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nanoland · 3 years ago

Text

am writing hellblazer fic asfdfsfff

title: The Cave

fandom: Hellblazer

characters: John Constantine, Chas Chandler, the First of the Fallen

blurb: John gets lost in a cave.

warnings: Depression, covid19, demons getting themselves Extremely murdered.

It was when the death toll had crested 100,000 that he’d snapped and made his way to Number 10 Downing Street with murder in his eyes and a briefcase full of every cursed artefact he owned.

“What are you gonna do, eh?” bellowed Chas, who’d been following behind him in his cab for the last half mile. He’d already tried to physically drag John into it and had received a bite on the hand for his trouble. “Chuck ‘em through the windows? That’s bulletproof glass, John! Fuck’s sake! Be reasonable!”

“Stop sodding shouting!” John shouted over his shoulder, wiping rain off his face. “You’ll spread sodding germs!”

“John, I already had it. Four months ago, remember?”

“You can have it more than once! Christ, does nobody in this city read the papers but me?”

It was fair to say that John wasn’t at his best. In his defence, he’d spent the last year sitting inside his tiny, poorly-ventilated, roach-ridden flat, vividly imagining what a respiratory virus would do to lungs that had suffered over forty years of heavy smoking, two run-ins with cancer, and the actual devil sticking his actual great big grubby clawed hand in ‘em. No fucking thank you.

Chas sighed heavily and climbed out of the cab again, slamming the door as he did. He splashed through a dozen puddles before coming to stand in John’s path, arms folded. “Listen, Conjob. I love you. Even when you’re a complete prick, which is most of the time. And I know you can do amazing things. But mate, hear me out; you cannot assassinate the British Prime Minister.”

“Someone bloody has to!” John Constantine, greatest wizard of his age, screamed at the top of his wretched, ragged, Satan-besmirched lungs.

Eventually, Chas managed to calm him down and get him home for a cup of tea.

“Sorry ‘bout that,” John grunted as his socks dried in front of the heater and the rational parts of his mind re-exerted themselves.

“S’alright.”

“How’s the bite?”

“Didn’t pierce the skin. John, you need a break. A holiday. You need to get out of town for a few weeks. Go breathe fresh country air, do some weird mystical shit with a goat, whatever it is that sorts your head out these days. But you can’t carry on like this, mate. I haven’t seen you this miserable in years.”

He handed John one of Renee’s strawberry-patterned towels. Dragging it across his face, John grunted, “Holiday? At a time like this?”

“Why not? Makes as much sense as any other time.”

“What if you come down with it again? Or Geraldine? Or Renee?”

“John,” said Chas, gently, laying a hand on his shoulder. “You already tried to cure me with magic. It didn’t work. At all. Just wasted a lot of chicken blood and Renee’s best spoons. Get this in your skull: there’s nothing you can do. Alright? I know you hate that, but it’s the truth.”

John swallowed thickly. “Yeah. Yeah. Alright.”

So he went home to his tiny flat, stuffed fresh socks and his toothbrush into a backpack, booby-trapped his front door, and fled London in the dead of night, feeling like one of those gits in Boccaccio’s Decameron.

“It’s called glamping.”

“Some new wizardy stuff, I’m guessing?”

Chas’s voice over the phone was distracted, like he was half-watching the telly. John was relieved; he’d wanted to hear another human speak but wasn’t feeling up to a proper conversation demanding his usual levels of sparkling charisma and staggering wit. Not right now. Not without weed, and he’d not thought to bring any.

Nestling deeper into his teak folding chair and drawing a thick woven blanket up over his knees, John said, “Nah. Not buggering about with any of that old guff until I’m back in town. Promised myself.”

“Right.”

“Don’t sound so sceptical, you git. I’ve done it before.”

“Mm-hmm. What’s your record? The longest you’ve ever gone without doing anything mystical and creepy?”

“‘Bout… hmm. Three days.”

“You’re coming up on the tail end of that right about now.”

“I know. Chas, on my word, I am going to make it to Sunday without so much as sniffing around a graveyard or wanking off a werewolf. I am on holiday.”

“Alright, alright, if you say so. Good for you, mate. So what’s this ‘glamping’ business, then?”

“It’s camping. But posh. I’m sitting up here atop a hill in Yorkshire with a tent the size of a cathedral and me chic woodburning stove and me box of white wine and feeling like the yuppiest old cunt who ever drew breath.”

“Sounds horrible.”

“It does, doesn’t it? That’s why I chose it over a nice comfy bed and breakfast. Figured I’d wake up with a cow shitting on my head and could use that as an excuse to come home early. Actually, though… it’s alright. Quiet. There’s a river at the bottom of the hill where these giggling honeymooners like to have a morning bonk but it’s far enough away that I can’t hear them unless they’re really having fun. And the weather’s been alright. It’s all surprisingly decent.”

“And you’re waiting for the other shoe to drop.”

“Yep.”

“Hmph. I should have come with you. You get all weird and introspective when you’re left alone for more than a couple days.”

“I’m not alone. There’re birds. Squirrels. A few ghosts hanging out by the toilets.”

“John.”

“Ain’t gonna talk to ‘em! Mind you, one did give me a wink when I was zipping up. How’s everything back home?”

“Er – look, I won’t lie, it’s shit. It’s all shit. But it’s not any more shit than it was when you left three days ago. Not any worse, not any better, yeah?”

“Right.”

(Stupid to be disappointed. Stupid that a part of him had secretly believed that as soon as he abandoned the sinking ship that was London, things would miraculously get better for everyone, even as another part of him, on the opposite side of his brain, had been convinced – maybe even hoped – that the moment he was gone, the entire city would descend into screaming anarchy, at which he could point and laugh from a safe distance.)

“Listen, John, I’ve gotta go. Renee needs groceries. Be careful, please?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Don’t fuck about with any occult bollocks. Don’t go foraging for brain-melting mushrooms. Don’t do anything. Just stay in your tent and read your dirty books, yeah?”

“Heard and understood, Mum.”

“Bastard.”

“Love you.”

“Yeah, you too.”

John dropped his phone onto the grass and stared up at the sky. A herd of thin grey clouds drifted past. Off in the distance, he could just make out the shape of a barn – or was it a church? Either way, there were sheep next to it.

A squirrel scurried down a nearby tree trunk and then up another one.

Yawning, he scratched his chin. (Getting scruffy. Hadn’t shaved in two days now.)

“Should prob’ly do some reading,” he mumbled to no one.

A few minutes passed.

He dangled his head back behind his seat and sang quietly: “First produced my pistol… then produced my rapier… said ‘stand and deliver’, for he were a bold deceiver… mush a-ring dum-a do dum-a da…”

Heaving a sigh, he stood up and walked around his tent to dispel pins and needles, then went inside to read his book.

“I am not bored,” he muttered fiercely, staring down at pages that might as well have been blank.

“Oh, but you are, John.”

England’s greatest wizard jumped up, wielding his novel as though it were a club, and dealt a devastating blow to empty air while screaming something along the lines of, “Raargh die die die!”

Then he waited for a moment to see if the voice returned. Tried to determine whether he could sense anything. Nope. Admittedly, that didn’t mean much these days. Lots of beasties and bastards out there had learned how to hide from him.

“Either I’m hallucinating or someone’s pissing me about,” he concluded, placing his hands on his hips. “Chas, mate, I’m sure you would agree that either constitutes a fine reason to leave this fucking tent.”

And leave he did.

He went caving.

The BBC had published an article a couple years back calling the UK’s cave systems its ‘last true wilderness’. He and Chas had had a good long laugh over that, Chas suggesting that John take the caver quoted on an expedition to Faerie or maybe direct him toward any of the two hundred portals to Hell between Plymouth and the Orkney Islands.

But the article had stuck with him. Perhaps it was the obvious love the caver had for his hobby, the clean and simple joy he got out of crawling around in dark, damp holes. John was always drawn to people like that, and not just because it sounded smutty.

(Imagine if he’d loved something clean and simple; gotten into bird-watching or carpentry instead of magic. Would have saved him a lot of hassle.)

Idly, one evening, he’d poked around on the internet – now that, that really was the last true wilderness – until he’d found a map listing all the cave systems in the UK, along with a guide to which were popular, which were dangerous, which were good for a family holiday, and yes (inevitably), which had been the scenes of grisly accidents.

(Wikipedia said that historically there’d been only 136 fatalities ‘associated with recreational caving’ in the UK and that, statistically, it wasn’t a particularly dangerous hobby. Hadn’t stopped him from having vivid dreams about bodies wedged in tiny tunnels miles below ground, cooling and rotting and bloating, except how could they bloat when there simply wasn’t enough room, what happened when…

Anyway, Chas had eventually rescued him from his maudlin musings and dragged him to the pub.)

And while his memory was a messy old thing, especially these days, that just happened to be the sort of useless information that tended to hang around in his head for years, like the words to every song in Sweeney Todd or the rituals required for an exorcism spell that didn’t actually work, doing nothing but taking up space.

There was a cave only a few miles from the campsite.

When he arrived, he beheld a clumsily painted sign nailed to an oak tree next to the entrance:

CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC UNTIL SPRING

NO TRESPASSERS

HAZARDOUS! ENTER AT OWN RISK

He lingered at the cave’s mouth. Though it was big enough for him to stand up in, it made for an unassuming sight. Squirrels played in the old oak with three sets of lovers’ initials carved into it that stood at its left and the pathway leading up to it was strewn with weeds and wildflowers.

“Am I really this stupid?” he pondered aloud, before correcting himself: “Am I really this bored?”

After five minutes’ internal debate, he decided that yes, he was.

He took a step towards the narrow crevice, before stopping himself. No. This was ridiculous. What was he thinking? Shaking his head, he turned and walked away.

Three hours later he was back, now with a good pair of leather boots (stolen from an arsehole in a nearby village), a Power Rangers backpack (given to him by a kid in exchange for a cigarette and some magic tricks), a cheap flashlight, two cans of lager, and a packet of crisps (paid for with the last of his cash).

“Off we go, then,” he said, and marched into the dark.

Like a well-fed leopard on a low-hanging branch, the First of the Fallen lounged across his throne of vertebrae, long black hair dribbling off his broad shoulders and pooling on the ground. Though he was wide awake, his eyes were closed. This, combined with the corpses of three supplicants dangling from nearby steel hooks, would hopefully discourage anyone from bothering him for the next few hours.

“My liege?”

Shit.

He kept still. Said nothing. Perhaps they would go away.

“Um… my liege, I’m terribly, monumentally sorry to disturb you, but…”

With a wave of his claw, the messenger exploded into red mist.

When, ten minutes later, a second messenger summoned up the courage to approach him, he realized that it must be very serious indeed.

“You have five seconds,” he said cordially, holding them up by the neck.

“Con… constantine!” they croaked.

Brightening, the First set them down. “Indeed? What’s the little bastard up to this time, eh?”

“Nothing, my liege. He’s dead.”

A few minutes later, a fourth corpse hung from a hook and the throne of Hell was empty.

To the First of the Fallen, caves were still a novelty.

Confined spaces, in general, were still a novelty.

At 13.6 billion years, he was only slightly younger than the universe. While solid planets had come into existence around the same time, he’d not actually visited one until the emergence of homo sapiens and his subsequent quarrel and falling-out with God – a mere 300,000 years ago.

Cast from Heaven, naked and freezing cold, he’d stumbled into a rocky cranny by the shoreline and wedged himself between its slimy walls. That was his earliest memory of ever being ‘indoors’. No surprise, then, that he avoided such places when he could. He had built no castles in Hell; his throne sat atop a mountain beneath an endless red-gold sky.

But right now, it wasn’t the cave that had his attention, dark and chilly and, yes, slimy as it was.

“Stupid turd,” he grumbled, glowering at the corpse. “Ow!”

He’d bumped his head on the cave ceiling again. It was too low for the average human to stand upright, much less an eight-foot primordial being.

Constantine stared at him, blue eyes blank and glassy. His body was unmarred save for the dent in the left side of his scalp, which had stopped leaking some time ago. As far as the First could tell, his nemesis had simply tripped and fallen onto an unfortunately positioned, unfortunately sharp rock.

The First spat on his tie and snarled, “Pathetic! What the fuck are you even doing here, eh? And – God’s hairy bollocks, when did you last bathe?”

His soul was still dangling off him, like drool from a dog’s mouth. Heaven, obviously, had no interest in him and the First hadn’t yet authorised his admission into Hell.

Because he wasn’t ready, dammit.

He’d not been expecting to welcome John home for at least another thirty years.

“Always have to make it difficult, don’t you?”

When he reached down to take hold of the soul – such a grubby, tattered thing – it bit, blazing gold for a sliver of an instant before he snatched his hand back. Stuck his index finger in his mouth until the sting abated. Fumed.

He tried again, grasping it firmly, as one might a snake. It thrashed. He gave it a disciplinary shake before opening Constantine’s mouth with a claw and forcing it down his gullet.

Coming back to life was never enjoyable. Constantine spasmed and gurgled, legs and arms contorting as pink foam gathered at his lips. The First, bored, sat down beside him, reclining against the cave wall with one knee crooked. Surveyed their surroundings. The ground was – oh dear – littered with crisp crumbs, an empty foil packet, two cans, and dozens of cigarette butts. How foul.

“Disaster in your wake, as ever,” he commented, tutting.

Constantine groaned, eyelashes fluttering.

Belatedly realizing that he wouldn’t be able to see in this subterranean gloom, and very much wanting to afflict him with the identity of his saviour, the First snapped his fingers. A dozen lit candles appeared across the cavern, hovering ghost-like in mid-air.

“Urgh… fffu… whu… oh, Christ Almighty.”

Watching him sit up, the First assumed a lordly expression, tilting his head. “And what do you have to say for yourself?”

Unhealthily pale skin and facial muscles stretched and twisted to an indeterminable end.

Then John Constantine set his jaw.

Growled: “I’m on holiday, you bellend.”

And passed out.

He awoke to the smell of slightly burnt waffles.

Better than burnt flesh, which was what he’d anticipated after His Infernal Bloody Majesty had popped in for a fag and a chat. Certainly better than sulphur.

“For you,” the First of the Fallen purred.

A white plate – averagely-sized but rendered absurdly dainty by the dimensions of the clawed fingers holding it – was set down in front of him.

He frowned at its golden-brown contents. “The catch?”

“No catch. I was peckish. I imagine you are, too.”

“Come on. Not in the mood. Did you piss on ‘em? Did you mix a baby’s blood into the batter?”

“Honestly, John.”

Scratching his chin, he reviewed the facts. Still in the same sodding cave, albeit far better illuminated than the last time he’d been conscious. Alive, but with that unmistakable stiffness that he’d come to associate with having recently been dead. Cold. Irritable.

Hungry.

His archenemy’s smug smile was almost enough to make him spit the first bite back out. Instinct borne from months of extreme poverty forced him to swallow instead.

“Tastes like shit,” he remarked, wiping his lips. “But I suppose you usually have minions to prepare food for you. Where’s the syrup?”

A regal sigh, before a bottle appeared beside the plate. He emptied a third of it and spent the next few minutes in delicious, sticky silence.

There were, as ever, consequences to allowing the First of the Fallen centre stage. The moment the big smelly git realised that John really wasn’t in the mood for banter, he waved a hand and conjured up a thin hardback with Into the Underworld: The Amateur’s Guide to Caving in Britain on the front.

As John rolled his eyes and stuffed another waffle into his mouth, the First cleared his throat and read: “‘According to the National Speleological Society, the minimum number of people required to safely embark on a recreational caving expedition is four – at least one of whom should have prior caving experience.’ Did you know that, John?”

John chewed sullenly.

“I did. I’d wager that most people do. At least, I’d wager that most people know that going caving in groups smaller than two – going caving alone – is wildly inadvisable. Caves are dangerous, John.”

Where were his cigarettes? Had the bastard nicked them?

“And… let’s see – ah! Here we are. ‘There is a great deal of commercial equipment available to a first-time caver, some of which is necessary, some of which is not. Two items, however, that are absolutely non-negotiable are a helmet and a helmet-mounted light.’ Do you have either of those, John?”

“Do I criticise your fucking hobbies?” he exploded, knowing better, knowing it would only encourage him. Sugary crumbs flew everywhere.

“You do, in fact. Often. And quite understandably. My favourite hobby is murdering your friends, after all.”

John threw the plate at his head.

He’d had a good sense of direction even before he’d learned how to see psychic residue coating streets and walls, left behind by previous travellers. Always scurrying around in places no kid should; subways, sewers, dirty basements, any haunted house his greedy little eye fell upon.

When he’d reached sixteen, burgeoning schizophrenia had muddled him up now and then. Occasionally, it’d even left him standing in streets he didn’t recognise with no earthly idea how he’d got there. PTSD had compounded the problem.

Even so, at fifty plus, he didn’t make a habit of getting lost. Meds, practice, and years of experience meant that he could walk from Chas’s house to Saint Paul’s with a blindfold on.

Long story short: This was embarrassing.

“I’m fairly sure we’re going in circles. That stalactite is very familiar.”

And he certainly wasn’t fucking helping.

