#unfortunately i do high key want to write this but it would be 1. ambitious and 2. for deadass my secondary ship for a multiship situation

[utilitycaster]

sometimes you have a good and well thought out idea for a fic and sometimes you are just like this concept is best expressed as a series of ao3 tags for something you will probably never write

[bestworstcase]

more than once you've said "the tts fandom can't write x character, or can't write y character," but have you considered that maybe they can write them fine, you've just built up your desired interpretations of these characters? you give off this condescending attitude, like ONLY YOU can write tts characters accurately, ONLY YOU understand them, & any interpretations that don't in some way align with what you think are WRONG. this has become more apparent as you've worked through bitter snow

let’s discuss king frederic, and how he is often characterized in fanworks vs how he is characterized in the show. 

now... i think we can all agree that frederic is at best a mediocre father and a not especially good king, that in his worst moments he steps over the line into emotional abuse vis a vis his treatment of rapunzel, and that the avoidant head-in-the-sand approach he takes to the black rock problem in s1 causes widespread pain, unnecessary panic, and does not improve the situation whatsoever. 

he is widely disliked in the fandom for very good reason

however! it is difficult, though hardly impossible, to find fic where frederic acts or speaks... like frederic, for one very simple reason: the fandom, by and large, as a group, writes frederic as an angry, abusive man who blows up when he is confronted with the many, many things he does wrong. often this takes the form of a character, or characters, getting up in front of him and rattling off his list of crimes, real or perceived, followed by him basically throwing a tantrum.

canon frederic, to put it bluntly, does not do that. 

exhibit a: caine’s confrontation of frederic in before ever after.

caine sets up exactly the scenario that in the average tts fanfic would end with frederic yelling / blustering / furiously denying the accusations, plus she does it while rounding up all his guests and putting them in cage to haul them off and, presumably, kill them somewhere. like. the stakes are life or death and this is an extremely stressful situation for everyone involved.

and this is how that conversation goes down: 

FRED: Release my guests immediately!

CAINE: What’s the matter, Fred? Am I ruining your perfect day?

RAPUNZEL: ...The Duchess?

CAINE: Oh, honey. I am no Duchess.

RAPUNZEL: I don’t understand.

CAINE: Of course you wouldn’t, Rapunzel, but try to follow along. This is all your fault.

RAPUNZEL: What?!

CAINE: You see, after your untimely... disappearance, your father locked up every criminal in the kingdom... including a simple petty thief. My father. I saw him thrown into a cage and hauled off like some animal, never to be seen again. So... I thought I’d come back, and return the favor. 

[the wagon rolls in]

CAINE: Load ‘em up, boys! Your turn, Your Majesty. 

[Frederic moves to shield Rapunzel; Caine snickers.]

CAINE: Oh, come on, you didn’t think we’d leave our prized pig in the pen, did you?

RAPUNZEL: [as Caine’s gang drags Frederic toward the wagon] Dad—

FREDERIC: Rapunzel, stay back. 

RAPUNZEL: But—

FREDERIC: No. There’s nothing you can do. As your father and your king, I command you to stay put. 

there are two key points that i want to make here, because they diverge significantly from the way frederic is characterized in analogous scenarios in fanfics, like, 90% of the time. 

1) fred doesn’t get angry. he doesn’t bluster or yell. he orders caine to release his guests, and when she refuses, he gets quiet. he does not interrupt caine’s rant, he does not even try to deny her accusations, and he doesn’t stomp around escalating the situation even while caine is prancing around waving a sword in his daughter’s face or literally poking him in the chest. 

he stays calm. 

2) fred’s primary, overriding concern is for rapunzel’s safety, and the safety of his guests. not his own. he does not struggle when caine’s men lead him away. he protests on behalf of his guests, but not himself, and he attempts to physically shield rapunzel from harm before he is dragged away. he doesn’t waste his breath trying to argue with caine, but he does tell rapunzel firmly not to put herself in danger trying to rescue him. 

now... there are plenty of ways to interpret why frederic behaves this way, and my personal take is certainly not the only possible one. but the behavior itself, the staying calm in the face of a crisis, while someone is in his face threatening him, his family, and his guests and making pretty charged accusation, is a) objectively playing out on the screen and b) directly at odds with the way frederic most often acts in fanfics. 

exhibit b: mood-swapped frederic blows up just like fanon frederic constantly does

and this is the only time we ever see frederic lose his temper like this in the entire series. again, this is not a matter of interpretation: this is just plainly what happens on the screen. when he is in his right mind, frederic is not a “scream accusations, whip out a sword, and impulsively declare war or attack someone because he’s mad” sort of person, and to say that he is really like that, deep down, is just as silly as trying to argue that cass really is a peppy, soft-hearted, affectionate pushover, or that eugene really is too riddled-with self-doubt and anxiety to make any decisions, or that rapunzel really is a grouchy, moody, misanthropic person. the mood potion makes everyone act like fundamentally different versions of themselves; their behavior is, literally, out of character for their normal, not high-off-their-asses-on-a-magical-potion selves. 

exhibit c: the angry mob in secrets of the sundrop

like with caine, this confrontation kicks off with a premise that should be pretty familiar to anyone who reads any fic featuring frederic at all, ie everybody is pissed at frederic and there is literally an enraged mob screaming for justice in the throne room. and that goes like this:

[everybody shouting in angry panic]

FREDERIC: People... [raising his voice to be heard] Citizens, please! Listen to me!

[Max rears and whinnies to get everyone’s attention, and the shouting dwindles away.]

FREDERIC: I will not lie to you any longer. Corona is in grave danger. The queen has been taken; over half our royal guard lie wounded; and these black rocks draw ever closer.

[the shouting begins to pick up again]

EUGENE: Uh, sir, hi, yeah—if there’s a ‘but’ in this speech, you probably want to cut to it right now. 

FREDERIC: But I look at you, and I don’t just see subjects. I see friends, family; strong, brave individuals who have stood by each other, side-by-side, and have never, ever backed down from a fight! Today, we face a danger like none before. As your king, your friend, and as your brother, I ask you to fight one more time. For Corona!

again, key points: 

1) frederic does not deny, bluster, shout down, or otherwise attempt to refute the basic point that he bungled the black rock situation. he did bungle it, and he knows that [this scene is preceded by him spelling out the full extent of his failures to rapunzel and openly admitting guilt]. through his behavior, he demonstrates that he accepts culpability for the situation and implicitly accepts the legitimacy of the crowd’s anger. 

2) he raises his voice only so he can be heard above the shouting, and as soon as folks quiet down, he drops to a reasonable volume again. his mood is grim, but he isn’t angry. he projects calm. 

3) eugene is nervous about frederic losing control of the crowd and accidentally causing a riot or something; frederic is not. 

4) instead of denying the crowd’s anger, frederic tries to reframe the problem for them: yes, things are bad, but they are strong and brave and we can all work together to put things right. he doesn’t shout them down; he seeks to inspire them. 

and 5) when frederic says “we face a danger,” he means that. the very next thing he does after giving this speech is go straight to the frontlines to fight in the same battle he’s asking everyone else to join in. he's not asking them to do anything he isn’t willing to do himself. 

which... i would argue even more than the caine confrontation in BEA, is diametrically opposed to the way the typical fanon frederic would respond to an angry mob situation, because the typical fanon frederic is a very angry, aggressive man, and that... simply isn’t who frederic is. he’s calm, he’s knows how to work a crowd, he knows how to use his authority to achieve his goals without browbeating or threatening. 

even when he does get angry—such as his instinctive reaction to arianna’s kidnapping, when he jumps first to “we will invade old corona”—he doesn’t yell or stomp around or throw tantrum. he gets stiff and rather cold and makes an impulsive judgment call... but then he takes some time to brood by himself, calms down, talks things out with rapunzel, admits his failures, and doesn’t follow through with the impulsive order he made in the heat of the moment. 

like... flat out, he is not an angry man.

and it’s frustrating, when i go to read fanfic and frederic is overwhelmingly characterized as this hapless angry shouty abusive person, because it is breathtakingly far removed from how he acts in canon, and i like frederic as a character. i find him very interesting, and it’s not fun to read fics where everything that makes him interesting is taken away and replaced with this sort of one-note Shouty Angry King/Bad Dad Whom Everyone Hates. and that applies, unfortunately, to a very large number of the types of fics i like to read (namely, long canon exploratory or canon divergent fics, etc)

anyway,

i am perfectly happy to read interpretations of the tts characters that do not mesh well, or are even wholly incompatible with, my own. 

but i do expect, as a minimum, characters to behave more or less the way they behave in canon unless there is a clear reason for them to be different. i expect varian to be nerdy and chaotic and a bit of a disaster, for example. i expect adira to be aloof, blunt, and perhaps a touch arrogant. i expect cassandra to be ambitious and frustrated and prone to self-sabotage and envy. i expect lance to be laid back and eugene to be a bit vain. i expect the captain to be gruff and very tight-laced. and i expect frederic to act like a politician who is in control of his feelings but sort of cowardly at heart, because that’s how frederic acts in the show. 

i hold myself to these standards too. a ton of my editing process is “hm does this character really talk like this? is this how they would react to this situation?” and then going through and rewatching scenes or whole episodes and trying to find roughly analogous emotional beats or situations to sort of gauge whether i’m hitting the mark or not; it’s very difficult and i work hard on it and do not always succeed... and this does make me a bit picky about characterization in fics i’m reading, yeah, because it’s... always at the forefront of my mind. and then yes i post about it here, because this is the hyperfixation landfill where i dump my tts-adjacent thoughts. 

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

of course, you’re welcome to unfollow me if you do not enjoy reading what i post. it’s important to curate an online experience that you enjoy! if my general demeanor irritates you, you don’t need to inflict yourself with it.

[nyullm2020]

How to Crush Law School Exams as an LL.M.

Hello again!

It’s been a minute. I’ve just had a well-deserved break after finishing my finals, where I managed to get a bit of sun in Florida and Puerto Rico.

It’s been a running start into my final semester of the LL.M. - and I can’t quite believe how fast this has all gone. I have a lot of content ideas coming up about everything I will be doing this semester, including juggling my internship at the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office, a Research Assistantship with an NYU Law Professor, the March Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam (MPRE) for the Bar, a full load of classes, and job hunting/networking - but first things first. I wanted to reflect on last semester’s exams, final papers and overall grades, and think about what I did well, and what I would change!

What are American law school exams like?

I’ll start by giving you an idea of the format of exams to give you an idea of the general approach, and hopefully take away some of the anxieties you as a future LL.M. might have.

There is no uniform exam or grading type for each and every course. American law school professors have a lot of discretion about how they will structure and assess their courses - including what mode of exam you will take (multiple choice, short answers, long problem question responses, policy-based essays, etc), or a final paper, and whether and to what extent class participation counts toward the grade. My assessments ran the gamut. In one class, I had a group assignment worth 30%, a 5,000 word final paper worth 60%, and 10% class participation, and in two others my final exam was worth 100%, with the professor’s discretion to slightly boost your grade based on your overall participation and contribution to the class. My Constitutional Interpretation seminar was 50% class participation, and 50% based on regular pieces of written work we handed in, including a final paper of 2,000 words.

Exams typically last between 2-4 hours, while take-homes take 3-8 hours (I haven’t had a take-home yet, but I will have a 12 hour take-home this semester). We all took our exams from home with a special software (Exam4 or the law school’s own exam software, THESS). Both my exams this semester allowed students to use any notes they wanted, and you could access the internet as well. The main problem with doing that is running out of time! So creating an organized outline of your notes and brainstorming essay ideas ahead of time is pretty crucial.

How do Professors grade? And what is a good grade?

Professors seem to have pretty broad discretion when it comes to grading - and definitely so when I think about Australian law school professors, who grade ‘blindly’ and never know who is behind the student number unless they look it up later, or are awarding prizes for the top students. The possible grades at NYU range from an F to an A+, as follows:

A+, 4.333; A, 4.000; A-, 3.667; B+, 3.333; B, 3.000; B-, 2.667; C, 2.000; D, 1.000 and F, 0.000.

No more than 2% of students can get an A+ in a given class, with a target of 1%. I am proud to say I was the only A+ student in one of my classes - yay! A huge personal achievement for me, and so I will brag a little here because I don’t want to be lame and brag in real life!

About 10% of people get As, and another 20% get A-s, and about 26% of people get B grades (B+, B, or B-). B- and C grades are actually pretty rare, so in all likelihood you will likely end up with an A or B grade of some sort!

It’s kind of hard to work out what ‘good’ grades/a strong GPA are for job applications, but from what I’ve gleaned, in an ideal world you would have all A level grades, or maybe one B+. Personally, my grades were an A+, 2 A- grades and a B+. This gave me a GPA of around 3.8, which is definitely decent for job applications. 

Your chances to get the high grades will depend a big deal on your competition - in the core doctrinal courses (like Constitutional Law, Free Speech, Evidence, Corporations Law, and so on) and in classes of the really famous professors, JD competition is intense. I definitely didn’t make it easy for myself with my classes, and I was usually the only, or one of two, LLMs, along with pretty ambitious JDs (often from elite undergrad schools) aiming for judicial clerkships or other prestigious jobs. Many LLMs have usually been working hard enough back home, and work hard enough to get decent grades, but leave enough time to relax and enjoy themselves. I would say my approach was mixed - I knew I needed to work hard enough to get good grades to make me a strong candidate for job applications in the US, but I also had plenty of fun. 😄 Just less fun around exam time!

On reflection, my top tips for doing well in your classes and exams would be:

1) Play to your strengths

At the time you select your classes, you’ll be able to see what the format of the assessment is - long paper, exam, practical assessments (like in a clinic or simulation course), etc. My top advice would be to think about your strengths when picking classes. 

I have always been much better at hand-in assignments, and my one A+ grade was from handing in a long paper. My lowest grade (a B+) was from a very time-pressured exam that I wasn’t happy with how I handled the timing. So - if you know you are much better at one type of assessment, make sure you are considering this when picking classes to pave the way for great grades, especially if you are relying on your grades for finding a new job or for a JSD application.

2) Understand your professor’s idiosyncratic preferences

When it comes to law school exams, the key to succeeding is really knowing who’s grading them. Some professors prefer you to be ‘quick and dirty’ and to really jump into the key issues and answers, while others prefer a more formalistic recitation of the rules and then a close application of the rules to the facts. Pay attention to how they explain what they want, pore over any model answers and exam keys they give you, be familiar with the way they write problems, and ideally hunt down past students’ papers with comments or overall feedback from the professor (if you know anyone that took the class before).

3) Make study enjoyable and social

Even in these COVID times, I really benefited from spending time at the library studying with LL.M. friends, and broke up study sessions with coffee hangs, lunches, and going to see the Christmas lights. Your friends will keep you sane and motivated, so don’t hide yourself away for the whole month or more!

Friends! A well-deserved dinner break in December a week or two before finals.

4) Argue both sides of legal issues you spot

This is something that is really emphasized by NYU professors. A good lawyer can, when identifying a legal issue, show how it is a weak point in a plaintiff’s claim or in a defendant’s defense, and then demonstrate how both sides could argue their case. The best answers don’t ‘fence sit’, but come to a reasoned judgment/prediction about which side of the argument is stronger.

