the past 6,000 characters, in fact. I need to find something different to talk about. But first, I just had an idea pertaining LTEs. I should compare this LTE to the longest joke in the world! The longest joke in the world is 56,554 characters long, which is about how long I'm trying to get this LTE by the end of today. So if I reach my goal today, this text will be longer than the longest joke in the world! That's pretty cool. I would also be a quarter of the way to my goal. But let's get back to finding something different to talk about. I can't think of anything. My sister is singing a song about wanting Subway. I will never understand her. What goes through her brain that makes her decide "Yeah, I think it would be a good idea to sing about how I really want Subway"? I don't get how her brain works. She also likes eating paper. I asked her and appearantly she was perfectly okay with me writing that in here. She probably thinks nobody's ever gonna read this. But she's gonna be wrong! Eventually. Now she's asking me to write about how she likes yogurt. "Because I didn't used to", she says. She's eating mango yogurt, and she has water in a Gatorade bottle. Now I'm asking her what else I should put in this text. She says I should write about how there's wild sage where we live. Now she's having hot chocolate. She didn't ask me to write that, but I told her I was going to write it and she said okay. My sister might start her own Longest Text Ever, again. She says it will have only one word repeated throughout the entire text. But I told her that it defeats the purpose of an LTE. In the original FlamingChickens LTE, one of the very first things that is written is "I will just type, and type, and never, ever use copy and paste". Okay, I just made a webpage for her LTE (it's gonna be an actual LTE this time). Stay tuned for "The Best Longest Text Ever", as she calls it. I think it should have just been called "KKs Longest Text Ever" or something, but whatever. She types really slow, but I hope her LTE will be successful nonetheless. Warning: if you do go and read her LTE, she spoils Spiderman: Far From Home at the very beginning, so be careful about that. In fact, she's basically typing the entire plot of the movie. Well, that's one way to increase your LTE's length, I guess. My sister is listening to her terrible songs instead of writing her LTE. Well, she has her LTE page open, but she's not writing anything and is singing instead. Actually, she's writing stuff now, so ignore everything I said previously. She's still writing the entire plot. Her LTE is now 2,000 characters, which isn't very long, but she's only been working on it for an hour. Plus she's a slow typer. She types everything with one hand. It might take a while for her LTE to get to this level. But assuming she keeps writing it and doesn't forget about it after today, it'll get pretty long eventually. I still need to write 7,000 characters today. My sister is watching a cringy video made by our old elementary school. They became a French immersion school after I left. She found one of the videos I was in... oh god, I can't stand to look at that video. It hurts me to think about those days. My sister's LTE webpage has text now! Maybe I should create a page linking to all the LTEs I know about. I think I'll do that. Boom, it is done. I think I'm gonna also put a link to it on this page. There, that's done as well. Guys, I'm not sure if I'm gonna make it to 15,000. I still have 5,000 characters to go (I was completely off earlier, I don't have 7,000 left to go), and there's not much left of the day. In retrospect, it was probably a bad idea to make a goal for the day in the first place. After all, LTE writing is supposed to be fun! Sort of. There's zero need to make unneccesary deadlines. I think it just reduces the fun, as well as the part of my life that isn't just writing huge walls of text. From here on out, I declare character-per-day goals abolished. I will no longer make attempts to write a certain amount in a single day. I should have listened to my past self, who said not to do goals every day. But I didn't, and now I regret it. But anyways, here's a fun fact about this LTE: excluding my upcoming usage, the pronoun "he" is only used twice in this LTE, and they both refer to my dad. On the other hand, the pronoun "she" is used forty times! Almost all of these refer to my sister. Only one refers to my mom. I guess I just really like talking about the weird stuff my sister does. But not as much as being meta and talking about my own LTE. Here's another fun fact: "LTE" is the fourteenth most common word in this text! That's insane. It's more common than words you'd expect to be common, like "you", "I'm", "for", "be", "about", "was", and so on. I really need to talk about other things once in a while. But since I have zero creativity, I always resort to talking about the same topics. From what I've seen, most other LTEs are pretty diverse, but mine isn't at all. Honestly, this is likely the most boring LTE to read. But my absolute lack of creativity means it's probably gonna stay that way for a long time. I'm tired, so I'm gonna go to sleep. Maybe I'll be more creative by tomorrow. Probably not. Anyways, goodnight. Hey, I'm back, and I don't feel any more creative. But I did have a dream last night, so I'm gonna talk about that. Last night, I dreamt that I was in one of our old houses, and I saw that someone made a video roasting Viesa. They talked about how you shouldn't say "dog" in Viesa, because appearantly "deeg" is bad or something? I don't know. Then they said the rule where W becomes V is weird, but I don't remember the reason they said it. I didn't really care about how they roasted my language. Then I watched a Minecraft video for whatever reason, and then the dream ended. How do other LTE writers have so many topics to talk about? All I ever talk about is either LTEs themselves, or the fact that all I ever talk about is LTEs. There's no diversity. I very rarely talk about anything else. And when I do, it's usually about languages and lasts only a few sentences. There, I deleted it. Oh, you don't have any context. Basically I wrote a bunch of depressing stuff, then I decided to delete it all. I knew I was going to regret it later, in the same way I regret writing all that stuff about furries. Not that I think there's anything wrong with being a furry, it's just that it personally makes me uncomfortable looking back on it. I'm not even into that stuff as much anymore. I don't watch furry YouTube, and I don't talk about how much I want a fursuit/go to a convention. That's a part of me that's slowly disappearing. Okay, I'm gonna stop talking about that, because I literally just said how I regret talking about it in this text. You know, I've been feeling kind of down about this LTE lately, because as I just mentioned, all I ever talk about is this LTE itself, there's no diversity, blah blah blah. It's especially been like that ever since the four month gap. In fact, I barely talked about LTEs before that gap. It's like I lost all my creativity after four months. You know what? I'm officially gonna say this: If, for some reason, you are reading this before you decide you want to start reading this entire text, READ EVERYTHING FROM "WOW, IT HAS BEEN A WHILE" TO HERE AT YOUR OWN RISK, BECAUSE YOU WILL LIKELY DIE OF BOREDOM DUE TO THE MONOTONOUS TOPICS! There, now I'm gonna try and forget that half this LTE is the same exact boring topic. I will also try to avoid writing about the same exact boring topic for the rest of this text. Let's celebrate the End of Monotonous Topics (EMT) by talking about how we (my sister and I) had lunch and did various other things with our grandpa! So grandpa asked if we wanted to have lunch and spend an afternoon with him, and we said yes. Then he picked us up, and we went to a nearby town where we had lunch, went to a museum which was a house built in 1909 as well as the town's first hospital, and got ice cream from what is appearently one of the best ice cream places in the country, according to grandpa. So today was a fun day. I'm gonna go now. Bye! Hey, I'm back. That's the fifth time I've said that. I need to come up with more original... nah, whatever. Anyways, I had a dream last night which was basically a whole movie I don't remember most of. All I remember is playing a keyboard at the store for some reason, and that the dream ended with a random car horn. Oh, and there was Minecraft involved in the beginning, which I'm pretty sure is becoming a recurring theme in my dreams. I don't know why that happened, because I rarely play Minecraft anymore. Do any of y'all remember the DVD screensaver meme? That was one of my favorite memes. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, many DVD players had this screensaver where it was a DVD logo bouncing around the screen. The big moment that everyone anticipates is when the logo hits the corner of the screen perfectly, because, well, it's just so SATISFYING! I used to watch a livestream that was literally just this screensaver running endlessly. And when it hit the corner, it was a huge celebration for both me and everyone else watching. I got so excited when the logo hit the corner. My computer's screensaver is even still a DVD screensaver. But nowadays when I see it hit the corner, I don't have as much enthusiasm as I used to. I've just seen it too many times for it to be exciting anymore. Plus, the meme isn't even a thing anymore. I doubt that livestream is even still running. But you never know, so I'm gonna check to see if it's still going. Oh wow, it is! That was the last thing I expected to see in July 2019. But only four people are watching it, which makes sense. The title now says "DVD Logo Screensaver For 1 Year", even though it hasn't quite been going on for a year. But when it hits that point, perhaps that's when it will finally end? It should have ended months ago, if you ask me. Yup, I was right. There's a countdown on the livestream to when it ends, and it says 181 days, 9 hours, 12 minutes, and 3 seconds. Wow, the corner hit and wall hit numbers are much bigger now. The most corner hits I'd seen is around 1400 or so, but now it's at 4776! The wall hits used to be in the hundred-thousands, now it's at over two and a half million! Hello, I have returned. There, I came up with something original to say! Anyways, I just combined every single LTE I know of (including this one) and put it onto one single page on a Wikia wiki called "No Rules Wiki". That wiki exactly as you would expect from the title. I found it a while ago, and I thought it was about time I made a contribution, even if pasting over half a million characters into a single article is breaking some rule... I've been wanting to make Viesa an actual conlang for so long now. I think it's long overdue at this point. Hey, I'm back again. These sections are getting shorter and shorter each day. But oh well. I just discovered how much I like the word "number". I don't know why, but it's just so fun to say! I think I've liked that word ever since I was a toddler learning my numbers! I remember thinking it was a fun word even back then. At that time I had two little electronic toys: one was orange and for numbers, and one was purple and for letters. I'm pretty sure those were the colors. I also vaguely remember having a fan that lit up and displayed custom messages. I haven't seen anything like that since then. All I hear right now is Baby Shark being blasted upstairs. You know that song, right? I don't know who doesn't know it at this point. I can't think of a single person I've seen that doesn't know what that song is. Dang, ever since the EMT I haven't been writing as much in this text. Looks like LTEs were all I could talk about. Oh well. How many times have I said "oh well"? Probably a lot. About eight times, in fact. I'm back again. I went a full day without writing anything into this LTE yesterday! There were a lot of things happening that day, so I didn't feel like writing. I could've written at least a little bit, but I didn't. Time for me to use this LTE as my dream journal yet again! I had a dream where my domain was "exin" (or something like that) instead of "whiletrue", so that was a thing. I also had a dream where there was this game that I thought existed in the real world, but it didn't. Dreams do that sometimes. I don't remember much about the game, but it involved the Simpsons, I guess? Also, I was in a weird store where they had an... iCarly laptop? And a bunch of gift cards. That's all I remember. For now, at least. My sister does not like synthwave. She says "it's repetitive", "the sounds they use don't sound like music", and she doesn't like how it doesn't have lyrics. First of all, she's hypocritical because she always listens to the same songs on repeat. And why does it matter that it doesn't have words? Why does she think every single piece of music in existence has to have words? YOU BETTER WATCH YOUR OPINIONS THERE! (That was a reference to a cringy GoAnimator that no one reading this will get, unless you came to this website from my YouTube channel which you subscribed to during my OS video days). Anyways, synthwave is objectively the best genre of music. I remember hearing HOME - Resonance for the first time in a Discord voice chat, and it was magical. I wish I could listen to that song for the first time again. That was how I got into synthwave. You know what my favorite color combination is? Yellow text on a magenta background. Oh, and don't forget the Comic Sans. That is just pure beauty right there. In fact, it's used in the first frame (well, close enough) of "history of the entire world, i guess", which makes me love that video even more. We're at 60,000 characters, 1,000 sentences, and 12,000 words! Weird how all those counts hit such round numbers in one day, huh? I need to stick to the EMT, so I should stop talking about that. My sister is attempting to build a Lego city. Her goal is to have three buildings, since she doesn't have THAT much Lego. Have you noticed how quickly I've been switching topics in this text? That's because I can't talk about anything for a long time. That is, unless that thing is languages or LTEs. I am currently trying to revive a language my sister and I started making a while back. Sometimes my sister has days when she doesn't hate languages for some reason, then she ends up starting one. But of course, she regained her hate and abandoned it. Now I'm the only one working on the language. By the way, the language is called Lazay, which was the successor to Zula, the first language we made together which is now deleted. We started writing the language on paper, but then I started a Google Doc. I'm sure the papers are still here somewhere. I'm just too lazy to find them. I’m back again. I haven’t been ending these sections with goodbyes recently. But whatever. We’re on our way to IKEA to get a dresser for my room. We’re listening to Queens of the Stone Age right now, and I’m just waiting for “Fortress” to come on. I sing that song in Viesa, but I make up half of the lyrics. It goes: Ванавар јак фиртрас кува, ма башег ђара, ја сок. Try and translate that! The song is playing now. I like this song. We���re back from IKEA now. Actually, we’ve been home for hours now, and we’ve already built the dresser. My computer crashed (but don’t worry, I started writing this in Google Docs on my phone), and now Google Chrome won’t open. So I have to use Microsoft Edge for now. I’m gonna sleep now. Goodnight! Hello, I'm back. My sister is brushing my back with a hairbrush, and I don't know why. I asked her what I should write about (because I have zero creativity), and she said I should write about that. I'm gonna type whatever comes to my head now. Hi, I'm a boring human being who has zero creativity whatsoever and still happens to be writing an LTE. Isn't that insane? How could this be? Nobody knows, and nobody will ever know. It is a strange mystery that has yet to be solved. Hmm, I wonder if I should go and eat pancakes now? I'm so random right now. In fact, there's an entire subreddit for that: r/iamsorandom. You should check it out! I mean, you don't really have to, but it would be nice if you did. I use Reddit a lot, but I only use it for language-related stuff. Well, I make posts in language-related subreddits, but the non-language subs that I look at are ones that I don't post anything to, because I know nothing about literally anything that isn't languages. And heck, I don't even know much about languages! I only make English codes and call them "conlangs". Sort of. I usually don't actually call them conlangs, but I use them for such purposes. I speak Viesa as if it were a real language, but it simply is not. Why did I make Viesa in the first place? Well, you see, it all started out as a joke for April Fools' Day. I called it "the new universal language", despite it literally being a cipher of English. What!? A cipher of English being a universal language? How silly! What a funny joke, right? Maybe? Somewhat? Anyways, I then made a SECOND VERSION! DUN DUN DUN! This second version had CLICKY SOUNDS which, spoiler alert, dissapear in the next version of Viesa. Sad, right? RIP CLICKS 2018-2018 NEVER FORGET! I also added WACKY GRAMMAR STUFF and PRONOUNS! WOAH! How crazy! Then I made the next version: VERSION 3.0! This version added CYRILLIC! (you know, that alphabet the Russians use, as well as the Serbs, whose version of the Cyrillic alphabet I stole for Viesa. Hehehe!) And that's the entire history of Viesa, explained in a Zany way! Do you like how I capitalized "Zany" there? Aren't capital letters so cool? They let you YELL AND SCREAM AT THE TOP OF YOUR LUNGS! They add EXCITEMENT! And most of all, they let you capitalize words like This. lowercase letters are also cool. without them, we'd all be yelling and screaming all the time. That would be pretty tiring, wouldn't it? I see two water bottles. One is empty, while the other still has some water in it. The empty one is blue, and the one with the water is pink. I should also mention that the blue one is mine, while the pink one is my sister's. I got that water bottle because I lost my other one at school. But GUESS WHAT? I FOUND IT IN THE LOST AND FOUND! Wow! Now I had two water bottles. How Wacky and Crazy and Zany and Bizzare and all those adjectives that perfectly describe this epic moment! Wow, writing your mind is a great way to increase your LTEs length! Before I was actually THINKING about what I was writing. But now I barely do, and it's greatly improving my LTE! Except the overuse of capital letters might throw the reader off guard a little because of how sparingly I've used them in the past, but oh well. I could fix it, but I don't feel like it. I want to continue writing, but I need to sleep now. Goodnight! Hi, I'm back again. My computer crashed AGAIN, and I was ignorant enough to not save my work, so that means I have to start this part of the text all over again. That's quite unfortunate. But did I mention that my Google Chrome is working again? That's the good news. It's good news because Google Chrome has all my logins, websites, and stuff like that. Hopefully you know what I mean when I say that. Maybe you do, maybe you don't. I don't even know what I mean right now! I'm probably insane right now. Especially since I'm writing this right now, as I have been for about 18 days minus the four month gap... I think. I hope I did that right. As I've said before, I'm bad at math. My sister just read the entirety of what I've written today for some reason. My sister just sang "I want your computer to crash again because I'm evil". She IS evil if she wants my computer to crash. At least I'll have this section saved. In fact, right now I'm pressing Ctrl+S after every sentence! Including this one. And this one. Also this one. I think you get the point now. My sister keeps typing into this LTE without my consent, and I keep having to delete it all. It's pretty annoying. Hey, flashback to when I said that way at the beginning of this text! You know, the part where I talk about the Teen Titans Go episode called "Waffles" where the word "Waffles" is said a hundred-something times. You know what else is said a hundred something times (in this LTE)? The letter J. So far it's been used 115 times in this LTE. That's your Interesting LTE Fact of the Day! Well, not really "daily", but whatever. Here's a story: Once upon a time, people got tired of starting off their stories with "Once upon a time", so they stopped doing that. But one person decided not to stop using "Once upon a time", and used it at the beginning of this story. And that person is ME! The end. Wasn't that a lovely story? You're probably not thinking that. Again, I'm not creative in any way whatsoever. That's why I don't usually write stories and instead write giant walls of text full of meaningless information, like the one and only WhileTrue's Longest Text Ever that you're reading right now. Hopefully nobody died of boredom from reading between "Wow, it has been a while" and the EMT. That's the most boring part of the LTE! 90% of it is just me talking about LTEs themselves. How uninteresting is that? Very uninteresting. Penguins. What are they? I don't know. What am I even writing right now? I haven't a clue. Isn't it weird that I said "haven't a clue" like that? Normally "haven't" isn't used if it's alone as a verb, as in "I haven't my keys". Who says that? Nobody, that's who. And yet "I haven't a clue" is an actual thing I've heard people say. Anyways, AFRICA! That was random, but let's discuss it anyway. Africa is a well-known song by Toto. It's a good song. I can kinda sorta play it on piano? Maybe? I don't know. Another song I can play on the piano is All Star by Smash Mouth. You know, the Shrek song? Anyways, I once made a video called "All Star but it's played on a Sesame Street piano" and it got almost a million views. It's been stuck at 900,000 for what seems like forever now. I'm gonna check to see if it's at a million now. I doubt it, though. Nope, still at 926,000 views. And I doubt it's gonna get any more, to be honest. It had a good run though. My sister is chugging applesauce. She thinks she's epic because of it. I don't know anymore. I seem to keep saying that after everything I type at this point. It's strange. Hello, I have returned after yet another long absence. When was the last time I added to this? I think it was somewhere in July. So yeah, it’s been three months, as it is now October 17, 2019. The end of the decade is approaching fast. I’m a bit excited, because I’ll have significant memories from more than just one decade! My earliest significant memories started in Kindergarden, which was in 2010. This means that I only really remember one decade. But now that an entirely new decade is coming up, I’ll be able to remember another! Part of me feels like I shouldn’t be excited over this, since the boundaries between years is arbitrary, and a decade is 10 years only because we count in base 10, so if we counted in base 12 or something, a decade would be 12 years long. That was kind of a run-on sentence, but I don’t really feel like making this text perfect, anyway. Have you heard of the Library of Babel? libraryofbabel.info is a website containing every possible combination of the lowercase letters a-z, space, comma, and period. The library is divided into hexagonal chambers. Each hex contains four walls. Each wall contains three shelves. Each shelf contains 32 volumes. Each volume contains 410 pages of 3200 characters each. Everything you could ever say or write is on this website. Even this LTE! See for yourself: https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?lte. Okay, that’s only the first bit of it, but every other bit of this LTE is somewhere in the library! In fact, here’s the next bit: https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?lte:1. It’s split up into about 20 different pages. I don’t feel like putting links to all of them here. It also removes punctuation that the library doesn’t use, like the exclamation point, question mark, colon, and so on. But it’s pretty mind-blowing stuff, if you ask me. If you try and browse the library yourself though, you probably won’t find much more than total gibberish. It’s crazy to think that everything we could ever possibly say or write is massively outweighed by meaningless strings of letters and punctuation.