(The floating candles, following them like ducklings, were. John’s torch had broken when he’d tripped. Still, he didn’t need the First of the Fallen for light. Could conjure it up himself, no bother. It just made sense to avail himself of a primordial being’s infinite magical resources before dipping into his own, far more limited stockpile.)

“Do you know the way out?” John asked, not breaking his stride.

“I do.”

“Will you tell me where it is?”

“I will not.”

“Then shut up.”

In his defence, John hadn’t thought the cave was big enough to get lost in. It hadn’t looked it from the outside.

But he’d wandered, then crawled, down at least a mile of twisting, increasingly narrow tunnels before getting himself killed. He’d kept meaning to stop; said to himself five times, ‘Okay, Conjob, this is getting stupid, let’s trot our arse back to civilisation’. Then he would notice another crevice wide enough for him to squeeze into.

“Curious place for a holiday,” the First of the Fallen commented after bravely keeping his tongue still for an unprecedented five minutes.

“Curious times we’re living in, innit?”

He hummed in agreement. “Are you really not here for any particular reason? Not – I don’t know – trying to find a missing child abducted by the fae? Searching for a wicked spirit who’s been cursing the local shepherds? Treasure-hunting, perhaps?”

“No.”

“You’re just here.”

“Yep.”

“Why?”

“I told you. I’m on holiday. Taking a nice long break.”

“John. We’ve known one another for some time. I am familiar with the ways in which you ‘take a break’. You either go to the pub or you go to several pubs. Attempting to reconnect with nature is hardly your style.”

“Being oblivious to current events – especially shit ones – is hardly your style. Been too busy shaving your chunky arse to pick up a newspaper lately?”

“Print is dying. Besides, you try managing an entire dimension. See how much spare time it leaves you. Honestly, I’m run off my feet most days.”

“So quit.”

“Don’t be silly. What else would I do?”

“I dunno. Could be a camgirl. You’ve got the legs for it.”

“Stop trying to change the subject. Why aren’t you at home?”

John stopped walking and spun to face him. “There’s a plague, you gormless, oblivious prick. I can’t go to the pub. I can’t meet up with me mates. I can’t visit people’s homes to perform exorcisms. I can’t do anything but sit indoors, on my own, for months on end, just watching everything get worse, and that… and that’s not an option. Not for me. I crack too easy. So I got out. Before I killed someone. Now, for the last time, shut up and let me concentrate.”

He bent down to tug off his shoes and socks.

Telepathic magic tended to work best when you were naked. But sod that. Not with the First of the Fuckheads watching. Waffles or no waffles, he did not deserve a treat.

“Oh, is this what we’re doing now? Marvellous! I do love watching your quaint party tricks,” he oozed with a mocking round of applause as John dropped to his knees.

Ignore him.

Taking a deep breath, John let his awareness expand.

It was hard, with the First standing right there. His presence was staggeringly heavy, weighing on the ley lines like an iron ball on a lace hammock. And so alien; elements found nowhere on Earth, bones and muscles formed before Earth had been a glint in God’s eye.

John sneered into the darkness. Piss on that. On him. This was child’s play. Buggered as his brain might be, John Constantine wasn’t going to falter at the sound, scent, or sensation of a mean-spirited old cosmic relic.

Okay, let’s see what we’ve got.

Seven years ago, three people came this way. A family. A woman; her sister; her daughter. They were having fun. The sisters had done this before; the daughter had been begging to come along for years. Afterwards, they were going for pizza. It was a good day.

Two years ago, four people came this way. All friends from work. Well – ‘friends’. One was the company CEO, the other three wanted promotions. Everyone but the boss was miserable. One was arachnophobic.

Eight months ago, a… sheep? Yeah. A sheep. Barely more than a lamb. It was lost. There was a storm and it came down here looking for shelter. Went too deep. By the time the shepherd found it, it was half-starved.

“John? What are you-…”

Ignore him.

Ten years ago, another family. Fifty years ago, a frightened child running from a monstrous father. And others – a hundred others – a thousand. The cave had a rich and storied history. Almost against his will and entirely against his better judgement, John followed its threads through the rock layers, chasing faded ghosts, brushing up against magic so ancient it had fossilised.

“John!”

Ignore him. Ignore him. Ignore-

His head was ringing. His blood was on fire.

Fuck, I’ve gone too far, too bloody deep, fuck, oh fuck.

“Constantine! Heed me!”

His eyes snapped open.

“Ah,” he said.

“Precisely,” said the First of the Fallen, who was holding him up by his coat collar like a jizz rag in need of a bin.

The cave had changed.

It was brighter, thanks to a small, well-constructed fire in its centre.

The walls were covered in paintings. Deer. Hogs. Great red and brown bulls.

A woman sat in the corner, wrapped in furs, adding detail to what might have been a fox. She didn’t seem to have noticed them.

“Did you mean to do that?” the First of the Fallen queried.

“In thirty thousand years, a monk will come down here and find them. He’ll be horrified, believing that they’re the work of… well, me. So he’ll leave and return with water in buckets and scrubbing brushes. As he lies on his deathbed, he will be firmly under the impression that this great good deed will grant him entrance into Paradise.”

The First of the Fallen paused for effect, then added, “Alas, he will be mistaken.”

Without looking away from her work, the woman spoke several words in a language miles removed from any contemporary tongue John had ever heard.

“The young lady says she doesn’t mind spirits wandering her caves, but requests that we don’t chatter while she’s trying to concentrate.”

Crouching next to freshly-etched cow and her calf, feeling uncharacteristically dazzled, John said, “Ask her if I can take a picture. Ask her!”

“Homo neanderthalensis, John. She won’t have the faintest idea what you mean.”

Rolling his eyes, he fished his phone out of his trenchcoat pocket and waved it at her. When she deliberately ignored him, he shrugged and took the shot.

The flash won her attention. She stood – revealing a faded seashell necklace and a long, curving scar across her left thigh – and approached them, limping slightly. John held out the phone to show her the picture and, after a resoundingly unimpressed inspection, she uttered a terse sentence.

“She’s unsure why the sickly-looking spirit thinks shrinking her beasts in any way improves them,” said the First of the Fallen.

The woman raised her head (hard to tell how old she was; younger than him, definitely) and looked John in the eye, squinting. Another few sentences followed, some of which sounded like questions.

Sarcastic questions, unless he was mistaken.

“She asks if you shrink them because large beasts frighten you. She speculates that, if the only beasts you can bear to approach are scrawny ones, it’s no wonder that you yourself are such a measly creature. She says that she too was scared of bulls when she was a child, but that her mother taught her not to be. She wonders why your mother failed you in this regard. Should I tell her your mother died in childbirth, John?”

“Stick your head up your own arse and choke. But ask her name first.”

Tossing back his thick black hair, he scoffed. “Why? What does it matter? She’s a primitive, doomed creature and she’s not even really here. This is just one of the cave’s memories.”

“Christ – are you jealous I’m talking to her more than I’m talking to you? Because that’s fucking inane. This is a one-in-a-lifetime type deal. I’ve never spoken to a legit bloody Neanderthal. I speak to you all the blasted time, more’s the pity.”

Yellow eyes narrowed. “Maybe I’ll kill her.”

John laughed. “You said it, squire; she’s a memory. You can’t kill her. She’s long dead. Now shut up.”

He wasn’t able to learn her name. Still, via pantomime and pointing, he eventually managed to convey his desire to find a way out of the cave – or so, at least, it seemed.

She took a bundle of sticks from beside her fire, lit them, and walked towards the nearest inky-black tunnel.

“See?” he said to the First of the Fallen as they followed her. “Politeness. All it takes.”

“Don’t act like you have any real idea what’s going on. She could be leading you straight into a trap. You’re aware, I’m sure, that archaeologists generally agree Neanderthals practised cannibalism? Ten muscular relatives might be waiting right around the corner with clubs and a cooking pot.”

“For fuck’s sake – I have literally stood and watched you slouching on that colossally pathetic bone throne of yours and nibbling the edge of someone’s pelvis like it was a turkey drumstick. Loathsome bloody hypocrite.”

“That doesn’t remotely count as cannibalism, John. That was a human pelvis. I’m not a human. I’m the prototype. A species of one. Which, I suppose, means it’s technically impossible for me to commit cannibalism. Hmm. What an interesting philosophical notion.”

Walking a short way ahead, bare feet soundless against the rock, their new self-appointed guide said something.

“What was that?” John whispered.

“‘If you must burden my ears by bickering like children, you could at least do it in a language I can understand’. Then she called us a rude word.”

Then the First of the Fallen spoke several sentences in his usual bored, drawling cadence and, to John’s surprise, she laughed.

“What was that?”

“Nothing,” the First of the Fallen said, innocently.

“I’m serious, bastard. What’re you saying to her?”

“Nothing important, John, really.”

More than once after that, he caught her glancing back at them and snickering.

The artist and the twisting stone galleries through which she led them – it couldn’t possibly have all been hers; the monk had destroyed the work of generations – were insufficient to keep John’s mind from straying back to important matters.

“Hey. Ponce. What’ve you done with my cigarettes?”

The First of the Fallen had plucked them from his trenchcoat pocket while he was unconscious. When it came to his sorcerer, he’d learned, you always wanted a bargaining chip to hand.

“We’re in the company of one whose lungs are as yet unsullied by the Industrial Revolution, Constantine. Are you really planning on exposing her to second-hand smoke?”

It was a prospect John, it seemed, hadn’t even considered. Obviously angry with himself for that (oh John), he snapped, “No! I was – it’s – look, she can’t get lung cancer, can she? She’s dead. Doesn’t matter what she breathes in now.”

Smothering a smile, the First of the Fallen said, “Oh? So the fact that she won’t actually perish upon inhaling your fumes is all that matters, is it? Never mind her comfort or dignity, I suppose; as long as you don’t have to clean up another corpse.”

Nostrils flared. Fists clenched. Blue eyes gleamed with something hotter and even more violent than divine wrath.

“Like you give a shit about her,” John growled.

So much in this miserable world reminds me of Heaven. The grass. The sky. The beauty. You alone remind me of the time before Heaven; that bizarre, unpredictable time when there were no rules, no beauty, only feelings, only sudden bursts of light, fierce and erratic, cutting through the void.

“Or anyone,” John continued, gathering steam. Nicotine withdrawal, the First of the Fallen suspected, was kicking in. “Remind me, what was that you said the day we met? ‘To be mortal is to be stupid, proud, conceited – and ultimately pathetic’. You showed your hand, idiot; you loathe us all. Ergo, any taunts that depend on you concealing that are a total bust. Forget about the ciggies. If they’ve been anywhere near you, I don’t want ‘em.”

For years, the First of the Fallen had secretly hoped John had forgotten his, in hindsight, ill-considered words.

(He’d meant every one of them, but at the time he’d been trying to come off as a Gentleman Devil, the quintessential Man of Wealth and Taste, affable and urbane, not a bitter, angry old monster.)

Should have known better. John was so foolishly protective when it came to humanity as an abstract concept, even while his attitude towards actual humans tended to be far more variable. He’d probably been furiously gnawing on that phrase – ‘ultimately pathetic’ – like a dog with a bone for thirty years.

Thirty years.

Was that really all the time they’d known one another? John Constantine, his Constantine, He Who Was Most Hated… a mere thirty year acquaintance?

“What’re you laughing at?”

“Heh. Nothing, John. Reminiscing, that’s all.”

“About what? Poor old Brendan?”

Brendan, Brendan. Who -? Oh yes. John’s friend. The one who’d sold his soul. The catalyst, in fact, for their meeting. Pity the bastard was in Heaven; he’d have liked to thank him.

“You see these?” said the artist, holding up her torch to illuminate a painted wolf pack. “My grandfather did these.”

“What’s she saying?” John demanded.

As the First of the Fallen translated, he gazed dispassionately at her.

The first time he’d encountered a human, they’d looked much the same. Small. Unremarkable. Clad in skins and hardened from a life exposed to this planet’s weather (he personally hated weather and had made sure there was no such thing in Hell).

Mind you, the ones he’d run into while naked and terrified and still injured from being swatted down to Earth like some insect had been much less hospitable. They hadn’t known what he was; only that he was wrong. When he’d tried to approach their campfire, they’d thrown stones at him. Slaying them all hadn’t even occurred to him. Father had said that they were precious and at that stage, he’d still given a toss about His rules. Instead, he’d slunk away.

Catching food wasn’t a problem. He was faster than any buck or bird. It was loneliness, not hunger, that drove him to try again, and again, and again. In time, they grew used to him. Even showed him kindness. They had an extraordinary capacity for that. (For all that it was so often conditional and withdrawn the moment one became too strange or too frightening.)

But he’d never grown used to them. They were, at heart, creatures of community. And he simply wasn’t. He was a species of one. The prototype. He’d always been alone but for God’s company, and adjusting to life as a member of a tribe had proved impossible. Their norms, their traditions, their complicated etiquette – it had all bewildered him, then intimidated him, then irritated him. That, combined with his ageless body and supernatural strength, had driven an inevitable wedge between them, and he’d returned to the wilderness to wander alone.

He considered telling John that story.

(Why not? He’d told him everything else and the idea that his nemesis might have an incomplete view of him was, for some reason, concerning.)

Then he considered John’s likely reaction. The curled lip. The scornful snort. “What, you looking for pity? ‘Boo-hoo, my rotten childhood turned me into a git’? Hah! Jog on, squire.”

No. John’s hatred was a hard-won prize. John’s contempt was to be avoided at all costs.

“You realise most people aren’t allowed down here,” the artist said, glancing his way. She was shorter than John, who himself was slightly shorter than the average man; her eyes were level with the First’s navel. “Only elders and those who’ve earned the right. There are grave penalties awaiting any who sneak in.”

“Really?” he replied, interested only in John’s furrowed brow and silent, aggravated attempts to work out what they were saying.

“Yes. Because this place is important. Sacred. When I was young, I spent years dreaming of being allowed to venture this deep. I don’t know the ways of spirits – but I’ll not pretend it doesn’t rankle that you spend more time studying your sickly friend than your surroundings.”

“You’re still young. Compared to me, everyone is.”

“He doesn’t even seem to like you very much. Why are you travelling with him?”

“I don’t know. Why do urine and semen come out the same hole?”

“‘It’s none of your business’ would have sufficed. Are you always this rude? Is that why the sickly one doesn’t like you?”

“No. No, he dislikes me for other reasons.”

“Well, well, well. Hullo,” came John’s voice, and they both realised that he’d stopped walking.

Turning, the First of the Fallen spied his nemesis standing with his hands in his pockets, studying a man dressed like a thirteenth-century peasant.

“Eh? Where did he come from?” the woman asked.

In quavering tones, the peasant said, “Are you angels?”

The First of the Fallen laughed. “John! He’s asking if-…”

“Just because I can’t speak Neanderthal doesn’t mean I don’t know sodding Middle English. Give me an ounce of credit. I’m only a cocking wizard, after all,” John snapped, before addressing the new arrival: “No. Just travellers.”

The peasant’s shoulders slumped. “Oh. I thought maybe God had sent me angels. I’ve been requesting them for several days.”

John shuddered. “Bad idea. Trust me. You don’t want to mess around with that lot.”

“But I need guidance. Protection.”

“From what?”

Eyes wide, the peasant took his hand and clutched it. “My friend, can’t you see? I am being pursued.”

“By who?”

“By demons.”

(to be continued)

#hellblazer #john constantine #chas chandler #first of the fallen #fanfic #my fic

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escarlatafox · 5 years ago

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whispers for the 'send you a series' meme, i'm tempted to just be Unoriginal and say kung fu panda, but if you'd rather something else, i'm seeing a lot of steven universe around here jfjfiea

Masha ily. You know that, right? :D

Kung Fu Panda:

Favourite character: Who else but Shifu? XD

Second favourite character: It might actually be Po

Least favourite character: Hard to think of a least favourite character. If we ONLY count the main cast + the villains in the movies and exclude any other minor characters, then I’d say Kai maybe? Just wasn’t as impactful to me as the other characters/villains. Or if we include minor characters I might say the hugging panda from the third movie because the gag and his character didn’t really add much. Also, I’ve already spoken about this in the past, possibly more than once, but back when I was a child upon watching the first movie, my answer to this question would actually be Ping. Suffice it to say, my opinion on him changed a LOT. XD

The character I’m most like: Maybe I am like Po in some ways. At my core, I’m a fangirl lol. And I like food :O

Favourite pairing: Don’t really have any ships. Crane and the girl from that one short tho. Like idk if I’d want them to get together, maybe not now that I think about it. But it would be nice to see them interact more.

Least favourite pairing: HAH. Let’s just say I really hate what Legends of Awesomeness decided to do with Shifu in the shipping realm and leave it at that. :P

Favourite moment: YOU’RE GONNA MAKE ME CHOOSE? There’s no way. I could only list off notable ones. Okay, if we narrow it down to non-Shifu moments, off the top of my head, you obviously have the iconic cannonball scene at the end of kung fu panda 2, and in the THIRD movie I love love love how when Po is in the spirit realm and he says “turns out... I’m all of them” and the music swells and the framing and the scenery is just. so gorgeous . I love. So much. If I sat here thinking too long I’d probably start recapping all the movies SO since I’ve thrown those two out there I’ll cut myself off before I get too out of hand. XD

Rating out of 10: First movie is just 10/10 for me. It’s my favourite movie, not just in the franchise but like, probably ever among movies in general, and just about every moment and scene feels like home when I watch it. The trio of movies I’d then put at probably around 9/10.