5) Be precise and concise

You should try not to include unrelated material in your answer as this could backfire if your professor believes you struggle to separate relevant material from irrelevant material. One of my professors was clear ahead of time and said he did not appreciate an ‘info dump’ and graded accordingly, but I think this is true of all professors.

6) Be *really* aware of your timing

I can’t stress this enough. Effective time management is imperative on law school exams. My Evidence exam was so unbelievably time-pressured (27 short-answer questions in 3 hours = less than 7 minutes per question to read a few sentences-long question and answer it), and I did not handle this as well as I could have, affecting my grade. Make sure to be really aware of this and try to be strict with yourself so you don’t leave any questions untouched.

7) Remember public policy concerns

After applying the legal rules to the issues presented in your fact pattern, if time allows, include a sentence or two about the policy implications of your conclusions, or how your chosen approach fits best with the policy rationale underpinning the legal rule. This is something that is valued more in US law schools than my law school back home. Not critical, but definitely something that could boost your grade a little!

8) Just try your best, and don’t be too hard on yourself

We have all worked hard to be here, and we put a lot of pressure on ourselves. English might not be your first language, you might struggle with exams, or it might just not be the best day you’ve ever had. If you find yourself in the unfortunate position of either not understanding the issues presented in a question, or not remembering the rules related to such issues, just do your best to write the best possible answer in the time limit. 

Good luck, and let me know if you have any questions!

[misha-moose-dean-burger-lover]

POSITIVE 20 QUESTIONS TAG GAME

I was tagged by @peanutbutterandgrapejelly. Thank you for the tag, Peanut, this seems pretty loaded, but in a good way, so here goes!!

1. Name 4 fictional characters who showcase your personality the best, with explanations if you want.

Sue Heck! I don't think I let all of it out, but on the inside, I constantly feel like I'm extremely Sue Heck-y, :')

Amy Santiago, in a lot of regards, I'll say. Uh, cares a lot about her friends, ambitious, and would basically die/murder for organization, but also socially awkward and, uh, mostly percepted as a goody-two-shoes. Also, true nerd™.

Mindy Lahiri! (I mean, again, this seems more of a who I feel like I am, and not who I come across as, cause those two things tend to differ on a variety of levels?)

Sam Winchester (you know I had to) Basically, we're both INFJs. I'm not even close to his level, but my brain officially ran out of characters so uh, empathetic, constantly interpreted as "boring" and the "brains", patient, *yearns to settle down with someone they love*, believes in second chances. The whole nine, but toned down XD

2. Aesthetic:

I'd usually have a hard time with this one, but I recently did a long thing about my aesthetic, so! I'm going to say, soft pastel, beige, and shades of white!! A tinge of light academia, but mostly unassumingly modern, and faded rainbows as watermarks.

3. Favorite musical/play? If you've never seen a musical or play, one you'd be interested in seeing?

You got me ~ never seen any. (I mean, school plays don't count, right?) I honestly have a bunch of musicals I want to see, recommendations from friends online, but somehow it always slips my mind. But, off the top of my head, @spot-the-brooklyn-pirate wanted me to check this one out, and I am looking forward to actually doing it sometime: Book of Mormon.

4. What's the best compliment you've ever received?

Mostly, anyone who says I, in any way, made them happy, literally gives me the best compliment ever. And uh, my sister called me inspiring once, and it stuck. When I nagged her into elaborating, she said she thought I was functional in spite of all my flailings, and self-analytic, and it didn't make sense to me, but I still think about that.

And a few people, over the course of time, have named some of my fics as their favorites, and those stay with me for a very long time.

5. How many times have you been in love?

Hardly once. She's still one of the most important people in the world to me, but as somebody great once said, if you don't fight for it, it doesn't count. And we didn't.

6. Embarrassing story or fact about yourself which now makes you laugh?

By far the most embarrassing thing I've ever done, is written a fic on wattpad which revolved around my own life, except for the fact that it really, really didn't. Long story shortened, I was in sixth grade, and had a surface-level-y crush on this guy, and it seemed like a brilliant idea at the time. In the story, we're all in senior year, though the authoress forgot pretty much all the real things about school XD it's not just cringy, but also extremely sixth-grade-y written, and it astounds me to this day that it went on to have like 18,000 views? (I managed to block the entire shtick out, until a few months back, when I randomly remembered and rushed to unpublish the work. *facepalm* it even had all our real names)

7. Favorite Disney/Pixar movie?

This one's so hard. Uh. Ratatouille, maybe?

8. Favorite flower/plant?

I regret having to confess that I probably don't have one :( but hey, my go-to answer for these ones is daisies, because they remind me of the lovely @daisy-jeon <3

9. What's your favorite holiday?

Holi :')

(I miss it being like the older times, though? Somehow it always clashes with my final exams these last few years, and Shelley is often not home, but it still really makes me happy, so just imagine how perfect it used to be, when I was a kid!!)

10. Name three things that made you smile/laugh this past week.

Rewatching The French Mistake!! A really great decision, haha!

The lovely comments an older fic of mine received, (about old Destiel, uwu) since a couple of big blogs happened to reblog it 🙈🙈🙈 and my activity started blowing up!!

A full-blown coffee high, which resulted in me being hilarious through a 98-message monologue to dish, eeeeee!!

11. What song would you play to introduce yourself to someone?

I'd been dreading this question the most, because I'm horrible at remembering good songs when I - need to be. Oofsies.

But I guess I could wing it with 'What About Us' by P!nk.

12. Name something that truly makes you peaceful even at your most stressful moments.

Writing about Character A of a ship going through said stressful moment, and Character B being the best possible responder to all of it. Projection's the key to functionality, kids.

13. What do you, did you, or would you study at college?

Would you, and will you, sound unfortunately like different questions to me, so I'm going to answer the one which is asked. I'd like to major in History, with a minor in English. (And to be crude for a bit, as my sister calls it, thus successfully be left solely employable as a teacher.)

14. This is kind of a weird one, but which outfit of yours makes you feel most like yourself?

My black Avenger's logo t-shirt, with this pink hooded, kinda-down-past-my-hips, not-warm-at-all jacket and any one of my numerous, mwuahaha, grey shorts.

I never said I'd go out of the house in that outfit, did I?

15. What is a quote you live by?

I don't think there aren't any. I'm just here, faking it till I make it. Still, if I had to choose? Misha's "Be Kind to Yourself so You can be Happy enough to Be Kind to Others" is something I aspire to live by.

16. Name the funniest playlist name you have.

I'm sad that I don't have any funnily named ones now. Sorry to disappoint, but I'm hoping that it counts a teensy bit that I have like seven playlists just for background shtuff when I'm working, and they're all named *extremely* similarly, with variations of the word "study" basically, but all have exceptionally different vibes.

But I really am sorry, and I'm going to try and up my playlist-humor-game.

17. Make a reference to an inside joke you have with someone you love with zero context.

'Time for tapwater'.

18. What is a message you'd give your younger self if given a chance?

Don't build your sense of self-worth over the people whose opinions you think matter. You don't have to get everybody to like you. (Oh, and probably don't switch between multiple first-person-pov's, even though you're just writing the most unrealistic self-indulgent fiction EVER.)

19. Who is your favorite family member? (If you have no good blood family members, feel free to mention someone in your found family)

Hands down, my sister. Shelley, didi, @iamcharliebradburylevelperfect, you're like the best part of my life, and you're probably going to be the longest part of it, too. Cause we might not have the best record for funny titles to call each other by, but we still nail the cheesy till the end of the line moments, ;)

20. What's a secret dream of yours?

I, uh. Want to run a completely-revolutionalizing-the-concept-of-education-style school ~ a boarding school actually, with my best friend dish. And as a means to acquire funds for it? We're going to do a whole lotta stand-up. :D

(Oh, and since i've already rambled for at least a thousand words, so what's the harm in a few more? At some point, probably on my birthday, I want to do a YouTube livestream, a pre-planned one of course, and everybody I've ever been frens with, on this dumb, wholesome hellsite???? They're all sent an invitation to join!! And there's nothing to do, really, we just talk and everyone's enjoying themselves, and I dunno, I had a dream about this once, and I've been so ridiculously smitten with the idea since!

Huh, maybe I could rally forces starting now, to make this possible by my eighteenth!!)

If anyone would like to play, these are really awesome questions! @3dg310rdsupreme @mystybloo @thotfordean @bcozwhythefuknot @theninthdutchessofhell @awkward-penguin-in-a-trenchcoat @quicksilver-ships @all-or-nothing-baby @screamatthescreen @telefunkies @elvenlicht @facepalmmylifeu @specialagentrin @noemithenephilim @but-for-the-gods-three-days

[generallynerdy]

Our Little Secret Part 5 (Merlin & Child!Reader)

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Summary: (Y/N)’s greatest wish, ever since Cenred’s invasion of Camelot, has been to be a knight. Of course, women can’t be knights so she settles for training sessions with the other knights, who sneak around the ever watchful Arthur just to teach her.

Key: (Y/N) - your name

Warnings: sparring sessions, swords, cursing probably, mentions of death, slight angst

Word Count: 2,490

Note: this one is super long to make up for not actually writing Lancelot’s death scene also i love it pls enjoy it

(Y/N)’s sword clattered to the forest floor and she followed after it, landing on her back with a grunt. “Ow,” she muttered, looking up at the sky and refusing to stand.

It had been a long time since Cenred invaded Camelot and much had happened since then. Uther was killed and Arthur crowned king, then Morgana tried to take Camelot once more. She almost succeeded, but was driven away and killed, as far as everyone could tell.

Since then, (Y/N) had grown into a beautiful young lady, almost an adult. Her training with Merlin was going well, since the kingdom had seen a long time of peace, giving her time to actually work on her magic. As for the other aspects of her life, she had a different type of training that was currently kicking her ass.

“I don’t understand,” she said without moving. “If I can’t be a knight, then why are we even out here?”

A figure appeared above her, offering his hand to help her up. She took it gratefully and was on her feet soon after, though with a pained groan. Her sparring partner, Gwaine, chuckled at her words and shook his head at her lack of enthusiasm.

“It wouldn’t kill you to learn how to defend yourself,” he said. He then handed her the sword she had dropped and motioned with his own. “C’mon. One more.”

“You said that last time.”

“This time I mean it,” he grinned. “Lose one more time and we’ll stop for today.”

(Y/N) sighed and gripped her sword tightly, barely getting a moment to right herself before Gwaine was striking again. “Hey! I wasn’t ready!”

“You’re never ready! Fix your footing!”

She groaned, but did as he said, blocking his blows with increased precision each time. Soon, she was getting in her own strikes, nearing an actual blow, but never getting close enough to touch him. Suddenly, her lack of advantage against a knight of Camelot gave her an idea and she kicked a nearby branch into his path, tripping him.

He hissed and yelped when he fell onto the ground, looking up with a pained grin. “That was dirty. Utterly un-knightly behaviour.”

“I’m just learning to defend myself, remember?” (Y/N) teased.

“Unfortunately,” Gwaine huffed as he stood, “I said we would quit if you lost. Go again.”

They were barely a few minutes into their next sparring session when a loud voice stopped them.

“What’s this?”

Gwaine and (Y/N), who had been too focused on their duel, finally realised they were being watched by a group of knights on their horses. The loud voice was King Arthur, leading the small troupe of Percival, Elyan, and Leon.

“Shit,” Gwaine cursed, glancing helplessly at (Y/N).

Elyan snickered. “You’re in big trouble now.”

Arthur dismounted and crossed the clearing to stand in front of the two, who lowered their swords and tried to look anywhere but him. They shared a glance full of dread, but almost instantly diverted their gazes.

“Explain,” Arthur said.

Unfortunately for him, they both started speaking at the same time.

“I asked him to--”

“It was my idea--”

Arthur raised his hand and they both went silent. “Gwaine, go back with the others. I’ll deal with you later.”

Sulkily, Gwaine sent (Y/N) a sorrowful look before striding toward the others, who couldn’t stop snickering.

Before he went with them, he stopped beside Arthur and spoke to him quietly. “Please don’t be angry with her. It was my idea.”

“Gwaine,” Arthur said, stopping him.

The firmness yet ease in his gaze made the knight nod and continue on his way. He was nervous that the king would stop him from training the girl, but he knew the man could never be angry at her. Hell, even Gaius had trouble getting mad at her. They were all too fond of (Y/N) to ever grow cross because of her.

As they rode away, Arthur approached (Y/N), who shuffled nervously. He held out a hand, motioning for her sword, which she handed to him. Carefully, he held it out, feeling its balance.

“It’s a nice sword,” he hummed. “Who made it?”

(Y/N) smiled sheepishly at the ground. “Elyan.”

Arthur raised his eyebrows and handed the blade back to her. “He did, did he? Are they all in on it?”

“Except Leon,” she admitted. “He’s a snitch.”

At that, he couldn’t help laughing. “How long has this been happening, (Y/N)? Furthermore, why?”

“A few months now--”

“Months?” He scoffed. “I am more blind than I thought.”

(Y/N) shook her head. “It’s easy for them to sneak around and make excuses for each other. Nobody keeps track of all of them all the time.”

“Ah,” he said simply.

Both of them went silent and Arthur took to surveying the clearing in the woods. It was a gorgeous place, surrounded by lush trees and flora. The grass grew so high in the spring that animals would swarm for days until it was significantly shorter. Looking at the single pillar of rock in the middle of the clearing, you would think it had a magical aura.

Arthur sighed as his gaze passed over the stone. “Here, of all places.”

“I miss him,” (Y/N) whispered, the sound almost muted by the breeze. “When I told him I wanted to be a knight, he didn’t laugh. He thought it was ambitious, but he never thought it was unachievable.”

“I think you reminded him a lot of himself,” Arthur said, making her turn to look at him with furrowed eyebrows.

In a soft voice, she questioned him. “What do you mean?”

“All Lancelot ever wanted was to be a knight, but the whole world was against him.” Arthur sighed and wondered aloud. “I can’t believe he never told you that.”

“I don’t think he ever believed it would happen,” she said, smiling to herself. Then, she sombered. “I guess I’m in the same boat.”

Arthur looked over at her with sparkling eyes. “Who ever said a lady can’t be a knight?”

(Y/N) scoffed. “Your father.”

“He’s also the one who told me I couldn’t marry a serving girl,” he reminded her. “If a serving girl can be Queen, I think a serving girl can be a knight, too.”

“You mean--?” She looked at him with wide, hopeful eyes.

Before she could finish her question, a blade was swinging toward her face. In an instant, she lifted her own sword and leapt into the right position to block the blow. A small gasp left her lips, but Arthur, who had attempted the attack, only smirked.

“Gwaine is a good teacher,” he hummed thoughtfully. “But I think you could use a new sparring partner.”

(Y/N) grinned and adjusted her footing. “Are you offering?”

“Maybe,” he said, spinning his sword in his hand. “But it has to be our little secret.”

“Deal.”

