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mrsspidermanmaryjanewatsonparker · 5 years

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“While they're depicted as happy and in love, there are a lot of details that don't make sense.”

Oh boy I can’t wait to hear this from the pinnacle of comic book journalism that is Screenrant....

20 EVERYTHING ABOUT "ONE MORE DAY"

Okay fair enough

19 THEY HAVE NOTHING IN COMMON

Sense of humour. Study different forms of science. Science and acting are both about making sense of life. Troubled childhoods. Living double lives. Living with guilt over relegating on responsibilities which hurt your family. Immense inner strength. Oh and btw having shit in common isn’t the be all and end all of romantic relationships so shut up.

“It's possible for two people to love each other and not have much in common. ”

That’s what I said.

“At some point, however, a couple needs to have something to build a relationship on.”

And they did see above and add in being one another’s friends, confidants and support group.

“Peter Parker and Mary Jane couldn't be further apart from each other in almost every single way. He's a science geek with a weird sense of humor and no social skills.”

Also heroic, also gult ridden, also responsible, also inner strength, also working class, also lost a parent, also lived a double life....like MJ.

“Meanwhile, MJ is an aspiring model/actress, except for when she's a super successful model/actress.”

Everyone knows model/actress = a personality right.

“In recent years, she's shown a more entrepreneurial side, but that still involved opening a nightclub, the sort of place where Peter doesn't fit in at all. They say opposites attract, but there comes a point where that just becomes nonsensical.”

Yes there is but that point is well beyond the ways in which Peter and MJ are opposite to one another because their traits often balance one another out.

18 THEY GOT TOGETHER WAY TOO SOON AFTER GWEN'S DEMISE

They got together almost 2 years after Gwen died shut up.

“Time in comic books is a funny thing. The Marvel Universe has a sliding timescale, meaning that it's hard to peg down when stories took place in relation to each other. The time that passes in the real world means nothing. That being said, Peter and MJ started dating way too soon after Gwen Stacy's demise.”

Canonically its still 2 years so shut up.

“She lost her life in Amazing Spider-Man #121 (1973) by Gerry Conway and Gil Kane. By the end of the next issue, the seeds were being planted for them to get together. They didn't immediately start dating, but Peter seemed to get over his "one, true love" suspiciously fast”

2 years isn’t too fast and she wasn’t his one true love. Nobody has a one true love.

17 SHE FLIP-FLOPS ON PETE'S LIFE AS SPIDER-MAN

This list is about stuff that doesn’t make sense. Anybody dating a superhero is probably going to flip flop over their own or their loved ones’ lives being potentially endangered by super powered serial killers.

“Look, dating a superhero must be hard. Nobody can blame someone for not wanting to deal with it, or trying to convince a loved one not to risk their life. Also, it can make having a social life impossible. It's understandably frustrating, but at some point, enough is enough.

It seems like Mary Jane can't make up her mind about Peter's life as Spider-Man.”

Obviously she can because she chose to date him, chose to marry him and stayed with him all the time sans stories where she was written as OOC.

She both likes it and dislikes it which makes her compelling and its realistic too. She doesn’t HAVE to make up her mind definitively and every day stay on track with liking or hating it because people flip flop over shit all the time.

Shit Spider-Man himself flip flops about BEING SPIDER-MAN!

“Sometimes she's fully supportive, while other times she wants him to quit. ”

Gee its almost like something as dangerous as a superhero’s life would have lots of factors that impact how you feel depending upon what side of the bed you got up from.

Also she never wanted him to quit outside of when she was OOC. She only once wanted him to remain retired when she was heavily pregnant.

“Considering that she knew Peter was Spider-Man before she even met him, it's time for her to figure out her feelings and make a decision. ”

a) She did, hence they married

b) She doesn’t need to make a decision YOU the individual reader want her to but realistically the character for her own sake doesn’t have to

“They both know he's not going to give up being a hero, so it's time to be grown ups.”

16 THEIR ENGAGEMENT WAS SUPER QUICK

In the history of mankind there have been quicker engagements.