Steven Universe:

Favourite character: I can now say with confidence that it is Steven Universe.

The people who liked Steven “before it was cool” certainly have bragging rights, because I was one of those people who failed to find myself among them, as I lacked the foresight, or... future vision for it. :P. At first, in the very early days, I didn’t really care for Steven. It’s often very easy to gloss over a protagonist, and, in my case, not truly appreciate what’s great in a character like early-days Steven, or even Po. Now, Steven and Po are, naturally, quite distinct characters in their distinct franchises but there are certainly parallels that can be drawn, not only in their character but how I initially felt towards them. By asking for both fandoms in the one ask, I feel like you’ve given me the opportunity to speak about this, which has been idly on my mind every so often. XDBoth Steven and Po are the protagonist of the franchise they’re in. They’re both fond of food, they both start out needing training and then develop incredible skills along the way until they become one of, if not the most powerful in the cast. They’re both generally very easygoing, excitable, enthusiastic, FRIENDLY, and generally kind. At the start of their journeys, there’s a lot of focus on how much they’re lacking in skills and abilities, how difficult it is for them to accomplish even the basics. They both gotta Save The World, whether it be more in the sense of the universe as a whole or China.And the thing is I had the same issue with Po as I did with early-days Steven; I didn’t realise how great Po is. I was just a little too dismissive. With time, (and I’m talking around the point where I actually entered the fandom after the second movie was out, so it was mostly kid me who is guilty of not recognising Po’s greatness) I grew to realise just how cool Po is, to truly appreciate his genuine enthusiasm and excitement and also utmost reverence and admiration of kung fu. I simply Expected Po’s character to be less than it was, which is what caused the oversight. But Po is honestly so fantastic and deserves every last bit of love the fandom has to offer him. Also, seeing his potential and him reaching his potential is so damn epic. See: his “turns out, I’m all of them” quote/scene I mentioned earlier.So to bring things back to Steven, whose character arc nonetheless has its VERY stark differences from Po’s, it was around when Steven managed to calm down and stop the cluster that it fully registered in my mind how fantastic and amazing he is and how much I appreciate his character. In fact, it was a little earlier than that. Pretty sure I hadn’t actually started watching the show yet when Sadie’s Song aired, but I was getting all the deets secondhand on my dashboard and I loved what I heard and saw in gifs/pics. A boy who just wants to perform and dance around on stage in heels and a gorgeous outfit to boot (I really liked the thought of trans girl Steven at the time tbh, which was being thrown about on my dashboard back then, though of course that’s not the path the show decided to go down, so he/him it is...!). He had my full support. And THEN when he calmed the cluster down like that... (and I think I was probably watching the show at that point?) I just, loved his incredible talent to reach out to others and HELP them, I loved his magical gem abilities and how he always seemed to be triumphing against the odds, and as the show progressed his feats only started getting more and more impressive. I absolutely noticed how much responsibilities he’d started forcing onto himself, how he was trying to manage everyone and be an adult to all the adults in his life, I was kind of intrigued by how much he was shouldering, and it struck me that he had developed an Atlas Personality long, long before he was ever listed as an example of it on the wikipedia page. I simply adored Steven and his placement in the show and everything.He’s also completely ACING things as usual in the movie too.And then Steven Universe Future hit, and oh boy, that’s a whole other story. Steven truly emerged as the forefront seeing as the focus was now unrelentingly on him and his issues. What initially got me really hooked as well, was the inherent shock and intrigue of seeing a character who would usually always do the right thing, who always seemed to know what was best for everyone, who always seemed to be able to read a situation and understand who needed help and then reaching out and offering them help... not only completely failing to recognise that HE was the source of a given problem (see: the pink dome rapidly closing in), but to actively dig himself deeper by being convinced SOMEONE ELSE was at fault, and whirling around and trying to pin it all on them. Before Steven whirled around to point at Lars, there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that he was about to be like “guys, you know what? I think I’m causing this - I think I have some stuff going on” LOL NOPE. And that was only the tip of the ice berg. Steven had nowhere else to go but down, and boy, down did he go until he hit rock bottom, pulled out a shovel and started digging.

Second favourite character: Hard to say. I do know that I am crazy about the zircons (I mean c’mon - lawyers!). I was crazy about Blue Pearl when we first saw her too. My answer might’ve been Aquamarine or even Eyeball if it wasn’t for Steven Universe Future. Seeing more of them just kinda made me go “ok you know what, yeah this isn’t really what I expected and they’re not actually really my thing after all.” I reeeeally don’t know. Steven Universe has such a stellar cast of great characters. Steven Universe Future also kinda threw me off Spinel, but obviously Spinel is A+ as well.

Least favourite character: I don’t really care about Lapis. She just kind of lost appeal as a character to me and I never really understood her I guess. I was also never fond of the diamonds... because you know, discourse, and like, the discourse kind of has a point. But after Steven Universe Future I might invest more in trying to understand their positioning in the show a little more, now with the confirmation that Steven never did actually forgive them. I completely wrote-off White Diamond’s seemingly quick turnaround for the longest time and honestly never bought it and felt it was WAY too easy and rushed/forced. But I came to an internal understanding quite recently and I THINK I finally get what the show meant there so I think I can buy it now and find it believable at last, which is nice. So don’t quote me and don’t crucify me, but I might warm up to the diamonds a Little.

The character I’m most like: omg. There’s so many characters idk who is most like me hahaha

Favourite pairing: Connverse. Connie kissing Steven on the cheek in the movie made me SO pleased, and I can say this is my favourite pairing if only because the prospect of it not working out and instead going up in flames and not actually having a good resolution - which is a threat that felt so very real during Steven Universe Future - was deeply, DEEPLY upsetting to me. Like I didn’t care because I’d been taking it for GRANTED, but the moment anyone suggested, with alarming plausibility that they may split up or whatever, I was immediately on edge like “NO NO NO NO NO”.

Least favourite pairing: Stevinel. Stevidot. Just, any ship with Steven and any of the gems is an instant no from me. D:

Favourite moment: omggg. Again, there are simply way too many, so no answer I give here can or will be definitive. So I’ll simply state my love for when Steven is singing Change and Spinel yeets him in the sky and there’s the stellar animation where he goes “You can make it different... You can make it right! You can make it better! We don’t have to fight!”

Rating out of 10: I’d probably give it a 9/10, if only because, look. There are a LOT of shows out there. There are a lot of pieces of media I’m into and have watched. And Steven Universe is just. It’s good. Even when I like another piece of media MORE than Steven Universe, I can still more than readily acknowledge when/if SU has vastly superior writing. And it usually does. The only thing stopping me from giving it a 10/10 is because for the vast majority of SU’s existence I was mainly only ever a passive watcher/fan and/or got secondhand knowledge (closer to the start of it airing), so it lacks that fundamental closeness to my heart that something like Kung Fu Panda has. (Though I got way more close to it during SUF, as my reblogs can attest to LOL). The other thing stopping it from hitting that 10/10 is there are things I still take issue with, like how the Rose=Pink reveal undermines Pearl’s character (the “rebellion” aspect) and casts an EXTREMELY uncomfortable light on Pearl being in love with Rose. Yes, the show already showed us that Pearl’s obsession with Rose is unhealthy and problematised it. But regardless of how problematised it already was, I’m just not comfortable with a former slave being shown as being in love with their former master at all. What does that add, realistically? There are other valid criticisms that have been pointed out, namely how aspects of the show such as Sugilite’s role in Coach Steven do fail its Black audience. That undercurrent is there and it’s unfortunate.

#mashanevershutsup #ask #asks #THANK YOU I was actually feeling unhappy and you sending me an ask like this kinda cheered me up?#Gotta love that Human Interaction #long post

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geek-patient-zero · 5 years ago

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Part 1, Chapter 2

Or: McCann Reads His Mail

Blood War: Masquerade of the Red Dead Trilogy Volume 1

Dire McCann returns to his office, in “the heart of the tenderloin district.”

Big, bold, black letters on the door proclaimed, D. McCann, Investigations. Beneath his name, in much smaller print, was the disclaimer Consultation by Appointment Only.

I guess even Dire knows his first name’s a little odd and abbreviated it. Who’d want to give work to a guy who looks like they’re trying to give themselves a nickname.

There’s several paragraphs describing the office. The outer office/reception area has a coffee table with old issues of Sports Illustrated and three red chairs, like a doctor’s office with an even more limited selection of outdated magazines.

It wasn’t much, but he didn’t require any better. Recently, his only clients had been the Kindred, and none of them worried about his taste in furniture.

Not to his face, anyway. Vampires are like suburban parents that way.

The office proper, or his ”inner sanctum” as the narration calls it, is pretty standard; huge oak desk, “an elaborate telephone answering machine,” a table with a fax machine, PC, and printer on it, some metal cabinets, and more red chairs. It was also mentioned to have an “outrageous” rent that was almost worth it for the building’s cleaning lady.

The glow of a nearby streetlight gave the room an eerie, ghost-like interior.[...]No cheaply framed photos with hearty endorsements or tacky paint-by-numbers artwork hung on the walls. McCann believed in a strictly functional workplace. Besides which, it made a better impression on potential clients.

McCann sits behind his desk and reloads his submachine gun.

Considering what had happened already tonight, it seemed like good policy to stay ready for trouble.

For all the good it did him, but good thinking I guess. Proper paranoia helps in the World of Darkness.

Then he checks his answering machine. Two of the messages are for “divorce work.” That kind of stuff “didn’t interest” McCann, but there’s another detective in the building who specialized in it, and McCann trades him leads for favors, so he writes down the names and phone numbers. Another message is trying to sell him health insurance.

McCann grinned. Considering his present circumstances, he wasn’t sure he could afford the premiums.

Finally, McCann gets around to checking the mail he was carrying around during the first chapter. After separating the junk mail, he’s left with the small box, which was from Switzerland, three letters from Venice, Italy, another from Australia, and the last from Peru. He starts with the mail from Venice.

Dated approximately a week apart, the letters contained detailed records for financial deals made during the previous seven days. The facts and figures covered hundreds of major business transactions throughout Europe and the United States. The detective scanned the documents carefully. There were no unusual expenditures or unexplained finances. Not that he expected to find any. The masterminds of the Giovanni Clan were the greatest financial wizards in the world. They kept a tight watch on their investments. McCann merely wanted to make sure no one other than him was skimming the profits.

Interesting. Despite doing work for the Camarilla, McCann also has connections to the independent Giovanni Clan, or at least is stealing money from them, and in a way that even their “financial wizards” can’t detect. There’s an even more interesting reveal at the end of the paragraph.

The longer he lived, the more cautious he became. And, though he appeared to be in his mid-thirties, Dire McCann lived a very long time.

Huh. The summary on the back cover describes him as “mortal.” Then again it also misspells his surname as McCannan, so...

Next he opens the latter from Darwin, Northern Territory Australia, which contains a newspaper clipping. Recently, “nomadic” Aborigines fled their reservation in the Tanami Desert and set up a shanty town outside the city. Officials tried to get the “troublemakers” to go back, “but with no success.”

No one could offer an explanation for the natives’ unexpected migration. Nor were the unwelcome Aboriginals willing to discuss why they had abandoned their primitive shelters and made the long trek to the coast. Their only reply was to point in the general direction of the Macdonnel Ranges and utter the word “Nuckalavee, Nuckalavee,” over and over again.

The hell’s a mythological Scottish demon doing in Australia?

Unfortunately, no one other than the natives understood what the term meant.

Have they tried asking a Scottish person? Maybe someone from the Orkney Islands? This is like Native Americans fleeing from the Loch Ness Monster or a kappa.

For those of you who’d never heard of it, or had never played The Bard’s Tale, the Nuckelavee is this big horse with the upper torso of a rider growing out of the middle of its back, and it has no skin.

The story ended with the mayor promising city residents that the shanty town would be gone shortly.

Australians being shitty to the Aboriginals. What a surprise.

I know, hypocritical coming from an American. But still.

McCann grimaced. He understood why the Aboriginals had fled. But he doubted that the government officials in Darwin would believe his answer. Or care. Mentally, McCann noted that he should request that his clipping service search for any follow-up stories. Or reports of unusual disappearances in the Northern Territories.

It’s a minor spoiler, but not an unsurprising one given the setting, but the World of Darkness version of the Nuckalavee is a vampire; a Nictuku, the name for a fourth generation Nosferatu. Father Naples mentioned them during the prologue when he was talking about the Nosferatu, remember?

“A few of their fourth-generation progeny are rumored to be grotesque monsters, known as the Nictuku.”

But whether it’s the mythological Nuckelavee or a vampire character based off of it, it’s bizarre that Weinberg took a mythological creature from one culture, transplanted it to a completely different one on a different continent, and act like it was always a part of that culture. Even in 1994, before Wikipedia, anyone familiar with Scottish folklore would know better. Hell, check that fan wiki page I linked just now. The reference used for the page came from VTM: Clanbook: Nosferatu. It came out in 1993, and it’s most likely what Robert Weinberg used for information on Nuckalavee too. If the information on the wiki is accurate to the book, then the book straight up says that the thing is Scottish. Even if the vampire migrated at some point, more people should know about it, at least as a legend, than some scared Aboriginals.

Speaking of... I’m no expert on Aboriginal cultures, living on the opposite side of the Pacific and all, but I’m sure they can communicate better than pointing at some mountains and grunting a monster’s name in fearful tones like some old Hollywood tribal character. At least enough to say “there’s something life threatening by our reservation and we’re getting away from it.” The story’s sympathetic to them at least, but that part rubs me the wrong way.

Next, McCann opens the envelope from Peru. It contains a photo and a handwritten note from a member of the Explorer’s Club. The photo makes McCann “swallow hard”. More bad news.

Scribbled in black ink around the margin of the photo were the words, “Found at entrance to huge cavern, Gran Vilaya ruins, Peru.” The picture showed a massive stone statue of a crouching demonic figure with a misshapen, bloated female body and the face of a snarling jaguar. Circling her feet in a ring were a dozen stone heads. Judging from the size of the skulls, the demon stood a least fifteen feet tall.[...]It fronted a huge network of previously unknown caves that honeycombed the Andes for miles. No one knew for certain the purpose of the underground warren. Several members of the expedition thought it might have served as a ritual burial ground for the mysterious Chachapoya civilization due to the numerous skeletons found scattered all through the tunnels. Which would therefore identify the demonic figure as the guardian of the dead.

Credit where it’s due, Robert Weinberg didn’t just make up the Chachapoya. Little’s known about their ancient civilization, and some of what we do know come from the Inca that conquered them and the Spanish, which aren’t what you’d call unbiased accounts. They even lived in the kind of “fog-shrouded region” or “cloud forests” that Gran Vilaya was described as being found in.

The writer ended his note with the hope that McCann felt his research money was being well spent.

McCann used money from a “secret Giovanni slush fund”, which of course none of the Giovanni clan elders know about, to fund the expedition. McCann feels the cost was justified, but would’ve preferred it it if they’d found nothing.

The statue was not a representation of the spirit guardian of the dead Chachapoyas. It showed their murderer..

Not sure why the Spanish had to build underground catacombs for the Chachapoyas to die of disease and poverty in when- No, wait, he’s talking about a vampire.

A creature who abhorred all life, she was named Gorgo, the One Who Screams in Darkness. And the empty caverns in Gran Vilaya indicated that once more she walked the Earth.

Turns out she’s another Nictuku, like Nuckalavee. One with a kickass title. It looks like some very old, very powerful vampires are waking up, and McCann is not happy about it. He opens the box from Switzerland. It came from “an old friend.”

Inside were photocopies of more than three hundred pages of hand-written memos and high level classified documents. They were a mixed selection from a half-dozen different European security agencies. All were marked TOP SECRET.

But we readers don’t get to learn what they say, because McCann checks his watch and learns he’s gotta be at the Club Diabolique to meet Alexander Vargoss in half an hour.

McCann’s preparing to leave when his phone rings. Remember his “elaborate telephone answering machine?” It’s got some spiffy futuristic tech in it like a “caller ID feature” and the ability to record phone calls. Stuff that only someone secretly skimming money from the Giovanni can afford. But seriously, I enjoy reading old stuff and seeing things that are common today described as rare and amazing. Hell, I didn’t know caller ID was a thing in 1994. My family’s middle class and we didn’t get phones with caller ID until the 2000′s.

Unfortunately, none of his phone system’s features come in handy in this case. He doesn’t recognize the number, but McCann answers the phone anyway.

A man whose voice McCann didn’t recognize spoke in clear, crisp tones. “Lameth,” said the stranger, “beware of the Red Death.”

Without another sound, the man hung up, leaving a stunned McCann holding the receiver. Lameth, the speaker had called him.

Nah, Dire, despite his clear, crisp tones the mysterious caller still has a bit of a lisp. He was actually calling you “lame-ass.”