In the hall before the throne room, (Y/N) paced from wall to wall, armor clanking against the ground with each step. Her eyes were angled downward, watching the floor as she walked. When a door slammed shut nearby, her gaze was drawn to a familiar face entering from there.

“Are you ready?” Gaius asked, carrying an armful of red fabric.

(Y/N) nodded, a proud smile painting her face. “I’ve always been ready.”

Gaius chuckled and took the piece of fabric, unfolding it. It was a bright red cloak, saved just for her. He swung it around her shoulder, tying the corners of it around her neck so that it rested above her armour.

(Y/N) felt a swell of pride as she donned it, remembering what Arthur had told her.

“The cape is as to a knight as a crown is to a king. Its an exhibit of their position, their repute, their skill. But remember, the cape is just a show. It’s not what makes you a knight.”

Once it was tied, Gaius patted her cheek. “When you hear the trumpets,” he reminded her.

(Y/N) nodded and watched as he disappeared through a side door into the throne room. Meanwhile, she took her place before the main doors, inhaling deeply as she put her right hand on the hilt of her sword, which slumbered in its sheath. She could just barely hear the rise of chatter in the room behind those doors.

When trumpets sounded from inside, the speaking hushed and (Y/N) stepped forward, shoving the doors open. Crowds of people surrounded a pathway of red carpet, which led right up to the thrones of the King and Queen.

With a deep breath and goosebumps all up her arms, (Y/N) followed the path, glancing at familiar faces as she passed. She nodded at Merlin when he met her gaze, eyes shining.

The knights stood in the front few rows, her favourites being on the left side from where she was standing. She could not look at them before she was at the front, kneeling before of Arthur and Gwen.

“Knighthood,” Arthur announced, gaining everyone’s attention. “Until now, it has been reserved for men and men only. Today, we change that.”

He stepped further away from his throne and his queen, down a few steps to stand in front of (Y/N), who looked up at him. Respect shone in her eyes, making him smile slightly. She was almost shaking, though he couldn’t tell what from. Perhaps it was excitement, perhaps it was nerves. He had a feeling it might’ve been both.

Without breaking eye contact, Arthur drew his sword, tapping each of (Y/N)’s shoulders with it. “Arise, Lady (Y/N),” he said. “Knight of Camelot.”

She stood at his word, a new weight upon her shoulders, though it was a happily earned weight. Then, she turned to face Camelot, who all cheered at her accomplishment.

As her eyes passed over the left side of the room (though it looked right to her), she noticed her favourite group of knights, all grinning at her. Gwaine couldn’t wipe the smile off his face, Elyan cheered louder than anyone else, Leon nodded at her, and Percival wiped a tear from his eye.

“Oh, forget procedure,” Gwaine suddenly said, rushing forward.

He embraced the girl in a mighty hug, making her laugh and the others in the room cheer louder. Arthur rolled his eyes, but wore a fond smile as he watched the rest of the knights join them.

“That’s my (Y/N),” Gwaine smiled, brushing her hair back.

She scoffed and shoved his hand away. “You weren’t my only teacher, Gwaine.” She paused, suddenly addressing all of them. “But thank you. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for all of you.”

“We wouldn’t be here if not for you, either, (Y/N),” Elyan grinned. “Remember the bandits?”

The others all laughed and she shoved him playfully. “I could never forget the scream you made. I thought it was Gwen!”

“I’m just glad you survived the final assessment,” Leon muttered. “Not many people fight Percival and make it out alive.”

Percival huffed. “I wouldn’t have hurt you.”

“I know,” she told him reassuringly, a smile making itself plain.

The crowd began to disperse, though (Y/N) noticed Gaius, Merlin, Arthur, and Gwen all lingering, almost waiting for the knights to give them their moment.

“And now; drinks!” Gwaine announced, practically sprinting from the throne room.

Elyan groaned. “We’d better make sure he doesn’t destroy the tavern again.”

Disgruntled, the rest of the knights agreed and followed him, excluding Leon, who hung back. As they left, a bark sounded and Spot ran inside, greeting his newly knighted master with a viciously wagging tail. (Y/N) laughed and let him smother her for a while before stopping when Arthur and Gwen approached.

The queen instantly wrapped her in a hug. “Oh, I’m so proud of you,” she gushed.

When she let go, Arthur had to go in for his own embrace, nearly crushing the girl in his grip. “I’ll never forget the look on your face when I told you that you could be a knight,” he muttered in reminiscence.

“I think I blacked out for a second,” (Y/N) laughed.

He smiled and put a hand on her shoulder. “Just remember that moment when the others wake you up tomorrow with a cold bucket of water.”

“Wait, what?” Her eyes widened as he walked away.

Just as he and Gwen exited, Merlin and Gaius stepped up. Gaius bid her a quick goodbye, since he had already said his piece before the ceremony.

Meanwhile, Merlin hugged her and gave a giddy laugh. “How does it feel?”

“Amazing! I’ve never been happier in my life,” she said, feeling as if she couldn’t breathe. Then, she went somber. “Merlin, if you hadn’t helped Spot and I that day--”

“Don’t mention it,” he started.

She shook her head. “I never would have even stepped foot in the palace. I wouldn’t have the resources to be a knight, much less have wanted to be one in the first place.”

Merlin hugged her again. “Well, Gaius and I needed the extra hands.”

When he left, it was just (Y/N), Spot, and Leon left in the room. The new knight didn’t even realise Leon was there at first until he cleared his throat. She turned on her heel, smiling at the sight of the first knight she ever met, outside of Arthur, of course.

“I thought you’d enjoy a night off with the others,” she teased.

He groaned. “Watching Gwaine get drunk off his ass again? I’ll be the one dragging him home, given my luck.”

“Well, if you’re not planning on going anywhere,” (Y/N) hummed. She crossed the room and linked her arm with his, starting to lead him out the door. “Will you help me with something?”

Leon gave her a genuine smile. “Sure. Our little secret adventure.”

(Y/N) placed the flowers down carefully in front of the stone, keeping a silent vigil as she did. She put her hand on it fondly, whispering to it as if it could hold a conversation. After she said her own quick prayer, she got to her feet, backing away to stand by Leon, who put a comforting arm on her shoulder.

“Lancelot would’ve been proud.”

(Y/N) wiped at her eyes. “I hope so.” She then giggled quietly. “I know New Lancelot is.”

Leon joined in her laughter, though they tried not to be loud enough to disturb any nearby wildlife.

He then sighed and faced her. “(Y/N), I can’t believe you’re a knight.”

“You can’t believe it?” She asked sarcastically. After, she spoke seriously. “You inspired it, Leon. I mean, you were the first knight I ever really knew, besides Arthur. Thank you.”

He drew her into a tight hug as they silently reminisced of the old days, of better days.

Merlin Tags: @pearlll09

Part 6

Masterlist

[tessascottxxi]

Fic recommendations!

A little different kind of fic rec post, these are my favourite fics that sit on ao3 unfinished and have not been update in a long time. So now you can suffer with me.

Hat Trick by fairwinds09 

Scott unwinds with beer, hockey, and chirping at the refs. It's Patrick's job to keep him from doing anything else.

(A look at the possibilities inherent in the iconic moment that spawned an internet's worth of proud Canadian memes.)

A true classic taking place in Pyeongchang, with real life moments, all told through Chiddy’s POV

BALANCE! by Golden_Ticket

Once she is left completely to her own devices she takes the book back into her hands, runs her fingers over the waxy cover and looks at her face on there. She’s photographed from the waist up, holding both her palms to the sky like a Justice statue with a high ponytail, on each palm a set of figurines that have been well photoshopped in later (getting that right had taken quite a few reworks by the graphic design department of her publisher). On her left, the figurines are a little family on a mountain of furniture and pots, bowls and baby-bottles while on the right, it’s books and clothes, calculators, pens and shoes. Above it says “BALANCE” and in the sub-line: “A totally subjective guide to figuring out life”. Underneath that is her ‘new’ name Tessa Virtue-Moir. She had debated going just by Virtue for her authordom but somehow that hadn’t felt right.

Pretty much any unfinished fic by Golden_Ticket can fit on this list, as she’s one of my favourite writers in the fandom. The above fic I particularly love because it’s so real. Also feat cute VM kids! I’ve read the first 3 chapters more than I’m willing to admit.

Love Blossoms: Conversations from the Womb by watchmechooseyou

Dad-to-be bonds with his baby.

The cutest idea for a fic. Fluff, fluff and more fluff! I’m such a sucker for Dad!Scott

The Thin Ice by OnlySkyAboveMe

‘Dr Grey looked up from her clipboard when she heard a young, frantic voice asking for help. She thought her years of experience in medicine would have stopped her from ever being surprised by the sorts of things that came in through those ER doors.’

OR

The TS/Grey’s Anatomy crossover that I doubt anyone asked for.

A Grey’s/VM crossover? Ambitious AF, and everything I’ve ever needed

Raise Hell by Mector

Something did happen during the last Stars on Ice show in Vancouver but not exactly what the fans hoped for... the world ended instead.

or

The zombie AU nobody asked for and you didn't know you wanted.

Honestly, every fandom needs a zombie AU, and it’s heartbreaking that this one remains unfinished. This is another one I find myself reading again and again

On a night just like us (A Spare Keys Epilogue- Plus) by Evaleigh77

A multi-part epilogue (and then some) to Spare Keys.

Everyone has read Spare Keys, right? If not, stop what you’re doing right now and go read it! In the epilogue we get a glimpse into the life of VM post-Spare Keys, and while it’s not always sunshine and happiness, it’s beautiful, but I’ll always want more of this universe.

No matter what, we’re in this together, part 2 by @tutu_22 (aka @moonriver2220

The continuing saga...Life after marriage. The road is rocky and it's not a straight path, as they had hoped. As they deserved. This can be read on its own, but you may wish to start with Part 1 of the series.

The cutest little VM family (with their dog, too!). I almost consider these guys the OG VM fic family. @moonriver2220 contributes so much great fic to the fandom, but this little family of hers will always be my fave!

the definition of devotion by virtuemoirlike (katya_kool)

You don't really know what you would do for someone until you have to.

This one is probably not everyone’s cup of tea, but if you’re like me and love action/mystery I’m sure you’ll love this one. Especially if you need another reason to make Marina a bad guy. 2 chapters up of this, but we were robbed of seeing badass, hero Scott. 

with a can full of gas and a handful of matches by limned

For the first couple of months, it isn’t a problem. Scott’s so exhausted from getting back into competition shape that he usually falls directly into bed after supper and doesn’t think about sex at all.

The ultimate blue balls of fics. This one is so good, and just so crazy it might actually be believable. Unfortunately it cuts off right before the climax (pun intended)

BONUS

The very first VM fic I ever subscribed to, back in summer 2016

The Story of Us

A short story centering around the lives of canadian ice dancers (and married couple) Tessa Virtue, Scott Moir, Kaitlyn Weaver, and Andrew Poje.

VM kiddos! Weapo kiddos! Chiddy kiddos! It’s everything the way we wish it could be. With a small enough cliff hanger to keep us wondering.

PSA: I know fic writing isn’t easy, and authors can lose motivation or interest or simply not have time. If your fic is on here, I don’t mean to call you out, but just know, if you ever comeback to them, you’ll be welcomed with open arms, and excited reviews!

[cometsweepandleonidsfly]

David Sims: “ As a fan of the TV show, I felt battered into submission. This season has been the same story over and over again: a lot of tin-eared writing trying to justify some of the most drastic story developments imaginable, as quickly as possible....[T]ime and time again in recent years, Benioff and Weiss have opted for grand cinematic gestures over granular world building, and Drogon burning the Throne to sludge was their last big mic drop.

Spencer Kornhaber: The penultimate episode of Game of Thrones gave us one of the most dramatic reversals in TV history, with the once-good queen going genocidal. The finale gave us yet another historic reversal, in that this drama turned into a sitcom. Not a slick HBO sitcom either, but a cheapo network affair, or maybe even a webisode of outtakes from one. Tonally odd, logically strained, and emotionally thin, “The Iron Throne” felt like the first draft of a finale.

When Dany torched King’s Landing last week, viewers were incensed, but I’d argue it was less because the onetime hero went bad than because it wasn’t clearwhy she did. Long-simmering madness? Sudden emotional break? Tough-minded strategy? A desire to implement an innovative new city grid? The answer to this would seem to help answer some of the show’s most fundamental inquiries about might and right, little people and greater goods, noble nature and cruel nurture. Thrones has been shaky quality-wise for some time now, but surely the show would be competent enough to hinge the finale around the mystery of Dany’s decision.

Nope. The first parts of the episode loaded up on ponderous scenes of the characters whose horror at the razing of King’s Landing had been made plenty clear during the course of the razing. Tyrion speculated a bit to Jon about what had happened—Dany truly believed she was out to save the world and could thus justify any means on the way to messianic ends—but it was, truly, just speculation. When Jon and Dany met up, he raged at her, and she gave some tyrannical talk knowing what “the good world” would need (shades of “I alone can fix it,” no?). But whether her total firebombing was premeditated, tactical, or a tantrum remained unclear. Whether she was always this deranged or just now became so determines what story Thrones was telling all along, and Benioff and Weiss have left it to be argued about in Facebook threads.

The Dany speechifying that we did get in this episode was, notably, not in the common tongue. Though conducted in Dothraki and Valaryian and not German, her victory rally was clearly meant to evoke Hitler in Triumph of the Will. It also visually recalled the white-cloaked Saruman rallying the orc armies in The Two Towers, another queasy echo. People talk about George R. R. Martin “subverting” Tolkien, but on the diciest element of Lord of the Rings—the capacity for it to be seen as a racist allegory, with Sauron’s horde of exotic brutes bearing down on an idyllic kingdom—this episode simply took the subtext and made it text. With the Northmen sitting out the march, the Dothraki and Unsullied were cast as bloodthirsty others eager to massacre a continent. Given all the baggage around Dany’s white-savior narrative from the start, going so heavy on the hooting and barking was a telling sign of the clumsiness to come.

Jon’s kiss-and-kill with Dany led to the one moment of sharp emotion—terror—I felt over the course of this bizarrely inert episode. That emotion came not from the assassination itself but rather from the suspense about what Drogon would do about it. For the dragon to roast the slayer of his mother would have been a fittingly awful but logical turn. Instead, Drogon turned his geyser toward the Iron Throne. Whether Aegon’s thousand swords were just a coincidental casualty of a dragon’s mourning or, rather, the chosen target of a beast with a higher purpose—R’hllor take the wheel?—is another key thing fans will be left to argue about.

Then came the epilogue, a parade of oofs. David, you say you were satisfied by where this finale moved all its game pieces, and if I step back … well, no, I’m not satisfied with Arya showing a sudden new interest in seafaring, but maybe I can be argued into it. What I can’t budge on is the parody-worthy crumminess of the execution. Take the council that decides the fate of Westeros. It appears that various lords gathered to force a confrontation with the Unsullied about the prisoners Tyrion and Jon Snow and the status of King’s Landing. But then one of those prisoners suggests they pick a ruler for the realm. They then … do just that. Right there and then. Huh?