Shit STAN LEE got married super quick, he married his wife Joan of 60 something years literally the day she got divorced.

“In Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21 (1987) by David Michelinie, Jim Shooter, and Paul Ryan, Peter Parker married Mary Jane. Behind the scenes, this occurred because Stan Lee wanted Spider-Man to get married in the newspaper comic strip that he was writing at the time. Marvel liked the idea, and decided to have them get married in the comics as well.

The problem was that they were broken up at the time. So, the writers had to quickly bring her back, rekindle the romance, have Peter propose, and then get married.”

This is total fucking bullshit.

Mary Jane had been a mainstay in the titles for over 4 years before the wedding, being the most recurring character sans Spider-Man himself.

Moreover broken up isn’t strictly accurate, Peter and Mj years prior to their wedding had been effectively dating whilst being in denial about it to one another or publicly.

Their romance and love was always there they just weren’t being honest about it until Peter proposed.

Yeah the proposal-wedding was a few issues, but the romantic tension and relationship had been years in the making.

“Anyone that's ever planned a real wedding knows how unrealistic this whole timeline was.”

Yeah unless you were having a quick wedding at city hall with a small ceremony and there was a time skip before and during the final part of the story where they tie the knot.

15 DO THEY HAVE A BABY OR NOT?

“The second Clone Saga that ran during the mid '90s had one of the most confusing endings ever written. Basically, the writers needed to finish Ben Reilly's storyline while also tying up all of Peter's loose ends to make it possible for Peter to become Spider-Man again. One of these plot threads was the fact that Mary Jane was pregnant.

The editors felt that Spider-Man being a dad would age him, so they suggested that Mary Jane not have the baby, after all. However, it was also heavily implied at the time that Norman Osborn had the baby taken away. This storyline was teased for a few years, before ultimately being forgotten about.”

This list is about things that do not make sense. This list is not about things that are merely unresolved.

14 WHY DOES PETER STILL USE THE BLACK SUIT?

“In Amazing Spider-Man #299 (1988) by David Michelinie and Todd McFarlane, Venom made his frightening first appearance. Mary Jane thought she saw Peter wearing his black costume, until a mouth formed and turned into a horrific smile. Venom didn't hurt Mary Jane, but the experience was still pretty traumatic for her.

After Spidey defeated the villain, Mary Jane asked him to stop wearing the black costume. This made sense, and Peter happily obliged. Except, he keeps bringing the costume back from time to time.”

Yeah and it’s justified each time.

He brought it back in the 1990s during McFarlane’s run because he needed something stealthy and he discussed this with MJ.

He brought part of it back in the Clone Saga because he had nothing else to wear but it wasn’t the whole suit.

He brought it back during the Mackie run with Larsen because again he had nothing else to wear and MJ was presumed dead at the time anyway.

He wore it again in Back in Black at a time where he wasn’t wearing it in front of MJ and wanted to send a message to criminals that he was now going to be a more violent and scary fucker (it worked).

He wore it again in Brand New Day when he was impersonating Venom and he and MJ were broken up.

He wore it again in ASM #800 when he needed the power boost from the symbiote to beat Red Goblin.

And all this aside, MJ got over her fear of Venom anyway.

So rather than making no sense each individual instance actually did add up.

“Sometimes there's a specific reason, other times he just seems to feel like wearing it. He knows it scares his wife, but apparently Peter likes the way it looks too much to care.”

Not true as I just explained. Peter himself doesn’t even LIKE the suit anymore.

13 HOW SUCCESSFUL IS HER CAREER?

“Not everyone is a fan of Peter and Mary Jane's relationship. While many fans love her, some feel that it's weird for Peter Parker to be married to a supermodel. That can be a valid complaint, but the problem is that Mary Jane has had one of the most inconsistent careers ever.

She's constantly moving between being a struggling model, a highly sought after model, a soap opera actress, and even giving up on show business completely multiple times. It's understandable for careers to have ups and downs, but it seems like the writers can't even decide if she's famous or not.”