[fimflamfilosophy]

Characters: Tearing Each Other Together

After the world-sweeping success of my previous article (forty notes on Tumblr, wow!) and being driven out of my house due to mold for the second time in two months, I think the time is right to add another essay to the subject of character design and writing. But what’s left to say after having definitely solved the entire process of character writing the last time?

Well, suppose you can figure out the emotional state of one person. That’s well and good, and oddly harder for people than you might imagine. And I think the reason it’s so hard is because in virtually any show you’re not going to be given a character in a vacuum to learn that process from. They have some story, something they’re trying to overcome, and other characters they’re bouncing off of, and the actual process of conflict is more complicated than knowing who your characters are.

Hate, Love, or Indifference, It’s All A Struggle

So what’s the essence of a story? There’s some motive that’s trying to be achieved. A conflict. And I can’t stress this enough. Conflict. Because it’s one thing if you say your main character is a kid who wants to be the best Poke’mon trainer and completely another to have that be a concrete objective with a satisfying story and conclusion. Wanting to be the “best” isn’t actually conflict. It’s a dream. Being forced to travel the known world to acquire eight gaudy pins that probably cost twenty-five cents each to manufacture? That’s conflict.

And not only do you have to travel the world, you do so with a shrill red-head who explicitly hates you because you trashed her bike, and a sex-starved pervert whose life dream is to make Poke’mon mate with each other for a living. And that’s important. Without Misty and Brock, Ash’s journey is a lot less interesting for a lot of reasons. Misty calls Ash out every time he messes up, and aside from being on a watch list, Brock is a helpful older character who tells Ash, and therefore the audience, what’s what.

But let’s back up, because people understand the benefit of Brock and Misty at a basic level, but when you’re starting off, how do you know who those people should be? Well, every show, from sitcom, to comedy to drama, does its best to balance personalities against each other so there’s always some sort of conflict possible between them.

Now, “conflict” doesn’t mean they’re trying to kill each other. It could mean they’re falling in love with each other. Maybe it means they don’t have much in common but have to work together over long hours in isolation. The idea is simply that there’s something to overcome between these people. Misty thinks Ash is stupid - that’s a conflict which is often leveraged to push Ash forward. Brock, however, has a reactive role in the show, only functioning in conflict when a womanizer who grovels at the feet of ladies Ash is already helping anyway.

It’s odd because if Misty were older she would be set up very well as kind of an “opposites” romantic torture device with Brock. They’re even depicted as professional equals, which would have made their levels of expertise and experience more balanced. Had they been closer in apparent age, a “will they won’t they” romance would have fit adequately, with Brock’s constant hitting on other women serving as a major, hopeless, long-lasting roadblock to a serious relationship between them; it would work especially well because Misty is established to have an inferiority complex to her prettier sisters. It also might help explain why Brock hung around so long. But as it was, Brock’s main contribution to the inner dynamic was to act as a mediator, caretaker, and mentor.

But circling back to Brock’s dream of Poke’mon husbandry. Well, on the meta level that’s why he doesn’t leave. Because it’s not a motive, he’s not taking steps towards it, and it’s not going to happen, it’s just a dream. Until it does happen, anyway, and then they wrote him out of the show - but we’ll dig more into this later.

Balancing Imbalance

The best place to look to see good conflict set ups between characters are popular sitcoms. Consider the show “Frasier”: it ran for eleven seasons and revolved mainly around the personal spats of Frasier, his brother Niles, their dad, and the dad’s caretaker, Daphne. Frasier was arrogant, Niles was insecure, Dad was an earnest roughneck, and Daphne was well-meaning. Frasier and Niles were also elitist pricks at times so they couldn’t even always agree where to eat together, much less with their father who was happier having a burger with ketchup.

Every episode had some central motivator; an ice fishing trip, a joint investment, an awards ceremony - but these things were just catalysts to the main conflict, which was almost always something between characters. We’d seen it time and again, that Frasier and his Dad would come to blows over differences in taste. Niles would try to court Daphne while torn by his commitment to his failing marriage, over and over. But the pithy banter and the way they resolved it would always be new, so people watched this show, episode after episode, for over a decade.

And the simple beauty of it all was that each of the characters had something to do with each other. Whether it be filial obligation, lust, sibling rivalry, friction between introversion and extroversion, or taste in food, they always had some source of conflict to make a show out of. Niles and Frasier were both psychiatrists, but from different schools of thought and different working environments, so they even had chances to butt heads academically and professionally. It was rich with writing opportunities and it’s not any wonder it lasted so long.

Another sitcom, “New Girl”, which was about a group of roommates, had a good dynamic set-up between two characters, Schmidt and Nick. Nick is a messy slob and Schmidt’s a type A neat freak, creating a really obvious source of conflict to work with. But then they had a third character, Winston, who they lampshade as the token black guy. 

Now, the joke that Winston is the “black friend” has pretty much no legs, so in the early seasons you see him acting as kind of a third party mediator, or maybe a wild card, and it winds up being funnier when Winston is unhelpful. So as the seasons went on, Winston gradually lost his damn mind. He becomes a cop and meets a woman so that he’d have some character growth and dynamic, but also develops into a man who would burn a building down as a prank. The writers had no idea what they were doing with him and he gradually flew further and further off the handle.

Don’t get me wrong, I really liked Winston as a character. Aside from being funny in the show, watching the writers gradually unglue him from sanity was its own meta comedy above that. I knew they were doing it on accident, but having such a good time with it that it was just going to keep getting worse. In fact a major component of the finale for the whole show is an insane thing Winston does. They wrap the show on the note, “Winston is crazy”. And it all happened because they didn’t figure out what Winston’s conflict was at the start. He didn’t have a source of conflict with anyone, so the man became a living breathing embodiment of conflict in general.

Your Story Ends With the Conflict

Now, the catch is, in any type of fiction, whether a video game, a roleplaying session, or a sitcom, the story ends when the conflict does, because if the conflict is over there’s nothing more to tell! It used to frustrate me to no end back when “My Little Pony” was popular and the other nerds on the internet used to ask, “How many times must Fluttershy learn not to be shy, or that being shy is okay? When will she overcome all that she is and eliminate the core element that creates conflict for her?”