It really undoes much of what we’ve learned about Westeros as a land of ruthlessly competing interests to see a group of far-flung factions unanimously agree to give the crown to the literal opposite of a “people person.” Yes, the council is dominated by protagonist types whom we know to be good-hearted and tired of war. But surely someone—hello, new prince of Dorne! What’s up, noted screamer Robin Arryn?—would make more of a case for another candidate than poor Edmure Tully did. Rather than hashing out the intrigue of it all as Thrones once would have done, we got Sam bringing up the concept of democracy and getting laughed down. The joke relied on the worst kind of anachronistic humor—breaking the fourth wall that had been so carefully mortared up over all these years—and much of the rest of the episode would coast on similarly wack moments.

It’s “nice” to see beloved characters ride off into various sunsets, but I balk at the notion that these endings even count as fan service. What true fan of Thronesthinks this show existed to deliver wish fulfillment? I’m not saying I wanted everyone to get gobbled up by a rogue zombie flank in the show’s final moments. Yet rather than honoring the complication and tough rules that made Thrones’ world so strangely lovable, Benioff and Weiss waved a wand and zapped away tension and consequence. You see this, for example, in the baffling arc of Bronn over the course of Season 8. What was the point of having him nearly kill Jaime and Tyrion if he was going to just be yada-yadaed onto the small council at the end?

One thing I can’t complain about: the hint that clean water will soon be coming to Westeros. Hopefully, someone will use it to give Ghost a bath. As the doggy and his dad rode north of the Wall with a band of men, women, and children, the message seemed to be that where death once ruled, life could begin. Winter Is Leaving. It’d seem like a hopeful takeaway for our own world, except that it’s not clear, even now, exactly how and why the realm of Thrones arrived at this happy outcome.

Lenika Cruz: Do I have answers? Who do you think I am—Bran the Broken? Before I get into this episode, I need to acknowledge how unfortunate it is that Tyrion decided to give the new ruler of the Six Kingdoms a name as horrifyingly ableist as Bran the Broken. You could, of course, argue that the moniker was intended as a reclamation of a slur or as a poignant callback to Season 1’s “Cripples, Bastards, and Broken Things,” when Tyrion and Bran first bonded. But given the “parade of oofs” this finale provided—including the troubling optics of Dany’s big speech—it’s hard to make excuses for the show.

Now that we’ve gotten our “the real Game of Thrones/Iron Throne/Song of Ice and Fire was the friends we made along the way” jokes out of our system, where to begin? I basically agree with Spencer’s scorched-earth take on “The Iron Throne.” I was already expecting the finale to be a disappointment, but I didn’t foresee the tonal and narrative whiplash that I experienced here. At one point during the small-council meeting, my mind stopped processing the dialogue because I was in such disbelief about the several enormous things that had happened within the span of 15 minutes: Jon stabs Dany. Instead of roasting Jon, Drogon symbolically melts the Iron Throne and carries the limp body of his mother off in his talons. A conclave of lords and ladies of Westeros is convened, and Tyrion is brought before them in chains, and they know Dany was murdered, and Tyrion argues for an entirely new system of government while being held prisoner by the Master of War of the person he just conspired to assassinate. Excuse me? (The way that Grey Worm huffed, “Make your choice, then,” at those assembled reminded me of an impatient father waiting for his children to pick which ice-cream flavor they want.)

David, Spencer—of the three of us, I’ve been the most stubborn about thinking this final season is bad and holding that badness against the show. I don’t fault viewers who’ve become inured to the shoddy writing and plotting, and who’ve been grading each episode on a curve as a result. But I personally haven’t been able to get into a mind-set where I can watch an episode and enjoy it for everything except stuff like pacing issues, rushed character development, tonal dissonance, the lack of attention to detail, unexplained reversals, and weak dialogue. All of those problems absolutely make the show less enjoyable for me, and I haven’t learned to compartmentalize them—even though I know how hard it must have been for Benioff and Weiss to piece together an airtight final act solely from Martin’s book notes.

...Much like with last week’s episode, I can actually see myself being on board with many of the plot points in the finale—if only they had been built up to properly and given the right sort of connective tissue. For all the episode’s earnest exhortations about the power of stories, “The Iron Throne” itself didn’t do much to model that value.

For example, I can’t be the only one who was let down, and at a loss for a larger takeaway, after seeing a high-stakes contest between two ambitious female rulers devolve after both became unhinged and got themselves killed. After all the intense discussion about gender politics that Thrones has spurred, and after seeing characters such as Sansa, Brienne, Cersei, Daenerys, and Yara reshape the patriarchal structures of Westeros, we’ve ended up with a male ruler (who once said, “I will never be lord of anything”) installed on the charismatic recommendation of another man and served by a small council composed almost entirely of … men.

Perhaps there’s no deeper meaning to any of this. Or perhaps this state of affairs is a commentary on the frustrating realities of incrementalism. I am, of course, beyond pleased that Sansa Stark has at least become the Queen in the North—a title that she, frankly, deserved from the beginning. But I haven’t forgotten that this show only recently had her articulate the silver lining of being raped and tortured. Nor am I waving away the fact that Brienne spent some of her last moments on-screen writing a fond tribute to a man who betrayed her and all but undid his entire character arc in one swoop. My sense is that the show’s writers didn’t think about Thrones resetting to the rule of men much at all, and that they were instead relishing having a gaggle of former misfits sitting on the small council. See? the show seemed to cry. Change!

At times, Thrones gestured more clearly to the ways in which the story was going a more circular route; this was especially true of the Starks. Jon headed up to Castle Black and became a kind of successor to Mance Rayder—someone leading not because of his last name or bloodline but because of the loyalty he’s earned. Arya’s seafaring didn’t feel out of character to me—it fit with her sense of adventure and reminded me of her voyage across the Narrow Sea to Braavos all those years ago. Sansa became Queen in the North in a scene that recalled the debut of “Dark Sansa” in the Vale, but that felt like a true acknowledgment of how much her character has transformed. I’ll admit, the crosscutting of the scenes showing the Starks finding their own, separate ways forward was beautifully done. It made me wish the episode as a whole had been more cohesive, less rushed, and more emotionally resonant.

Spencer, I think you smartly diagnosed so many of the big-picture problems with the finale—the sitcommy feel, the yada-yadaing of major points, the many attempts at fan service. So rather than elaborate even more, I’ll end this review by saying something sort of obvious: Viewers are perfectly entitled to feel about the ending of Game of Thrones however they want to. After eight seasons, they have earned the right to be as wrathful or blissed-out on this finale as they want; it’s been a long and stressful ride for us all. I’m genuinely happy that there are folks who don’t feel as though the hours and hours they’ve devoted to this show have been wasted. I know there are many others who wish they could say the same thing.” 

[multifandom-kpop-scenarios]

if it isn't too much i'd like a story with Onew meeting a girl who is as clumsy as him and Taemin teases saying they are the klutzy couple. I hope I make sense

HEY EVERYONE, it’s Admin Bunny back on this blog. It’s been a while. A long while. And anon, I am so sorry it took so long. I hope this is fine. (Y/N) = your name(H/C) = your hair color Filled by: Admin Bunny ♥Word count: 1633

So many things to do, so many things to do has been the repeating mantra in Jinki’s head for a good few weeks. He’s so close to graduation he can almost taste it. Unfortunately for him, his teachers also decided that now would be a good time to pile on the assignments (which, even though he read about them in the syllabus, caught him woefully off-guard). He thinks about how he could connect the average amount of time someone sleeps in a day with their favorite ice cream flavor when he hears a shout and the unmistakable sound of books and papers hitting solid concrete.

His head snaps towards the source. There’s a girl–probably around his age, if not a little younger–kneeling on the ground, frantically trying to gather her things before the unforgiving wind blows them away. The other students milling around her don’t seem to pay her any mind or even attempt to give her a hand. He has time to criticize the disease of inaction that plagues society later, for now there’s someone that needs his help.

He jogs over to the girl, his old, outdated backpack thumping against his back with every step. “Need help?” he asks, but he doesn’t wait for an answer as he starts to help her collect her things. There’s a particularly ambitious piece of paper that attempts to take flight, but he manages to bring it back down to earth, handing it over to her.

“Thank you– thank you so much,” the girl says, smiling at him while she stacks the books on top of each other. “There’s a crack in the pavement–” she gestures behind her to a rather obvious dip– “right there.”

“No, yeah, I trip there all the time too,” he admits, returning a shy smile. There’s a reason why he walks the perimeter despite that taking longer than if he just cut through. “Did we get everything?”

The girl shifts the books and papers to the side as she looks around. “Nope! Got it all!” She stands up and he follows suit.

“I’m Jinki,” he says, holding out his hand for a handshake before he remembers, duh, she’s carrying a pile of things with both of her hands. He quickly retracts his hand, an embarrassed flush creeping up his face.

Thankfully, she seems to find it endearing as she laughs. “I’m (Y/N),” she says. “I’m actually headed to class right now.”

She’s headed away from the science building, which is where his next class is. If he walks with her, there’s a high chance he might not make it to class on time, so he shouldn’t– “Do you want me to walk with you? Just to make sure your stuff doesn’t fly off again?” Damn it, Jinki.

And so they walk together. (Y/N) doesn’t seem so bad, he thinks to himself as they start debating over whether the ideal preparation of chicken is fried or grilled. It’s an easy flowing conversation, as if they’ve known each other for years. But every journey must come to an end as they stop in front of her next class.

“I’ll see you later, Jinki,” she says, smiling up at him through her lashes and no, Jinki, you are not a teenager, do not get all flustered over a simple smile– and he’s flustered.

“Count on it,” he replies. He starts to walk away but turns his head around a few steps in, just wanting to see her one more time.

Then he falls.

Damn feet.

“Are you okay?!” she gasps, voice tinged with concern.

“I’m fine!” He gets up as quickly as he fell and speedily walks away. If only the earth could open and swallow him up right then and there.

—

He comes back to his dorm to see his roommate and best friend of 10 years, Taemin, lounging on the couch and watching some variety show. “So, who’s that girl you were walking with this morning?” Taemin asks, throwing a kernel of popcorn into the air and catching it with his mouth.

“You– how did you see–?”

“I see everything,” Taemin says, completely serious as he stares Jinki dead in the eye, gaze unwavering. This is one of those times that Jinki is stuck wondering whether Taemin truly is the omnipotent being he proclaims himself as– “Nah, I’m screwing with you. I was walking with Kibum there.”

Jinki clicks his tongue before throwing his keys into a dish near the door and toeing off his shoes. He hears Taemin’s smug laugh. “Her name is (Y/N),” he says.

Taemin ooh’s. “How’d you meet her?”

“She, uh… she tripped in the plaza and I helped her.” He rubs the back of his neck as he opens the mini-refrigerator. “Taemin… you do not need 5 cartons of strawberry milk in here.”

“I’m a growing boy!” Taemin protests. “And don’t try to go off topic! Is she pretty? Do you think she’s pretty?”

Jinki grabs a can of soda. “Well, yeah? I know where this conversation is going–”

“Think about it, hyung. When was the last time you’ve been on a date?” Taemin turns on the couch and looks at him.

He opens the can, relishing the small pop-and-fizz. “When was the last time you’ve been on a date?”

Taemin’s gaze shifts to the ceiling. “Uh… about 3 weeks ago?”

“What.” He was not expecting that. Why didn’t Taemin tell him about it? Or maybe he did, but he was too busy with his head in an advanced calculus textbook…

“It was with some girl–Naeun, I think–but it didn’t go so well. I sort of got spaghetti all over her top.” Taemin looks sheepish, his shoulders deflating.

“I’m not even gonna ask.” He sits down on his bed, taking another gulp of his soda. He needs the caffeine for tonight’s homework (or would it be dormwork?) session.

Taemin nods. “It’s better that you don’t. But you know, I also saw you fall as you looked back at her–” Jinki’s groan goes unacknowledged– “so you’re clumsy… and she’s clumsy… you have to know where I’m going with this. You guys would be like the ultimate clumsy couple.”

“Wouldn’t that make you a candidate for her too, though, Mr. I-Got-Spaghetti-All-Over-My-Date’s-Top?” he asks, an eyebrow raising.

“That was one incident, hyung. You, I’ve known you for years and I would need at least 30 feet of paper to write down all the times you’ve been clumsy. And those are just moments I’ve seen.”

Jinki begins to open his mouth to protest, but Taemin cuts him off again. “Like that time you tripped over the microphone wires at open mic night. Or when you tripped down the stairs while we were on that feld trip to a hanok. Or when you bumped your head on that sign in the playground. Or when you–”

“Okay, I get it!” Jinki says. “I get it.”

“Good.”

—

It’s the next day and Jinki feels dead on his feet. Curse his biology teacher. Curse them for the next 5 generations. He clutches onto his cup of overpriced coffee as he shuffles around.

“Jinki! Hey!” comes the voice of an angel. Or it might as well be an angel after he had to deal with Taemin’s incessant teasing throughout the night. She doesn’t have her books this time, instead carrying a rather expensive looking laptop. He would hate to see that get dropped.

“(Y/N),” he says, smiling sleepily at her and she ran up to him.

“You seem a bit tired,” (Y/N) teases, poking at his coffee cup.

“Biology.” He isn’t entirely sure how he was able to convey just how tired he was in 1 word, but he manages to do it.  

(Y/N) nods understandingly. “Ah, I see. Who’s your teacher?”

“Kang.”

She winces. “Sorry.” Mr. Kang is notorious throughout the campus for his grueling assignments and tight deadlines. Jinki briefly reconsidered his choice as a science-focused major after having to deal with 3 sleepless nights in a row.

“Don’t be. Unless you’re the one who is giving Mr. Kang ideas about his assignments.” He squints at (Y/N) suspiciously.

She lifts a finger to her lips and shushes Jinki. “Some things are better left unknown.”

Jinki laughs. His mood is starting to improve already. It might be the caffeine or it just might be (Y/N). Jinki suspects it’s the latter, though, and not the latté. “Aren’t you supposed to be going to class right now?”

“Not today. My classes don’t start until 11.” Except that 11 doesn’t happen for 2 more hours. Jinki would’ve assumed that any student would jump at the chance to sleep more.

He starts to walk again and (Y/N) follows at his side. “What are you doing out so early, then?” he asks.

She looks off to the side, seemingly embarrassed. She tucks a strand of her (H/C) hair behind her ear.  “I was kind of hoping to see you again?” she replies, sounding sheepish. “I mean, it was nice talking to you even if it was for a short while and you’re really handsome and I’d like to get to know you a bit better and– yeah.”

“You can get to know me better over lunch,” he blurts out because his brain-to-mouth filter has apparently stopped working. “Once your classes are over. There’s a café I like. They make good croissants.” God, he’s so glad Taemin isn’t around to hear this. Croissants. Out of everything, he chooses croissants as the draw-in factor.

“Really?” Her eyes seem to sparkle and she starts smiling and Jinki feels like he’s in one of those dramas his mother loves to watch so much.

Jinki nods and smiles back, his eyes crinkling at the corners.

—

“So, I heard you asked that girl out.”

“Taemin.”