It was a name from the dawn of history, one that McCann believed long forgotten. A master schemer, the detective did not like unexpected shocks. Especially ones of this magnitude.

McCann certainly has the connections and resources to be a master schemer. Still, I’d of liked to have seen him actually scheme before the narration straight up calls him one.

He tries to listen to the recording of the phone call, but turns out it didn’t record. The caller ID screen is blank, and even the phone number it picked up earlier disappeared. This is starting to sound familiar.

Luckily, McCann memorized the number despite his previous confidence in technology. He calls the local police station, specifically a cop named Harry. He asks for a favor due to him for a bottle of wine he sent Harry for his birthday; the location where his phone call was made from. Turns out, it’s from a booth in the front lobby of his building. One that’s been out of service for months.

Let’s recap. Assassins just tried to kill McCann. Powerful vampires are waking up abroad, which is worrying for a very old schemer with an eye towards international news like him. And an untraceable magic man just called him by a very old name no one should know and warned him of a threat with an ominous name. All before he’s gotta meet with the Prince of St. Louis. Good thing McCann’s a big tough book protagonist, ‘cause I’d certainly be a little anxious.

Not a believer in coincidence, the detective knew the three events had to be linked together. But how?

The voice on the phone had warned him to “beware the Red Death.” McCann had absolutely no idea who or what the Red Death might be. He had a terrible suspicion that he would soon find out.

#vampire the masquerade #vtm #vtmb #world of darkness #vampire: the masquerade #blood war

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agilenano · 5 years ago

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Agilenano - News: Why SQLite succeeded as a database (2016)