The answer should always be that the character will learn their damn lesson when the show ends or when they’re written off it. If you are sick of seeing a character and don’t want to see them any more, the best thing to do is close out their issues, because once they have no conflicts, they have no story, and there’s no point in doing a show about them. Asking Fluttershy to stop being shy is asking to say goodbye to her, because she's a cartoon and her job is to entertain kids by being neurotic and yellow.

People think they’re so smart when they say they’d solve all a character’s problems if it were them. In the finale to the first season of Poke’mon, for example, Ash decides to gamble his whole championship run on Charizard, who’s a self-absorbed bitch of a creature that ultimately throws the match and leaves it an open question whether Ash might have won if he’d left the team primadonna sitting on the bench.

Some viewers see that and complain it’s the dumbest possible thing Ash could have done, but it’s probably one of the single most brilliant things the Poke’mon writers did in the grand scheme, because think about where it left us. Ash didn’t achieve his goal of proving he’s “the best”, but it feels like a fluke and if he got another shot, he might make it all the way. This gave the show a gateway to more episodes with Ash still having something to prove and a dumb mistake indicating he still had a lot to learn. Because he didn’t win, his story hadn’t ended.

In some cases shows can end characters just by addressing some dream goal they’ve been expressing since the first season. In the case of Brock, they intentionally removed him from the show by introducing him to some girl who was willing to work with Brock in the animal husbandry business. He’d been traveling all this time, his dream opportunity fell into his lap, and he was gone. What reason would he have to refuse, and why would anyone stop him? And of course, Brock’s dream job was incompatible with the central plot elements of the rest of the show, so that was it!

The Format Informs the Conflict

If you want to write something but you aren’t sure when it’s going to end, you need a concrete, long-term conflict that’s not just going to go away. For example, in “Scooby Doo and the Thirteen Ghosts”, there were thirteen ghosts. By design, that show should have ended after Scooby Doo found all thirteen ghosts. It actually ended earlier than that because it was cancelled, but you get the idea. When you have a finite goal, your run time is going to be finite as well.

At least in theory. In “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure” they establish at the beginning of one season that everyone’s magic powers were based on the Tarot. Now, I don’t know the Tarot off hand, but as the show went on I knew that sooner or later they’d run out of Tarot cards, and in my mind I assumed the season would be over when the Tarot ended. But then I got a good chuckle when a guy showed up and his powers were based on a totally different theme, because I knew the writer had realized he’d stumbled into something good and wasn’t ready to end it. He invented a cheap excuse to keep going! And I think if “Scooby Doo and the Thirteen Ghosts” had been successful they’d have managed to unleash a whole lot more than thirteen ghosts because Hannah Barbera was not exactly a studio with a lot of shame.

Character conflicts like those in sitcoms are a great way to have conflict perpetually, because people don’t really change that much and there’s no reason why most of the fundamental friction shouldn’t be there indefinitely. But of course, character-driven conflict is going to be secondary in an event-driven show. “Jojo” actually does have a lot of character conflict, but the plot is primarily about the battles and the journey - if all the fighting ended Jojo’s characters probably couldn’t carry a sitcom, at least not without some serious hard work, a little genius, and a touch of elbow grease.

For event-driven conflict, you’ll want to establish a target - a moving target if you don't know when the story ends, and that can be pretty difficult. Old action shows and comics used to do it by having a rotating cast of villains, so that after one was defeated another would show up tomorrow, and it was assumed these guys regularly broke out of prison, or they escaped in rocket pods, or whatever, and they’d be back later with a new goofy scheme. In these cases you tend to find reactive heroes; they patrol the streets until a lunatic in tights and a garden-themed hat shows up and transforms everyone into people-shaped topiaries somehow.

For active heroes, you need to establish something that requires a lot of structure, like Ash’s journey to win the Poke’mon League. In every country he visits, they all have this asinine rule that you have to go to eight unique locations and kick the ass of someone who disadvantages themselves with an easily-countered mono team that all have the same exact weakness. You can’t be accepted into the League if you haven’t proven you own a water Poke’mon to utterly flatten the fire gym! Let’s be real, this nonsense is probably designed intentionally as a money gate - most people run out of cash before they qualify. Either way, it ends when Ash wins the league, and he lost the league so the show could keep going.

For roleplaying games, the same rules apply. With your players, you’re either going to establish a reactive goal - an adventuring guild hires a bunch of colorful salarymen with silly accents to go to a dungeon as part of their nine to five job - or you need players to set an active goal for themselves and keep the realization of that goal beyond their reach until you’re ready to end the game.

The Active Hero Acts

In my younger years, I learned to roleplay in almost exclusively player-driven games where we were expected to come up with our own goals and pursue them ourselves, but I’ve discovered that is stunningly rare in most roleplaying circles. Your typical D&D player likes to play the salaryman with a funny accent who doesn’t have to worry about the venturous part of adventure. His boss told him to go to the Cave of Everlasting Wonders and Torturous Screams, recover the Sword of Bad Portent, and then hand it over to the department of magic items where they’ll file the paperwork to get it delivered to the patron that wanted the sword for some reason. No need to have your own motives.

But what if you want to play a crime fighter who actually, you know, busts up all the crime? Clearly you can’t just wait for crime to happen passively - you’ve got to go after people. Act instead of being reactive. Purse snatchers are small time and in a more grounded setting the guys you’ll catch by being passive are just grunts being hired out by someone - usually kids in a lot of cases. You have to seek out the bosses.

Making an active character to fit into any setting can be challenging, and I’ve seen quite a few pitfalls. I think one of the funniest motives is always “the guy who wants to go home” due to its obvious failure condition. A lot of stories are about everymen who just want to get out of trouble, but those stories end when they get out of trouble! In many books, movies, shows, or roleplaying games, you’re almost always going to find opportunities to send that guy home, and you’ll have to either conveniently ignore it, switch motives and decide not to go home, or end the whole story with going home. These characters only work where the story is happening to them and it's all out of their control.

I’ve also seen my share of the “quirky genius inventor/scientist”. When someone designs a character mistaking a dream for a motive. They dream of building a better mouse trap, you see. That’s their inner conflict. And while this is a real world conflict, it’s difficult to make it a good story because actual science and invention involves a lengthy quantity of controlled experiments. You breed hundreds of fruit flies, expose them to nicotine, and try to isolate the gene that causes nicotine resistance. It can be fascinating work at its level but sometimes the most exciting part of your day is when you give yourself a steam burn cooking the fly food. The “quirky scientist” in fiction is usually more of a mentor, and if he insists on staying in his lab doing his work then he’s not even a main character - he’s a guy who explains fruit flies to the audience and then is never heard from again. Other times he’s the asshole who invented the story’s whole problem.

I once played in a game with “the quirky scientist who wants to go home”, and man was that a frustrating ride. The game itself was about occult magic and demons, and for most of the game the scientist was experimenting with teleportation magic to go home and was focused on that above the goal of finding and eradicating demons (the game’s premise). And when he finally met a boss demon that could teleport him home to his lab, he went! We wound up retiring a character who, to be honest, was barely even interested in the main subject of the story. Had he been in a film or a show, they’d have cut the character after the first draft because he served no purpose and wasted screen time.

So how do you make sure your character has a working, proactive goal, in a nutshell? Establish a goal that can be achieved by the character within the framework of your story through action by leaving his house (or after burning his house down so he can’t go home), and then make sure the goal is big enough that it will take many broad steps to get there - those steps need to be concrete and visible, not things that would happen off-screen. Most importantly, tie that goal into the main premise of the story, so that reaching the end of the story generally may achieve what the character wants.

If You Aren’t Trying, It’s Not A Trial

Okay, I understand that last bit probably requires more unpacking. But think of it this way. There’s a writing structure referred to as the “Hero’s Journey”. Basically it goes like this: the hero is forced into adventure, he meets friends and goes through trials, he hits his lowest point, he is reborn into a better man, he ends the conflict, story over.

What I’m talking about specifically right now are the trials. The “wacky inventor” is usually presumed to do all his research off screen because most media likes to focus on the results of the invention and the conflict. But if you were to focus on the trials of a scientist, it’d actually be about procuring research grants and potentially materials. You wouldn’t watch a show about a man who checks gene A-235 for nicotine resistance in flies, then goes on to A-236, then A-237.

If I were to write a story about a researcher, here’s one thing I might do: the researcher fails to find what he’s looking for in gene A-235, and when he goes to seek a grant to look at A-236, he finds one of his colleagues has convinced the university that the protagonist’s research is a dead end. Hearing this, the researcher realizes he’s about to lose his lab, so he writes a bit of a lie into his report on A-235. He says it may prevent cancer.

Now, the protagonist is, deep down, a good man. He thinks this will generate some buzz at the university and get him more funding, but he��ll do a follow-up and show the data doesn’t hold up. After that he’ll ask for money for A-236 and everything goes back to normal. But disaster strikes. His article, which was only supposed to show up in an obscure research journal, gets picked up by a major news network and winds up being spread all over. Suddenly he’s “the man who cured cancer”.

And as he’s trying to figure out how to navigate the issue, another researcher comes out and says that under peer review, he was able to replicate the results. He too shows that A-235 cures cancer! Now the hero isn’t sure. He becomes a celebrity and simply lies about his research because he has no real data, but try desperately as he might, in private he just can’t get the results the peer review insisted were there.

He struggles and struggles, coming to blows with his colleague who’s scrutinizing his research notes. Throw in a love interest who’s impressed with what this guy did, and actually I think I’ve just described the plot of some movie I saw a long time ago about faking cold fusion. I think Albert Einstein was a supporting character in it. In my version the twist would be the peer reviewer was also trying to get a grant by lying. Point is, the central conflict of the film certainly isn’t the scientific process, it’s all the crazy crap that happened on the way from point A to point B.

The story is in the trials. If nothing changes, if the character doesn’t have to change their way of life or go through anything special, it’s either not a story or it’s not your typical story. There are plenty of experimental films or well-regarded books that can make a certain banality become interesting. Stories that explain the simple struggles of day to day living for people on hard times. But the trials, the palpable challenges, that’s really the meat of it all. When you think of what your character should be doing throughout the story, he should be going through these efforts, these steps, these trials, all in the name of whatever his broader goal is.

Where You Start Affects Where You End

It also matters quite a lot when and where characters are introduced. A lot of tales follow some basic notes, and one of the more common elements is “crossing the threshold”, which prevents your characters from going back to their life before the adventure. It’s used because it compels the characters forward, as they have no other direction they can go. It can be anything: the character’s home town is destroyed, the character commits a crime, he accepts a contract, his mother dies - so long as it prevents him from going back. It’s especially useful in roleplaying games where you really need everyone to be driving forward.

In one such roleplaying game, I got in a spat with the guy who wanted to run the game because I was trying to make a leader character, but the game master wanted to base his game around a movie he’d seen with a single main character. He’d elected another player to be that main character, and explained to me he’d be starting the game after that character had already crossed the threshold and had begun his journey. This meant that everyone else were supporting cast and could go back to their normal lives at any time, because they were coming willingly from where they were and not really facing any drastic changes to their personal status quo.

I eventually resolved not to play in that game at all, because none of the character dynamics I wanted were going to work. It was supposed to be a “wannabe” superhero game, with the premise that everyone wanted to be heroes, except one player had already started the journey and it turned out another had already reached the end of that arc and was going to play a character that had been a hero going on years before the story began. There was no plan to really reconcile the narrative clashes.

If that game were to work as it was, without me being present, then the person playing the pre-established hero would have needed to take the mentor role. The other players besides the main character would have needed to be comfortable in auxiliary roles, and the group would have to play as though they were part-way into the story. Still learning to be a team but well past the initial stages of a plot, and they’d all need to think up reasons to be in this group individually on their own, because the threshold had already been crossed and they didn’t cross it together.

The friend running the game was actually dismissive of my advice here, arguing that I was overcomplicating everything with a meta analysis of narrative and structure when all we need is a basic drive to play, and I don’t think he realized he’d set himself up with a much more complicated game and less cohesive premise by going about things as he had.

The already established hero couldn’t be the mentor because a mentor character had already been created as an NPC. The auxiliary players weren’t really informed at the outset they’d be auxiliaries - especially not me who’d wanted to play the team leader. The player who’d been designated as the central protagonist didn’t want to lead or be the central protagonist. It could have worked, but it would have taken a lot more planning and many more concessions than a typical game.

In a more recent game, I’ve got another bit of an issue with the start misleading the general goals of the players. It’s a sci-fi game, and first, one player is doing “the quirky inventor scientist”; his current stated dream is vaguely to create transhumanist technology. He also wants to play the leader, so he established himself as the most important man nobody has ever heard of. He has spies in every major institution in the known galaxy and is a genius beyond comparison. He’s currently based in a rusting pirate ship in the middle of the space boonies doing nothing with his life save being the most important man.

Meanwhile, I set up a disgraced military officer with a revenge quest against his own nation. But the pirate crew my character joined turned out to not believe in structure nor leadership and they killed their last commander to have a system of “democracy”. My structure-minded character has tried to take the lead and drive us forward, but he runs into general deconstructive resistance and the “quirky scientist” wants to be the leader, but hasn’t yet expressed self-motivated goals.