Because a model and actresses career and fame can’t fluctuate right?

12 THEY'VE BOTH DEALT WITH TOO MANY STALKERS

WTF is too many exactly when one of you is a famous-semi-famous actress and model and the other is a superhero?

Like shit dude, there are people, a lot of them women, who aren’t famous and can have stalkers.

“In the late '90s, Marvel's first attempt to undo Spider-Man's marriage resulted in Mary Jane getting on a plane which then exploded mid-flight.”

Technically that was not their first attempt.

“For the next year or so, everyone believed she had passed away. Instead, she had been snatched away by a deranged stalker, who caused the explosion so that no one would look for her.

Before that, Mary Jane had to deal with Jonathan Ceaser, who attempted to take her away several times in the early '90s.”

OP misspelled ‘once’ as ‘several times’.

“Even Peter had to deal with his ex girlfriend, Felicia Hardy, dating Flash Thompson just so she could be near him during that same time period. ”

That isn’t a stalker.

“People really need to give these two their privacy.”

Again...not a thing that doesn’t make sense which is the point of the article.

11 THEY BREAK UP CONSTANTLY

constantly

Dictionary result for constantly

/ˈkɒnst(ə)ntli/

adverb

1. continuously over a period of time; always.

Hmmmmmm...doesn’t seem to add up with breaking up:

For the first time in the late 1970s.

Again in Spider-Man vs. Wolverine.

Trial separating (which isn’t a proper break up) in 2001.

Seperating for real in OMD/OMIT

Breaking up again in Superior when it wasn’t even the real Spider-Man. And no her dumping him again twice doesn’t count.

Gee, four break ups across 40+ years = constantly apparently.

“Comic books can't just rely on action, they also need to have drama. One of the most common places writers create drama is in the hero's relationships. It's probably very hard to date a superhero, and it's understandable that not everyone would want to sign up for that ride. At some point, however, enough is enough.”

I’m not saying I’m innocent of lazily repeating the same words and phrases over and over again, but I also don’t get paid to write for a big website.

Also, wtf does enough’s enough even mean?

They broke up a few times, one due to genuine issues, once because of a misunderstanding, once because MJ wasn’t well and Peter was OOC (which doesn’t count) and every other time also because they were both OOC.

“It's hard to feel bad for them when Peter and Mary Jane break up, because they do it all the time. He's always focusing on saving people, she's constantly moving to another part of the country to work on her career. When Mephisto forced them to break-up, he could've just waited a few months and gotten the same result.”

Again all the time and constantly does not = 4 times across 40 years.

Also that wasn’t Mephisto’s endgame but whatever.

10 HOW DID SHE NOT NOTICE OTTO'S MIND IN PETER'S BODY

Hey look, the secod legitimate point on this list. The answer was because bad writing.

9 HOW DO THEY AFFORD THEIR APARTMENTS?

“A common complaint across various forms of fiction is that characters always seem to be able to afford apartments that they shouldn't be able to. For Spider-Man and Mary Jane, however, it's pretty bad. Of course, there are times when Mary Jane's career is going very well, which explains how they can afford a nice apartment.

For the most part, however, Peter is a struggling photographer and she's a struggling model. Somehow, they are consistently able to afford apartments with giant skylights. ”

If this happens across most fiction in ways which aren’t more egregious than anything else (because Joey and Chandler’s apartment is egregious given their jobs) then it’s not worth mentioning on this list.

“Seriously, Tony Stark would struggle to afford some of the places they've lived in over the years.”

He really wouldn’t.

8 PETER WAS SUPER SHALLOW ABOUT MEETING HER

First off he wasn’t super shallow, he was as shallow as you would expect any teenager to be in that situation.

Also, a teenager being shallow. Thats certainly something that doesn’t make sense and belongs on a list entirely about shit that makes no sense.