Brought to you by This week we talked with Richard Hipp, the creator of SQLite, about its history, where it came from, why it succeeded as a database, how it’s development is sustainably funded, and how it’s the most widely deployed database engine in the world. 84 minutes Recorded Apr 30, 2016 Published Apr 30, 2016 Download (60MB) Toptal – Join the best, or hire the best engineers and designers! Email Adam ([email protected]) for a personal introduction to our friends at Toptal. SQLite Home Page GDBM fopen(3) - Linux manual page Bruce Perens - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia He co-founded the Open Source Initiative (OSI) Welcome back everyone. This is the Changelog and I am your host, Adam Stacoviak. This is episode 201 and today Jerod and I are talking to Richard Hipp, the creator of SQLite. We talked to Richard about the history of SQLite, where it came from, why it succeeded as a database, how its development is sustainably funded and also how it’s the most widely deployed database engine in the world. Our first sponsor of the show today is our friend at Toptal. And you know if you’ve been listening to show that we love Toptal and one of the interesting things about Toptal is being able to take control of your career, being able to work on technologies you’re going to work with, being able to work with the companies you want to work with, choosing your own salary, being able to travel. I talked to Asael Arenas, the Community Manager for Toptal in South America and I was blown away by what this guy had to say, so take a listen. “To be tied to a desktop these days is something that is not necessary for developers. If there are still developers - and I’m sure there are a lot of developers who’re still tied to their desktops, I will let them know about Toptal, about this company that will give you the opportunity to drive your own career. You can decide how much time you want to work, how much you want to earn, where you want to work from, when you want work. So what else? All that is possible.” Alright, that was top Toptal’s Community Manager for South America, Asael Arenas. He’s living a dream, he’s traveling the world, he’s getting paid, he’s doing what he wants, he’s choosing his own path, and if that’s what you want to do call up on Toptal, toptal.com. Tell them that Changelog sent you. If you want a personal introduction, email me [email protected]. And now on to the show. Hey everyone here, today we’re joined by Richard Hipp. Now, Jerod, this is a deep topic because SQLite or SQLite (different pronunciation) - we’ll debate that during the show - is such a prolific, widely-used technology. This is something you pointed out, in terms of this technology to kind of interest you, so maybe we should open up with why, why did it interest you so much? Why it interested me was basically for the ubiquity of it. You know, it’s one of those technologies… I think, I’ve said before on the show - I think it was the cURL show - we were coming to software development around the year I guess 2001, 2002… Anything that predates my inception into software, I just kind of assumed it always existed. And so this is one of those programs that I just haven’t thought about in the historical context, until I saw something like an article, I think the Guardian article which was actually written back in 2007 but still seemed pretty poignant until this day, and got to just reading about… You know, I knew what the technology was, but reading about the technology and how many - I mean it’s just like in almost every device in the world. And it’s public domain, super interesting. So I said, “Oh, we gotta get this guy on the show”, and Richard, thanks so much for joining us. So here’s the way we kick off the show - diving a little deeper, especially Richard to someone like you, who’s got a deep, rich history of software development; kind of figuring out where they came from, what made them get into technology in the first place. So take us back to as early as you want to that got your influence, that got your feet wet in technology. What were the first steps that got you into software development? [] When I was in the 9th grade, I saw all a Teletype connected with an acoustic coupler 110-baud modem to a mainframe computer. And I said, “I’ve got to learn to program that.” And I went to the school library and I checked out every single book about computers in my high school library, all three of them, and I read them cover to cover that night. And I got an account on that little computer and started programming away in BASIC. Saved up my money… Shortly after that, the Apple I came out, and I was about to buy the Apple I and the Apple II came out. And I bought just the motherboard for an Apple II. Got it. Had to build my own keyboard, my own power supply, sorted it altogether. The first board I got didn’t work. I called up Apple, they put me through the technical support and Steve Wozniak answers the phone. ..and said, “Oh, yeah. Send it back. We’ll send you another board.” They sent me another motherboard and that one worked. That’s how I got started in computers, trying to write programs in 4K of RAM, and that 4K included the video memory. So that’s how I got started. I went to university, studied Electrical Engineering, didn’t do anything with computers for a while. Coming out of university with a master’s degree, I took job at Bell Labs, and the first thing they did was sit me down in front of a console, running Unix, and I learned Unix and C, and work there for a few years, quit, went back to graduate school, came out of graduate school in 1992. Back then getting a tenure track position was really, really hard. There were hundreds of candidates for any open position, and I was not the best candidate. My application was near the bottom of the stack, and so I just started my own company, just developing bespoke software, solving hard problems for people. That company has been in business now for 24 years. In the course of doing that one time we had a problem where we needed a database engine. We were using Informix. The customer said [\] Informix and, you know, that’s a big hassle to set up and stuff for development purposes. We needed something simple. We used Postgres for a while, that worked well for development. But it was read-only, the database was read-only, and I thought why can’t we just read this database directly off of the disk? And so I just said, “Well, I’ll write my own database engine.” So I wrote SQLite and I got to be real popular, and here we are. That might be the purest love at first sight type of a story in terms of technology I’ve ever heard. It was just like I saw it and I thought, “I’m gonna go get every book from the library I possibly can and I’m gonna do this.” Yeah, that was a lot of fun, playing with computers in high school, but I stayed away from computers all through college. It should also give anybody that’s new, I guess, you should say - it’s the easiest way to say it - some inspiration, because you cared so much that you created your own hardware to access the motherboard that you had bought from Apple. To me, that’s determination. That’s the purest, simple version of determination I’ve ever seen, because… By any means necessary, you had to. Right? You didn’t … Yes, that’s all you had to do. And, you know, we didn’t have computer monitors of any type. You had to video output, you had to modulate it to RF, into the RF range and hook it into the antenna wires on a TV set. And of course, with the limited resolution a TV set, the whole screen was 40-characters wide and 24 lines long. We thought it was magic. It was the most amazing thing in the world. [] Well, take us back to that. Share with us if you can, Richard, a magic – a story of a magic moment then. Since it’s such magic to you, if you can remember back to those times when you were first enamored by this thing - what story can you share that sticks out most to you about something magical? You know, it’s hard to say… There’s just something magical about making things work. I’ve always liked building things from scratch and making things work. That goes back in my family, my father’s the same way. When he builds things… My father is sort of the original maker. You see the makers now, but modern makers, they always have computers built in. The things my father makes usually involve an internal combustion engine of some sort. But it’s the same idea. I just do it with abstractions on a computer screen. Writing programs is a really, really interesting thing, because we can build entire worlds out of just pure thought stuff. We don’t have raw materials, it’s just pure ether, and it materializes, and it becomes a whole other world. That makes me think of a very specific domain where that other world comes into the real world, which I think nowadays is somewhat considered a solved problem, but I think probably you faced, at least when you were getting started, which is printing. Do you have any memories of the early days of printers? I mean, did you have to write your own drivers? How did printers originally…? Yeah. We just… I didn’t print things out. [laughs] It’d go up on the screen and you’d write it down. Printing was not an option. I looked at ways of making my own printer. You know, they had daisy-wheel printers that would print things, but that was a lot of money and I didn’t have any money back then. You’re thinking 1977, the Apple II motherboard costs $600. That was just the motherboard, and that’s $600 in 1977. Jimmy Carter was President of the United States. That would be like paying thousands of dollars today for just the motherboard, and it had 4K of memory on it. Printers were ridiculously expensive. I did manage to get a hold of a used electric typewriter and I played around trying to figure a way to get that to be my printer, but it turned out that that electric typewriter was mostly mechanical, there was not much electrical interface to it. So that didn’t work out well. I would figure out a way to hook up an internal combustion engine to this electric typewriter exactly… Yes. Yeah, exactly. You mentioned that you went away from computers in college and I read that you got a philosophy degree, or you got a Doctor of Philosophy from Duke… Can you talk about your college years and why did you move away from software and then why did you move back? Well, so as an undergraduate at Georgia Tech, I did electrical engineering, and I stayed away from software because I think that was easy. I knew how to do that already, and I wanted to learn new stuff. So I did digital signal processing, which in the early 1980s was a really phenomenal thing. This was brand new stuff. Now everything is digital, but back then it was just the beginning of the digital age. [] I’d never taken him a computer programming class until I went to Duke in graduate school, and I studied in the Department of Computer Science there. It was computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, and my thesis was on a speech recognition system and a dialogue system. I figured really cool ways, I devised some really cool things for resolving elliptical utterances and anaphora. It was interesting work, but once I left - I did that for five years at Duke and left that and never looked back. I haven’t done anything with it in two and a half decades. Maybe eventually. I’m not in any hurry. You know, people get really enamored by AI and that sort of thing these days, but I lived in it for five years and I still think that a lot of the hype is just that, it’s hype. I think the Alpha Go situation - I don’t know if you have to speed on any of that, with the AI program beating the Go champion. That was a significant event. And the IBM thing, the Watson thing - that was significant. These were significant, but still there’s a long way to go. The material available to people these days compared to what I had is enormous. I mean, what I wouldn’t have given when I was in graduate school to have this Internet full of text that I could study. Just getting a corpus of text to use for analysis was really, really hard in the ‘80s. Whereas now you can trivially download gigabytes of it, and that helps. It is moving the field forward. But if you read newspapers and magazines, you’ll think that HAL 9000 is just around the corner, but I don’t think so. Yeah, I think from those seeing it from the inside. Even though, as you said, the major milestones and we are daily making advancements, but as people who work in software day in and day out, I think we definitely see a different angle at that the world of software advancement than other people … We still have trouble getting graphical user interfaces, right? Let alone something, you know, that understands itself and is self-aware. I mean, forget it. Yeah. So I read an interesting tidbit on your Wikipedia page which – I don’t even know if the fact itself most is interesting… I mostly want talk about it because it said there’s a citation needed, and I thought, “Can a podcast be a citation?” If so, we can get one right here. You can confirm or deny this, and we can go on and edit Wikipedia when we’re finished with this call. It says, “He married Ginger G. Wyrick on April 16, 1994, changed the name of his company to Hipp, Wyrick & Company, Inc, and signed all stock over to his new bride.” I did. She’s is the president of the company. It turns out I had to buy half of that stock back from her at one point. Yeah. We were working for a company and of course I was the prime on that company, and they insisted that I be a significant shareholder in the company. So we went out to eat, we declared a business meeting and I handed her a $50 bill and took 50 shares of stock. Ginger is a musician, so we are yin and yang. She’s very prolific, and all of her stuff comes through the same company. She’s the president. I am Head of Research. Yeah, why not? It seemed like a fun thing to do, and I was excited about getting married. You know, I thought getting a PhD was hard… You know, convincing Ginger to marry me was the biggest thing I ever accomplished. Way harder than writing the most widely-used database engine in the world. I had a similar move, but not quite as profound as yours. I incorporated my consultancy as well, and you do have to name, just for legal reasons, board of directors and all these things. And I made Rachel, my wife, the treasurer of the company. Just figured there was some poetic [\] to that. But I think president would have won me more brownie points, for sure. Alright. Well, we can go edit Wikipedia, Adam. We can add the citation and say “Refer to this time stamp of this episode.” Since we’re on the note of Wikipedia, is there any sort of heading there - I haven’t scanned it fully - that debates how you pronounce the technology? How do I pronounce the name of the product? I say S-Q-L-ite, like a mineral. But I also hear a lot people say, “Sequel lite and SQL lite.” You know, I don’t care. Whatever comes off of your tongue easily is fine with me. Right, just use it. That’s the only thing, that’s it. But the official correct way is S-Q-L-ite? Hm, like a mineral. Were you playing on the word “light”, or were you just playing on mineral…? Many people pointed out to me that I’m not good at marketing. My marketing person would have picked a better name. Yeah, it’s funny, because in our pre-call, when Adam and I were just kind of talking about this call, I thought you had pretty decent marketing, didn’t I, Adam? I said you do a pretty good job. I even like your little tagline, “Small. Fast. Reliable. Choose any three.“That appeals to me as a nerd. I didn’t come up with that. That’s something that … No, somebody put that on the mailing list; who it is, is lost in the sands of time. If you’re listening please, please call me and tell me, remind me what your name is. But somebody said, “Hey, why don’t you put that on the website? I said, “That’s great”, and I put it there. So that one’s not due to me. Do you recall when you put that on there and has it been any sort of like real driving force, or has it been something that just entertains Jerod? It’s been there for over a decade. We haven’t messed with it. Everybody likes it, it’s a cute little line. It is. Well, I think we want to talk about SQLite. I’m gonna try my best to pronounce it that way for you. I’ve called it “Sequel Lite” just because… Even SQL and sequel are, you know… You pick which one you want to say, I guess. Seriously, call it what you’re used to calling it. But we wanna talk about it, we wanna talk about its history. You mentioned kind of its inception a little bit, but we wanna draw down on that, and then we’ll get into the technical features. We’ll talk about the ubiquity, the community that you’ve built around it, the business that kind of is there that supports it, all sorts of things. We’ll take a quick break and when we get back, we’ll talk about all those things and more. We’ll be right back. Alright, we are back with Richard Hipp and we are talking about SQLite - I can’t say it my way anymore, I have to say yours … I can’t make myself do it naturally, even though you’ve told me to do so. Yes. So let’s talk about its origin. You mentioned that it came out of a specific need in your consulting. We know that it was around the year 2000, that was about the time that it became a product. Maybe that was 1.0, I’m not sure, but give us the reason… Go deep on the reason of why you started a brand new thing, why it needed to exist. You mentioned that you had Postgres as an option, but this made more sense for a particular customer or the circumstance. Give us that genesis story. So the customer… They were using Informix for the database engine. The problem that I was working on, it was a really interesting problem. We had to solve an NP-complete problem, which of course we couldn’t solve, but we could do really good approximations and that’s what it was about. It was a really, really cool product and I was a contractor, but I was sort of leading the design. Anyway, we put this thing out in the field for testing, and it was in an industrial site, and the people were operating the equipment. They would sometimes power cycle the machine that it was running on, and when it would come back up, Informix database sometimes would not come up, and this was a configuration problem, that’s all it was. There was nothing wrong with Informix. They just hadn’t installed it right. When in the database it didn’t come up, the users would double click on my application. I would try and connect to the database and wouldn’t be able to, and I would pop up a dialog box that says, “I’m sorry, I can’t connect to the database.” And course, it wasn’t my problem, but my application painted the dialogue box, so I got the support call. And I thought “This is not a good thing. I’m not in the database business.” Being a database guy is never part of my career goal, and so what can I do about this? And I thought, “Well look, the way we’re using this database - it’s read-only, at least us, and it’s very, very slowly changing otherwise. If the computer is healthy enough to bring up my application, why can’t I read the data directly off of disk? Why do I have to go through a server to get to my data?” There was a funding interruption, I had couple months off and I thought, “Hey, I’m just gonna go and cobble together a really quick and simple database engine that just does a few very simple SQL commands, insert the lead, update and select.” No joints, wasn’t trying to be efficient… All I needed to do was pull stuff off of a disk in that memory. And I put it out there and… I’ve been doing open source for years before this, putting things on my website, and people would find my thing – or well, you know, I’d put things on my website and it’d get like five downloads per year, or something like that. I’d figured this would be just another one of those things, but for whatever reason it really resonated with people. I remember seeing on Net News, somebody had this really exciting post on Net News about, “Wow! I have an SQL database engine running on my palm pilot. This is no joke.” Of course, whenever people get excited about your software, an ego boost kicks in any you’re like, “I’m gonna work on this and make it a little bit better.” Yeah, so that was motivation to kind of work when I had the opportunity. The first version, it used GDBM as the storage engine, which is the GNU Database Manager. It’s a hashing-based database, which is [\]. And so SQLite version one was GPL. It was also hash-based, and I wanted to expand SQLite to be able to do range queries. For that you need an ordered storage engine that orders the keys, basically a B-tree. I looked at Berkeley DB, which was the big thing at the time, and I spent a couple days studying the documentation and I realized that the documentation was sufficiently vague that I was gonna have to write test programs to find out enough detail to make this work. I thought, “It’s gonna be easy for me just to write my own B-tree storage engine”, so I did, and that was SQLite version two. That got to be really popular. Yeah. The first release of version 2.0 came out just a couple days after the 9/11 event… But that got to be really popular, and before long I started getting phone calls, and I got a phone call from Motorola. I don’t know if you remember, but back then Motorola was the world’s leading manufacturer of cell phones. And they said, “Hey, we wanna put SQLite on all our cell phones, but we need you to make some enhancements for us. Can we bring you on contract to make these enhancements and to support it?” I said, “Sure, of course.” I hung up the phone and felt “Wow! You mean you can make money off of open source software?” Who knew…? And I had to figure out some kind of pricing structure. We put together a contract and it wasn’t for a lot of money, but for me at the time I thought it was all the money in the world. I hired some people and we made some changes, and that went great. Then AOL contacted me and said, “Hey, we want some enhancements.” And AOL needed to be able to handle binary data. SQLite version 2 can only handle text data. So AOL said, “Hey, we’ll give you some money, fix it to handle binary data.” So we did. Once again, I was able to hire some people… I got Dan Kennedy working for me at that point. He’s from Australia, and he has been working for me ever since. We started SQLite 3 - I think that was in 2004, about this time in 2004. Once SQLite 3 got out, it got loaded into everybody’s products, and it just grew and grew. I was still doing bespoke software for various companies back then, but within a few years I stopped that and we now just do full-time supporting and maintaining SQLite for companies around the world. I like that, it’s very kind of organic. You’re kind of adding big customer to big customer, each one brings you on a contract to add some features, and so the overall product gets better. You mentioned the first version was GPL, and it’s public domain now. Let’s put that on hold. I want to talk about it specifically soon, but I want to get to the ubiquity, because you said Motorola came in and they wanted to put in their phones - that’s a lot of phones, and now you have AOL and then you start to add all these other ones. [] If we go to the website now, there’s a page which was the one that I just sent to Adam, and I was like, “We gotta talk about this.” Because I knew that it was in like every Linux basically, but I didn’t realize it’s on every android device, every iPhone, iOS device, Mac, every Windows 10 machine, so that pretty much covers all computers there. You know, we’re using Skype to talk, it’s inside of Skype. It’s in iTunes, it’s in DropBox, it’s in TurboTax. ..It’s embedded into languages, PHP and Python have it. Even television sets and set-top cable boxes… Most of the uses, I don’t even know about. People write me and say, “Hey, I was messing with this or that and the other and I found this SQLite database file. Did you know they’re using your software?” No. [laughter] I’m glad they are. I’m glad they’ find it useful. It’s used in most everything. I think… It’s impossible to tell, but I think that SQLite is probably… There are more instances of SQLite in use every day than all other database engines combined. Clearly, the other database engines make a lot more money for their creators, but I get the usage award. And I also think that SQLite is probably the second most widely used software component in the world behind zlib. I haven’t been able to identify anything else that I think might be used more than SQLite. Yeah, it’s a little bit scary, a little bit intimidating. It’s gotta make your decisions weigh on you more when you’re like, “Well, it’s gonna affect everybody.” It does, it changes your whole perspective. The way I look at software today versus the way I looked at it 15 years ago is very different because of that. So let’s talk about why. I mean, I think I have a good guess at why it’s so widely distributed, but as you said, there were many other database engines out there, many that are very good, even Postgres, which you say you use as kind of a reference implementation of at least the SQL stuff. But why is SQLite so ubiquitous? What do you attribute it to, personally? I would believe your opinion more than mine. I don’t know. I put it out there and people really liked it. I’m flattered that they like it. The team and I worked really hard to make it a solid product that stays true to what it is; the goal is that it just works. It should be in the background, it’s not something that you have to think about. It’s there when you need it, and it’s gonna work. It’s like a utility. You don’t think about, you know, the people at the water works, so when you turn the spigot, fresh water comes out. That’s an amazing thing, and we want SQLite to be just like that. It’s just there and you take it for granted. That’s how I think… I would think that like just like that; my first experience with it was Ruby on Rails, and as soon as you get Rails going it’s using that, and there’s no need for something extra. You could add it if you wanted extra, if you need different things, but it came with it. And just the fact that it was so simple, a single file that you can copy and move it around as you wanted to. It seems to me like the access and barrier is so low to use it, it’s so simple, and everything else has so many hoops to go through. [] Yeah. We try and keep it simple. Now one of our earliest patrons was Symbian. The company made the operating system that – and they were [\] and that was operating system on all the phones sold all over the world, except for the United States. They never really penetrated the US market. But this was in I think 2005, Symbian needed a database for their operating system, and apparently they had a big bake-off where they got 10 different embedded database engines - they told me about this later - SQLite was one of them and they competed them: seven commercial, three open. The other nine, they actually brought in engineers from that company to help tune it for their tests, where they ran tests on it and then they said that SQLite won the bake-off. And they called me up and said, “Hey, can you come over for a meeting?” “Sure.” So I flew over and it was – we had a meeting on Thanksgiving Day. They don’t do Thanksgiving in London, apparently. But then they had the Mayflower. [laughter] That’s a good reason. They were the Mayflower. There you go. So apparently there was a bake off and we did well in the competition. I don’t know what the criteria was, but apparently we were very competitive against the other databases. And more recently - and I won’t name this other company - I’ve heard the same thing about another company. I won’t name them because they’re still current and actively using it, I just don’t want to embarrass them… But they also had a bake-off and chose SQLite. So apparently we win the competitions, and I don’t know why or how, because there’s a lot of really good products out there and I don’t know why we happen to win, if it’s luck or providence, I don’t know. But we do try to keep it small and simple - we solve a problem and that seems to resonate with a lot of people. How about the embedded aspect? It’s not client-server, which I think plays to its simplicity, as Adam said. There’s less to setup, less to get started, there’s less moving pieces to break. I think you said that Informix situation where there was a configuration problem, but it was trying to connect to some server, or something. Yeah. As far as I know, SQLite is the only SQL database engine that is not client-server. The other embedded SQL database engines, like MySQL embedded and so forth, they start a separate thread which is the server. So they don’t have a server’s process, but they do have a server thread, as far as I know. And, you know, why didn’t I do a server thread or something like that? Well, you know, it was easier not to is one reason. Another reason is that, you know, I’m not a database person. I didn’t know I was supposed to. Nobody told me. [laughter] Oh, that’s rich, right there. No one told you, you had to. No one told me that that’s what you’re supposed to do, and so I just sat around and thought, “Well, how can I do this?” and the way I did it seemed to make sense to me, so that’s what I did. Somebody had said before that you stumble on the best things in the world through accidents. It speaks to your curious heart going back to your original story, which is how you got into this in the first place was complete curiosity. And maybe that’s a good thing. Richard Hipp:. Yeah. I learned a lot about SQL just writing SQLite, which is kind of scary but true. It’s just humorous in light of how widely deployed it is in the entire world, and it’s like, “Wow, you’re not really a database guy.” [] Especially when early on when I was writing it in and I had come across something and I went, “How is this supposed to work?” and I had to go ask people, “What’s it’s supposed to do when you do this?” [laughter] So we’ve got just a few minutes before the break, but something just dawned on me, that given what you had just said, something that a lot of software developers deal with today is this notion of imposter syndrome, where they don’t belong. And given the fact that you never thought you were supposed to be a database guy or whatever, the story is… But yet as Jerod mentioned and now that everyone else knows how ubiquitously SQLite is used, have you ever dealt with or had to get over serious impostor syndrome? Has it ever been something where you’re like, I don’t belong here in this database world? Well no, not really. But that just goes back to my personality. I don’t really belong in any little group. I don’t fit in very well anywhere, I’m sort of a weird person. Eclectic, we’ll say that. So no imposter syndrome ever around, you know, not supposed to be a database guy, but yet you have … You have won all of the bake-offs, so that kind of destroys imposter syndrome when you keep winning all the competitions, I guess. Well, I meant personally; less technology, more personal. No, it’s intimidating when I’m invited to talk to groups of database experts. It can be a little bit scary because these guys know – they have been studying databases their whole life, that’s their passion. And for me it just sort of happened. One day I was going along solving hard problems, and the next thing you knew I’m a database guy. What happened? Well, it’s a hard problem. Well, I think not knowing any better is a great way to renew yourself into success in many situations. And it seems like whether you meant to or you stumble upon a lot of good design decisions, which really does set it apart from other database engines… Like you said, you’re the only one that is that way, it allows it to be distinct. And I think you said you’re not much of a marketing guy, because the name is troublesome, but I think the name does indicate a lot about it, which is to say this is light and it is simpler and it’s different than those other things. The other thing that’s really different and probably helps with adoption is the fact that you put it in the public domain, which is the ultimate form of open source. We’re gonna tee that up, I wanna talk about in detail. We do have another break to take, so we’ll take that now. And then on the other side we’ll talk to you about why you made it public domain, what the implications were that is public a domain, and then how you still sold some licenses against it anyway, which I think is hilarious. So let’s take that break and we’ll be right back. Alright, we are back and we are definitely going to talk about licensing and the public domain side of this. But before we get to that, I think we could actually cover some more of its technical merits. We talked about how some of the stuff was providential, or you stumbled upon perhaps some of SQLite’s advantages over other database engines in certain contexts, but we shouldn’t short come all of its technical merits. [] I think what our listeners could probably use help with is knowing the clean lines when it comes to comparing and contrasting from a MySQL or from a Postgres or from anything that you choose, Richard. Could you just kind of enumerate for us a few things that make SQLite different? Well, from the perspective of somebody who’s just using a database engine, one thing that’s very different is the type system that we use. SQLite really started life as a Tcl extension, Tcl being the programming language, the Tcl/Tk. The project I was working was working on was written in Tcl/Tk and so SQLite began as a Tcl extension and as a scripting language, like Perl or Python, where you can put any type of value you want in a variable. So a variable might hold a string, a number, a byte array or whatever. So I made SQLite the same way, where just because you’ve declared a column of a table to be text doesn’t mean you can’t put integer in there, or just because you declared a column in the table to be a short int, why not put a 2-megabyte blob there? So what? It’ll do that. This takes a lot of people by surprise. The way SQLite works - it’s completely compatible with other databases. Where it causes problems is that people do their initial development work for say on Ruby on Rails app and they’re doing it with SQLite, and they take advantage of this flexibility in typing that SQLite provides without realizing it. And then they get ready to go to production and they switch over to Postgres or my MySQL, and those systems don’t do that and then suddenly their application breaks. For example, they might’ve declared a varchar 40, and they didn’t realize they were putting strings in there that were longer than 40 characters. People have criticized SQLite about this. They say it’s weakly typed and the other systems are strongly typed. I think those are [\] terms. I prefer to say that SQLite is flexibly typed and that those other systems are rigidly typed or judgmentally