It’s not exactly my most harmonious game and there’s quite a lot going wrong here, but here’s how it could have worked: first, establishing that the crew of the pirates respects no leadership places the entire crew in the precarious position of being “chickenshit” at the outset. That kind of incohesiveness is why a band of rogues gets easily defeated; it’s not the behavior of scrappy men of action, but hopeless men of inaction. A corrupted “democracy” collectivises failure while awarding success to whoever actually has the most power in the group structure - it protects the weak leaders from responsibility and disincentivizes good work by allowing those same men to reap rewards while offloading the burdens to those lower on the ladder. In essence, “If things are screwed up, blame the democracy. If things are good, I did it.”

What should have happened was the “quirky scientist” should have been in charge to start with, because otherwise he has no reason to be on board the ship. He’s the most powerful man in the galaxy, after all. If it were because he was financing the pirates to go on raiding and salvage missions relevant to his research, then it would make sense. He’d have a purpose and a position of leadership just as the player wanted. It would also establish the pirates have some command structure and a level of respect for it that allows them to function.

And the power struggle between the disgraced officer and the scientist? Perfectly reasonable character conflict that would drive actual, meaningful roleplaying and story. The scientist may bankroll the operation but the officer is the tactical talent and the two pull in opposite directions, as power-hungry men often do.

However, the opportunity to start with a sensible and meaningful social dynamic has passed, and on top of that the “quirky scientist” keeps his galaxy-wide power a secret, so it’s all kind of messy and “badly written” in the sense that most audiences would be generally rooting for the crew to fail, and they’d find the grand reveal of the scientist’s galactic power to be frustrating and unrewarding because it’s more of a plot hole than anything. So close on so many counts and yet so very far, and the opportunity to pull it together eventually is present but a more challenging and uphill battle than getting it right at the outset.

In The End, Did We Even Learn Anything?

Creating a character is easy, in my opinion. Creating a working story with a group of self-driven characters can be a lot harder. This is especially true of roleplaying games or of cooperation with multiple writers, where you need to be on the same general page with a committee. It can help a lot to establish the exact conflicts at the beginning, but as can be seen with Winston from “New Girl” or the later seasons of “My Little Pony”, what you have can morph beyond your control as things go on.

Sometimes you never had control in the first place. Sometimes you lose control because you conclude the original conflict of your story and struggle to find a new one - the brand is too successful to let go. Maybe an executive comes in and injects an idea that throws the entire balance of everything totally out of whack and now nothing works. Sometimes your friend thinks story structure is overrated. It’s a difficult juggling act.

So at the end of this essay did we even learn anything? It depends a lot on what you’re trying to do and what you wanted to learn. If you’re the more typical Dungeons and Dragons group, you don’t need to think much about this. Just make your characters and passively react to activities handed out by Dungeons, Dungeons & Co - your conflict is event-driven. Are you writing a sitcom? Well, balance a tangled web of conflicting character habits and write the ensuing disaster. Want to make a complex film about a group of highly motivated, proactive people with sophisticated individual goals that ultimately converge while still respecting their rich, conflicting, inner politics, and do all that writing as part of a team? Well, good goddamn luck, but with the right start and enough care you can make it happen.

[agent-cupcake]

re: Felix Fraldarius

While working on a request, I was distracted (imagine that!) with a preoccupation about Felix as a character rather than a piece in the fairly limited set of headcanons I was writing for him. Then I saw someone make a comment about how Felix is, and I know this is a revolutionary hot-take, ‘an edgy tsundere’ and a one-note character. Seeing that criticism of a fictional character I have no reason to defend got my fingers itching for some action, but I’m not about to get in internet arguments or attempt to change people’s minds. Whatever. Funny thing is that they’re right but I still don’t see that as the scathing criticism they intended... and here’s why!

From the second you meet him, being an edgy tsundere is basically one of Felix’s most instantly identifiable traits. He’s got dark hair and a grumpy face, he likes fighting, and he’s a tsundere. The first two points even feed into his tsundere personality! It’s relevant to this specifically because tsundere boys have very rigid structures - a structure Felix follows nearly point by point. This is illustrated especially by the way the support conversations are presented with the C B A (and S) ranks, a lettered label for his shift from cold to warm. And yes, there IS an argument to be made about how following oversaturated tropes so doggedly ultimately cheapens a character, and I think that’s a valid critique. Using a well known and beloved trope to make a character likable is the old stand-by for dating sims everywhere because they know there is always a market for it no matter how poorly handled it is. I think it’s a fair critique for Felix, too, at least to some degree. BUT this gets into the trope versus cliche argument. As I see it, a cliche is born from poor handling of a trope. A trope is something widely known that can be used as shorthand to get across a general understanding of something before building upon it creatively, whereas the use of a cliche IS the entirety of the idea which is then regurgitated without so much as an attempt at adding anything new. This elevation basically comes down to writing. Three Houses is full of this trope-driven language, especially noticeable in Dimitri, Sylvain, and Felix and the way their tropes are used as a base to create solid and interesting characters. I’ll note that there are other places in the game where it’s not as successful, but that’s a separate discussion that has more to do with some core issues I have with the game’s story/supports. But, yeah, Felix is indeed an edgy tsundere. And the game revels in it. When elevating a trope you can go a few different ways, but one of the styles that’s coming back into popularity is that of using tropes to their very fullest potential by making no attempt to subvert expectations. Following this direction, the writer takes everything that a trope embodies - the good, the bad, and the ugly - and molds an interesting character from it by teasing out the core ideas associated with the trope, creating some new out of the very best of what that trope can offer. After the era of an obsession of subverting tropes, it makes sense that things are swinging back around to ‘basics’.  

SO, internet commenter, Felix is an edgy tsundere. He’s angsty and has a tortured past and lots of baggage. He’s mean to the point that makes him nearly unlikable at times. He makes a big deal about his lack of interest in people and denies the very idea of affection or allowing people to see past his prickly exterior. And holy hell is he angry, a very attractive bundle of ice, pain, and rage. Felix is soft, too. He’s afraid of letting others get close and clumsy with the very idea of affection in any capacity. When he does soften up, it’s awkward because he has no idea how to express himself in that way. He’s lost, at multiple points Felix recognizes that his goals and abilities will be rendered null eventually, that there will come a time that the only things he values about himself will become useless. Felix’s endings show him orienting himself around the people he loves for direction and strength, a direct opposition to how he starts the game as a ‘lone wolf’. What I’m trying to say is that the best part of Felix isn’t the otome aspect of being a tsundere, but how the tsundere traits impacted and elevated the rest of his character.  

[tlbodine]

Why Isn’t “Mass Shooter” a Modern Horror Monster?

Horror reflects the anxieties of the culture that produces it. In the 1950s, we got monster movies about radiation-mutated creatures and invaders from beyond the stars, mirroring our Cold War Science fears. 

In the 1970s, as “Women’s Liberation” and birth control went mainstream, we see an influx of horrors settled on childbirth and children and family dysfunction. 

And as the 70s bled into the 80s, while real-world serial killers were leaving behind trails of victims, the masked psycho was dominating the field with countless slashers. 

But now -- throughout the 2010s -- mass shootings loom large our our collective American consciousness. Hardly a week goes by without hearing of one somewhere, and they inspire fear and terror. Yet we haven’t seen them show up to dominate horror media in the way serial killers do -- what’s up with that? 

Horror-media discussion about gun violence under the cut! 

Before we get started, a caveat: There is media about school shootings. It’s just not usually horror. Most, as you can see from IMDB, is family drama: https://www.imdb.com/list/ls070532039/

And none of them are really particularly mainstream, not in the way we associate with slasher films. 

So what’s the difference? Why is a killer with an axe more compelling as a film monster than a killer with a gun? 

Some hypotheses: 

Primacy: Because mass shootings are frequently in the news/public discussion, it’s always “too soon” - the real-life horror is too horrifying for entertainment. Sounds good on paper, but why isn’t that true for slashers? Those movies were popular when serial killers were at their most active. 

Politics: Perhaps political motives are influencing the market. Since gun control is a contentious topic, maybe some powers are motivated toward censorship. But wouldn’t that also censor the family drama type movies? Why would it focus on horror especially? 

Logistics: It’s just really hard to make a good horror movie about a mass shooting. Guns kill people pretty quickly and indiscriminately, so you lose the mounting suspense and intimacy of a killer with a knife and other similar horror/slasher conventions. 

This last point, I think, bears some further consideration. The more I think on it, the more it seems that the things that make gun violence especially horrifying in real life are also things that make it very hard to put in a horror story: 

Mass shootings happen, obviously, in mass. Most horror formulas require characters to be isolated and picked off one by one. 

Guns kill people in ways that are impersonal and swift. If you’re killing a stadium of people with an automatic weapon, it’ll take just a few minutes. You can’t stretch that out into a long, lingering torture sequence or whatever. 

Gun violence is indiscriminate. Wherever a crowd gathers, a shooter can start killing people. There’s no space for, say, the “horror rules” re: jock, slut, virgin, etc. because morality doesn’t play into it. 

A killer methodically making his way through a sorority house, killing its members one by one lends itself more naturally to suspenseful storytelling than a gunman opening fire on a crowd. A killer leaving clues and taunting detectives lends its own narrative structure. 

In that regard, it’s pretty obvious: We cannot make a slasher-style film or a torture-porn film about a gunman. It just won’t work. 

But perhaps we’re looking at it all wrong. What if we viewed the mass shooter not as a serial killer, but as a force of nature? The disaster movie genre has ample cross-over with horror, and the general formula would work well for a mass shooter: 

Introduction to a wide cast of characters as they maneuver into a vulnerable position

The disaster hits, and we move between individuals affected by the calamity, watching their initial reactions 

In the ensuing chaos, characters attempt to escape further danger

The danger passed (for now?) some characters manage to survive, now irrevocably changed

Whether the disaster in question is an earthquake, a sharknado, or a school shooting, that formula should work. The key to success lies in the pacing and the large cast, allowing you to stretch out a relatively brief event into a detailed and tense narrative. 

So why haven’t we seen that? Outside of, like, one made-for-TV movie I recall watching in the 90s, this presumably straightforward premise hasn’t gained much traction. 

The Making of Monsters: Signs and Signifiers 

Perhaps the real reason we haven’t seen a lot of horror stories about mass shootings is because there is already so much mythology and symbolism tied to these sorts of narratives, and that symbolism is at odds with the creation of movie monsters. 

Guns carry a tremendous amount of cultural significance and baggage, at least in the United States. It’s why they’re so politically contentious. And when something is already heavily laden with symbolic meaning, it’s hard to turn that symbolism into something else in a way that will stick. 

Point #1: Guns are a great equalizer. Unlike a knife or sword, skill doesn’t matter all that much when it comes to killing somebody with a gun. You don’t have to be strong or fast or have a ton of training. You just have to point it and pull the trigger -- if you do that enough times, and at a big enough target, you’ll probably hit something. This means that anyone can kill someone with a gun: a skinny nerd, a young child, a petite woman. Guns are the thing that give you, the underdog, a way to compete against them, the big strong enemy. 

This leads to Point #2: Good Guys With Guns(tm). As absolutely anyone who has been on the internet for five minutes after Any Sort Of Bad Event will tell you, Bad Things can be stopped by Good Guys With Guns(tm). And while you can debate the merits of armed civilians protecting a group from harm against an active shooter, it’s impossible to deny that, historically, good guys have been armed. Police, military, armed militias, frontiersmen, etc. carry weapons. Which means that “guy with a gun” does not immediately translate, visually or thematically, as “threat” in the same way as wielding a butcher knife in a non-culinary context. A guy with a gun could, at a glance, be a good guy. A guy with a big knife is obviously a villain. Similarly, the Good Guys With Guns(tm) bleeds over into the horror genre. What would the zombie apocalypse be without headshots? How many horror franchises could have been cut short if someone had just shot the killer? 

Finally, Point #3: Guns in media have special powers. Gun mythology in film and television is well-developed, with its own set of tropes and expectations. In movies, pointing a gun at someone will automatically make that person comply with whatever you ask them to do -- we even have vernacular about this, “nobody put a gun to your head” -- as if the gun were somehow more powerful than a simple threat and could in fact control behavior. Often, people who are shot in television politely fall over and die quietly; it’s a civilized end, without all of the screaming and thrashing (never mind where they’re shot or what that would would do in real life). And there are so many types of gun. We have a whole video game genre dedicated to it -- collecting guns, learning their various abilities, applying them situationally to achieve various goals. With so many established tropes, writing anything with new tropes and rules runs the risk of generating confusion, disbelief and even hostility in an audience. 

So, with all of that in mind, it starts to become clear: 

Writing a horror story about gun violence is difficult because guns carry so much mythic significance, and it’s impossible to write about them metaphorically while keeping it clear what that metaphor is. 

If I write a story about an atomic-powered lizard who destroys a Japanese town with radiation, it’s easy enough to see that it’s a metaphor for nuclear warfare. But there is no similarly straightforward metaphor for gun violence readily apparent. 

But it’s tougher even than that -- because guns themselves aren’t the only thing to have been mythologized. 

The Myth of the Lone Gunman 

Remember: Guns are the great equalizer. 