“In the early stories, Peter could be kind of shallow. Granted, he was a teenager, but he always just seemed interested in dating the prettiest girls. ”

Ugh...no he didn’t. He asked out 3 young women who were all relatively attractive but none of whom were like compared to Hollywood starlets of the era. There was something of an implication that Betty Brant, his high school love, was not as attractive as the more glamorous Liz Allan whom he typically rebuffed in favour of Betty.

Also if we’re playing the ‘its super shallow to just date the hottest people you can’ then Peter and MJ were no worse than one another at those ages.

“Considering that he was always getting bullied and picked on, he should've been more understanding.”

a) Being bullied and picked on isn’t innately going to make you more understanding of anybody

b) Understanding of who? Who was he being inconsiderate towards exactly? He asked out two girls he was attracted to, attraction being an involuntary thing in the first place. He presumed his elderly not hip aunt who described MJ as being a good house wife was going to pick someone unattractive or boring, especially considering that if she was going to be set up with him she probably couldn’t get a date with anyone else. Meaning in his teenage head she must be unattractive

“Then, when he found out that she was beautiful, he was suddenly interested. ”

My God how dare characters as teens be shallow and flawed. It makes no seeeeeeense!

“It turns out, Peter's type was "any girl that looks good, regardless of her interests or personality."”

That’s true which is why he quickly began to turn away from MJ because he found her shallow and preferred Gwen who was seemingly not shallow...

7 WHY DID SHE NEED TO BE SET UP WITH PETER IN THE FIRST PLACE?

...huh?

“Every comic book fan knows the story of how Peter and MJ met. A recurring plot line in early Spider-Man stories was Aunt May constantly trying to set Peter up with her friend's niece. The two didn't actually meet until The Amazing Spider-Man #43 (1966) by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, when Peter opened the door and she said the iconic phrase "face it tiger, you just hit the jackpot!"”

Wow...the degree of incompetence in this paragraph is truly impressive.

First of all it was ASM #42 not #43...how do you fuck that up. More importantly it was with Lee and Romita Senior not Lee and Ditko. SERIOUSLY how do you fuck that up.

“What's weird about this, however, is that Mary Jane was a beautiful and outgoing girl. Peter was busy being Spider-Man, and was considered a nerd by his peers, so it's understandable that he'd need help getting dates. Mary Jane, on the other hand, should have been doing just fine.”

Lets ignore how this was explained in Parallel Lives a story which has a major plot point referenced by the article more than once.

...why is this presumption Mj NEEDED to be set up. Maybe she just agreed as a favour to her aunt.

6 HOW DID SHE KNOW TO SAY THE JACKPOT LINE?

Because she knew she was sexy and could tell by his reaction he didn’t realize that and was taken aback by it.

“Ok, this might seem like a nitpick,”

Why let that bother you now.

“The famous scene where Peter and Mary Jane first meet plays out like this: Peter answers the door, and Mary Jane is standing and delivers the famous line. It's a memorable moment, but it also doesn't make any sense.

Mary Jane never met Peter before this.”

Not formally no, but yes she had and knew what he looked like.

“How did she know she was a "jackpot" for him? Maybe she wasn't his type?”

His reaction spelled it out for her.

“For all she knew, he could have answered the door and been very disappointed. Also, maybe he wouldn't care what she looked like? It was a pretty arrogant thing to say, looking back, and she's lucky it didn't backfire.”

*rolls eyes* oh fuck off.

5 THE REASON SHE CALLS HIM TIGER MAKES NO SENSE

“For years, everyone focused on the "jackpot" part of Mary Jane's famous introduction, but apparently, Peter was focused on a different part. Apparently, he never understood why she called him "tiger," especially because the nickname stuck. In all honesty, it's a good question. Especially during those early years, Peter Parker was anything but a "tiger."

In the original Clone Saga that ran during 1975, Peter actually asked Mary Jane for the reason. It turns out, it's because he's not a tiger and she's just playfully teasing him. That's fine, except why did she say it the first time she met him? How did she know he wasn't a "tiger?"”

a) Because she called everyone that

b) Because Aunt May and Aunt Anna probably told her about him

4 THEY DON'T EVEN TRY TO HIDE KNOWING EACH OTHER

Yeah they do.