typed. But it’s a criticism. That seems like a point of contention, because … I mean I can see both sides, because if I want this to be a varchar 40 and you let me put anything in there, then why did I declare it to be a varchar 40 in the first place? You know what I’m saying? Yeah, exactly. If you say it’s a varchar 40 and you an integer there, it will change it into text. Or if you have a comment that’s declared integer and you try to put text in it, it looks like an integer and it can be converted without loss. It will convert and store it as an integer. But if you try and put a blob into a short int or something, there’s no way to convert that, so it just stores the original and it gives flexibility there. And this is useful in a lot of cases, because sometimes you just have a miscellaneous column in a table that you might need to store lots of different things in. And in traditional database systems you actually have to have multiple columns, one for each possible data type, whereas in SQLite you put it all in one column. So it works well. And for that matter, with SQLite you don’t have to give the column a type at all. You can just say, CreateTable T1 (a,b,c) and then you’ve got a table with three columns named a, b and c and you put whatever you want there. [] That’s just for flexibility purposes, I see. Well, it flows directly out of the scripting language traditions. You don’t declare types for variables in Tcl; you didn’t used to do it in Python, I guess you can do it some, now. You don’t do it in JavaScript… You just say it’s a var. Yeah. I mean, I guess some of that leads to what I know as, you know, scripting roots from the web development perspective, which is where Adam and I are mostly coming from. And I think Ruby on Rail wasn’t my first exposure to SQLite, but it definitely was one of my first like using it, you know, more than just on the surface. And there’s this feeling or there’s this general, I don’t know what you call it, a consensus that like it’s for development purposes but when you get to production it’s foolish to use it in production, because it’s – I don’t want to call it a toy because it’s used in production more than any other thing out there, but I think that sense of it, where it will allow certain data in because your users will put in, which you didn’t expect - I think that’s probably where that feeling comes from, do you agree? I had the same thoughts honestly, Jerod. I thought that because it’s sort of a getting started thing with Ruby on Rails, and as I said that’s my first exposure with it, I kind of… And no downplay, because that’s why we have this show, that’s why we have people like Richard on this show to come and debunk big myths likes this, because someone may not ever think that SQLite is worth anything, because it’s just a beginner or just a starter thing it. But that was not exactly my thought; my thought was that it’s just for getting started. No, it’s definitely for more than that. Now for a website where you’ve got a lot of right concurrency, you need to move to a client-server database engine because you need that server process there to coordinate the concurrency. Yeah, the connection before laying this stuff. There’s just no way to do that in a serverless database like SQLite. So for so many things you don’t have that concurrency. You’ve just got a single actor or one or two actors accessing at a time; it’s not a factor, and SQLite works great in those situations. It’s where you get into big concurrency that it breaks down. Yeah. I mean, just take the example of what we talked about earlier where it’s inside of the Skype client. Well, I have my own and you have your own, and Adam has his own, and there’s no reason to have – – a server in that case. It’s completely usable right there. So that plays to its strength. So again, it’s the right tool for the job – One of our sayings is that, “We don’t compete against Oracle, we compete against fopen.” I like that one too. You’ve got lots of good taglines. Here’s another aspect of it that I think is a technical thing, which is probably pretty poignant considering recent events and the greater JavaScript community with dependencies: it doesn’t have any. So listen to this quote from the website, “All of the deliverable code in SQLite has been written from scratch.” It goes on to talk about how there’s no third-party code, everything is in there, there’s nothing that has a different license besides the public domain, which again we’ll get into. Tell us about that decision. [] Well, this – it does relate closely to the public domain thing. I’m just one of these people… I don’t like dependencies. I really like to statically link things, because with dynamic linking you just never know what version of a library you’re gonna link in a runtime, and if you’re delivering many copies of this, there will be some users who will come up with a bad version of a DLL or a shared library. Then they’ll call you for support and it’s really hard to debug if you don’t know what they’re running. And then, yeah, with upstream libraries and that sort of thing you’re – there’s a dependency there that just makes life a little bit harder. Sometimes it works better to build your own tools. I know a lot of people say that you should never reinvent the wheel; the hacker credo is “Steal the code, don’t rewrite it.” I understand the point of view, but I’ve always been sort of the person that I’m more willing to write it myself. So rather than find a different SQL database engine that would work better than Informix, I just wrote my own. And the text editor that I used to write SQLite is one that I wrote myself. No… I think I put it out there a couple of times. It’s nothing… It does what I want. I cannot imagine anybody else… Yes. It does what I want, and I cannot imagine anybody else finding it useful for anything. But rather than use Bison or Yacc for the language parser in SQLite, I wrote my own parser generator called Lemon. When we needed to beef up the development processes for SQLite and put more rigor in them… It was originally using CVS, because in 2000 CVS was just cutting-edge, state-of-the-art stuff that was really cool. But we needed to move something better and I looked at Mercurial and Git, and they weren’t gonna meet my needs, so rather than trying to work around this problems, I just wrote my own version control system. Now, that’s reinventing the wheel right there. I just tend to do that a lot. I tend to write my own stuff more than other people would. That’s either a failing or a virtue, depending on your point of view I guess. When you mentioned your own version control - that’s Fossil correct? Yeah. So Fossil SCM is a tool which Richard has written and another one that we’ve had people request us actually to talk to you about. We don’t have time for it, but we might have you back to talk about it. Interestingly, it does have a dependency which is SQLite. So I guess it depends on you’re writing a library versus an application. Right? All of the SQLite source code is managed by Fossil, and Fossil uses SQLite. And you can ponder that recursion at your leisure. Right. Well, it shows you can depend on yourself too, that you’re internally trusting, not externally trusting. There you go. Do you think that this mindset you have with writing your own stuff… Because now, as we talked about the barrier to entry, today I think people tend to lean on others because they’re sort of bootstrapping themselves into developer world. They didn’t go to school or they typically didn’t go to school or they did go to school; it’s like a boot camp, or something like that. And that’s not the downplay that whatsoever, it just means that they don’t have the breadth of experience that you do. Well, yeah. They’ve got so much more to learn than I had to learn in 1977. There’s just so much information out there. And I’ve been doing this for so long, and it seems natural to me, but I’ve been doing it for decades, and I’ve been constantly learning that entire time. So yeah, I don’t know what – if you’re starting out, you’ve got to build on what other people are doing. I don’t see any other way to do it. How would you start? Say you want to become a software developer with zero knowledge today, and you are looking for a starting point. What would you try? [] Well, I would probably try the wrong thing. [laughter] But if I were to advise people… One thing that I see is everybody’s flocking toward integrated development environments and I want to encourage new developers to get really familiar with the command line and shell prompt. If you’re on Windows, that’s fine. Certainly get familiar with Bash on Unix. I see so many people coming out of school, they’re new programmers, and they cannot operate without pointing and clicking, and somehow that limits their level of understanding. I make the analogy, if I go to a foreign country where I don’t speak the language, I can go to the market and I can point at things and we can make hand gestures and I can buy food to eat and stuff, but I cannot start a business or carry on a deep conversation about the meaning of life and the relationship of God and man. For that, I have to speak their language. And it’s the same with computers. If you’re just pointing and clicking, that’s great if you’re a casual observer or if you’re a user and you don’t want to spend the time to learn this foreign language. But if you really wanna get deep, you’ve got to learn the language. Once you do learn the language, it’s much easier to communicate that way, much easier. So I encourage people starting out, go low level and do things from the command line rather than depending on point and click GUIs. Well, some good news that came out of Microsoft’s Build conference today is that they have partnered with Canonical to bring Bash to Windows. I was thinking right after this podcast I’m going to figure out how to get that on my Windows machine. I’d seen something, Jerod, in our tweet stream, but I hadn’t got that news yet. We tend to stay timeless with our shows versus timely, but why did they do this? You know, that’s the new Microsoft - they’re embracing open source, they’re embracing Linux, they want to be more developer-friendly and so they’re having kind of a first-party user mode Linux executables in Windows 10; I haven’t read beyond that. So all I saw was a Verge article, but everybody is pretty excited just about… They have the purpose to bring the Bash command line to Windows and not in some sort of virtual machine. First-party user mode. Well, that’s funny too because I’m looking at our tweet stream, because I haven’t opened up Tweet box on this show with you, recording this. There’s one that says as a response to our tweet “April fool’s.” I know that April fool’s is just around the corner, but not that kind of corner. This is real. We gotta be careful on April Fool’s day not to be, because I know we tweeted that out. We’re gonna make sure that our stories are legit. I’m pretty sure this one’s real. Okay, so we’ve covered the technical, some intricacies, and we’ll probably go deeper into that, but we are inside a time limit. I definitely wanna get to your take on licensing. So you started off GPL, but that sounded like because you had a dependency that was perhaps GPL back in the day. And for a long time it’s been public domain. And I think the piece in The Guardian which said basically, the subtitle was “Richard Hipp’s database is used by some of the biggest names in IT, but he has not made a penny from it”, And its whole emphasis was this aspect of you giving it away not just GPL or even LGPL, but like “This belongs to the public.” So tell us your decision behind that, and then we’ll probably take a break and then we’ll talk more about it on the other side. [] Sure. Well, just to correct The Guardian article, it was correct when it came out but, I mean, we’ve got a business built around this now. Yeah, and they didn’t mention consultancy in that. So that was 2007, but it was just… It peaked their interest, so… Yes. So when I ditched the dependency on the GPL to GDBM library and wrote my own, it was all my code at that point, and I could put whatever license I wanted in it. And I thought I wanted a much more liberal license so people could just toss this into their application and not have to worry about it. And I looked at the BSD license and I looked at the MIT license and I thought, “You know, really, what’s the point?” Why not just say, “Hey, it’s public domain” and put it out there? And that what I did. That was a little bit of a tough decision. That’s kind of letting your baby go because you’re casting it into the wind and hope that it does well. Also at the time I did not realize, having lived my whole life in the United States, which is, you know, under British common law, where the public domain is something that’s recognized. I did not realize that there were a lot of jurisdictions in the world where it’s difficult or impossible for someone to place their works in the public domain. I didn’t know. So that’s a complication. And for that reason some companies started to say, “Hey, we need to buy a license anyway”, so we made this product available. “We’ll sell you a license for SQLite.” We do our best to talk them out of it and explain they don’t need this, but for a lot of people it’s cheaper to pay the fee and get the license than it is to convince their lawyers that they don’t need one. So that’s one way that we have, you know, making a little bit of money to fund continuing development. It’s more than just a license, though, it’s also a warranty of title. The document we send them represents and warrants that all, every byte of source code is an original work that we control, it came from us. In other words, they are not bits and pieces that we just pulled off of the Internet, that might be contaminated with licenses that you don’t know about. And if you are doing a large project with potential legal exposure, you wanna make sure that you really can use this without incurring possible are lawsuits down the road. Maybe Google wishes that they had thought more about Java before they put it in the Android. They don’t want… Ten years down the road, if their product’s a big hit they don’t want somebody coming back and say, “Oh, that SQLite actually had stolen some code from us and so now you have to pay a license to us.” So just to protect their portfolio and their product, a lot of companies are eager to pay us that money. So that works well, that’s nice. It’s a nice little supplement of income so I can hire some people, and we can work full time on SQLite and not have to do other things on the side just to keep food on the table. That’s excellent. I think we wanna to drill down on that a little bit more, because you have the license, you also have an encryption, you have some extensions that you sell. Interestingly, there’s even a test harness which seems to be an annual thing. These seem to be like their products that exist because they’ve been specifically requested, right? But let’s hold that off, Richard, we do have to take our final break, and we’ll hold that for the close of the conversation. So we’ll be right back and we’ll talk money and licensing next. We’ll be right back. Alright, we are back. Richard, before the break we were talking about the public domain aspect of the project, the fact that you do sell licenses because often times it’s cheaper to buy a license than to convince your lawyers that you don’t need one. And also because public domain isn’t recognized in some provinces, which I wasn’t unaware of as well. I’m sure that one took you by surprise. As I mentioned, these seem like they’re on-demand type of things, they don’t seem like fully-fleshed out product ideas. I would be questionable if you could make a living off of what you have here. You also have some support from sponsors. Can you talk to us about all different ways that you guys stay afloat? Right. So back in 2007 when Symbian was starting to put SQLite in all their phones, they came to the same realization… At that time it was just me working on it pretty much. Dan was helping me on a part time basis. But they realized that if this is a critical part of their infrastructure, they needed to make sure my business was sustainable. So they said, “Look, Richard, you need to set up a consortium or a foundation to provide support for your developers so that you can work on it full time.” They told me they wanted to increase the bus factor of SQLite. The bus factor being the number of people who have to be hit by a bus to cause all development to stop. And they were concerned about that, because I was kind of the only person at the time. So we started working out this idea of the SQLite consortium, which would be companies that would sponsor us to keep the project going. And somehow Mitchell Baker at the Mozilla Foundation got wind of this and said, “Oh, Richard, let me show you how to do this.” And so I got with her and she really – she knows how to set this up, and we really did everything according to her specs and started the SQLite consortium. So companies which are typically large companies that really depend on SQLite as part of their product, they just pay us an annual fee. We do support them, they can always pick up the phone and an engineer will be on their site as quickly as possible if that ever comes up. But really the purpose of it is that they want to make sure that the product is sustainable, it continues to be supported and doesn’t become orphanware, because they depended on it. We charge a substantial fee, but from their point of view it’s half an engineer, so it’s cheap for them. It gives us working capital and allows us to just go and operate and really constantly improve SQLite. And based on those funds, we’ve done dramatic improvements in reliability and performance, because we have the freedom to work on it constantly all the time. So the SQLite consortium is what’s really allowed us to keep SQLite going and to keep the current and real and vibrant. [] We started working… The other products, you’re right, are a one-time thing for the most part, the encryption extension. When people buy the encryption extension, we actually just give them a password so that they can log into our version control system, and it’s forever. They can download the source code whenever they want, whenever they need it and constantly stay up to date. They don’t have to ever have to renew. We sell support contracts for people, but that’s not a big money maker. Our bread and butter is our patrons, our SQLite Consortium members. It seems to be opposite of what I would expect, though. I mean, I guess as a foundation or as a consortium you would expect at some point that… I mean, a lot of open-source businesses build themselves around some sort of support or pro version, and instead you’ve built it on the good will, and I guess that’s what the membership is really about. It’s about, as you said, a patron model versus a support-driven or support sales model or something like that. It really is more of a patron model. People have built businesses around an annual support subscription or something like that. To make that work, I think you have to have a sales staff. Yeah, and plus I wouldn’t know how to do that. One of the reasons people really like working with this is we are a 100% engineering shop. There’s no sales talk. When you talk to somebody at our company, you’re getting direct no-nonsense talk with an engineer; you’re not talking to sales people. And that’s different. And that’s not to knock the sales aspect of things. I understand that, and you have to do that in a lot of occasions, and those people work really hard, but we’re just doing it a little bit differently. You mentioned, maybe it was during the break, you quoted something from the article about how people tell me I could have made a lot of money on this if I had any business sense. And I believe them, I probably could have. By hiring some sales people, I could probably make a lot of money, get rich. But you know what, we make enough. It’s not a lot. I’m driving a 10-year-old Civic, but that’s fine. That’s all I need. You know, everybody - I’m getting off-topic - has this threshold where they get enough money. When you have nothing, you wanna make money, everybody wants that. But at some point you get enough money, so “Okay, now I have enough money, now other things become more important. Family, free time, working in the community, charities… Whatever.” And that threshold is different for different people. Some people, they don’t reach that threshold until they get into the billions, other people reach it at a few tens of thousands. Me and the people that are on the team, our thresholds are kind of low, so we’re okay. I’m not sure if you mentioned it directly, but just out of curiosity, how big is your team, your company? What type of a group of people are being supported by it? Right now we’ve got to tree other engineers working on it. Dan Kennedy, he’s Australian. He has been with me for a long time and he has written major portions of it. He’s been instrumental in doing all of the full text search and the archery and lots of other things like that. Joe Mistachkin’s in the Seattle area and he handles all the Microsoft ends of things, which is an enormous, enormous job. Then we’ve got Mike Owens, who wrote one of the books about SQLite. Right now Mike is full-time employed with somebody else and so he’s just handling our website and taking care of all of that, making sure all that work smoothly for us, but he’s still on the team. [] We did have Shane Harrelson. He’s the guy that invented the amalgamation. SQLite is delivered as a single great big source file, almost 200,000 lines of code, but that makes it really convenient to use because you’ve just got one source file that you drop into your application and compile it with the rest and then you’ve got a database engine. But we don’t edit that one great big source file, we have hundreds of individual source files and they get pulled together in just the right order to build this amalgamation. And Shane is the one who invented that force. He took a job with another company, he’s not with us anymore. We still hear from him from time to time, he’s still a big user. So that’s the whole team. It’s a small team. It’s interesting to hear who’s involved based on the fact that this is what keeps you, as you said before, employed and so SQLite having this patron model, it’s interesting to hear who’s involved. Because becoming a member, supporting this consortium is supporting those folks… …still there or not in some sort of way to kind of keep this thing do what it needs to do. Exactly. It’s been a really, really, really fun journey for us. Really, it has. We hope to keep this going for a long time. Well, since you mentioned a long time… Do you have a plan? You said in the breaks you’ve got some sort of long-term plan, but you didn’t go in the detail. What’s the plan for SQLite? What can those who use it now expect 50 years from now? Well, at some point surely some new technology is going to come along and SQLite will cease to be an important thing for new products. I don’t know when that’s going to happen - it could be next week, it could be in 20 years. I just don’t know. For example, people are really excited now about the new persistent memory that doesn’t lose power when you power down, and there are various types of that, and that could be very disruptive to the whole database industry. But because SQLite is so widely used, we expect it to be used in legacy for many, many years. A few years ago when Airbus had contacted us - they use SQLite in the A350, Avionics - they asked, “We need you to support this for the life of our airframe, which is 40 years.” So we said, “Oh sure, we’ll support it through 2050.” So we sort of set up the company with the idea that we’re going to try and keep it going through the year 2050. The expectation is that at some point the usage will begin to die down and our role will become more of just maintain legacy, but we anticipate keeping it going for another - what is that, 34 years? Why 2050? Just because it’s a nice round number? Well, that’s 40 years from the date that Airbus contacted us. And they said the life of their airframe was 40 years, so that’s where we came up with that number. That’s a big, big airplane. I don’t know if anybody’s ever seen that thing. In pictures it doesn’t do it justice, but to see it face to face… It’s ginormous. I wouldn’t imagine being the pilot flying that thing, let alone being the database powering it. [laughter] I don’t know what we do inside the – it’s the A350, not the A380 by the way. Okay, okay. That gives a little slack to you then, but that’s still big. Yeah, it’s still big. I don’t know what we do in there, I don’t think it’s in safety-critical applications. I think they use it to log maintenance activities, so that when the airplane lands, the ground crew can just get a print out of what needs to be fixed. [] Right. On that note, I mean is there any other really interesting places where this database is used? I mean, that’s something I didn’t expect to hear on this show. Is there anything else, any other places you’ve seen it used or know about its uses that’s just like, “Wow! That’s interesting.” Or even ways it’s used? You know, if you had given me a little prep, I could probably have given you a list. I hear about this stuff all the time, but nothing else comes to mind. Airbus is a pretty cool thing. That’s an on the fly question because the Airbus example threw me for a loop. I didn’t expect… I mean, I guess it would make sense, but it’s such a well-known aircraft. That’s a big deal. Sure. Bloomberg, the news agency and the biggest provider of Wall Street data in the world, all of their stuff goes through SQLite, or at least our parser. They took the front end of SQLite, the SQL parser and code generator and execution engine, and chopped off the data storage engine and include their own enterprise scale, massively concurrent, a multi data center storage engine on the backside. All of Bloomberg goes through that, which I think is pretty amazing. Since you’ve been in open source for a while, maybe you can help us kind of look back at the last couple of decades. What are some of the most interesting or biggest changes you’ve seen happen in the community, in open source, in the way software is delivered throughout the years? What are some of the most interesting things that you’ve seen happen that really got you excited about where we’re heading? Well, you know, back in the old days they didn’t call it open source. I guess it was Bruce Perens who invented that term. How long ago was that? Was that in the late ‘90s? Back in the day we were just handing a software around and we didn’t have a word for it. And so even just coming up with a word, open source, that was a huge step. I think it was Bruce Perens that came up with that, but we’d have to research it. It says that he created the open source definition. Yeah. So yeah, that was after… Linux started though Linux Kernel, so back in the ‘90s was when that happened. So that was big, and even think about when SQLite got started, we didn’t have broadband like we have today. I remember one of our early patrons was AOL and they were still sending out CD-ROMs to your mailbox that you get online for what? $5 a month or something, with your dial-up modem. That’s the way the world rolled when this whole thing started. We lose sight of how much the world has just changed in this past 10 years. Now everybody has broadband, it’s taken for granted. Now, everybody has a cell phone. When SQLite first came out there were cell phones, but we didn’t have the smartphones that you have today. Right. That’s still a lot to think about that. I was just on a separate podcast being interviewed, and I was in retrospect talking about how the iPhone was the very first cell phone I’ve ever owned, because I grew up not very well off, I grew up poor. So to finally make enough money to own a cell phone, I actually worked for people to get a cell phone then rather than buy my own, so I just sort of leveraged that as long as I could. You know, I guess I was just sort hedging my best against it, but man, you know, it’s crazy to think about when cell phones became prolific, that’s an interesting fact there. [] Yeah, and the iPhone just revolutionized the world. Its design, the fact that you had the complete screen, it had the LCD covering the whole screen - that was a radical idea at the time I saw. I was able to see some of their early prototypes of android phones and they all looked like BlackBerrys with a little tiny screen at the top and a great big keyboard. But when the iPhone came out, that all changed. So now everybody has a smartphone, it’s ubiquitous, everybody has broadband, Wi-Fi’s everywhere, and this has opened up a communications revolution. It’s really easy to go online and download whatever code you want, it’s really easy to search. We have Google, and people take Google for granted, but you just type things into your search engine and you can find whatever you want instantly. Twenty years ago you couldn’t do that at all, and that has completely changed the world. But we do it so much every day that we now take it for granted. I guess since we have you thinking about the future to a degree, because you’re [\] and you’ve probably got a long list of things that you’re really interested in, I’m curious… We have a couple closing questions we tend to ask on this show. Sometimes we omit them when we run out of time, but I figured that this one at least is a good fit for you. So the question is “What’s on your open-source radar?” but you can frame it however you like. It can be a technology radar. You know, given your expansive history, you may rather just write it yourself rather than use somebody else’s, but for that odd day that you want to use someone else’s stuff, what’s on your radar that you would like to play with if you had a free weekend and you didn’t have to do anything with SQLite? I wrote the version-control system Fossil and I learned a lot about version control with that. I’d really like to try the follow-on system that improves upon it and is kind of a Git killer. And I’ve sketched out a design, but have had no time to work on it. I’ve often said that email - it’s everywhere, everybody depends on it, but setting up an email system is really hard, and the world needs a really simple-to-use email system that you just drop in place and it just works. That would be fun to work on. I would definitely see something like that. You’re the right kind of person to do that because one, you’re not afraid to just jump into a place where you’re not exactly the database guy as you’ve said before, so you’re comfortable being in a touchy territory. And it’s true, because everyone leans on some sort of cloud service to do it. Everyone I know somehow leverages either Gmail or Gmail for Businesses, Google for Businesses or whatever, and that’s the way to do it. There’s a lot of people who are ruling their own solution using Ansible or something like that that. They’re using somebody else’s known ways of doing things to deliver something that’s their own solution to the server. But I would agree with that, however I have zero technical ability to follow you there, but I will be a user. I will be a user for sure. Well, I’ve been saying that for years. I haven’t found those free cycles to do that yet. So, Jerod, he also said something else that peaked my interest for the future show that we’ll have with him on Fossil, he said “Git killer.” Can you believe he said that? Git has done a lot of good, but I mean look at it, Git is the version-control system that everybody loves to hate. I have an extensive collection of people ranting against how awful Git is. And truth, they’re mostly right and yet we continued to use it. That amazes me. I don’t understand why that is. There are better alternatives that exist today and it’s not hard to design things that are way better than anything that exists today. It’s just a matter of sitting down and spending a month or two and writing the code. [] So answer this for me then… We’re not gonna talk deeply about Fossil now because that’s a future show, but to tee up some sort of teaser or interest, is Fossil in its current form a Git killer or can it be given, like you said, the month or two months of additional work to kind of get there and just sit down focusing on it? Is it ready to be that now? No, in my opinion Fossil is better than Git, but the difference is not enough to overcome the additional learning curve of learning a new system that’s slightly different. So it’s just an incremental improvement, it’s not a disruptive improvement. And I think to really overcome… Because Git has huge, huge traction now. Everybody uses it. We have GitHub. In order to overcome that incredible installed base, you’ve got to have something that is revolutionary. Well, I mean even Mercurial has had this problem, right? I mean, Facebook gave it the best name brand to as a social proof mechanism to get people to switch, and yet no one’s switching in droves. It’s a hard problem, and I’ve got a list of features I think that would go a long way toward getting to the Git killer, but it’s just a matter of sitting down and implementing them, and that takes time, and something like a version-control system really has to be right, because if it messes up and you lose source code people get really upset. Yes, yes definitely. Well, that’s definitely a teaser for a future show on Fossil, but I guess before we close is there anything else you want to mention before we tail out? No, I think we’ve covered a lot of stuff. You know, we could talk for days on SQLite about technical aspects, but in a one-hour show I think we’ve covered a lot of ground. Well, it’s certainly interesting to hear your entrance into software development technology. I hope the listeners can appreciate how pivotal that kind story is to have on this show. It’s so interesting too to have someone like yourself with such deep and rich history, and also unafraid to just not use what’s there and write your own. That to me is pretty interesting, so to live up to that and be inspired by that and share that back with all the listeners who love this show, that’s so awesome. I thank you and Jerod thanks you of course too for your time to come on this show and share that. Then also what you do with giving back in public domain and all the things we covered on the show, that’s phenomenal. So we’ll leave it there. Thank you for having me. You all have been great, I really appreciate it. Well, fantastic. Listeners, you know we love you. Thank you so much for listening to this; members who support us, you’re phenomenal; our sponsors, we love you. Fellas, that’s it for this show, so let’s say goodbye. Our transcripts are open source on GitHub. Improvements are welcome. 💚 [ comments ]