This knowledge sits in the foundation of storytelling, not just in the fiction we make up but in the way we build narratives around mass shootings in the real world. There are certain tacit assumptions we make about gunmen that may or may not be accurate.

We have a certain narrative framework in place to explain school shootings, for example: The awkward, isolated young man who is bullied until he finally snaps and goes on a killing rampage. 

Never mind that this narrative is not wholly supported by facts. It may be true in some cases, but certainly not all. And yet, go back up to that list of mass shooter movies on IMDB and look again at what the majority of them have in common. 

This is problematic because, from a mythic perspective, people who are bullied and then stand up to their oppressors are heroes. 

In Carrie, when Carrie White destroys the school after being humiliated on prom night, we’re on her side. It feels good to watch her kill all those people who were awful to her. It feels just and righteous and imminently satisfying. 

When Spartacus leads a slave revolt, we cheer. When Daenerys Targaryen kills all the masters and uses their heads as mile-markers, we feel triumphant. When Arthur Fleck shoots the smug talk-show host on live television, we think, Well, he had it coming. 

Oh, sure. We pay lip service to being horrified. And these dark heroes might die at the end, receiving some karmic retribution for the price of their revenge. But can you say, truthfully, that you have ever once watched a story about an underdog killing his bullies and felt sorriest for the bullies? 

So: This is the problem with our cultural narrative about the school shooter. Purposely or not, it puts the shooter in the role of hero. 

And not only is that irresponsible, it’s just downright inaccurate. 

When Stephen Paddock opened fire on a concert and killed 58 people, he was not firing back at his oppressors. 

When Omar Mateen shot up a night club in Florida, he wasn’t getting revenge against his bullies. 

When Adam Lanza slaughtered 26 people at an elementary school -- 20 of them young children -- he obviously was not giving his victims what they deserved. 

In the real world, mass shooters might be motivated by political ideology and a desire to promote fear -- ie, terrorism. They might be unhappy with some aspect of their lives and decide to “punch down” at a vulnerable group in the worst possible way. They might be looking to become the heroes of certain media narratives, to secure some kind of fame or notoriety. They might want to kill themselves in a way that hurts a lot of other people at the same time. There are lots of reasons why people might commit mass murder. 

But the important thing is that the victims are, overwhelmingly, not bullies and oppressors. They are people. Just innocent people in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because mass shootings aren’t really about personal vendettas; they’re about mowing down a bunch of strangers in a few minutes at an impersonal long range. 

So here’s my final thought on the topic: We SHOULD tell horror stories about mass shootings. 

It’s a topic that’s timely, and it’s a scenario that’s frightening. There’s no reason not to tell these stories. But to make it work -- on a logistic and socially responsible basis -- we need to change our treatment. 

Going back to the “disaster movie” idea: It’s time to treat mass shooters in fiction as forces of nature, as oblivious and blindly destructive as a hurricane. It’s time to center the focus on the victims. Never mind the killer and what led him to this moment. Let’s take a minute to think about the people caught in that situation -- the people who fear for their lives, who try to help one another, who fight or flee or hide once the first shot is fired. Let’s write about the moments of humanity shared by two strangers crouched behind something while shots fire all around them. Let’s write about the horror of having your perfectly normal, mundane day suddenly and irrevocably shattered by a stranger with a gun. 

There is horror there, real horror, that can be mined and cultivated and turned to art. And it seems to me that embracing that, and shifting the cultural narrative away from valorizing the lone gunman, would be good for art and society. 

Are you ready to tell that story? 

I am. 

[douchebagbrainwaves]

THEY DON'T GET THAT THERE ARE SO MANY DEALS

We say that the situation degenerates into a popularity contest. I don't think this is true. It's not only economic statistics that ignore the value of safe jobs.1 Better to make a living.2 Grownups, like some kind of primitive, multi-celled sea creature, where you work regular hours at one job to make money, or morph it into any number of random factors could sink you before you can finish.3 If you'd proposed at the time.4 Startups live on speed and momentum. So why don't they do something about it? Translated into more straightforward language, this means: We're not investing in you, but they seem positively eager to syndicate. That's why the Internet won. Nerds still in school should not hold their breath. Surely it was their duty to their limited partners simply to invest in a bunch of eleven-year-old kid, I didn't have much more experience of the world.

It wouldn't have been a natural fit for, say, corporate law, or medicine. Bootstrapping sounds great in principle, but this is not so disinterested as we might think. The other connection between startups and technology is that startups create new ways of doing things are, in the abstract that people get tortured in poorer countries. College was regarded as job training where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing they could do could make them popular. Together these three phases produce an S-curve. With some degrees, like MDs and PhDs, you may end up with a bunch of guys who get together to go hunting. One reason it was profitable to carve up 1980s companies and sell them for parts was that they hadn't formally acknowledged their implicit debt to employees who had done good work and expected to be rewarded with high-paying executive jobs when their time came. If you take a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so many people do, you have to make decisions about things they don't understand? Except the lions turned out not to have any teeth, and the business of putting galleries online barely qualified as carrion. That is wildly oversimplified, of course, but probably.

That's what leads people to try to do a mysterious, undifferentiated thing we called business. They're happy to invest small amounts—sometimes as little as $2000 per month. Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires. A barbershop isn't designed to grow fast, I mean it in two senses. And since the lawyer could never admit, in front of it. Gradually it dawned on us that instead of trying to answer the first question.5 Teenage kids are not inherently unhappy monsters. For example, in my opinion, a crock. The problem is, the only investors who can do it right are the ones who obligingly flew Altavista into a hillside just as Google was getting started. It's easy to start to depend on it happening. Being smart doesn't make you an outcast in elementary school.

And I lost more than books. You must resist this. Synchronicity and locality are tied together. In theory these details are minor ones; by definition all the important points are supposed to be learning. Nor is it necessary for a startup to be cheap. For one thing, it seems as if society just has to make a conscious effort to find ideas everyone else has overlooked.6 If you're working on something or b be teleported to Rome and spend the next hour wandering about, was there any sort of work I'd prefer? This is clearest in the case of names. The three main causes of the Civil War were.

So innovation happens at hacker speeds instead of big company speeds. Whether they like it or not, an effort to be more conservative for their kids than they would if they got in at the very beginning.7 In industrialized countries the same thing: obedience. Paradoxically, fundraising is this type of distraction, so try to minimize that too. Even as recently as a few decades ago there was a good idea. Currently the way VCs seem to operate is to invest in those that at least have a chance of going public.8 Better to make a conscious effort to keep your expenses low; but above all, it means you don't need a lot of Internet startups are, though they may not have had this as an explicit goal. The average teenage kid has a pretty much infinite capacity for talking to their friends. The hardest part is realizing that you can. Fortunately, I can fix the biggest danger right here.9 Growth will slow, partly due to internal limits and partly because they tend to do it is to bait the hook with prestige.10 Arguably it's an interesting failed experiment.

Notes

There's a sort of dress rehearsal for the government.

Think it's too obvious to your brain that you're paying yourselves high salaries. That's probably true of nationality and religion too.

More generally, it causes a fundamental economic shift away from taking a difficult class lest they get more votes, as on a seed investment of 650k. Geoff Ralston reports that one of the Industrial Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 1973, p. If you have to track ratios by time of unprecedented federal power, in the US in 2002 was 35,560. Currently we do the right to buy corporate bonds to market faster; the crowds of shoppers drifting through this huge mall reminded George Romero of zombies.

On the other students, heirs, professors, politicians, and try to disguise it with the administration. We try to give him 95% of the most abstract ideas, but I don't like to fight.

The reason the young side. Part of the edge? 8%, Linux 11. It is the fact by someone who doesn't understand what you're doing.

Though we're happy to provide this service, this thought experiment: If you want to invest in these funds have no trouble getting hired by these companies unless your last round just happened, the company is Weebly, which draw more and angrier counterarguments.

That's why there's a special recipient of favour, being a scientist is equivalent to putting a sign saying this is to give up, and this destroyed all traces. But you're not even allowed to ask about what other people.

Actually he's no better or worse than Japanese car companies have never been the plague of 1347; the Depository Institutions Act of 1982, which make investments rather than giving grants.

As far as such things can be huge. False positives are not mutually exclusive. Com of their upbringing in their hearts that if VCs are suits at heart, the users' need has to give you a couple of hackers with no valuation cap. Applying for a startup you have to spend all your time on a weekend and sit alone and think.

I'd encourage anyone starting a startup is taking the Facebook/Twitter route and building something for free. A round, that suits took over during a critical period. They act as if having good intentions were enough to absorb that. But I know of no counterexamples, though, because the broader your holdings, the world wars to say about these: I once explained this to realize that species weren't, because it was putting local grocery stores out of a type II startups, but one way, they'd have taken one of the incompetence of newspapers is that if you were able to grow as big as a source of them.

[papas-con-aceite-y-mucha-sal]

What would be the best way to write anti war in a modern devilman?

Honestly Idon’t think it’s necessary to change much apart from adapting it to our days technologywise. Which is why I found, at first (later I learnt this just had stopped being the main point, though I still don’t think that ‘excuses’ certain points), many of the changes of Crybaby jarring ina ‘what was the point of doing this?’ way. I remember an ask in the past where I replied I wasn’t expecting manychanges for this same reason. All of those original characters having so muchscreentime, and getting written from scratch arcs, is something that took me bysurprise.

Let’s see. Forthe original Devilman manga we have (at least) three main points trying to show us thistheme that we have to take into account:

Humans and demons, blurring the line of which one wasactually the monster, acting as each other. Lots of examples. Kaim showing feelings just like a human would, sacrificinghimself for Sirene’s chance at victory; humans accusing other humans of beingdemons just for the sake of slaughter, etc. Extended later in Lady afterdirectly stating them as the basic same thing.

A normalboy gets spurred into battle and sees all of his morals getting trampled little by little, until a point where he renounces to hisinitial goals of protecting humankind and engages into a pointless battle filled by anger,getting humans killed by inaction in one hand and all of his devilmen team inthe another. Extended in Devilman Lady once we get to see them all trapped inHell, and in Shin Devilman, which shows said boy killing humansway before everything tumbled down.

A higher being confrontes his own father to save livingbeings of getting killed for not being worthy, just to end up killing other living beings he deemed unworthy after seeingthem polluting the planet he fought for, realizing his hipocrisy and regrettingeverything when it’s too late.

DespiteCrybaby adding a lot of content from Devilman Lady, the novels and OVAs, or Saga(even the liveaction!) the first point is barely touched. Demons are seen justas ‘those monsters’ up until the end (Sirene’s battle conclusion isnever touched again; and no, Satan is not a demon but an angel so it hardlycounts; it would hardly count anyway even if he were due to how he gotportrayed). Humans acting barbaric is something that happens yet this is notenough deepened. Even the scene with people experimenting on devilmen (andMikiko) gets a 30s cameo at most. Hell, I don’t even remember if the antidemon specialcorp created by the gobernment (which is explicitly stated by Akira as thebeginning of a witch hunt just like the one in the XVI century) existed. That’show few emphasis that part got. And God’s attitude getting changed doesn’treally help. 

The second point is hardly there. Akira in the adaptation nevergives up on humankind (Ep10: “Humans won’t lose to demons. I swear I’m going to destroy you all!”).The few flaws he got in the adaptation (such as what happened in Ep5) are never brought up.

Ryo/Satan is completely villanized on here (I feel people havealready talked too much about him so I’ll just link to this instead: just look for the Ryo/Satan posts).He never ever realizes he made a mistake when it comes to humans. And his onlychange is right at the end because MUH FEELINGS.

All of thiscreates a story of “Good VS Bad” typical of shonen manga instead of a story of “bunchof idiots who are fighting each other instead of sitting down and talkingthings out before absolutely everything is lost and no single one of them wins”.

Do you see why this doesn’t work?

I’ll run out of characters if I dwelve much more into thisso I’ll link to this instead. Ican elaborate if you wish, however. Just send me another ask then.

Apart fromthis I’ve said (strange changes are strange) I feel Yuasa/Okouchi as ateam didn’t take enough advantage of what the adittion of moderndays could mean. Yes, the scene with Miki blogging in Ep9 is touching, and theymodernized the design of the characters, adapted the delinquents to rappers,… butthere isn’t much more to it. Especially not when it comes to the antiwarmessage. We can see GPS systems and some other details but that’s not what I’m getting into.

Back in the1970s when this manga was drawn smartphones didn’t exist. The Internet did butit didn’t got popular until 1990s. There was TV, phone or radio, of course, but inthe end news simply went slower. And letters aren’t free instant messaging.

Let’s go to Vol.4 so I can explain what I mean.

In here, we can see Miki went out to buy all thenewspapers she could get her hands into.

A newspaper shows you the printed news and that’s it. You can’t know anything else until anotherone gets printed. The surge of SNS, however, has made news faster. For good or worsewe can know what’s going on at any point of the planet at any time. When there’s a disaster we can know ithas happened few minutes after and get every single detail wewant at the minute.

In a context like Devilman from Vol.3 onwards that’s as muchof a blessing as is a nightmare. You wouldn’t be able to disconnect. There’s not a pause between news andthat’s both good and bad. It’s good to stay informed but it’s terribleto get obsessed over it.