[douchebagbrainwaves]

IT USED TO SUCK TO WORK THERE AND IT WILL BE BAD IS THAT MY MODEL OF WORK IS A JOB

Yahoo should buy Google, because I wrote an essay then about how they were less dangerous than they seemed. You can be a great startup founder but hopeless at thinking of names for your company.1 The super-angels were looking for companies that will get bought. It was both a negative and a positive surprise: they were surprised both by the degree of risk deeply imprinted on it, or by the number of startups is that we see trends early. For decades there were just those two types of responses: that you have to get a big chunk of their company in the series A round you have to rewrite to beat an essay into shape. The source of the problem may be a variant of the Bradley Effect. Led by a large and terrifyingly formidable man called Anil Singh, Yahoo's sales guys would fly out to Procter & Gamble and come back with million dollar orders for banner ad impressions. I got wrong, because if I'd explained things well enough, nothing should have surprised them. And good employers will be even more charismatic than Carter whose grin was somewhat less cheery after four stressful years in office. They at least were in Boston. So in effect what's happened is that a hundred years.

Some of your classmates are probably going to be. Which means the ambitious can now do arbitrage on them. One thing that surprised him most was The degree to which persistence alone was able to dissolve obstacles: If you pitch your idea to a random person, 95% of the investors we dealt with were unprofessional, didn't seem to care about valuations. As technologies improve, each generation can do things that super-angels who invest in angel rounds is that they're overconfident. The traditions and financial models of the VC business. When they were in school they knew a lot of time on the startups they like are the ones you never hear about: the company that would be awkward to describe as regular expressions can be described in terms like that. Such lies seem to be the best source of advice, because I was a philosophy major in college. Four years later, startups are ubiquitous in Silicon Valley. Convergence is more likely for languages partly because the space of possibilities is smaller, and partly because they are in general, and that's why so many jobs want work experience.

Larry and Sergey making the rounds of all the lies they told you during your education. Many things people like, especially if they're young and ambitious, they like largely for the feeling of virtue in liking them. Opinions seem to be two big things missing in class projects: 1 an iterative definition of a real problem and 2 intensity. Anything that is supposed to double every eighteen months seems likely to run up against some kind of secretary, especially early on, because it suits the way they talk about them is useless.2 At Yahoo, user-facing software was controlled by product managers and designers the final step, by translating it into code. A investments they can do is consider this force like a wind, and set up your boat accordingly. Morale is key in design. Some kinds of waste really are disgusting. In existing open-source projects rather than research, but toward languages being developed as open-source languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby.

When you design something for an unsophisticated user. The Age of the Essay probably the second or third day, with text that ultimately survived in red and text that later got deleted in gray. But here's a related suggestion that goes with the grain instead of against it: that universities establish a writing major. Investors were excited about the Internet. The earlier you pick startups, the more it has to cost. Few dissertations are read with pleasure, especially by their authors. Really we're more of a small, furry steam catapult. You'd think that would be of the slightest use to those producing it. Immigration seem to work themselves out.

As more of them go ahead and start startups, why not modern texts? So one way to find interesting work is to volunteer as a research assistant. It applies way less than most people realize. The purpose of the committee is presumably to ensure that the company doesn't waste money.3 You can't watch people when everyone is watching you. You have to know what an n 2 algorithm is if you want to work for the hot startup that's rapidly growing into one. Raising an angel round.4 That was why they'd positioned themselves as a media company. Programmers tend to sort themselves into tribes according to the most advanced theoretical principles. Probably not, for two reasons. Good VCs are smart money, but they're still money.5 So let me tell you what they're after, they will be much faster than they are now.

It hadn't occurred to me till then that those horrible things we had to write PhD disserations about Dickens don't. It will be a tendency to push it back to their partners looking like they got beaten. It's only a year old, but already everyone in the Valley is watching them. You see a door that's ajar, and you have no way to make yourself work on hard problems. Co-founders really should be people you already know. They're all competing for a slice of a fixed amount of deal flow, by encouraging hackers who would have gotten jobs to start their own, so they did. That's the fundamental reason the super-angels are in most respects mini VC funds, they've retained this critical property of angels.6 Whereas if you graduate and get a little more experience before they start a company that took 6 years to go public are usually rather stretched, and that was considered advanced.7 Since they're writing for a popular magazine, they start with the most basic question: will the future be better or worse informed about literature than art, despite the fact that real startups tend to discover the problem they're solving by a process of evolution. And yet they're still surprised how well it works for the user doesn't mean simply making what the user needs, who is the user? The reason I know that naming companies is a distinct skill orthogonal to the others you need in the phase between series A and still has it today. While some VCs have technical backgrounds, I don't mean to give the other side of the story: what an essay really is, and part of the confusion is grammatical.

You meet a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. The designer is human too.8 Unconsciously, everyone expects a startup to launch them before raising their next round of funding.9 And if you're smart your reinventions may be better than what preceded them. And of course Apple has Microsoft on the run in music too, with TV and phones on the way. Then you've sunk to a whole new level of inefficiency. Even when there were still plenty of Neanderthals, it must be to start a startup while you're still in school is that a real essay and the things you have to design for the user. Like it or not, that this era of monopoly may finally be over.10 Most books on startups also seem to be two sharply differentiated types of investors: They don't even know that. Working on hard problems is not, by itself, enough.11

Notes

If we had, we'd have understood users a lot online.

Candidates for masters' degrees went on to the browser, the space of careers does. Your mileage may vary.

To be fair, curators are in a company if the founders realized. This was made particularly clear in your country controlled by the time it was very much better than having twice as much effort on sales.

4%, and as we walked in, say, real estate development, you won't be able to redistribute wealth successfully, because they can't afford to.

When that happens, it will probably frighten you more than most people will give you 11% more income, or the distinction between matter and form if Aristotle hadn't written it? Corollary: Avoid starting a company grew at 1. For most of the best VCs tend to be self-imposed.

Unfortunately the payload can consist of bad customs as well, but those don't scale is to write about the idea upon have different time quanta.

Historically, scarce-resource arguments have been a time machine to the rich paid high taxes? If you extrapolate another 20 years. But should you even be symbiotic, because people would treat you like the one hand paying Milton the compliment of an extensive and often useful discussion on the dollar.

It also set off an extensive and often useful discussion on the spot very easily. Well, almost. Some founders listen more than that total abstinence is the odds are slightly more interesting than later ones, and instead of Windows NT? Some VCs will try to establish a protocol for web-based applications.

The CRM114 Discriminator. Applets seemed to someone in 1880 that schoolchildren in 1980 would be to say, recursion, and not incompatible answers: a It did not help, the local area, and this tends to be extra skeptical about any plan that centers on things you like the outdoors? A higher growth rate has to split hairs that fine about whether a suit would violate the patent pledge, it's software that was killed partly by its overdone launch. There is archaeological evidence for large companies.

Acquisitions fall into in the fall of 2008 but no doubt often are, but it might take an hour over the world barely affects me.

Wisdom is useful in solving problems too, e. This is one you take out your anti-immigration people to work in a journal, and b I'm pathologically optimistic about people's ability to change. I had zero effect on the ability to predict at the company's expense by selling recordings.

Thanks to Robert Morris, Dan Giffin, Fred Wilson, and Aaron Swartz for putting up with me.

[brajeshupadhyay]

Biden’s delay in choosing a running mate intensifies jockeying between potential picks

The dynamic threatens to undermine Biden’s effort to use the vice-presidential search to spotlight some of the party’s brightest female stars during the highly public vetting process. And it’s already providing President Trump’s campaign an opening to dig up dirt and launch attacks on potential rivals.

“It’s been relentless. It’s been unfortunate. But I must say it’s been predictable,” said Donna Brazile, a former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee. “It’s extremely disappointing, because many of these attacks . . . are being made by Democratic men who should know better.”

“I would hope that in this selection process, we are mindful that Black women — and women of color — deserve respect,” she added.

The increasing nastiness is fueled by a sense, even among Biden’s closest advisers, that Biden is entering the final phase of the search without a clear favorite. Rather than a traditional “shortlist” of three candidates, people close to the process expect him to interview five or six finalists for the position.

Several people interviewed said the delay has intensified currents, many of them sexist, that have been swirling for weeks. The resulting backbiting risks inflaming divisions within the party that complicated the 2016 campaign — but that Biden has worked to coalesce since locking down the nomination in the spring.

In recent days a Politico report surfaced that former senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut, who is on Biden’s vice-presidential vetting panel, told donors that Sen. Kamala D. Harris “had no remorse” for her attacks on Biden while on a debate stage. One donor implied to CNBC that Harris has too much “ambition.” And former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, a longtime Biden friend, told CNN that Harris can “rub people the wrong way.”

Some of the comments are being made by high-ranking Democrats pushing alternative candidates such as Rep. Val Demings (D-Fla.) and more recently Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.), making some worry that women of color are being forced to kneecap one another.

“It bugs me that people want to pit these two Black women against the other,” said Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), a key Biden confidant, referring to the burgeoning Bass vs. Harris narrative. “Nobody is trying to pit Sen. Elizabeth Warren against [Michigan Gov. Gretchen] Whitmer. And both of their names are being mentioned every day as being in the search.”

“It is messier than it should be because somebody is trying to create a story,” Clyburn added.

In recent days the negative attention has focused on Bass, who has gone out of her way to stress that she is unable to “envision” herself as president. In 2008, former president Barack Obama told Biden to view the vice presidency as the “capstone” of his career, and Biden has said that he sees his relationship with Obama as a model.

The Trump campaign immediately seized on Bass’s history with Cuba. “Joe Biden and Karen Bass Would Invite Castro’s Communism into America,” read a headline on a Trump campaign news release. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), in a press call with reporters, warned that if selected she’d be “the highest-ranking Castro sympathizer in the history of the United States government.”

Bass went on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday to show how she’d address those accusations, saying “I don’t consider myself a Castro sympathizer” and she characterized her position on Cuba as “really no different than the position of the Obama administration.”

She’s also pushed back on the notion that she and Harris should be compared with one another. Bass and Harris spoke privately at a memorial service for the late congressman John Lewis last week. “It was good,” Bass said of the conversation during a Friday interview on “The Breakfast Club.” “She said ‘We ain’t doing that.’ It was fine.” Bass added: “I’m not the anti-Kamala.”

Biden’s decision to eliminate men from the selection process has meant that many of the candidates who would traditionally be considered for this role, like Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), are off the table. There’s been no speculation about Andrew M. Cuomo, even as the New York governor’s star rose during his daily coronavirus briefings. Vanquished contenders like former Texas congressman Beto O’Rourke, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee or former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg have also faded from the national conversation as the spotlight shifted to women.

And many noted that the competition to become the second-most-powerful person in the country is always going to be fierce. “It’s natural that it’s competitive,” said Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.) “It’s historic regardless of who he chooses, so that probably adds to the intensity of it.”

For her part, Harris allies have been lobbying the Biden team in public and in private. Top racial justice lawyer Ben Crump, who represents the family of George Floyd, penned an op-ed for CNN supporting her candidacy. Behind the scenes, powerful allies like Glenda Baskin Glover, the head of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority and president of Tennessee State University, wrote to Biden’s vetting team urging them to select Harris — a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post.

And Harris attempted to use the attacks on her “ambition” as a weapon.

“There will be a resistance to your ambition,” she said Friday during Black Girls Lead 2020, a virtual conference for young Black women. “There will be people who say to you, ‘You are out of your lane,’ because they are burdened by only having the capacity to see what has always been instead of what can be. But don’t you let that burden you.”

She also received an assist from Biden campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon that came soon after Dodd’s comment. “Ambitious women make history, change the world, and win,” O’Malley Dillon said in a social media post.

Biden’s timeline for picking a vice president has slipped significantly. He initially said he would make the decision by Aug. 1, then said it would be the first week of August. Now the campaign is signaling that it will likely wait until the second week of August.

In an interview, Clyburn said Biden has only told him that he will make up his mind “before the convention.” In 2008 and 2012, vice presidential candidates were announced just days before the convention.

Clyburn also said he believes it would be a “plus” for Biden to select a Black woman, but added the former vice president does not like being told what to do — and he provided some hint that he can’t endorse one of the candidates.

“Of the 12 names out there, with one exception, I know all of them,” Clyburn said in an interview with The Post. “There’s one person that I don’t know.” Clyburn declined to say who on the list is unknown to him. (He made a similar comment on MSNBC last week, leading to speculation that he was throwing shade at former national security adviser Susan E. Rice, but Clyburn balked at that interpretation. “I know Susan Rice very, very well,” Clyburn said.)

He said that he’s trying to approach Biden carefully with his advice.

“Ultimatums are not good,” Clyburn said. “I’m not going to tell the vice president what he must do.” He warned that pushing Biden too hard can backfire. “Nobody wants to be forced,” Clyburn said.

Others are taking a far different approach in the final days. The Rev. William Barber, a leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, and roughly 50 other leading Black clergy members sent an open letter to Biden’s campaign Friday “insisting” that he select a Black woman.

“We are writing to caution the Democratic party that it takes Black enthusiasm, the key determinant for turnout, for granted at its own peril” according to the letter, which predicts that a Democratic ticket that includes a Black woman will result in Black turnout that exceeds Obama’s numbers in that community.

The decision will automatically elevate whichever woman is selected, either making history by installing her as the first female vice president or giving her a head start for the 2024 campaign should the ticket fail — which is a key reason that the stakes are so high.

The Biden campaign has been tight-lipped about its contenders. But that hasn’t stopped allies and friends from speculating.

“If I had to bet my life on who would be the candidate, I’d still bet Harris,” said Rendell, who is raising money for Biden and frequently talks to his top campaign officials. “She has the least negatives, she’s the most polished. She’s the person who can take on [Vice President] Pence in a campaign debate.”

But he also made it clear how volatile the process has been. “The buzz the in the last three weeks — not this week — but the last few weeks, the buzz was Susan Rice,” Rendell said last Thursday.

Her demeanor on television fueled the speculation, he said. “She was smiling on TV, something that she doesn’t do all that readily,” Rendell said. “She was actually somewhat charming on TV, something that she has not seemed to care about in the past.”

The interview process for these women has been unusually public. Nearly all of the women in contention have headlined a fundraiser with Biden and appeared during at least one virtual event with his wife, Jill — a strong signal that Biden will closely consult his wife as he makes his decision.

The exchanges give each potential vice president some time to develop a rapport with Biden. On Friday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) headlined a grass-roots fundraiser for him and at one point Biden apologized for going on too long.

“No! Don’t be sorry,” Warren said. “I love everything you had to say.”

The post Biden’s delay in choosing a running mate intensifies jockeying between potential picks appeared first on Shri Times News.

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[thefatherofkatag]

Reality Rules.

Unless you’re winning, most of life will seem hideously unfair to you.

The truth is, life is just playing by different rules.

The real rules are there. They actually make sense. But they’re a bit more complicated, and a lot less comfortable, which is why most people never manage to learn them.

Let’s try.

Rule #1: Life is a competition

That business you work for? Someone’s trying to kill it. That job you like? Someone would love to replace you with a computer program. That girlfriend / boyfriend / high-paying job / Nobel Prize that you want? So does somebody else.