Agilenano - News from Agilenano from shopsnetwork (4 sites) https://agilenano.com/blogs/news/why-sqlite-succeeded-as-a-database-2016

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thisislizheather · 5 years ago

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February Feats 2020

I write this from underneath two blankets, perched atop three pillows. This is day three of being sick (Nathan just joined me in illness yesterday) and I think I’m getting better but that could just be blind hope. In any case, I still have to tell you what went on last month. Forgive the tone of this post, it might be… affected.

I heard that Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker are going to be in the Paul Simon play Plaza Suite together and so I casually thought “Ooo, might be nice to catch” so I looked it up and tickets START at $700. So I guess fuck me then. I swear to god, this fucking city.

The best cover so far this year:

Above Photo: Brian Stauffer, The New Yorker

I rewatched a movie I love: The Door In The Floor and it really holds up well. Kim Basinger and Jeff Bridges and both too good at what they do. Love this movie so much.

I rewatched The Evil Dead and look I understand it’s probably a “good horror movie” especially for its time and budget, but I fucking hated it, maybe even more so than the last time that I saw it. Never again. Why do I keep rewatching things that I hate? I don’t have to like everything. I must repeat this to myself daily.

I had lunch at Daily Provisions and their lemon cruller was really good and light and the chicken club sandwich was good, too. Always a solid morning/afternoon place.

Favourite tweets of the month.

I tried Trader Joe’s Whole Wheat Couscous and maaaaan, it was so good. So I guess all couscous is good? Gotta get my hands on that pearly couscous. That seems like the money cousocus.

I made this Greek Couscous Salad for lunches for a week and didn’t get sick of it at all, I gotta remember to keep this in the rotation. I also kept the salad and the couscous separate until I wanted to eat, and then I’d join them together.

I can’t believe I hadn’t seen this sketch before (calling someone a “goofy bitch” just about killed me), also ignore how bad an actress Cardi B is.

I finished watching The Good Place and yes it was a good show. I don’t think l liked it as much as pretty much everyone else in my life who loved it, but it was definitely a good show. This scene was the best part of the finale, for sure. That song used in the scene will always elicit tears, I remember falling in love with it when it was used in the movie that everyone hated but me, Swept Away.

Again, I visited Everlane and it still disappoints. Why do I keep thinking it’ll be different each time? What the fuck is wrong with me?

I saw Parasite and it was wonderful and everyone who hasn’t seen it should see it. I haven’t heard from one person who didn’t like it. Universally liked!

I listened to the new Strokes single and hated it, so that’s something. Growth?

I haven’t seen the whole episode yet, but I really liked RuPaul’s SNL monologue.

Why isn’t everyone putting pickles on grilled cheese? Makes no sense. Fucking taste explosion.

I finally tried the (off-menu, must be requested when it’s not brunch) Cacio E Pepe at L’Artusi and holy christ, it might be better than their mushroom ragu. I KNOW. Such wild developments! (They also started serving at lunch, but only lunch delivery, not dine-in. SO this means nothing to me.)

I think I will officially stop buying candles from Bath & Body Works. The ones at Marshalls are cheaper, last longer and the variety of scents is endless. I have a candle from Marshalls right now simply called STORM and it really does kinda smell like stormy weather. Obviously I’m waiting for a thunderstorm to light that mother. I have mental issues?

I watched the newest season of Shrill (no big spoilers ahead) and loved it, obviously. The disappointing-ness of parents is so nicely shown (that moment at the restaurant when she asks her dad what he thinks of her boyfriend and he’s so indifferent, ugh so perfect), I absolutely LOVED the wedding episode (infact all of the episodes following that one are the best ones, I think I just love the episodes not centered about this not-great relationship with her and her boyfriend), the WEHAM episode is perfect (finally someone making fun of makeup for for legs), and I continue to love the character Fran. Really hoping for a third season, especially based on the season finale.

Don’t ask me why, but I watched most of the Police Academy movies and I think the Miami one might be the best one?? I couldn’t make it twenty minutes into the Moscow one, so I feel like you might want to trust me when I say that I know what I’m talking about.

These are my new favourite leggings of all time, they feel like you’re wearing nothing at all.

Cannot get over the beauty of these women and these outfits.

Above Photo: Camila Mendes

Above Photo: Nyma Tang

I watched the Michelle Carter documentary and I don’t know how other people feel, but it’s absolutely unreal that she was found guilty. Of course Nathan disagrees.

I ate at Frank for the first time in over a decade with the one and only Irene and it’s still great. Love that they do the opposite of al dente pasta here. Photos below.

Above Photo: Tagliatelle special, at Frank

Above Photo: Roasted garlic bread, at Frank

Above Photo: Mushroom pappardelle special, at Frank

I can’t find a link for them online, but I bought some reusable Leak Proof Snack Bags by Kitchen Details at Nordstrom Rack and they’re perfect since we typically use a million of those disposable ones for holding sunflower seeds and almonds

I threw out a lot of clothing/shoes/bags, so I went out and bought some things that I absolutely love. I now have a faux fur, brown evening coat that I’ve long dreamed of owning, a new everyday purse, a vintage, gold, mesh evening purse, new everyday shoes, more sunglasses and some new wedges that may or may not replace the older wedges I’ve had since 2006 (the ones lovingly referred to as my Terminators because of the massive fall that I took in them upon exiting the movie Terminator Salvation). I could show you all of the new pieces, but I’d much rather slide into a room you’re in to show you my new fur coat. However if it annoys you not to see any of these new things that bring my joy, here are two of them.

Above Photo: Classic Reeboks from DSW

Above Photo: I also got them in blue

I’ve actually started using tiny drops of facial oil mixed with my nighttime face lotion and even though I’ve only just started to do this, my face is already way less dry when waking up. I don’t know if I can do this in the hotter weather, but for now I’ll keep it up.

I know all of these are old songs, but I recently heard and fell in love with this Taylor Swift song. And this one. And this one. Oh and this one too.

I went to Giorgio’s of Gramercy again (the last time was a few years ago with Nathan) and it’s still great! I haven’t had a steak in awhile, but the one here? Holy hell. Magnificent.

I went to see the new Kubrick 2001 exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image and it was pretty neat. They have one of his Oscars on display in a case, which was actually really cool to see.

I read and reviewed a biography of Johnny Carson that truly sucked.

So Nathan and I are in the middle of watching McMillion$ and can I just say: boooooooooooooooo. I’ve never seen a “documentary” more over-produced, self-indulgent, superfluous and WILDLY overdone. It’s a bloody six part series that could’ve EASILY been an hour and a half movie. If you ever need proof of a documentary having too much money spend, my god have you found it. Of COURSE Mark Wahlberg has something to do with it, this man needs to fucking STOP. I know they are countless other men attached to the project too, but it’s much easier to shit on just him. God, what a waste of time. The Wikipedia page is more succinct.

I watched To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before 2: P.S. I Still Love You and it was everything I wanted it to be and more. Loved the Adventures in Babysitting reference right off the top (I’ll forever love that movie and it doesn’t get talked about enough), I loved pretty much every musical choice (these are my top three songs from the movie), and I loved the idea of doing another Thanksgiving in March (although I’m pretty sure Chrissy Teigen did this a few years ago and planted that great seed in my head). Definitely the best thing on Netflix at the moment.

Seeing this restored footage of NYC in 1911 is both exciting and eerie as hell, for some reason.

Nathan and I went to the Raptors game that ended their winning streak, sorry about that.

I’ve been consumed with reading so much stuff about what’s going on right now and this was a little helpful: 4 Practical Ways to Prepare Your Home for a Pandemic. Don’t judge me for sharing this link! I’m delirious.

Things that I’m looking forward to this month: visiting Collingwood and going skiing with my family, I might splurge and get that mini birthday cake from Momofuku Milk Bar, and the new season of On My Block comes out on the 11th. I’m pretty into the idea of turning 35, usually I’m more jacked about my birthday month but I think I’m too down to care at the moment. Caring coming soon.

If you’ve got any interest in reading last month’s roundup, you can see what went down in January over here.

#monthly roundup #Liz Heather #this is liz heather #February #2020

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survivormyanmar-blog · 8 years ago

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Ep. #1 - “Love At First Chat” - Steffen & Gaston

The game started with Day 0 and the tribes having time to get to know each other. On Day 1 the players were made aware of "The Cave" which will be used to get rewards throughout the season. The first Immunity Challenge was Guess that GIF. Both tribes finished early so results were announced on Night 1 and Togye (the Favorites) won and the Mata tribe chose to send Amanda and Ting Ting to The Cave. With having to go to Tribal, Caroline tried to take control of a majority alliance on the Fans tribe but her aggressive game play was turning everyone off. The vote quickly changed from people wanting to vote off Linus for being inactive to wanting to vote out Caroline for playing too hard. When the votes came in it was an 8-2 split with Caroline going home and leaving her ally, Maranda, on the bottom.

WHAT THE FUCK TREVOR AND OWEN this faves tribe is iconic i'm not worthy of anyone here jay was my first host so she's my mother tommy is an icon in his own right because we're both in the 7th place club i've literally only heard of the legend ting tine STEFFEN?? GOD I already feel on the bottom and nothing has happened

...and I think Tommy is already tryna flirt with me. I mean, I love flattery but I'm not letting it get in the way of me and my villain edit. uh-uh honey.

so the game is afoot I guess but I really don't feel any pressure to make alliances yet? we'll see how the rest of this goes though.

Dear Diary, I feel hurt, and destroyed, but I got my main hoe Amanda over here, Ashley who I'm in another game with and Sam and Christian who I knew from outside the game so thats a start, but like I LOVE TING TING, she could be my Angela 2.0 and I love her soooooooooo much. Gotta do this quick, because challenge soon, and now just hope I can make it to merge with Leah on the fans, my baetato, so wish me luck, cause I won Myanmar before, I intend to do it again.

So, I arrive a little late to the whole introduction to the game, and it turns out that one person hasn't shown up at all. I feel great that I'm not already casting myself as the tribe outcast, but there is always room for that to change. I love everyone here. Everyone is so sweet and so engaging on topics that we talk about, and really its shows that people care about the game just like you. So here's to the best, cause otherwise, I'm so screwed.

Oh my gosh!!! I am on Survivor...or close to it! I definitely am going to have so much fun no matter my freaking age. I am the youngest one here. But age is just a number and I'm gonna prove that to these people. First impressions I am talking to everyone trying to find something to bond with. Maranda and Netflix, and stuff like that. Immediately Leah attracts me. I think anyone close to my age I can work with. Because on Zwooper my gaming website there are people like that who I can relate to and am more free of will than people in their 30s with kids. That's kinda weird. But just wait because Neme (I call myself that but also Nehe) is gonna be a star of this game for sure. I am all about strategy and I am gonna slay this.

This is going to be one hell of a ride.. I can't wait to see how far I can get in this game... I already starting my alliance and it's going to be great fun!!!

idk just feeling kinda *nice* as we move into tomorrow. hopefully there'll be more talk of game then, but I'm totally okay with just relaxing right now.

Confessional, Day 1 Welcome to Fans vs. Favorites in which just like the CBS Survivor Fans vs. Favorites, the fans aren't fans so much as they're newbies who want to play the game. No one has really copped to following Tumblr Survivor before (which is fine). I've checked out the short bios and bio videos and I definitely have a few thoughts, but I want to talk about these Favorites first. If I am in a position to work with any favorite, GASTON is at the top of my list. His bio video made him seem very reasonable and definitely a person that I'd get along with in my day-to-day. RICHIE also seems very lovely and smart. On the flipside, I only made it through 3 seconds of STEFFEN's bio video before determining he's a loser and I couldn't even press play on AMANDA's because she seems like a very sweet, but very real Disney freak. I worked at Disney for 6 years as a post-high school job and she reminds me instantly of every co-worker that I didn't want to sit near because she's a Disney-obsessed freak. Also I guarantee you that 45% of the cast are virgins. I don't know why I feel like that's related. As far as my own tribe, everyone is very sweet and agreeable on the surface. I've had great one-on-one conversations with most of everyone. I get a really good vibe from CARLOS and KRYSTEN. Their bio videos are adorable and they both seem like great people to work with. ADRIAN, KEEGAN, and LINUS are nice enough. NEHE is very sweet and I love his energy and enthusiasm, but I wouldn't work with him too closely because he's in early high school and that's a loose cannon waiting to happen. I haven't talked with LEAH or MARANDA yet individually. Both seem nice. LEAH is trying to play the "I don't know what's going on" card to the point where she volunteered herself playfully as willing to be anyone's puppet. Her Skype name gives away that she's an ORG host. Big Brother is not all that different from Survivor. Even if she hasn't played one before, a host knows their shit and she's not fooling me. Her bio video was kind of cute though. As for MARANDA, and this applies to CC (CAROLINE) as well--please shoot me in the face if I'm playing these sorts of games 10 years from now. I don't think either of them will really have a sense of how to relate to the younger group--hell, I'm worried about that for myself and I'm 10 years younger than them! CC is the only person who has talked game this evening with me. Whether that means I'm at an immediate disadvantage or if everyone else is like me and feeling everything out before plunging in remains to be seen. I appreciate that CC reached out to me to align, but after I told her I got a good vibe from KRYSTEN, she told me flat out that KRYSTEN is going to be out first because when asked about aligning, she was hesitant and non-committal. I feel like that's such a strong take to have on a player this soon in and her attitude (and god awful spelling for a grown adult) really turns me off about her. She comes off as really intense and she's playing hard immediately. How I proceed when it comes to CC will be interesting. I want her gone because her erratic negativity and immediate desire for discord makes me want to get rid of her immediately. However, I need to be careful if I'm to make this happen--if CC were to find out, that negativity and intensity would be shifted over to me, and I don't need that. So I'll work with CC cautiously for now, but if I feel like I can get KRYSTEN, CARLOS, and three other tribe members to join me in getting rid of her, I'm going to make it happen. If CC approached KRYSTEN before me, I can only imagine how many people CC has approached for an alliance this early in the game. It's been a few hours. Calm down. I'm going to check out the Wikipedia pages tomorrow to learn more about everyone. Until then, goodnight!