We also live in the era of information where we have theneed of constantly consuming the newest news. This leads to journalism becomingeven more sensationalist, hiding info, talking about an issue thatthey actually don’t know about, or straight up lying. Ironic, isn’t it? Something like that wouldhave been so nice to use. But then it didn’t. Oh.

The other way of communication in the manga shown in the samevolume was phone calls from people living near of each other, or just speaking mouth-to-mouth. As I said, there was no Internet. This centralized everything, to the point oneof the Neo Devilman episodes makes us see a group of people trying to run fromtheir city expecting they won’t be recognized somewhere else and will be ableto live a peaceful life. In the Devilman manga we saw people were pointing out to others theydidn’t like as demons (which gets them tortured and killed) and others following them just to not go through the samefate.

Now imaginean anonymous board in the Internet created for the sole purpose of outingdemons… which becomes a board where people points out to someone they don’t like doxxing them in the process. Once their info is online said person can’t runanywhere. They’re marked forever. How cool a scene like that would have been with ‘Smells Blood’playing as BGM? And yet another unexploited idea.

The quickscuts to paranoic SNS messages, among other things, were good, that’s right, but they didn’t show as well thelack of humanity and creeping up paranoia for me that was shown in the manga. Many of the messages weren’teven translated (and the Arabic ones are simple gibberish from what I’veheard). 

I also felt scenes like Miki’s death lost a lot of emotion just because it stopped feeling as… claustrophobic, may be the word?, as the original was. She fought for her life up until the end there. It was a “It’s them or me!” situation. Crybaby Miki, on the other hand… well. 

It was the modernization what made me thought before Crybaby was out that humanity wouldn’t last twenty years as it does in the manga. And on that I guess I was correct. There’s notimeskip ever stated in Crybaby so I can only think the events were quicklyfollowed one after another.

Last butnot least, demons fusing indiscriminately in the manga with humans to provoke general panic was a clear symbolism for kamikaze attacks. Yet alone more antiwar being shown (that’s completely missing in the adaptation).

Being born japanese Yuasa/Okouchi shouldbe ashamed of removing this and changing it for that stadium episode instead. That,and removing the Zenon scene right after. Seriously, such terrible choices.

[50shadesofbrain]

Why do we Argue Online?

               Hi, welcome to my blog, Fifty Shades of Brain. In case you missed my first post, my name is Tim Carroll and I’m a psychology researcher at Harvard University.  The goal of my blog is to provide scientifically rigorous answers to questions about psychology and neuroscience, that don’t already have answers in the literature.  

               Perhaps the hardest thing about writing a blog about science questions is coming up with the right questions to ask.  If you ask too simple a question, you’ll probably be able to find the answer easily online.  If you ask too hard a question you’ll find that it’s probably unanswerable.

               I found my first Goldilocks question when I was playing an online game called Starcraft 2.  If you’re unfamiliar with Starcraft 2, it’s a video game where you control either an army of humans with futuristic technology, an army of aliens that look like they’re from the movie Alien, or an army of aliens that look like they’re from the movie Predator.  You then use this army to fight against someone else who’s controlling their own army of Humans, Aliens, or Predators.  

               However, in between your battles to the death, the game puts you into a chatroom where you can talk to all the other players online about setting up another battle to the death or swap strategy tips for your future battles to the death.  The funny thing about this chatroom is that I have literally never seen it used for that wholesome purpose.  What people use it for is discussing politics.

               In case you spaced out and missed the previous two paragraphs, this is a game about aliens blowing up other aliens. This is about as far from a political discussion group as you can get.  

               So, I’ve sat and watched these arguments. And while I have seen every political candidate compared to Nazis, communists, socialists, and various other slurs.  The one thing I haven’t seen anyone say is, “You’re right, you’ve really changed the way I view things.”

               And this isn’t simply limited to Starcraft 2’s lovely userbase.  The internet is filled with chatrooms and political discussion forums filled with people who want to do nothing but yell about how great/terrible Trump is to whoever is willing to listen.  Sure you can find a few exceptions, like Reddit’s neutral politics but they seem to be the exceptions to a very, very, pervasive rule.  

               Today on 50 Shades of Brain, I’m going to ask why?

               Why do people spend so much of their free time engaging in arguments online when the chance of convincing is so low?

Possibility One: They’re Bored.  

               While I’m sure this explanation is at least partially right, it can’t be the full explanation.  Even if we accept that every person involved in these online arguments is doing so out of boredom, it doesn’t explain why they’re using their computer with a working internet connection to argue rather than look at pictures of baby elephants or check out cool blogs.  

Possibility Two:  Releasing Pent-up Anger

               So let’s say that your job and/or marriage sucks and it leaves you with a lot of feelings of frustration and anger, and all you want to do is get into a fight with someone else and let it out.  What better people to do it with then people who are ALSO looking for a fight?  In theory this sounds pretty good, two people who want to get into a loud screaming match can get into a loud screaming match without any risk of either of them ending up in the hospital and/or behind bars.  

               Unfortunately the research doesn’t bear out on this. “Letting out your anger” is what’s known as Catharsis Theory - an idea first proposed by Aristotle and later popularized by Freud.  Unfortunately for both Aristotle and Freud, there’s quite a bit of research saying that Catharsis doesn’t exactly work.  Punching a punching bag makes you *more* angry not less.   See Bushman et al. 1999 or Bushman, 2002., where they tested exactly that. And even if everyone who’s arguing online hasn’t read those papers, you’d expect that most of them would realize that arguing online isn’t reducing their anger.

               Unless that’s not what they want to do after all…

Possibility Three: The goal is being angry

               A lot of people don’t like this explanation.

               Why would people like being angry?  It’s a difficult question, one that I don’t exactly have an answer to, but I can say this much, people tend to seek out things that outrage them.  

               Don’t believe me?  Here, take a look at some Fox News articles about Welfare Money.  

               Now, in case you’re unfamiliar, Fox News is an organization that caters to an audience that largely is against welfare. Now Fox news could show stories that make their base happy (“Look, this state rolled back Welfare.” Or “Look, fewer Americans are on welfare now than ever before.”)  But instead Fox News prefers to show its viewers things that will make their blood boil.  

               While there are a lot of negative things I could say about Fox News, I can’t accuse them of a bad business model.  They are providing their viewers and readers exactly what they want.

               You see, anger can be addictive.  Seriously, there was even an episode of Intervention about it.  The earliest paper I can find discussing this phenomenon is Ainslie, 2003, which argues that all emotions are reward-dependent behavior, and that getting angry or at least anticipating getting angry can be almost addictive.  The argument is taken a step further by Litvak et al. 2010, who raise the question of whether anger is even a negative emotion at all.   Unlike most negative emotions which leave us feeling pessimistic, anger leaves us in an optimistic state.  Also most positive and approach-related emotions, like happiness, are processed in the left frontal cortical region, while negative and withdrawal-related emotions, like grief, are processed in the right frontal cortical region.  And, despite the fact that most people would consider anger negative, it’s processed on the left side with the other positive emotions. (See Harmon-Jones & Sigelman, 2001 for more information on this particular phenomenon.)

               So, despite what we’re telling ourselves, maybe we really do like to be angry.  

               Now, I like this explanation.  But why would someone take the time and mental effort to type up an argument instead of just reading a few headlines on their partisan website of choice?  What makes arguing more satisfying ?  Well, I have a few theories about that.

Possibility 4: We like to hear ourselves talk

               I mean this metaphorically.  In the more literal sense people actually tend to dislike the sound of their own voice.

               It should be noted, that we are an inherently social species.  Pretty huge chunks of our brain are dedicated to interacting with and understanding others (there are so many citations on this statement, it’s hard to know where to start, but I kind of like this paper by Frith & Frith, 2010.)  Interacting with humans is believed to be necessary to both normal human development (McNeil et al., 1984) and our continued mental health (Kawachi & Berkman, 2001.) That’s why so many people have likened solitary confinement to a form of torture.   Perhaps a part of the fun of argument is actually getting to talk to a – presumably – thinking and breathing human being.  

               Or perhaps it’s more than that.  Humans do tend to love leaving their mark on the world.   Seriously, people have been leaving graffiti on walls that say some variant of “I was here” since before the fall of Rome.  There’s also some literature that suggests that one of the main appeals of blogging is the ability to express ones identity in a public way.  (Gurak & Antonijevik, 2008)  Perhaps, arguing online offers a similar psychological reward?

               Another consideration is that we just love being right. Or at least perceiving of ourselves as being right. Presumably you wouldn’t engage in a lengthy online argument if you believed yourself to be wrong.  And humans love being right.  We love being right so much that we process information differently when it confirms what we believe than when it challenges it (See the introduction to Taber & Lodge, 2006 for an overview of this literature.)  

               Our love of being right also affects our online experience. In fact we like being right so much, that Facebook and Google have started modifying their search results and advertisements in order to show us content that confirms our pre-existing opinions.  (Here’s a Ted Talk you can check out on this “filter bubble”)  Perhaps arguing online allows us to not only find a person to be angry at, but also to put out an argument and bask in the feeling of being right.  

Wrapping up

               If I were to combine everything outlined above into one super theory, it would be this.  People seek out arguments online so they can feel the almost-addiction-like rush of getting angry as well as the rewarding behaviors of social interaction, identity expression, and being (at least in your own mind) right.  

               So there are two caveats I’d like to leave you with before I close this blog post down.

               The first is this:  As with all psychology and neuroscience research, there are difficulties generalizing to every member of the population.  I’m sure there are people arguing online at this very second who aren’t motivated by the rush of anger, but instead by an earnest desire to convince others of the rightness of their political view.  Conversely, they might also just have an earnest desire to antagonize others.  

               The second caveat is a little bit of a warning. Up above, I cited the pretty cool research report, Litvak et al. 2010, which focuses on the way that anger affects our judgments and decision making.  In addition to being addictive, anger makes us significantly worse at thinking with a clear head. In particular, they say “[Anger] prompts careless thought, not careful thought.”  So, even if you spend all night arguing about politics online, it’s unlikely that you’re actually learning anything.

               So next time you see an infuriating internet comment, you’d probably be better off leaving it alone.  Chances are it isn’t worth your time.  

***

               Anyway, that’s my first blog post.  If you have any thoughts, you can leave a comment below. But, please, for the love of god, try to keep the arguing to a minimum.

[mortgagebrokerplanotx]

The Best Months to Plan a Move in Arizona

Arizona is a hot moving destination: The fifth most popular in the country. With the huge influx of people moving to the Grand Canyon State, it can be tempting to choose a moving date during a time when things start to slow down: the summer.

Even though you may save a few bucks here and there due to the lower demand, a summer move comes with some risks, and, in the end, the juice may not be worth the squeeze. On the other hand, making a move during the colder months, December through May, comes with tons of cool benefits, and not just because of the lower temps. Here are some of the best reasons to make your Arizona move when the temperatures drop.

Avoid the Heat

Hauling stacks of boxes, couches, beds, and furniture is a task in itself. Doing so when the temperature is over 100 can be torture. In Arizona, the hottest time of the year is the summer, specifically the end of June, when the average high is 110.5 degrees. Not only does this make a move uncomfortable, but it can also be dangerous to your health. If you have no choice but to move in the summer, be sure to look out for signs of:

Dehydration

Heatstroke

Sunburn

Heat exhaustion

Even though the months of December through March are known for cool, comfortable temps, even April and May are cooler—at least 13 degrees cooler than in June. This could make the difference between an easy move and one punctuated by heat-related health issues.

The heat can also do a number on your vehicle. When your car or moving van is running back and forth between your old and new home, the cooling system is tested to the max. Any weaknesses are likely going to be exposed and this could result in an unpleasant breakdown in the middle of the intense heat. Getting stuck in a stranded, steaming vehicle wouldn’t exactly help make for a smooth move. You can avoid the anguish by doing it in the spring.

Avoid Monsoons

Monsoons can roll in quickly and can wreak havoc on virtually any Arizona neighborhood. Because of their intense rain, they can put a damper on your move and make the roads impassable. It’s not uncommon for a flash flood to turn a quiet street into a mini river or a dip in the road into a small pond. Whether it’s hydroplaning or water getting sucked into the intake and flooding your engine, your vehicle—and safety—can be severely affected by the floods that come with monsoons.

Of course, a monsoon can happen nearly any time of the year, but every local knows that monsoon season goes from June through September. If you have no choice but to move during the summer, keep in mind the dangers of flash floods. Also be careful around areas that have rocks or boulders that could be dislodged and roll down to the road. If you are caught in a monsoon, pull to the side of the road and wait for it to dissipate. Be careful to not park in an area where water can collect and pool to the point of endangering your vehicle or those inside.

Avoid Dust Storms

Arizona dust storms are things of internet legend. Even though resilient residents have found ways of weathering these impressive spectacles, making a move during a dust storm involves unnecessary risks. The biggest danger is the lack of visibility. Because a dust storm comes in so quickly, a gust of dust can puff in front of your car, reducing visibility to zero in a matter of seconds. Zero visibility and a large moving van are a bad combination.