We’re all in competition, although we prefer not to realize it. Most achievements are only notable relative to others. You swam more miles, or can dance better, or got more Facebook Likes than the average. Well done.

It’s a painful thing to believe, of course, which is why we’re constantly assuring each other the opposite. “Just do your best”, we hear. “You’re only in competition with yourself”. The funny thing about platitudes like that is they’re designed to make you try harder anyway. If competition really didn’t matter, we’d tell struggling children to just give up.

Fortunately, we don’t live in a world where everyone has to kill each other to prosper. The blessing of modern civilization is there’s abundant opportunities, and enough for us all to get by, even if we don’t compete directly.

But never fall for the collective delusion that there’s not a competition going on. People dress up to win partners. They interview to win jobs. If you deny that competition exists, you’re just losing. Everything in demand is on a competitive scale. And the best is only available to those who are willing to truly fight for it.

Rule #2. You’re judged by what you do, not what you think

Society judges people by what they can do for others. Can you save children from a burning house, or remove a tumor, or make a room of strangers laugh? You’ve got value right there.

That’s not how we judge ourselves though. We judge ourselves by our thoughts.

“I’m a good person”. “I’m ambitious”. “I’m better than this.” These idle impulses may comfort us at night, but they’re not how the world sees us. They’re not even how we see other people.

Well-meaning intentions don’t matter. An internal sense of honour and love and duty count for squat. What exactly can you and have you done for the world?

Abilities are not prized by their virtue. Whatever admiration society awards us, comes from the selfish perspectives of others. A hard working janitor is less rewarded by society than a ruthless stockbroker. A cancer researcher is rewarded less than a supermodel. Why? Because those abilities are rarer and impact more people.

We like to like to think that society rewards those who do the best work. Like so:

But in reality, social reward is just a network effect. Reward comes down mostly to the number of people you impact:

Write an unpublished book, you’re nobody. Write Harry Potter and the world wants to know you. Save a life, you’re a small-town hero, but cure cancer and you’re a legend. Unfortunately, the same rule applies to alltalents, even unsavoury ones: get naked for one person and you might just make them smile, get naked for fifty million people and you might just be Kim Kardashian.

You may hate this. It may make you sick. Reality doesn’t care. You’re judged by what you have the ability to do, and the volume of people you can impact. If you don’t accept this, then the judgement of the world will seem very unfair indeed.

Rule #3. Our idea of fairness is self interest

People like to invent moral authority. It’s why we have referees in sports games and judges in courtrooms: we have an innate sense of right and wrong, and we expect the world to comply. Our parents tell us this. Our teachers teach us this. Be a good boy, and have some candy.

But reality is indifferent. You studied hard, but you failed the exam. You worked hard, but you didn’t get promoted. You love her, but she won’t return your calls.

The problem isn’t that life is unfair; it’s your broken idea of fairness.

Take a proper look at that person you fancy but didn’t fancy you back. That’s a complete person. A person with years of experience being someone completely different to you. A real person who interacts with hundreds or thousands of other people every year.

Now what are the odds that among all that, you’re automatically their first pick for love-of-their-life? Because – what – you exist? Because you feel something for them? That might matter to you, but their decision is not about you.

Similarly we love to hate our bosses and parents and politicians. Their judgements are unfair. And stupid. Because they don’t agree with me! And they should! Because I am unquestionably the greatest authority on everything ever in the whole world!

It’s true there are some truly awful authority figures. But they’re not all evil, self-serving monsters trying to line their own pockets and savour your misery. Most are just trying to do their best, under different circumstances to your own.

Maybe they know things you don’t – like, say, your company will go bust if they don’t do something unpopular. Maybe they have different priorities to you – like, say, long term growth over short term happiness.

But however they make you feel, the actions of others are not some cosmic judgement on your being. They’re just a byproduct of being alive.

Why life isn’t fair

Our idea of fairness isn’t actually obtainable. It’s really just a cloak for wishful thinking.

Can you imagine how insane life would be if it actually was ‘fair’ to everyone? No-one could fancy anyone who wasn’t the love of their life, for fear of breaking a heart. Companies would only fail if everyone who worked for them was evil. Relationships would only end when both partners died simultaneously. Raindrops would only fall on bad people.

Most of us get so hung up on how we think the world should work that we can’t see how it does. But facing that reality might just be the key to unlocking your understanding of the world, and with it, all of your potential.

[danafraedrich]

Writer's Life - Full-Time Author Two Year Review

Time is weird. Can we all agree on that? Like, 2018 simultaneously felt like it lasted both 3 years and 3 weeks. Two years ago this month I quit my “normal” (what is normal?) job. You can read the blog post here. Oh, past Dana, you were adorably naive. Right, so I’mma talk about some stuff I’ve learned since my first day as a full-time author.

Goal Review

Release a new book every 18 months or so ~ This, I’m thrilled to say, has been a smashing success. I’ve actually released about a book a year since I started this journey. Out of the Shadows came out just as I was gearing up to leave the old 9 to 5. You know how I was talking about time being weird? Yeah, that feels like forever ago! Anyhoodles, I still love the idea of publishing two books a year, and I have a strategy (sort of) for that. It has yet to happen because said strategy is incredibly ambitious. Still, I keep my goals high so if I miss, I miss better than I would if I’d set lower goals to begin with.

Transform into a human every day ~ Uh, yeah. Where the first goal was a smashing success, this second one…

Hard. Failed* so hard at this (she said, while wearing her PJs past noon while writing this blog post). I know it’s a thing that helps transport your brain from hangout mode to work mode, so I need to just freaking do it. Okay, I’mma go get dressed and stuff. BRB. Cue the hold music.

I’m back! Right, onto the next goal.

*I don’t seriously like calling missed goals failures. To me, a failure means nothing good came from the experience, and I just don’t think that’s the case a lot of times. The meme was too funny not to do, though 😉.

Keep a strict schedule ~ This is the one that’s transformed the most (and the hardest to pin down), but I’m totally okay with that because I’ve learned a lot about how I work (and don’t work) these past two years. Firstly, I don’t work well with timetables. I know some people work best when their life runs like a train schedule. Not me! And that whole “I’m gonna wake up at 6am everyday” thing. That’s hilarious. I stay up late. That’s just how I/my household works. Again, I’ll address this subject/organization in more depth later.

One hour of social media a day ~ This one is so weird because 1) I didn’t realize at the time what social media would become to me. I can spend half an hour just crafting a post. 2) Back then, I didn’t have all the lovely friends on social media that I have now. I have made awesome connections with such amazing people I really cherish**. 3) Social media still very much seems like a requirement for my line of work, but just how much time is required and what’s the best way to spend it? Nobody knows! So this goal is something I still grapple with. If I ever feel like I get a handle on it, I’ll let y’all know, but don’t hold your breath.

**Yes, you absolutely can make authentic friendships through social media. Fight me.

Write 7k words per day ~ 😳 Oh, honey. Well, past Dana was certainly shooting for the moon. Suffice to say that is not a realistic goal for me or anyone I know. It has been adjusted to something way more reasonable.

So there are the goals I had. I’m pretty pleased on that front. As far as stuff I’ve learned…

Prioritize ~ I only recently started feeling like I had a good handle on this. A guest on the podcast Productivity Alchemy shared a tip that has changed my life: in the first three hours of your day, get two hours of your most important work done. Y’all, I have never felt so pulled together as when I started doing that. Turns out, I work far better with time blocks than any kind of actual times.

I’ve also started keeping lists. You may have seen in my post from two years ago that I was using an app called Habitica to help keep me on task. Unfortunately, that didn’t end up working for me. Since then I’ve cobbled together a Franken-system that uses my Apple Calendar and Reminders apps and Evernote. This last one, you may recall from this post, is what I use for my e-BuJo, which I use to sort and prioritize tasks.

Adaptation is key ~ That super strict schedule I had back in early 2017 fell apart PDQ when literally anything else came up. If you read the post from two years ago, you’ll notice I didn’t have any time built in for any of the other stuff that comes with running your own business like marketing, accounting, correspondence, etc. Prioritize so you can be flexible.

Just keep swimming! ~ Okay, I said this two years ago too, so it doesn’t really count as something I’ve learned. But it bears repeating. You know how everyone wants to know the secret or key or whatever to success? I think the only answer (though not a guarantee) is persistence. Every inch of progress is still progress. Keep swimming!!!

Thank you to everyone who’s been a part of this journey with me. It’s still scary even two years later, but also still exciting. And I’m really looking forward to what the next two years holds. And if you want to share any tips, encouragement for fellow authors and readers, or just say hi, feel free to leave a comment below 👇.

Thanks for reading!

[hackersandslackers]

A Dirty Way of Cleaning Data (ft. Pandas & SQL)

Code Snippet Corner ft. Pandas & SQL

Warning The following is FANTASTICALLY not-secure. Do not put this in a script that's going to be running unsupervised. This is for interactive sessions where you're prototyping the data cleaning methods that you're going to use, and/or just manually entering stuff. Especially if there's any chance there could be something malicious hiding in the data to be uploaded. We're going to be executing formatted strings of SQL unsanitized code. Also, this will lead to LOTS of silent failures, which are arguably The Worst Thing - if guaranteed correctness is a requirement, leave this for the tinkering table. Alternatively, if it's a project where "getting something in there is better than nothing", this can provide a lot of bang for your buck. Actually, it's purely for entertainment purposes and not for human consumption. Let's say you were helping someone take a bunch of scattered Excel files and CSVs and input them all into a MySQL database. This is a very iterative, trial & error process. We certainly don't want to be re-entering a bunch of boilerplate. Pandas to the rescue! We can painlessly load those files into a DataFrame, then just export them to the db! Well, not so fast First off, loading stuff into a DB is a task all its own - Pandas and your RDBMS have different kinds of tolerance for mistakes, and differ in often-unpredictable ways. For example, one time I was performing a task similar to the one described here (taking scattered files and loading them into a DB) - I was speeding along nicely, but then ran into a speedbump: turns out Pandas generally doesn't infer that a column is a date unless you tell it specifically, and will generally parse dates as strings. Now, this was fine when the dates were present - MySQL is pretty smart about accepting different forms of dates & times. But one thing it doesn't like is accepting an empty string '' into a date or time column. Not a huge deal, just had to cast the column as a date: df['date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['date']) Now the blank strings are NaT , which MySQL knows how to handle! This was simple enough, but there's all kinds of little hiccups that can happen. And, unfortunately, writing a DataFrame to a DB table is an all-or-nothing affair - if there's one error, that means none of the rows will write. Which can get pretty annoying if you were trying to write a decent-sized DataFrame, especially if the first error doesn't show up until one of the later rows. Waiting sucks. And it's not just about being impatient - long waiting times can disrupt your flow. Rapid prototyping & highly-interactive development are some of Python's greatest strengths, and they are great strengths indeed! Paul Graham (one of the guys behind Y Combinator) once made the comparison between REPL-heavy development and the popularizing of oil paints (he was talking about LISP, but it's also quite true of Python, as Python took a lot of its cues from LISP): Before oil paint became popular, painters used a medium, called tempera , that cannot be blended or overpainted. The cost of mistakes was high, and this tended to make painters conservative. Then came oil paint, and with it a great change in style. Oil "allows for second thoughts". This proved a decisive advantage in dealing with difficult subjects like the human figure. The new medium did not just make painters' lives easier. It made possible a new and more ambitious kind of painting. Janson writes: Without oil, the Flemish Masters'conquest of visible reality would have been much more limited. Thus, from a technical point of view, too, they deserve to be called the "fathers of modern painting" , for oil has been the painter's basic medium ever since. As a material, tempera is no lesss beautiful than oil. But the flexibility of oil paint gives greater scope to the imagination--that was the deciding factor. Programming is now undergoing a similar change...Meanwhile, ideas borrowd from Lisp increasingly turn up in the mainstream: interactive programming environments, garbage collectgion, and run-time typing to name a few. More powerful tools are taking the risk out of exploration. That's good news for programmers, because it means that we will be able to undertake more ambitious projects. The use of oil paint certainly had this effect. The period immediately following its adoption was a golden age for painting. There are signs already that something similar is happening in programming. (Emphasis mine) From here: http://www.cs.oswego.edu/~blue/xhx/books/ai/ns1/section02/main.html A little scenario to demonstrate: Let's pretend we have a MySQL instance running, and have already created a database named items import pymysql from sqlalchemy import create_engine import sqlalchemy import pandas as pd cnx = create_engine('mysql+pymysql://analyst:badsecuritykills@localhost:3306/items) pd.io.sql.execute("""CREATE TABLE books( \ id VARCHAR(40) PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL \ ,author VARCHAR(255) \ ,copies INT)""", cnx) df = pd.DataFrame({ "author": ["Alice", "Bob", "Charlie"], "copies": [2, "", 7, ],}, index = [1, 2, 3]) #Notice that one of these has the wrong data type! df.to_sql(name='books',con=cnx,if_exists='append',index=False) #Yeah, I'm not listing this whole stacktrace. Fantastic package with some extremely helpful Exceptions, but you've gotta scroll a whole bunch to find em. Here's the important part: InternalError: (pymysql.err.InternalError) (1366, "Incorrect integer value: '' for column 'copies' at row 1") [SQL: 'INSERT INTO books (id, author, copies) VALUES (%(id)s, %(author)s, %(copies)s)'] [parameters: {'id': 2, 'author': 'Bob', 'copies': ''}] (Background on this error at: http://sqlalche.me/e/2j85) Soo, let's tighten this feedback loop, shall we? We'll iterate through the DataFrame with the useful iterrows() method. This gives us essentially an enum made from our DataFrame - we'll get a bunch of tuples giving us the index as the first element and the row as its own Pandas Series as the second. for x in df.iterrows(): try: pd.DataFrame(x[1]).transpose().to_sql(name='books', con=cnx, if_exists='append', index_label='id') except: continue Let's unpack that a bit. Remember that we're getting a two-element tuple, with the good stuff in the second element, so x[1] Next, we convert the Series to a one-entry DataFrame, because the Series doesn't have the DataFrame's to_sql() method. pd.DataFrame(x[1]) The default behavior will assume this is a single column with, each variable being the address of a different row. MySQL isn't going to be having it. Sooo, we transpose! pd.DataFrame(x[1]).transpose() And finally, we use our beloved to_sql method on that. Let's check our table now! pd.io.sql.read_sql_table("books", cnx, index_col='id') author copies id 1 Alice 2 It wrote the first row! Not much of a difference with this toy example, but once you were writing a few thousand rows and the error didn't pop up until the 3000th, this would make a pretty noticeable difference in your ability to quickly experiment with different cleaning schemes. Note that this will still short-circuit as soon as we hit the error. If we wanted to make sure we got all the valid input before working on our tough cases, we could make a little try/except block. for x in df.iterrows(): try: pd.DataFrame(x[1]).transpose().to_sql(name='books', con=cnx, if_exists='append', index=False,) except: continue This will try to write each line, and if it encounters an Exception it'll continue the loop. pd.io.sql.read_sql_table("books", cnx, index_col='id') author copies id 1 Alice 2 3 Charlie 7 Alright, now the bulk of our data's in the db! Whatever else happens, you've done that much! Now you can relax a bit, which is useful for stimulating the creativity you'll need for the more complicated edge cases. So, we're ready to start testing new cleaning schemes? Well, not quite yet... Let's say we went and tried to think up a fix. We go to test it out and... #Note that we want to see our exceptions here, so either do without the the try/except block for x in df.iterrows(): pd.DataFrame(x[1]).transpose().to_sql(name='books', con=cnx, if_exists='append', index=False, ) #OR have it print the exception for x in df.iterrows(): try: pd.DataFrame(x[1]).transpose().to_sql(name='books', con=cnx, if_exists='append', index_label='id') except Exception as e: print(e) continue #Either way, we get... (pymysql.err.IntegrityError) (1062, "Duplicate entry '1' for key 'PRIMARY'") [SQL: 'INSERT INTO books (id, author, copies) VALUES (%(id)s, %(author)s, %(copies)s)'] [parameters: {'id': 1, 'author': 'Alice', 'copies': 2}] (Background on this error at: http://sqlalche.me/e/gkpj) (pymysql.err.InternalError) (1366, "Incorrect integer value: '' for column 'copies' at row 1") [SQL: 'INSERT INTO books (id, author, copies) VALUES (%(id)s, %(author)s, %(copies)s)'] [parameters: {'id': 2, 'author': 'Bob', 'copies': ''}] (Background on this error at: http://sqlalche.me/e/2j85) (pymysql.err.IntegrityError) (1062, "Duplicate entry '3' for key 'PRIMARY'") [SQL: 'INSERT INTO books (id, author, copies) VALUES (%(id)s, %(author)s, %(copies)s)'] [parameters: {'id': 3, 'author': 'Charlie', 'copies': 7}] (Background on this error at: http://sqlalche.me/e/gkpj) The error we're interested is in there, but what's all this other nonsense crowding it? Well, one of the handy things about a database is that it'll enforce uniqueness based on the constraints you give it. It's already got an entry with an id value of 1, so it's going to complain if you try to put another one. In addition to providing a lot of distraction, this'll also slow us down considerably - after all, part of the point was to make our experiments with data-cleaning go faster! Luckily, Pandas' wonderful logical indexing will make it a snap to ensure that we only bother with entries that aren't in the database yet. #First, let's get the indices that are in there usedIDs = pd.read_sql_table("books", cnx, columns=["id"])["id"].values df[~df.index.isin(usedIDs)] author copies 2 Bob #Remember how the logical indexing works: We want every element of the dataframe where the index ISN'T in our array of IDs that are already in the DB This will also be shockingly quick - Pandas' logical indexing takes advantage of all that magic going on under the hood. Using it, instead of manually iteration, can literally bring you from waiting minutes to waiting seconds. Buuut, that's a lot of stuff to type! We're going to be doing this A LOT, so how about we just turn it into a function? #Ideally we'd make a much more modular version, but for this toy example we'll be messy and hardcode some paramaters def filterDFNotInDB(df): usedIDs = pd.read_sql_table("books", cnx, columns=["id"])["id"].values return df[~df.index.isin(usedIDs)] So, next time we think we've made some progress on an edge case, we just call... #Going back to the to_sql method here - we don't want to have to loop through every single failing case, or get spammed with every variety of error message the thing can throw at us. filterDFNotInDB(cleanedDF).to_sql(name='books', con=cnx, if_exists='append', index_label='id') Actually, let's clean that up even more - the more keys we hit, the more opportunities to make a mistake! The most bug-free code is the code you don't write. def writeNewRows(df): filterDFNotInDB(df).to_sql(name='books', con=cnx, if_exists='append', index_label='id') So, finally, we can work on our new cleaning scheme, and whenever we think we're done... writeNewRows(cleanedDF) And boom! Instant feedback!