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All I have to say is this: I get serious Abbey vibes off that Jay girl who I have yet to speak to. This makes me want her gone so bad. But then, I wanted Abbey gone ‘so bad’ all last season and she ended up winning. So maybe it would be wiser for me to become Jay’s best friend and that would better lead to her demise. MWA HAHAHAHAHA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26ZbDyZe_Nw

okay I just wanted to say that everyone has been so nice to me in this game so far! I got gifs and messages from so many people saying that they're rooting for me and it just warms my heart so thanks to all! (sun)

anyway I like this *all-star* feel because nobody is screaming and trying to make alliances yet like in every other game i've played someone has approached my about alliances on the very first day. I feel so relaxed like I could get voted out now and still feel like a ray of sunshine.

(Queen of long confessions begins now) First impressions: I got added to this the Togye tribe chat and almost passed out (I may have punched my boyfriend in the arm when I saw the cast). I didn't realize how scary being a favorite with lots of players I recognize would be. I'm going through all the episodes of everyone's seasons so I can get the tea. Amanda: She knows everyone in the community, which scares me a bit, but we've been talking and she seems nice. I think we could be in an alliance together pretty easily. Ashley: Doesn't seem like a huge threat from what I'm reading on the Sicily Tumblr, didn't really betray a ton of people and seems relatively trustworthy. Definitely a potential alliance member. Christian: We haven't talked at all yet, but also doesn't seem super threatening from Sicily. Gaston: Seemed strong in M*ldives but didn't actually do a ton of big moves. Anyone who survived that season has thick skin, but I'm not terrified yet. Richie: Very wary of Richie. Very. Even though we've been having a super friendly conversation and I like the personality he's showing me, I followed M*ldives closely and I know how he played. In short, he played like me, which is terrifying. Sam: I hosted Sam, so I know that he's super smart and strategic. He found two (or maybe three I can't remember) idols in Monuriki, one before the game even officially started, so I know he's going to play really hard. He would rather be voted out because everyone's playing a savage game than win because everyone else was weak, so I know he shouldn't be messed with. I think we'll either be super close allies or at each other's throats, maybe both. Steffen: Seems super nice, very #notorious in the community. Love Abbey, who I love (that's right bean ur getting a shoutout) Ting Ting: First boot. Very nice. Doesn't seem afraid of tumblr survivor, which is either good or bad depending on how we work together. Tommy: A bean, hasn't played in a main season in a really, really long time, which, again, could either be good or bad. I think we could work together. In his Mali confessions, he definitely seems like a power player and about as crackt as me, so I'll keep my guard up a while yet. That's.........all for now, I guess.

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oh thank got we got that win! now nobody from this tribe has to go home! the cave sounds exciting though so maybe I can go and get a leg up. fingers crossed!

honestly my edgic better be good istg

Well we did it! by 2 points we beat the stupid newbies. I wonder who's going to be sent to the caves and like what's going to happen but everyone is pretty chill so... we good

After Immunity Challenge: Lordie lordie, we lost by a small margin and it was upsetting. There's literally 10 of us on Mata and only half of us worked our asses off in that challenge. Like? Hello?! Where were the rest of you? This is a team challenge that required all 10 people... You're already playing with the mentalits of the merge... holy damn.

well this sucks I wasn't wanting to lose this chanllenge but it is was it is not sure who the vote will be but hopeing its not me if my alliance stays true it wont be me :)

So, we lost the first immunity challenge. It's a huge hit to morale and the paranoia immediately set in. However, I do have options. Two different alliance groups have approached me and as far as I can tell I'm safe this first vote. Deciding which group to side with could influence my entire game, so I need to choose wisely.

I worked hard for this tribe to win immunity. I love my Survivor so I did the best I could with the help of Brett, Adrian, Krysten, and Keegan. The fact we lost the first immunity challenge really does suck. I don't think I have anything to be scared about going to tribal. I think right now the vote will be Linus or Caroline. Linus was the last person I talked to yesterday. He showed up late to the immunity challenge while Caroline is playing hard too fast. I personally don't like bitches and she's a massive bitch. I know she's a 36 year old woman who's on bed rest but I don't like how she talks to me. She's playing too hard and not with class. I think everyone will vote her out if I ask for it. Theres not reason to keep bad energy around. Keep the tribe with good energy and move forward playing in immunity and killing it. I made an voting block tonight of the 5 who put the most work into the challenge. It shouldn't be an alliance but if we loose again the chat is there and we can try and vote together again. But I made a alliance with Brett and Leah individually. From conversations i have, I worked my way for people to trust me I believe and would work with me. So I'm in a good spot for now.

Day 2 Things aren't so bad. I put my thoughts on paper this morning before the challenge to evaluate who I wanted to work with most and who the least. I have great feelings about CARLOS, KRYSTEN, and ADRIAN and not so good feelings about CC (CAROLINE). We did our best at the challenge and fell just short of victory. I'm fine with it for now because the sooner I solidify my place in a majority alliance, the better. After the challenge, those who (like me) participated in the challenge and worked hard at it (ADRIAN, NEHE, KRYSTEN, and KEEGAN) formed a pact to go after someone who didn't participate. Of the people I wanted to work with, only CARLOS didn't factor in. I didn't have to weigh in much at all--the group felt like giving CARLOS a pass because he was on a plane and MARANDA was celebrating her son's birthday. That left CC, LEAH, and LINUS. I can also, meanwhile, acknowledge that we really shouldn't be so high and mighty about going after people who did not participate because it was us that elected to go early. The others pretty much showed up at the actual scheduled challenge time. It's really not their fault, but I'm not going to say that. I have the best working relationship with LINUS, but I am wary about both LEAH and him possibly having connections within the favorites because a lot of the Tumblr Survivor community wished both LEAH and LINUS well pre-game. I can't ignore that. But CC is so paranoid and completely crazy--she has plenty of time to think as an injured and unemployed 30something, she's made herself a huge liability. It makes sense to keep goats around, but not explosive ones. While this conversation was happening, CC attempted to start an alliance with MARANDA, KEEGAN, and me. I immediately spoke with KEEGAN to tell him we should move in lockstep for this vote. He agreed and ultimately we decided CC wasn't worth the effort to keep around. CC approached NEHE and ADRIAN and I intercepted them to tell them it's a bogus alliance. ADRIAN did the smart thing and appeased CC while NEHE did not and tried to play dumb, sending CC in a blind rage. LINUS is also voting for CC as far as I know, which gives us a 6 majority, in theory. I haven't decided whether or not I want to clue in CARLOS. I want to because I might need CARLOS in the event of a swap. MARANDA, as kindhearted and lovely as she is, can be slayed to leave next. I don't think anyone should tell her the situation. LEAH is an enigma, but I feel like she'll be told by the majority to vote for CC, so if things remain intact 21 hours from now, CC will leave in an 8-2 votes while the minority will probably vote for LINUS or NEHE.

My name is Jasmine Masters, and I got something to say. Round one and Im already at the bottom lol. My team was a bunch of idiots who tried to do the challenge we had 24 hours for in 5 minutes and the people who were here all formed an alliance). So, this round hopefully the votes been turned onto Caroline because she's been sketching people out. I heard the vote was starting on me, but now it's changed off, it looks like I gotta pray for the merge already haha. I want to stick with these people because I do like them, but a swap would simply save me as even though I may be on the outs of their alliance, it will have to expand to fit everyone on the swapped tribe from our original tribe :D .

Well kiddo's, its 4am and Im pulling an all nighter because I left a college paper waaaaay to long, and Im about to die of tiredness so I thought I'd take a break by telling all about myself because Im a huge egomaniac xD. So, Im Linus, I work as a childrens entertainer and am also currently getting a bachelors in political science. My job can basically be summed up as "Dress as Spiderman, go to birthday, make money!" and my school can be described as fuck stats class, live for monday nights when I have my theatre class. One fun fact about me is despite being a pretty ditsy dude, Im actually a Canadian trivia provincial champion and national finalist in Reach for the Top, which is the highschool Canadian version of Quiz Bowl. My favourite season of survivor is Survivor Gabon, followed shortly by Tocantins and Cambodia. My alltime favourite survivor is definitely Randy Bailey since he is such a morally conflicting character. On one hand Randy is very loyal and never turned on the onions, and we even feel some sympathy for him since he is basically all alone in the world as he has no family and didnt even have a loved one to bring to the loved ones challenge (Had he gotten that far). On the other hand he really is a dick and thats probably why he has so much trouble making those connections, and that kind of character disposition is something I just havent seen in any other reality show ever. I started playing orgs in May, and I've mainly played orgs in the facebook/wiki community where I've had some decent success I like to think, as I have won two of the biggest facebook orgs, the main and 703. My strategy is usually that of lay pretty low in the early game and coast by on social connections until late game where I can go hardcore on challenges since I tend to be pretty good at flash games. Im a very team oriented player and if you're with me, there is virtually a 0% chance Im turning on you pre final 5 (And if you're good enough at guilt tripping me I may still not turn on you xD). This game looks like its going to be a bit different though since Im used to being brought in by the power alliance early on since I am that loyal number for most of the game, so the fact that Im on the outs is gonna make me have to adapt a little. My strategy right now is even though I am on the outs of the big alliances, I gotta be useful in all the future comps and hopefully make the personal bonds with the people in the majority alliance so that they can find other targets more tempting than me. I just gotta hold out until a swap at which point I can hopefully gain some more favour with the fans by being that loyal number through the swap too and ideally we can slay a few of your favs ;) . As a player I look to keep the VL informed since whats the fun in watching if you have no clue whats going on, so Im really hoping none of y'all break my trust and leak this haha (Seriously Ill cry T_T ). So far in the game I'm really liking Brett, and although I know he's part of this majority and he hasnt told me, I see him as definitely a leader figure so I'd like to become his extra vote for now. Alternatively, I like Adrian quite a bit, and Keegan seems really nice so I definitely want to get in with her. I'm a bit weary of Nehe right now. We talked yesterday and today when I tried speaking to him after the challenge he basically ignored me until the vote got switched off of me, which on one hand isn't bad because he has a really obvious tell, but on the other means he could definitely have been one pushing for me from within the main alliance. Ideally though this is still very early and hopefully we can get back on the same page, since he's very active and I assume will be helpful in all the challenges and right now a strong tribe is key, although maybe Im just too into pagongings.

Nehe told Maranda that Caroline is the vote. This wouldn't be an issue if Maranda wasn't Caroline's closest ally. He's lucky we already have the numbers or he could have just ruined his own game. Although, I'm glad this happened so early on. It tells me Nehe is probably not the best ally. I'll work with him this vote but when the chance arises, he needs to go.

I'm so excited to be back! It's going to be an amazing game, the cast (at least for the favs) seems pretty competitive. So I thought I would do my first impressions of everyone for my first confessional. Amanda - she's nice but I feel she might be wrapped around Steffen's finger. I feel like she will do anything he says, they will probably be a pair. Otherwise she seems pretty nice, I think she would actually do better gameplay wise without Steffen in the game. I think if we went to tribal she wouldn't be someone to gun for me at the first tribal. Ashley - I like Ashley a lot, she seems down to earth and an individual. I can't really tell where her loyalties lie. I feel that me and her have a really good connection and I would love to work with her in the game. I just hope she wouldn't betray me, at least not too quickly. Christian - she doesn't respond to my messages. All she does is comment memes in the main chat, and honestly if your not here to talk to people when people approach you, you shouldn't be on this season. I would enjoy it if she was first boot, nothing personal against her. It's just I think out of everyone on the tribe she deserves to stay here the least. Gaston - he seems like a really genuine and nice guy. I'd like to strengthen our bond more because I feel he would be a good ally. I might approach him so about a deal or something just to make sure he can vote with me in future votes. Jay - she seems really nice, but there's a vibe that I get from her that reads "danger" "threat" "beware". I don't know what it is about her but something about her makes me skeptical. I like her as a person but honestly I don't know if she'd want to align with me but by the way she's positioned in the game it's more likely I think I wouldn't be one of her top picks to align with. Richie - he is cool. Our conversations are very nice, and he's a cool guy. I wouldn't mind allying with him. However, I don't think people see him as a threat so he may just go far because of that. If I'm ever in a dire position and I'm allied with him, I'm definitely going to be the one going home. Sam - something about him makes me trust him. I like chatting with him, he's pretty cool. I think he'll be one of the bigger game players this season. I think he's in a good position in the tribe. I want to get on his good side, because I like him a lot and he seems to have good ties with a lot of people and overall likable. Steffen - he is probably the biggest threat out of everyone out here. Whenever I talk to him it feels like he's trying to analyze me, and what I'm about. I feel like we are kinda close but Steffen would cut me whenever because he thinks I'm a game player. (I'm predicting) He has the most social ties to everyone, and I think he's in a good spot to "master mind" but in FvF "master minding" the entire season usually doesn't work out on ORGs. Also he seems kinda cold-blooded like he'll cut or betray anyone to get himself ahead in the game. I like the guy but something about him tells me "watch out". Even though I really wanna play with Steffen, I just hope he feels the same way about me. Ting Ting- she's my bae. I love her. She's my #1. I wanna strengthen our relationship even more. I think she's awesome and hilarious. I think we can definitely have a good under the radar alliance going that can last a long time. I can see myself and her working well together. It's just we have to strengthen our bonds together. She can be the Laura Alexander to my Julia Landauer except I wouldn't betray her. The Cave twist seems fun, kinda has me worried at the same time. I think I want to remain my under the radar approach and stay that way. Keep attaching myself to bigger threats and play lowkey for right now. I think it will be fun to see how it plays out. My biggest fear would be, being in the majority and the minority getting their hands on something from the cave, and I get out. The fans seem pretty cool, the only fan I know is Linus. What I know about Linus is he's a beast and amazing at comps and wins a lot of games by just being a beast. He's also the only fan that I think knows of me. So I wouldn't mind voting him out the minute I'm on a tribe with him. I also wouldn't mind jumping ship to the fans if I had to. It isn't like once we get out all the fans, all of us favs will win the season. There's only one sole survivor, not 10. Overall, I'm just gonna keep doing what I'm doing and try to have fun like I am having. I think I will try to beast these immunity challenges! Also slay us for winning the first challenge and more importantly, immunity challenge of the season! Final 19 never felt so good. That about sums up everything so far. I'll update when there is more to come. Peace out, girl scouts.

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I don't have too much to confess this round. It's gone fairly smoothly. The challenge was fun and most castaways took part. We think we found a classic "first boot". Someone who was just playing a little too hard and seeming a little crazy. She approached me on night one and let me know she had "numbers". Asked me if I wanted to work together. How was I supposed to make a decision on that alone? haha So I don't think it's me tonight, and if it is, you can use the #blindside for sure! xoxo

so just waiting for tribal--eating my pizza, doing my thing.

Everyone is pretty chill. The group call was fun it was cool

Don't have much to say. It's crazy how quick everyone was to vote out Caroline. I thought maybe people judged her too quickly. Then I thought about and realized, she never even approached me. She didn't cared to include me, so it didnt bother me too much to writensure her name down.

Today was a reassurance day for me. Last night I made an alliance more so voting block to get out one of the people not contributing to the tribe. (Leah, Carlos, Maranda, Linus, Caroline) I was more so leading to voting out Linus as I didn't have any relationship with the guy after our 48 hours of knowing each other. Then miss crazy pants Caroline comes over and gives me like this attitude because of the answers I gave the bitch. I am not dumb I knew that Caroline was trying to get info from me after knowing me for only like 36 hours and we didn't talk a lot and when i responded to her with answers like idk and i don't think anyone is in an alliance she got very angry. You got 10 people who want to be here but one of them is crazy person who came out to hard . That seems like a very easy vote right there. Today like I said was making sure if it went down. Target #2 made her entrance today trying to save Caroline from the vote. Maranda was very dumb to do that. I like her but if we loose I am coming for her because a majority agreed to Caroline and she knew this yet still tries to protect her. That's dangerous to my game. This voting bloc I mad is very communicative in which they are telling me all of their conversations and I talked to Brett and Keegan about making it an official thing. Before tribal I need to speak with Adrian and Krysten. Leah is amazing and hands down someone I am gonna keep by my side. She seems to like me too because I talk to her but I think I can morph her into liking me as a strategical ally and we can move through this game together. Going into tribal no funny business should be happening. Everything should go as plan and Caroline should go home. You don't play hard in the beggining of this game and act like a total bitch to people who aren't on that level yet. I take things slow and that's why your ass is going. I do need to keep an eye out on Adrian as he was fighting real hard to keep the vote off Linus so soon he may need to go.

#mustlearntoadapt #confessionals

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