Dust storms are also bad for the filters and engine of your vehicle, particularly if you’re driving. The air intake system can suck the dust into the filter, clogging it, which could result in your vehicle getting insufficient air to run properly. Even worse, the filtration system could malfunction and you could get lumps of congealed dust in your engine. It’s best to steer clear of dust storms, which tend to coincide with monsoon season.

Combine Spring Cleaning with the Moving Purge

Maybe, like most folks, you’re crazy-busy and just don’t have the time to do a thorough spring cleaning. If you move in the spring, you get the chance to combine spring cleaning with the ever-so-therapeutic moving purge. Instead of finding places to store or restore old items, go ahead and chuck ’em. It’s okay; you’re moving. There may not be enough room for that old desk in your new pad.

Economizing your time while moving is a handy way to add some efficiency to what can be an arduous process. Instead of sweating through the spring cleaning, put your unwanted stuff out on the front lawn, so your neighbors can do some “spring gleaning.” Charge a few bucks for each item, and you may have enough to pay for a moving van for a day or two.

Learn About the School System

One of the most crucial factors of a successful move is fluid integration into the school system of your new neighborhood. Maybe school wasn’t your favorite thing when you were younger, but you may have to push through the PTSD and spend time with some teachers and administrators to make sure your kids have the best experience possible. The months of December through May are an ideal time to introduce yourself to school staff, as well as those down in the municipality’s education offices. Here are a few reasons why:

Teachers are generally a bit more relaxed. Early in the year, as school starts, there is a pile of new and old obligations teachers have to conquer, and meeting with you may not be number one on their list.

Teachers and administrators are much more likely to “keep it real.” As the school year launches, everyone is putting their best foot forward—whether they’re being genuine or not—so what you see is not necessarily what you get. As the months go by, teachers and administrators are more likely to give you the real scoop on how things go down. This makes it a great time to investigate the school system.

You can see what matters: results. The beginning of the school year is clouded with impressive claims and goals. However, after a term or two has gone by, you get to see whether or not September’s objectives have been met, and you can talk about why or why not. Most teachers enjoy showing you before and after examples of student work. Don’t be afraid to ask about the challenges they’ve encountered during the year, as well, so you can get a full picture of what your child’s experience will be like.

Give the Kids a Chance to Make New Friends

Some families make the mistake of treating their kids like another set of boxes during a move. When it’s time to go, they toss ’em into the truck and pull off, but your kids are going to need to adjust to the new area, school system, and social structure. Getting them into the neighborhood early can help them start forming bonds with the other kids. That way, when they start the school year in the fall, they already have a crew that can help show them the ropes. Otherwise, they may be forced to be that super-awkward kid sitting alone at the lunch table while everyone else is sharing cool summer stories.

Even outside of the school setting, kids feel more comfortable when they’re able to acclimate to a new neighborhood, especially before summer hits and kids head to parks and pool parties. Giving your kids a chance to start building their social network will get them off to a more comfortable start.

Settle in Before the Start of School

Nothing is quite as jarring as a transition to a new school system at the start of the school year. In addition to the anxiety every kid feels as they are buried under mountains of new work and expectations, making friends and getting to know teachers and other school staff can pile stress on top of stress. A move in the spring means your kids can get an early jump on getting familiar with everyone and everything connected to their school experience: kids, teachers, staff, and academic expectations.

Even though waiting until the summer may make for a more seamless goodbye to their friends and teachers, a better transition will pay big dividends come report card time.

Keep Your Move Cool With Homie

Arizona is a beautiful place that deserves its spot high in the rankings of moving destinations. On top of that, Arizona is filled with budding neighborhoods that inspire current residents to make a move and explore more of what the state has to offer. Properly timing your move will help reduce the inconvenience of moving for both you and your whole family. The cooler months are the best time to move into your new home: Look at homes with Homie now.

The post The Best Months to Plan a Move in Arizona appeared first on Homie Blog.

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[stone-man-warrior]

December 9, 2018: 3:58 pm:

December 9, 2018: 4:00 pm:<br><br>I saw a video today being "Re-Tweeted&... StoneMan .Warrior - 2018-12-09 16:58:48-0800 - Updated: 2018-12-09 16:58:48-0800

December 9, 2018: 4:00 pm: I saw a video today being "Re-Tweeted" from Laura Ingraham of The Ingraham Angle on Fox News. The video shows a humorous scene of eight guys in Santa Claus suits fighting on a street brawl. I don't like Santa Claus. The whole idea is based on pedophilia associated with members of British Parliament. There are Parliamentary members who's regular official, or perhaps ceremonious, attire is quite similar to that of Santa Claus. The entire world has been brainwashed into the idea that it is OK to have someone dressed in the ridiculous costume inside of your house. Families with children have been victimized with this terror custom for centuries. They came up with the excuse that he comes down the chimney with toys for the children, so the children go right there to where the bearded asshole is at to see what goodies he brought, and bring him a snack of Milk and Cookies for after he rapes the children. The fat bastards were on the way from the pub after hours and snuck into the houses of where there are easy victims. Then they Brought the nonsense to the USA and it's all considered good and reasonable to have a fat terrorist bastard wearing a red and white Parliamentary outfit inside of the house in the wee small hours of the nighttime. Since they are all drunk when they show up to rape the children, or put them into that big bag and kidnap them, they came up with the reindeer story because of all of the racket they make on the roof while climbing through the windows. And the bag filled with toys is really a bag filled with your child and mine. Toys... Bullshit. Anyways, about the video that Laura Ingraham is promoting... The "Twelve Days of Christmas" is upon us. In Dystopian, Socaio-terrific Oregon, that means that the Twelve Days of Christmas'' song will be used as a means of providing a theme to the upcoming terror events in the area, and in the world. The Media terrorists of SAG role out the Twelve Days theme every year, twice per year. "Christmas in July" includes the "Twelve Days of Christmas" theme, and last summer included that there were "Eight Fires Burning". "Stinky Ryan Zinke", "Liesure Suit Larry Kudlow", and "Down Town Jerry Brown" are working the profits from those fires now through "land Grab" of fire survivors who are exterminated later, and the ones who were killed as the fires were happening. Also, "Salvage Timber Sales" were referred to on Twitter terror news media as "Timberwolf" in association with George H.W. Bush and the number 41. It;s all about killing, raping, pillaging, taking and profiting now. There is no US Government, there are only terrorists disguised as such. So, " 'Tis the Season" to role out another year of terror with a theme, Hollywood style, and with the Blessing of the Vatican. Laura Ingraham is a blatant commander of terror operations and so is Sean Hannity along with Dan Bongino, who is Mr. Hannity's "Tank Commander". "Tank Commanders" in terror talk, refer to media personalities and others who engage in providing marching orders for other terrorist cells in the field. Tank Commanders are recognizable by their outward display of the use of old school headphones and a goofy hat. The headphones are the kind that were popular in the 1970's, big, clunky hemisphere's worn over a goofy hat, which is just a hat, but is not the kind of hat one might expect to be worn by the individual terrorist wearing it. It's a simple idea and can be as simple as someone who is known to be a "Falcons" fan, but wears a "Marlin" hat... the circumstances about the hat won't fit, and the headphones further explain the notion of "Tank Commander" to the terror cells that need to get their orders fro someplace. The terror cells are small groups of about ten members, maybe more, maybe less, but always three or more. The cells commanded by a "tank Commander" are cells that use Nitrous Oxide/Versed airborne poison gas to subdue victims for capture, torture, and killing. They are riving bands and are geographically specified from the command chain as their services are called for in special operations usually. April LaJune and Dan Bongino are two examples of tank Commanders. Sean Hannity commands Dan Bonginoi, who commands the individual cells for specified killings. Fox News Media terrorists have pretty much conquered the entire US Government, and are very dangerous people who engage in a Coup of the USA daily with ongoing impunity. Watch for signs of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" terror events and the orders for them to be carried out by the media terrorists at Fox News. It's my opinion that all of the other news agencies work in concert with Fox, and much of what the other agencies do is simply to provide that there will be rivalry presented between the agencies such that they all appear to be opponents when they actually are all on the same team. If Fox were to be apprehended as a terrorist organization, then the illusion of rivalry between Fox and others such as CNN ensures that the terrorist SAG/SDA Coup will continue advancing the goals of SAG and the Vatican without interruption or intermission. The USA is being consumed in a relentless slaughter by those who entertain us. Don't get on the bus, never get on the bus. Fight terrorism with a Bic Lighter. Burn Candles, the gas is flammable, the small flame clears the air so you can breathe and think clearly.

Shared with: Public

StoneMan .Warrior - 2018-12-09 18:38:43-0800

December 9, 2018: 6:08 pm: Messages of terrorism come in all forms from everywhere. There are no limits to the source of terrorists information. Terrorism knows no boundaries, it has no age nor gender. Terrorism knows no boundaries. At Wal-Mart, the messages are everywhere also. The messages are inside of the sealed merchandise and put there during manufacturing. Since there are no anti-terrorist agents who look for clues, the messages go unnoticed. Often, the messages about terrorism is presented by victims of the terrorism who are vigilant to find help... to be rescued and freed of slavery. Terror slavery happens at the manufacturing end of the products consumed world-wide. Slaves are Citizens who were captured and forced to serve the needs of their captors. Strawberries. At the Wal-Mart they sell frozen strawberries. This entry is about a message in the form of what looks like a cry for help to me, and is contained within the strawberry packaging and has been there for as long as I have purchased frozen strawberries at Wal_mart. Frozen, whole strawberries in the largest size they have available, the 4 LB. size (four pound). The message is in the package by the way the package is made. The package should open up with a zip sort of easy-open way, and then have a freshness zip-lock built in so the you can store the frozen strawberries for use later. The zip-lock does not work. It cannot work. The package is made such that the zip-lock stays on one side of the package and is not functional, cannot be functional and will never function the way the package is made. The package is made absent of teh easy zip removable opening method that should be there... it;s not there. I have been buying the same strawberries, whole, frozen , Great Value Strawberries, 4 pound size, for about a year or more and the zip-lock has always been the same... the special plastic strip is stuck to one side, and cannot function. This could be a simple malfunction in the equipment that makes the package. I don't think so. If there was no terrorism where I live, I would never have noticed or cared about the dysfunctional zip-lock. But there is terrorism and people are killed daily at the Wal-Mart, so I notice things like this. Could it be another indicator besides slaves crying out fir help hoping some one will notice the dysfunctional bag? Yes, it could be an indicator of a wide variety of things. I choose to view the dysfunctional zip-lock on the frozen whole Strawberries as slave children who are forced to package strawberries by day, and be sex slaves by night because I know that there is no help for people who are not slaves, such as me. I cannot get help against terrorists who use poison gas to kill Americans, and I have access to internet and a phone. Slaves only have access to the machines they are forced to operate. They have to try harder to get help. They have to be more creative to get help. They cannot limit teh ways that they will attempt to get help. They seek help with a broken zip-lock on the frozen whole strawberries, 4 pound size. No one will help because the National Security agencies are too busy chasing dark skinned people with black beards when it;s the white skinned people from Hollywood and the people who go to Church on Saturday that are the terrorists. The terrorists are in the backyard kidnapping the American children at home and at School, and the anti=terrorist agents and the military are on a different continent. If the US Military and the National Security Agents were on Mars looking for Martians, they would be just as close to the real terrorists as they are now. The terrorists are at the White House. The address there is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC... I don't know the zip code.

StoneMan .Warrior - 2018-12-09 19:01:22-0800

December 9, 2018: 6:46 pm: Besides the Strawberries, there is tuna. I like tuna. I don't buy it veru often for myself, but when I do, I buy the Albacore or the Solid White tuna. It costs about four dollars for a can of Albacore, so I don't buy it often. I do buy goodies for my cats. The cats goodies in the cat food isle are expensive too. It's a scam. I found out that if I buy the cheapest tuna at the Wal-Mart, it is better that the most expensive cat food goodies in the cat food isle. I also found that the cheapest tuna, small can, very bottom right of the tuna department at the Wal-Mart, is $0.87 per can. The eighty-seven cent tuna is almost as good as the Solid White Albacore that costs four dollars (a bigger can though). The eighty-seven cent tuna is famous at the Wal-Mart. Why? If you buy the cheap tuna, someone will comment about it if they recognize that that you bought the eighty-seven cent kind. Why? I don't have the answer on this one. I think the indication is from the slaves that package the tuna. I think that are trying to get some attention to get rescued. The cheap tuna is good, comes in a small can. It's almost as good as the expensive tuna... the kind that comes in a bigger can. The terrorists carry the Nitrous Oxide/Versed airborne gas rectally holstered in pressurized tanks. I think that is what teh tuna slaves are trying to say. Wal-mart is capturing people and forcing them to do work, so the slaves find ways to get noticed, such as drawing attention to the size of CAN it takes to hold a tank of Nitrous gas. Don't forget that the terror soldiers who kill to serve the needs of the Screen Actor Guild are Canadians from Quebec. CAN-ada.

[tobytjohnson]

USOCR Championships

OCR Week # 8

Event: US OCR Championships

Miles driven:  a lot

Events: Saturday-3k, Sunday-15k

Approximate Distance: 11 miles

Medals Earned: 2 medals, 2 wristbands

I understand these are out of order.  I’m getting my shit together, calm down.