- Matthew Alhonte

[djgblogger-blog]

TDM: From model-free to model-based deep reinforcement learning

http://bit.ly/2H8UGUD

By Vitchyr Pong You’ve decided that you want to bike from your house by UC Berkeley to the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s a nice 20 mile ride, but there’s a problem: you’ve never ridden a bike before!To make matters worse, you are new to the Bay Area, and all you have is a good ol’ fashion map to guide you. How do you get started? Let’s first figure out how to ride a bike. One strategy would be to do a lot of studying and planning. Read books on how to ride bicycles. Study physics and anatomy. Plan out all the different muscle movements that you’ll make in response to each perturbation. This approach is noble, but for anyone who’s ever learned to ride a bike, they know that this strategy is doomed to fail. There’s only one way to learn how to ride a bike: trial and error. Some tasks like riding a bike are just too complicated to plan out in your head. Once you’ve learned how to ride your bike, how would you get to the Golden Gate Bridge? You could reuse your trial-and-error strategy. Take a few random turns and see if you end up at the Golden Gate Bridge. Unfortunately, this strategy would take a very, very long time. For this sort of problem, planning is a much faster strategy, and requires considerably less real-world experience and trial-and-error. In reinforcement learning terms, it is more sample-efficient.

Left: some skills you learn by trial and error. Right: other times, planning ahead is better.

While simple, this thought experiment highlights some important aspects of human intelligence. For some tasks, we use a trial-and-error approach, and for others we use a planning approach. A similar phenomena seems to have emerged in reinforcement learning (RL). In the parlance of RL, empirical results show that some tasks are better suited for model-free (trial-and-error) approaches, and others are better suited for model-based (planning) approaches. However, the biking analogy also highlights that the two systems are not completely independent. In particularly, to say that learning to ride a bike is just trial-and-error is an oversimplification. In fact, when learning to bike by trial-and-error, you’ll employ a bit of planning. Perhaps your plan will initially be, “Don’t fall over.” As you improve, you’ll make more ambitious plans, such as, “Bike forwards for two meters without falling over.” Eventually, your bike-riding skills will be so proficient that you can start to plan in very abstract terms (“Bike to the end of the road.”) to the point that all there is left to do is planning and you no longer need to worry about the nitty-gritty details of riding a bike. We see that there is a gradual transition from the model-free (trial-and-error) strategy to a model-based (planning) strategy. If we could develop artificial intelligence algorithms–and specifically RL algorithms–that mimic this behavior, it could result in an algorithm that both performs well (by using trial-and-error methods early on) and is sample efficient (by later switching to a planning approach to achieve more abstract goals). This post covers temporal difference model (TDM), which is a RL algorithm that captures this smooth transition between model-free and model-based RL. Before describing TDMs, we start by first describing how a typical model-based RL algorithm works.

Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

In reinforcement learning, we have some some state space $mathcal{S}$ and action space $mathcal{A}$. If at time $t$ we are in state $s_t in mathcal{S}$ and take action $a_tin mathcal{A}$, we transition to a new state $s_{t+1} = f(s_t, a_t)$ according to a dynamics model $f: mathcal{S} times mathcal{A} mapsto mathcal{S}$. The goal is to maximize rewards summed over the visited state: $sum_{t=1}^{T-1} r(s_t, a_, s_{t+1})$. Model-based RL algorithms assume you are given (or learn) the dynamics model $f$. Given this dynamics model, there are a variety of model-based algorithms. For this post, we consider methods that perform the following optimization to choose a sequence of actions and states to maximize rewards: qquad text{max}_{a_{1:T-1}, s_{1:T}} sum_{t=1}^{T-1} r(s_t, a_t, s_{t+1}) text{ subject to }f(s_t, a_t) = s_{t+1} The optimization says to choose a sequence of states and actions that you maximize the rewards, while ensuring that the trajectory is feasible. Here, feasible means that each state-action-next-state transition is valid. For example, in the image below if you start in state $s_t$ and take action $a_t$, only the top $s_{t+1}$ results in a feasible transition.

Planning a trip to the Golden Gate Bridge would be much easier if you could defy physics. However, the constraint in the model-based optimization problem ensures that only trajectories like the top row will be outputted. The bottom two trajectories may have high reward, but they’re not feasible.

In our biking problem, the optimization might result in a biking plan from Berkeley (top right) to the Golden Gate Bridge (middle left) that looks like this:

An example of a plan (states and actions) outputted the optimization problem.

While conceptually nice, this plan is not very realistic. Model-based approaches use a model $f(s, a)$ that predict the state at the very next time step. In robotics, a time step usually corresponds to a tenth or a hundredth of a second. So perhaps a more realistic depiction of the resulting plan might look like:

A more realistic plan.

If we think about how we plan in everyday life, we realize that we plan at much more temporally abstract terms. Rather than planning the position that our bike will be at the next tenth of a second, we make longer-term plan things like, “I will go to the end of the road.” Furthermore, we can only make these temporally abstract plans once we’ve learned how to ride a bike in the first place. As discussed earlier, we need some way to (1) start the learning using a trial-and-error approach and (2) provide a mechanism to gradually increase the level of abstraction that we use to plan. For this, we introduce temporal difference models.

Temporal Difference Models

A temporal difference model (TDM)$^dagger$, which we will write as $Q(s, a, s_g, tau)$, is a function that, given a state $s in mathcal{S}$, action $a in mathcal{A}$, and goal state $s_g in mathcal{S}$, predicts how close an agent can get to the goal within $tau$ time steps. Intuitively, a TDM answers the question, “If I try to bike to San Francisco in 30 minutes, how close will I get?” For robotics, a natural way to measure closeness is use Euclidean distance.

A TDM predicts how close you will get to the goal (Golden Gate Bridge) after a fixed amount of time. After 30 minutes of biking, maybe you only reach the grey biker in the image above. In this case, the grey line represents the distance that the TDM should predict.

For those familiar with reinforcement learning, it turns out that a TDM can be viewed as a goal-conditioned Q function in a finite-horizon MDP. Because a TDM is just another Q function, we can train it with model-free (trial-and-error) algorithms. We use deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) to train a TDM and retroactively relabel the goal and time horizon to increase the sample efficiency of our learning algorithm. In theory, any Q-learning algorithm could be used to train the TDM, but we found this to be effective. We encourage readers to check out the paper for more details.

Planning with a TDM

Once we train a TDM, how can we use it to plan? It turns out that we can plan with the following optimization: qquad text{max}_{a_1, a_K, a_{2K}, s_1, s_K, s_{2K}, ..} sum_{t=1, K, 2K, ...} r(s_t) text{ subject to } Q(s_t, a_t, s_{t+K}, K) = 0 The intuition is similar to the model-based formulation. Choose a sequence of actions and states that maximize rewards and that are feasible. A key difference is that we only plan every $K$ time steps, rather than every time step. The constraint that $Q(s_t, a_t, s_{t+K}, K) = 0$ enforces the feasibility of the trajectory. Visually, rather than explicitly planning $K$ steps and actions like so

We can instead directly plan over $K$ time steps as shown below:

As we increase $K$, we get temporally more and more abstract plans. In between the $K$ time steps, we use a model-free approach to take actions, thereby allowing the model-free policy “abstract away” the details of how the goal is actually reached. For the biking problem and for large enough values of $K$, the optimization could result in a plan like:

A model-based planner can be used to choose temporally abstract goals. A model-free algorithm can be used to reach those goals.

One caveat is that this formulation can only optimize the reward at every $K$ steps. However, many tasks only care about some states, such as the final state (e.g. “reach the Golden Gate Bridge”) and so this still captures a variety of interesting tasks.

Related Work

We’re not the first to look at the connection between model-based and model-free reinforcement. Parr ‘08 and Boyan ‘99, are particularly related, though they focus mainly on tabular and linear function approximators. The idea of training a goal condition Q function was also explored in Sutton ‘11 and Schaul ‘15, in the context of robot navigation and Atari games. Lastly, the relabelling scheme that we use is inspired by the work of Andrychowicz ‘17.

Experiments

We tested TDMs on five simulated continuous control tasks and one real-world robotics task. One of the simulated tasks is to train a robot arm to push a cylinder to a target position. An example of the final pushing TDM policy and the associate learning curves are shown below:

Left: TDM policy for reaching task. Right: Learning curves. TDM is blue (lower is better).

In the learning curve to the right, we plot the final distance to goal versus the number of environment samples (lower is better). Our simulation controls the robots at 20 Hz, meaning that 1000 steps corresponds to 50 seconds in the real world. The dynamics of this environment are relatively easy to learn, meaning that a model-based approach should excel. As expected, the model-based approaches (purple curve) learns quickly–roughly 3000 steps, or 25 minutes–and performs well. The TDM approach (blue curve) also learn quickly–roughly 2000 steps, or 17 minutes. The model-free DDPG (without TDMs) baseline eventually solves the task, but requires many more training samples. One reason the TDM approach learns so quickly is that it effective is a model-based methods in disguise. The story looks much better for model-free approaches when we move to locomotion tasks, which have substantially harder dynamics. One of the locomotion tasks involves training a quadruped robot to move to a certain position. The resulting TDM policy is shown below on the left, along with the accompanying learning curve on the right.

Left: TDM policy for locomotion task. Right: Learning curves. TDM is blue (lower is better).

Just as we use trial-and-error rather than planning to master riding a bicycle, we expect model-free methods to perform better than model-based methods on these locomotion tasks. This is precisely what we see in the learning curve on the right: the model-based method plateaus in performance. The model-free DDPG method learns more slowly, but eventually outperforms the model-based approach. TDM manages to both learn quickly and achieve good final performance. There are more experiments in the paper, including training a real-world 7 degree-of-freedom Sawyer to reach positions. We encourage the readers to check them out!

Future Directions

Temporal difference models provide a formalism and practical algorithm for interpolating from model-free to model-based control. However, there’s a lot of future work to be done. For one, the derivation assumes that the environment and policies are deterministic. In practice, most environments are stochastic. Even if they were deterministic, there are compelling reasons to use a stochastic policy in practice (see this blog post for one example). Extending TDMs to this setting would help move TDMs to more realistic environments. Another idea would be to combine TDMs with alternative model-based planning optimization algorithms that the ones we used in the paper. Lastly, we’d like to apply TDMs to more challenging tasks with real-world robots, like locomotion, manipulation, and, of course, bicycling to the Golden Gate Bridge. This work will be presented at ICLR 2018. For more information about TDMs, check out the following links and come see us at our poster presentation at ICLR in Vancouver:

ArXiv Preprint

Code

Let us know if you have any questions or comments! $^dagger$ We call it a temporal difference model because we train $Q$ with temporal difference learning and use $Q$ as a model.

I would like to thank Sergey Levine and Shane Gu for their valuable feedback when preparing this blog post.

[maryhare96]

How Marriott Built One of the Best Brand Newsrooms on Earth

Do you want to make a billion dollars? We’ll tell you how: Invent a drug that builds and sculpts every muscle in your body perfectly in one dose. One pill, and you’ll look like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jillian Michaels.

If only it were that easy. The unfortunate reality of exercise is that even if you use steroids, you’re going to have to make working out a habit.

Storytelling is no different. Sure, you can change people’s minds with one story. You can reword a beggar’s sign and get people to give more money. But if you want to build a long-term relationship—as a business or in everyday life—you’re going to need to think of storytelling like going to the gym.