“Peter's never been great at keeping a secret identity.”

Yeah that is why hardly anyone knew it before Civil War...

“His entire scheme is that he takes pictures of himself fighting crime as Spider-Man, and then pretends that he's just Spidey's photographer. He's basically telling everyone that he's connected to the wall-crawler in some way.”

Yet it worked so obviously he is good at hiding it.

“Even worse, whenever Spider-Man runs into Mary Jane, they often blatantly talk to each other in public. They always forget to pretend that Mary Jane isn't supposed to know Spider-Man. ”

He talks to lots of people in public and MJ has the easy cover story of knowing/dating Spider-Man’s friend Peter Parker.

“That, or they go way over the top and really awkwardly state that they don't know each other.”

No they don’t.

“At some point, someone's going to notice Spidey flirting with Peter Parker's wife and put two and two together.”

Yet they never have so...

3 HOW DID SHE FIGURE OUT HIS SECRET ID?

“As previously stated, Peter is kind of terrible at keeping a secret identity. ”

As previously stated no he isn’t

“Often times, Peter doesn't even get caught as Spider-Man, people just end up figuring it out.”

Again a lie from the author who didn’t even know Romita Senior isn’t Steve Ditko.

“For example, after dating Peter during the '70s and the '80s, Mary Jane broke up with him, moved away, and then came back to New York. ”

Actually they broke up in the 70s and began dating after she returned in the 80s.

“When she returned, she revealed that she had figured out his secret.

While that made sense, later stories contradicted this. It was eventually revealed that she saw Peter leaving his house dressed as Spider-Man the night Uncle Ben died. So, she didn't figure it out. Obviously, this was a retcon, but the result is that Mary Jane lied to Peter. She didn't figure anything out!”

a) Seeing Peter Parker enter an abandoned house and Spider-Man emerge would count as figuring out his identity

b) She never actually told him directly she figured it out like she was a goddam detective

2 THEY BOTH KEEP HANGING AROUND THEIR EXES

As do most comic book characters...

“Both Peter and Mary Jane had healthy dating lives before marrying one another. There's nothing wrong with that. On the other hand, it's strange how they're both constantly hanging around their exes. ”

Or refreshingly healthy...

“Peter still brings Black Cat around constantly, and he and Betty Brant are still very close.”

He dated Betty as a friggin teenager and the author reaffirms he doesn’t understand what constantly means.

“Meanwhile, Mary Jane dated Harry Osborn while they were both in college, and the relationship did not end well for him. Now, years later, everyone is always hanging out together and that's a little strange. Hanging around with your exes typically leads to disaster, and based on how many ex-boyfriends and girlfriends are around, Peter's Spidey-sense should be tingling.”

Or again healthy and an affirmation of a deep bonded friendship that goes beyond personal baggage from when they were young and dumb.

1 GWEN WAS MEANT TO BE PETER'S TRUE LOVE, NOT MJ

Again, not something that doesn’t make sense. In fact it makes less sense for Gwen to be his true love since they were not a great match and true loves are fairy tale bullshit.

“The end of Gwen Stacy is one of the most defining moments in comic book history. Up until that point, the hero saved the girl. Part of what made this story so memorable was that Gwen Stacy was always meant to be Peter's one true love.”

As far as Stan Lee was concerned yes but not everyone else.

Also OTLs are bullshit.

“Her demise rocked his world, and he's still affected by it, even to this day.

That's understandable, but it also strains Peter's relationship with MJ. She's always been understanding, but how many times can she come across him crying over Gwen's picture in the attic before it starts to effect her.”

He has literally never ever done this ever.

“She's constantly being reminded that she might be Peter's second choice.

Again with the misuse of constantly and no she isn’t because Peter has told and shown her she isn’t second best more than once.

And again, not a thing that doesn’t make sense however you slice it.

You what really doesn’t make sense.