              Wow, what a weekend!  This event was different than anything in I’ve experienced in OCR so far.  It was also the first of its kind in the US.  This was the first annual US OCR Championships in Mountain Home Texas.  It was held on the Y.O. Ranch which is kind of out in the middle of nowhere, but hey, it’s Texas. The ranch itself was unique because it was home to more than just livestock.  It was a 5000+ acre farm that also was home to many African wildlife such as giraffe, and zebras!  I decided to go to this event because it was something different for my trip.  Up until now it has been mainly Tough Mudders and Spartans.  It was also an inaugural event which is something I’ve missed out on before in the past.  I wasn’t sure if I was going to know anyone from past events that were going to be there. Turns out I did!  Only a couple people, but it’s still nice to see familiar faces along my journey.  I met new people that are now new friends.  The best part is I will most likely see them again at a future event.

              This race was a little different from events I’ve done in the past.  For example, at the beginning of the event you are given a timing chip, number and a wristband.  Now this may seem normal but it really comes down to the wristband.  The wristband was your proof of completion.  Sure, you get a medal at the end, which by the way, are really cool and scream AMERICA, but the wristband was more important. It was the proof that you completed every obstacle without failure for the entire course. The race was also split into two days. Saturday was a 3k short course that had roughly 17 obstacles while Sundays course was a 15k and had 39 obstacles. Obviously, there was some overlap between days when it came to obstacles. So let’s break this down by event shall we?

              Saturday 3K:  I had never done a “short course”.  Short courses are becoming more popular in the OCR world from what I’m learning. All it really means is, more obstacles, less distance.  For this event, I was able to sign up for an age category to compete in.  That means I get to compete against people in my age range. For the short course the age range was 30-39.  This was a better option as opposed to trying to hang with the pros.  I am still at the end range of my age group but what am I going to do?  I have to wait until next year to be the “young guy”. They corral us at the start, get us pumped up and ready to go, and send us of in groups of eight.  Once again, this was my first short course. I wasn’t sure how to pace at all.  I started off safe. Way too safe.  With just under two miles and a handful of obstacles I realize now that I could’ve pushed a whole lot harder.  I ended up placing in the middle of the group for my age.  I’m going to chalk this one up as a learning experience for sure.  I was happy that I made it through the course and completed all the obstacles without having to repeat any of them. That means I got to keep my wristband. This was the overall goal of the day. Following the race I wasn’t sure what to do.  I’ve never been done so fast and had so much free time.  I decided to hang out for a bit and wait for the pros to go.  I ended up meeting quite a few people and hung out with them.  Namely, Will and George!  It was a pleasure meeting you two and I hope to see you at future events! I also got a chance to run into some of the athletes that I had the pleasure to meet and judge at Tough Mudder X.  I’m learning time and time again that this sport is full of great people from all over the world and no matter where they come from there is always a common kindness that goes with OCR athletes and people.  Watching the pros run was nothing short of amazing.  It was both inspiring and motivational.  Men and women smoked the course like it was nothing. To put it into perspective, they did the course in about half the time it took me.  All I can think at this point is I have more training to do. Following the running of the pros I went to my campsite and jumped in the pool.  Cooled off for a little bit because Texas. After I cooled off I decided to head to Starbucks to try and catch up on emailing and internet stuff. From Starbucks I headed back to my campsite, cooked dinner, and promptly went to bed as soon as it “cooled off”.  Slept okay considering cooling off in Texas means lower 70’s.  

              Sunday 15k:  Sunday started off very similar to Saturday.  Wake up, breakfast and head to the course.  I prepared much like I do for every other event I’ve done for this distance.  This time, I did get to spend more time with warming up.  I knew what most of the obstacles were about and knew how to approach them.  There were still a few that I didn’t see the day before but I figured I would tackle them like any other obstacle I didn’t know anything about.  That really just consists of me walking up, assessing, watching others, and then doing.  The 15k was obviously a longer event and the difference from the 3k besides longer distance and more obstacles was the age range was smaller than the day before. Today it was 35-39.  I was even more okay with this!  Less people means a greater chance of doing well.  We also start as a group as opposed to groups of 8 like the day before.  Gun goes off and I feel more at home. Unlike they day before, people seem to be going more my pace.  There are always a couple of really good runners that shoot off in the beginning. I’m not there yet.  In my head I keep thinking “just run your race”.  That was the main goal for the entire event.  In past events, the competitive side of me kicks in and I end up gassing myself out too soon by trying to keep up with people that are faster than me. So, “run your own race” keeps repeating in my head. Along with an REO Speedwagon song. Not sure why REO Speedwagon is the band of choice lately while running but it seems to work so who am I to argue with myself.  I liked the course. It was laid out well and there was good spacing between obstacles.  Another goal of this race was to keep the wristband!  Once again, if I kept my wristband that means I completed all obstacles. There are a couple memorable moments on the course.  To start, it seemed like every obstacle rig, the judges would remind me to keep my feet up.  Either the rigs are too low, or I’m too tall.  I’m going to go with the rigs are too low, but I can’t change that so I deal with it.  The “yoke carry” was a fun one where it paid to be a big guy.  It was about a 6 foot round piece of wood with two 50lb bags of gravel hanging from either end. With the weight hanging like that it makes it very unstable and hard to walk.  Being a big guy and watching what others were doing I learned that I could reach both bags and steady them while carrying the weight a little lower on my shoulders. This allowed me to make up some time on a few other guys and even pass a few. They caught up to me on the run portion but at least I got them for a little bit.  The “wreck bag carry” was one of the next memorable moments. Once again, it pays to be a bigger guy. The carry consisted of a 50lb “wreck bag” (it’s like a sandbag but not as awkward), over a wall, up a hill, across a hill, down a hill, over a wall, through a tube, over another wall, and finally back to start. It was a fun bit of torture that I have grown to like.  The next moment wasn’t an obstacle but more of an occurrence. Texas being what it is, there are cactus. As I was running I apparently ran over a cactus. Ho w do I know? Well, I had to stop and pull three cactus thorns out of my foot. Not my shoe, my foot.  I tried to gut it out since I knew I was close to the finish but It f’ing hurt.  Had to take off my shoe for one of them.  This cost me a couple places. Once again, learning experience. What did I learn? Watch what I’m running through a little closer the next time I compete in Texas. The last real thing that sits in my brain is the second to last rig.  It was called “Urban Sky”.  Nothing about this obstacle was overly difficult at the time.  The things that made it memorable was the fact that after all of the rigs and course I went through, this was the rig that I tore a callus on.  Really?! After rowing for so many years and building up a tolerance to tearing, this is what my hands decide to do?  I guess I shouldn’t complain considering many people went through the course and their hands looked like hamburger on the other end.  Still found it interesting and I’m sure it’s not the last time it’s going to happen. I go through the last rig and down the cargo net to the finish line.  I made it!  I completed all of the obstacles and made it through the course which once again, means I get to keep my wrist band!  The medals are cool but I think I’ve mentioned that the wristbands are worth more. At least to me they are.  Following my finish, I hung out and chatted with more people about the event.  Talked with one of the organizers and gave him a great review of the overall event.  I was a little more tired than planned and the crowd seemed to be thinning fast.  I decided to pack things up and make my way back to Austin so I could shower and reset for the next part of my trip.  

              Overall, I learned a lot from this event. I learned that I still have a competitive streak in me. I’m not sure that will ever leave. I also have to keep in mind that my performance is a little skewed (in my head) considering I am running some sort of an event each weekend and driving to each event every week.  It got me thinking that I really want to expand on the events that I am doing this next year.  I want to experience more what the OCR world has to offer.  Take the time to plan out what events and when.  I also am looking forward to training in between events. Right now, it’s been a bit difficult because of all of the driving. We’re going to put this in the “what I’m going to do next in life” file.  I have had many hours and a few conversations that have got me thinking quite introspectively.  Right now I’m on this adventure for a few different reasons. Raise money for Whole Kids Foundation, prove that you’re never too old to accomplish something great, and not live in fear of change.  

              I hope my actions and this journey will inspire people to step out of their normal routine.  Try something new in life. Not live in fear of judgement.  Be more active. Did I mention not live in fear? NOT LIVING IN FEAR!!!

              Next stop from here is Plymouth, Wisconsin for a Tough Mudder! See you soon Mudder Family!!

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[douchebagbrainwaves]

THE COURAGE OF ESSAYS

Though, frankly, the fact that the text is email, on a smaller scale and don't like to have it. 3 uncle 50 2. They could have chosen any machine to make into a star. 6x. You don't hear that any more now that Japanese companies are building cars in the US. The number of possible connections between developers grows exponentially with the size of the tree, you're going to flake out and leave them stranded. From the outside that seems like it's going to succeed.1

Curiosity And what's your real job supposed to be startups. I wouldn't be surprised if by streamlining their selection process and taking fewer board seats. When anyone agreed to try Stripe they'd say Right then, give me your laptop and set them to work hard to maintain your target growth rate to impress investors. I claiming that no one sees their processors anymore, by writing a Basic interpreter for it. That was probably part of the feedback loop that makes the world interesting. Is it? Now almost every drawing teacher will tell you that if you had to compress them into a single piece of advice I would give about writing essays, it would make programs easier to read. VCs you're talking to someone from Hollywood who was planning a show about nerds. Steve Jobs. What's changed is the ability to reason. The reason he and most other startup founders are richer than they would.2

In retrospect I think one of the big successes have two or three times as much on sales as on development. At Viaweb our system had so many components and changed so frequently that there was a good idea to Mark Zuckerberg as because he used computers so much. It's possible to buy expensive, handmade cars that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay your expenses while you develop a conscience, torture is amusing. Plunge in, by all means, but worse still, neither does the developer of the filter. That yields all sorts of regulations to comply with. Not every kind of hard to imagine a technology company, their thoughts are your product.3 In the schools I went to, the people who say that the situation degenerates into a religious war, because so many startup founders have had some failures along the way. It's no defense to say that ambition is a component of determination, but they're just good enough.

That group says another. Presumably it was not only designed for writing throwaway programs, because that's the amount you need, you can rely on your intuitions as you ordinarily would, and b though in form merely information, software is eating the world, your work is not us but their competitors.4 Thanks to Sam Altman, David Greenspan, Aaron Iba, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this. But that doesn't mean what they end up investing in them. That is certainly true. Since there's such a thing as beauty, then there is the least suburban-golf-playing VC I know. Much more commonly you launch something, and no one else is there. Draw a sharp line between your thoughts and your speech. The MROSD manages a collection of angel investments that combined to maybe $200k, and a fifth person acceptable to both. The only real difference between adults and high school kids and adults both. One reason we don't see them is a cause for optimism: American graduates have more options. And since we're assuming we're doing this without being able to pick those out, wouldn't it?

If you get a regular job can tell you what we all wish someone had told me that he would want to put several people to collaborate on a research project. If they're dealing with recent art, they have certainly accelerated it.5 Who could have guessed that the company Wozniak and Jobs started in their spare time.6 So I think efficiency will matter, at least subconsciously, based on disasters that have happened to any bigger than a few tens of thousands see business as it's practiced by Boeing or Philip Morris. Yahoo would make from each link. Sometimes merely seeing the opposing case stated explicitly is enough to get the company to the point where you can't or don't want to have a very abstract language. It's not going to grow huge selling Basic interpreters. To the ambitious kids arriving at art school this year hoping one day to make great things.7 But I think the goal of this rule; if you have kids. It's the best place so far, but the whole world doesn't work that way.

More So The classic startup is fast and informal, with few people and little money. They'd freak if they knew their friends were. So the products that start as cheap, simple options tend to gradually grow more powerful. And from my friends who are professors. Security always depends more on natural ability. Theory: In US presidential elections, the more pressure there was to pay employees this way, or the role of a political commissar in a Red Army unit. In the first couple hours.

Notes

The best way for a name.

Revenue will ultimately be hurting yourself, because they can't afford to. We're only comparing YC startups, just as Europeans finished assimilating classical science.

The variation in productivity is the case of the word I meant. Type II startups, but whether it's good enough at obscuring tokens for this purpose are still expensive to start using whatever you make something popular but apparently unimportant, like warehouses. One professor friend says that clothing brands favored by urban youth do not try too hard at fixing bugs—which, if you have no way to fight back themselves. 66, while we can easily imagine.

A significant component of piracy, which either desperately tries to munge what I've said into something that doesn't seem to be discovered. They seem to them. VCs who don't, you're using a freeware OS? In judging both intelligence and wisdom we have to get endless grief for classifying religion as a constituency.

My point is that their local network infrastructure would be possible to have been doing so much that they're all that matters here but the meretriciousness of the word I meant. Unless of course some uncertainty about how to do this are companies smart enough not to have invented. Unless you're very docile compared to sheep. Wittgenstein asserted a sort of things you sell.

At three months we can't figure out what the attitude of a rolling close doesn't mean you suck. You have to do would be enough, it would literally take forever in the sense of getting too high a valuation cap is merely boring, we try to accept that investors don't lead startups on; their reputations are too valuable. But it's unlikely anyone will ever hear her speak candidly about the difference.

During the Internet worm of its identity.