Every story you tell becomes a part of your overarching story, just like every workout at the gym helps build your physique over time. The best companies are adept at consistently telling their story in a variety of ways over time. The most intriguing people tell lots of stories. They answer questions with stories. They relate to people with stories instead of just saying, “Me too.”

If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably convinced that you should be using stories more to build relationships. But it’s not always easy to convince an entire organization to start going to the gym, so to speak. Let’s explore a few specific ideas for how you can make the case for stories inside your company.

Want to build long-term relationships? Think of storytelling like going to the gym. Click To Tweet Selling Storytelling Inside Your Organization

Ten years ago, it was possible for one person to make content work for an entire organization. That’s no longer the case. Today, you need real support internally. It won’t necessarily happen all at once, but it’s the first step you have to take. And while it’s not easy, it pays off.

Let’s look at how Marriott’s content marketing program got started. Nine years ago, Kathleen Matthews, the hotel giant’s executive vice president of communications, walked into Bill Marriott’s office with an idea. She’d spent 25 years as a reporter and news anchor for an ABC News affiliate in Washington, DC, and she knew the power of a good story, especially when it came from a compelling figure.

She wanted Marriott to have a blog. And she wanted Bill Marriott to write it.

“Why the heck would anyone want to read a blog from me?” Marriott, then 76 years old, responded.

Matthews quickly convinced Marriott he was the best person to tell the company’s story, even though he didn’t even use a computer. So they struck a compromise. Marriott would dictate a blog post once a week.

And so, Marriott’s digital storytelling journey began. It started with those simple blog posts, but over the next seven years, their efforts grew exponentially. Before long, they were operating a full-fledged global media company.

In the next three years, Marriott launched a popular digital travel magazine, Marriott Traveler, that covers cities from Seattle to Seoul. It has built content studios on five different continents. And it’s even won Emmys for its short films like Two Bellman and French Kiss.

Becoming a Media Company

When you walk into the ground floor of Marriott’s headquarters, it fittingly looks like the lobby of a modern hotel. There are chic white lounges and cozy pods. A friendly receptionist welcomes you. But then you notice something unexpected. In the middle of the lobby, there are nine flashing screens encased in glass walls, like a TV control room that’s been teleported from Hollywood to Bethesda, Maryland.

In a way, it has. Inside the control room—dubbed “M Live”—typically sit various media veterans tasked with seeing just how much a hotel brand could capitalize on the new opportunities digital media gave Marriott to tell their story.

“We are a media company now,” Emmy-winner David Beebe, then Marriott’s vice president of global creative, told us.

It’s a big statement, but one that Marriott’s content production backs up. Which raises the question: How did Marriott evolve from a single woman—Kathleen Matthews— storming into the CEO’s office and advocating for content to one of the most advanced content marketing operations in the world?

Well, after a few years, Bill Marriott’s blog took off. And before long, he was convinced that content was the answer to the challenges Marriott faced in telling the story of a company that spanned almost two dozen different hotel brands.

So in 2013, Marriott made a big bet and hired Karin Timpone away from the Walt Disney Company, where she had led the launch of successful digital products like WATCH ABC, so she could connect Marriott to the “next generation of travelers.” In June 2014, Beebe, who was also working for Disney, followed Timpone.

Beebe and Timpone got to work fast. By early 2015, Marriott had created a successful TV show, The Navigator Live; a hit short film, Two Bellmen; a personalized online travel magazine; and some exciting forays into virtual reality with Oculus Rift. These projects generated immediate returns, from high viewer engagement to millions of dollars in direct revenue and even content-licensing deals. They helped the company build stronger relationships with its customers.

“We’ve said it before—we have a very intimate relationship with our customers,” Beebe said. “They sleep with us, after all. It’s sort of a joke, but it’s true.”

After these initial wins, the company doubled down on storytelling even more and beefed up its in-house staff, bringing in folks from CBS, Variety, and other media powerhouses.

They also joined forces with a wide range of outside creators—(including Contently!)—from famed producers Ian Sander and Kim Moses to YouTube celebrity Taryn Southern, who stars in a web series called Do Not Disturb in which she interviews celebrities in their hotel rooms.

Beebe rejected the temptation to insert any overt Marriott branding. When he got the first cut back from Marriott’s wonderful short film, Two Bellmen, for instance, his first note was to take out most of the brand plugs.

“We don’t want to see any ‘Welcome to the JW Marriott, here’s your keycard,’ and then a close-up of the logo,” he said. “None of that.”

In other words, Marriott bet on having career storytellers lead their content marketing program—not career marketers.

The key to making this work, however, wasn’t by shutting marketing out. Instead, Marriott found success by breaking down silos and gathering marketers and content people around a common cause.

The key to that is M Live, its glass-encased content studio.

Launched in October 2015, the studio has nine screens showing everything from the social media campaigns of Marriott’s 19 brands to real-time booking information to Marriott’s editorial calendar. But what might be even more impressive—and instructive for other brands—are the eight swivel chairs. Each seat in the glass room represents a different department such as PR/Comms, Social Media, Buzz Marketing, Creative + Content, and even one for MEC, a media- buying agency that amplifies well-performing content at a moment’s notice.

Some marketers may dismiss this scene as a fad—a foolish brand playing media company. But in truth, it’s actually the sign of a great storytelling culture—one that embraces media as marketing.

At the time of this writing, although Marriott is very much building a media business—with plans to license short films and webisodes to places like Yahoo!, AOL, Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon—M Live and the Marriott Content Studio are still very much a marketing initiative.

“We did not get this far by saying, ‘I want to build a media company,’” Beebe said. “First and foremost, [the goal] is to engage consumers. Get them to associate with our brands, build lifetime value with them. Content’s a great way to do that.”

A Culture of Storytelling

While M Live and the Marriott Content Studio are making great strides reaching people externally, they’re also having an impact on life inside the company. The content team has put in hard work evangelizing and explaining what they’re doing—part of the reason they built M Live smack in the middle of the lobby for all to see.

One executive, for instance, spent three months leading a project to create a guide that explains M Live and how anyone in the company can help if they have an idea or see a trending story. They’ve connected the M Live team to customer care to handle any complaints or problems, and each Marriott brand is getting deeply involved with the content creation process. “People are getting it,” Beebe said. “Now that we’ve done a lot, they’re starting to see the impact.”

Even Bill Marriott comes down to see what’s going on.

“He loves it, loves the idea of what we’re doing,” Beebe said. “He’ll just come sit down and chit-chat and pick up the phone. He’s actually gotten on Matthew’s computer and shown his wife stuff.”

It’s that support from Bill Marriott and CEO Arne Sorenson that’s pushed the ambitious content operation forward so it can keep transforming the company.

“That’s really what our goal is,” Beebe said. “To take all the brand marketers, all the brand leaders and teams, and turn them into great storytellers.”

Not every company needs to build a sophisticated content studio like Marriott to build a great culture of storytelling, but if they want to succeed as storytellers in the future, they do need to embrace what that studio represents—the destruction of silos and the shared goal of using stories to build relationships and make people care.

Which is, of course, is what marketing is all about.

This is an excerpt from the Amazon #1 New Release, The Storytelling Edge: How to Transform Your Business, Stop Screaming Into the Void, and Make People Love You” by Joe Lazauskas and Shane Snow, available today.

http://ift.tt/2Evbbdf

[rodneyevesuarywk]

How Marriott Built One of the Best Brand Newsrooms on Earth

Do you want to make a billion dollars? We’ll tell you how: Invent a drug that builds and sculpts every muscle in your body perfectly in one dose. One pill, and you’ll look like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jillian Michaels.

If only it were that easy. The unfortunate reality of exercise is that even if you use steroids, you’re going to have to make working out a habit.

Storytelling is no different. Sure, you can change people’s minds with one story. You can reword a beggar’s sign and get people to give more money. But if you want to build a long-term relationship—as a business or in everyday life—you’re going to need to think of storytelling like going to the gym.

Every story you tell becomes a part of your overarching story, just like every workout at the gym helps build your physique over time. The best companies are adept at consistently telling their story in a variety of ways over time. The most intriguing people tell lots of stories. They answer questions with stories. They relate to people with stories instead of just saying, “Me too.”

If you’ve made it this far, you’re probably convinced that you should be using stories more to build relationships. But it’s not always easy to convince an entire organization to start going to the gym, so to speak. Let’s explore a few specific ideas for how you can make the case for stories inside your company.

Want to build long-term relationships? Think of storytelling like going to the gym. Click To Tweet Selling Storytelling Inside Your Organization

Ten years ago, it was possible for one person to make content work for an entire organization. That’s no longer the case. Today, you need real support internally. It won’t necessarily happen all at once, but it’s the first step you have to take. And while it’s not easy, it pays off.

Let’s look at how Marriott’s content marketing program got started. Nine years ago, Kathleen Matthews, the hotel giant’s executive vice president of communications, walked into Bill Marriott’s office with an idea. She’d spent 25 years as a reporter and news anchor for an ABC News affiliate in Washington, DC, and she knew the power of a good story, especially when it came from a compelling figure.

She wanted Marriott to have a blog. And she wanted Bill Marriott to write it.

“Why the heck would anyone want to read a blog from me?” Marriott, then 76 years old, responded.

Matthews quickly convinced Marriott he was the best person to tell the company’s story, even though he didn’t even use a computer. So they struck a compromise. Marriott would dictate a blog post once a week.

And so, Marriott’s digital storytelling journey began. It started with those simple blog posts, but over the next seven years, their efforts grew exponentially. Before long, they were operating a full-fledged global media company.

In the next three years, Marriott launched a popular digital travel magazine, Marriott Traveler, that covers cities from Seattle to Seoul. It has built content studios on five different continents. And it’s even won Emmys for its short films like Two Bellman and French Kiss.

Becoming a Media Company

When you walk into the ground floor of Marriott’s headquarters, it fittingly looks like the lobby of a modern hotel. There are chic white lounges and cozy pods. A friendly receptionist welcomes you. But then you notice something unexpected. In the middle of the lobby, there are nine flashing screens encased in glass walls, like a TV control room that’s been teleported from Hollywood to Bethesda, Maryland.

In a way, it has. Inside the control room—dubbed “M Live”—typically sit various media veterans tasked with seeing just how much a hotel brand could capitalize on the new opportunities digital media gave Marriott to tell their story.

“We are a media company now,” Emmy-winner David Beebe, then Marriott’s vice president of global creative, told us.

It’s a big statement, but one that Marriott’s content production backs up. Which raises the question: How did Marriott evolve from a single woman—Kathleen Matthews— storming into the CEO’s office and advocating for content to one of the most advanced content marketing operations in the world?

Well, after a few years, Bill Marriott’s blog took off. And before long, he was convinced that content was the answer to the challenges Marriott faced in telling the story of a company that spanned almost two dozen different hotel brands.

So in 2013, Marriott made a big bet and hired Karin Timpone away from the Walt Disney Company, where she had led the launch of successful digital products like WATCH ABC, so she could connect Marriott to the “next generation of travelers.” In June 2014, Beebe, who was also working for Disney, followed Timpone.

Beebe and Timpone got to work fast. By early 2015, Marriott had created a successful TV show, The Navigator Live; a hit short film, Two Bellmen; a personalized online travel magazine; and some exciting forays into virtual reality with Oculus Rift. These projects generated immediate returns, from high viewer engagement to millions of dollars in direct revenue and even content-licensing deals. They helped the company build stronger relationships with its customers.

“We’ve said it before—we have a very intimate relationship with our customers,” Beebe said. “They sleep with us, after all. It’s sort of a joke, but it’s true.”

After these initial wins, the company doubled down on storytelling even more and beefed up its in-house staff, bringing in folks from CBS, Variety, and other media powerhouses.

They also joined forces with a wide range of outside creators—(including Contently!)—from famed producers Ian Sander and Kim Moses to YouTube celebrity Taryn Southern, who stars in a web series called Do Not Disturb in which she interviews celebrities in their hotel rooms.

Beebe rejected the temptation to insert any overt Marriott branding. When he got the first cut back from Marriott’s wonderful short film, Two Bellmen, for instance, his first note was to take out most of the brand plugs.

“We don’t want to see any ‘Welcome to the JW Marriott, here’s your keycard,’ and then a close-up of the logo,” he said. “None of that.”

In other words, Marriott bet on having career storytellers lead their content marketing program—not career marketers.

The key to making this work, however, wasn’t by shutting marketing out. Instead, Marriott found success by breaking down silos and gathering marketers and content people around a common cause.

The key to that is M Live, its glass-encased content studio.

Launched in October 2015, the studio has nine screens showing everything from the social media campaigns of Marriott’s 19 brands to real-time booking information to Marriott’s editorial calendar. But what might be even more impressive—and instructive for other brands—are the eight swivel chairs. Each seat in the glass room represents a different department such as PR/Comms, Social Media, Buzz Marketing, Creative + Content, and even one for MEC, a media- buying agency that amplifies well-performing content at a moment’s notice.

Some marketers may dismiss this scene as a fad—a foolish brand playing media company. But in truth, it’s actually the sign of a great storytelling culture—one that embraces media as marketing.

At the time of this writing, although Marriott is very much building a media business—with plans to license short films and webisodes to places like Yahoo!, AOL, Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon—M Live and the Marriott Content Studio are still very much a marketing initiative.

“We did not get this far by saying, ‘I want to build a media company,’” Beebe said. “First and foremost, [the goal] is to engage consumers. Get them to associate with our brands, build lifetime value with them. Content’s a great way to do that.”

A Culture of Storytelling

While M Live and the Marriott Content Studio are making great strides reaching people externally, they’re also having an impact on life inside the company. The content team has put in hard work evangelizing and explaining what they’re doing—part of the reason they built M Live smack in the middle of the lobby for all to see.

One executive, for instance, spent three months leading a project to create a guide that explains M Live and how anyone in the company can help if they have an idea or see a trending story. They’ve connected the M Live team to customer care to handle any complaints or problems, and each Marriott brand is getting deeply involved with the content creation process. “People are getting it,” Beebe said. “Now that we’ve done a lot, they’re starting to see the impact.”

Even Bill Marriott comes down to see what’s going on.

“He loves it, loves the idea of what we’re doing,” Beebe said. “He’ll just come sit down and chit-chat and pick up the phone. He’s actually gotten on Matthew’s computer and shown his wife stuff.”

It’s that support from Bill Marriott and CEO Arne Sorenson that’s pushed the ambitious content operation forward so it can keep transforming the company.

“That’s really what our goal is,” Beebe said. “To take all the brand marketers, all the brand leaders and teams, and turn them into great storytellers.”

Not every company needs to build a sophisticated content studio like Marriott to build a great culture of storytelling, but if they want to succeed as storytellers in the future, they do need to embrace what that studio represents—the destruction of silos and the shared goal of using stories to build relationships and make people care.

Which is, of course, is what marketing is all about.

This is an excerpt from the Amazon #1 New Release, The Storytelling Edge: How to Transform Your Business, Stop Screaming Into the Void, and Make People Love You” by Joe Lazauskas and Shane Snow, available today.

http://ift.tt/2Evbbdf