This person being paid for this garbage.

#Screenrant #Spider-Man #Peter Parker #mjwatsonedit #mary jane watson #Mary jane watson Parker #Dan Slott #Joe Quesada #MJ Watson #Gwen Stacy

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avereas · 7 years

Text

the antonym of flower

Port Mafia Week Day 5: Childhood

summary: Nakahara Chuuya meets Dazai Osamu in freefall, and Dazai makes a proposal. word count: 2.1k

read on ao3

“Damn you.”

“What?”

“What’d you have to do that for?”

Wrong-footed, Chuuya stares at Dazai Osamu. The boy is a skinny little thing: scrawny, quite pitiful. His hair is a wind-blown mess. He looks like he makes a fruitless habit of fighting monsters much larger than himself.

Or something like that, anyway.

“I was just trying to—“ Chuuya trails off.

“Just trying to what?” Dazai Osamu scowls at him. There’s a flicker of something ugly in his uncovered eye, wide and dark against his white face. He wears an armour of bandages, as though the tape is binding together the remnants of a shattered doll. Up close, this is all rather unsettling.

Chuuya has never seen anything quite like him, before.

Chuuya has never felt anything quite like this, either: pulverised, drained, like the vestiges of wetness wrung from a used towel. He lets himself slump against the concrete wall of the alleyway, the night air cold as it threads through the sweat in his hair. The lullaby of Yokohama traffic lures him to the threshold of sleep. He pulls his coat tightly around himself.

“Hey, gingerhead, I’m talking to you.”

“Whatever. I don’t care what you do.” The awareness of pain hits Chuuya like the drop into freefall. He groans and lets his head fall back; Dazai Osamu’s hand hovers in the air and does not follow. Chuuya realises that Dazai Osamu had been, for some reason, touching his face. A grotesque feeling is spreading from the phantom sensation of warmth, crawling through his body like poisoned honey. He feels sick. He feels empty. Nevertheless: “Next time you should throw yourself into the sea, instead. No one will be forced to see your smashed-up corpse then.”

A rustle of clothing, and then silence. Suspiciously, Chuuya cracks open an eye.

Dazai Osamu’s face hovers above his own, and he’s close enough that strands of his dark hair tickle Chuuya’s cheek. Chuuya tenses.

“That’s a great idea!” Dazai Osamu suddenly seems unduly excited. “If I jump from a cliff, do you think the impact of hitting the water would be enough to kill me, or would that only make me unconscious until I eventually drown?”

“Ugh.” Chuuya closes his eye and turns away. “What the fuck. Go away already.”

“Sorry, no can do! You know, I just wanted to kill myself. I didn’t expect some idiot to come jumping after me. But still, you gave me such a useful tip! Of course, at the least, I’ll have to see you home safely. That’s fair, right?”

No, Chuuya means to say, it’s this time of the year, I don’t want to deal with Ane-san now, but the abject exhaustion steals the syllables from his mind. He opens his mouth anyway.

Before he remembers verbalising anything, though, arms close around him. The incongruous warmth is suddenly very welcoming.

…

Sunlight presses insistently into his eyelids, and reluctantly, he draws himself from oblivion. He stares at his surroundings.

A white-washed room: bare, minimally furnished with a wardrobe, a chest of drawers and a double bed. He finds himself in the latter, bundled between white sheets. The open blinds of the single window paint stripes on the opposite wall; it is the only disruption to the spartan economy of the place. Gingerly, Chuuya pushes himself out from the covers.

There is the thump of fallen fabric, and he turns in surprise to see his outerwear and gloves fanned out onto the floorboards. He picks them up from their folded arrangement and idly shrugs on his coat, frowning slightly at the unfamiliar shirt that he finds himself wearing. Then, brazenly, he continues to the drawers.

One by one, he silently pulls them out: folded underclothes, coiled belts, boxes of cufflinks, rolled-up socks. Unopened packets of bandages fill an entire compartment, neatly stacked. He moves onto the wardrobe and finds it much the same: suit jackets, dress shirts, trousers are draped on hangers equidistant from each other. A small rack displays a selection of identical black ties. Altogether, a colourless rainbow; immaculate, as though from a catalogue.

Chuuya stands back from the furniture and stares at them for a while.

He finds Dazai Osamu sprawled on the floor in what appears to be the main living space of the residence, paper maps spread out all about him. He looks up as soon as Chuuya steps out from the bedroom.

“What is this place?”

“Well, you see, Chuuya,” Dazai says, drawing out his name in tuneless song. Chuuya stiffens at the assumed familiarity. “Last night, I didn’t particularly want to deal with Kouyou-nee-san and her whole mother duck act. So I took you to my apartment instead! You can make your explanations to her yourself.”

Chuuya stares at him for a moment, before the rage flashes up his spine, red-hot. “Make my explanations? You say that like I wasn’t there trying to save your stupid ass from becoming dead human pancake. She’s going to be pissed as hell that I didn’t go home at all last night." He pauses to take a breath. "What did you do to me, anyway?”

Dazai’s beam doesn’t waver, even as he extracts Chuuya’s mobile phone from his pocket and waves it around. “You do have a couple of missed calls.”

Chuuya scowls. “You even had the fucking nerve to go through my stuff. Give it back.”

Dazai shrugs and throws it at him.

Five missed calls and seven text messages. In spite of the anger that he’s sure to find in them, Chuuya swallows at Kouyou’s evident concern. He tries to draft up the optimum responses to her questions, but there is only really one thing he could say: I saw Dazai Osamu jumping from the top of headquarters, but I don’t know why I jumped after him.

Put like that, there is no conceivable way he could escape Kouyou’s wrath.

“If it’s any consolation, yesterday was a particularly difficult anniversary for your ane-san. That’s probably why she was especially worried.” Chuuya glances at Dazai, but Dazai has returned to his diligent study of his papers. “She’ll be feeling a little silly now, so she’ll go easy on you when you— when you get home.”

“How do you know that?”

Dazai looks up at him and smiles. The light reflects off his dark eyes, like a cat’s.

Chuuya grits his teeth and growls, “What do you know about her that I don’t?” but Dazai simply swings himself upwards and and pulls his arms into a stretch. Chuuya notices a brown-streaked shirt crumpled on the arm of the couch, and irritation wars with curiosity until he gives in.

“Got into a fight?” Chuuya nods at the garment.

“Oh. That’s…” Dazai is staring at him a little oddly. “That’s not mine.”

“It sure looks like one of your boring shirts.” Too late, Chuuya wonders if that gives away his snooping in the closet. Oh, well. He wanders closer and drops down on the other end of the couch.

“It’s not my blood.” Dazai picks it up gingerly between two fingers. “Do you remember what happened last night?”

“What kind of question is that? I only used my ability to save a suicidal maniac and now I feel like I’ve been hit by a car.”

Dazai’s eyes are keen. “Using your ability feels like that?”

Chuuya scowls. “No. It’s never been like this before. It feels even worse than when Ane-san pushes me really hard during training.”

“Training?” Dazai murmurs. “And how is that going?”

"It's going fine!"

Dazai smiles faintly, a gesture appearing to be borne more of habit than of emotion. “That badly, huh...” he murmurs, and serenely ignores Chuuya’s aggrieved “I didn’t say that!”

Dazai’s stare is uncanny as he absently balls up the shirt. He hums in acknowledgement and glances away, gaze blank even as his eyes skim the maps on the ground.

Curiosity wins again, so Chuuya asks, “Were you working on something for Mori-san?”

“Hm?” Dazai’s gaze sharpens and he finally seems to notice the maps around him. His lips curve down in sudden glumness. “Oh, no. I was just checking out some suicide destinations, you know. Turns out that there aren’t really any cliffs nearby. But Toujinbou does sound really cool, so I was thinking of a holiday—”

Chuuya stares at him silently.

…

The whole experience was rather bizarre. Later, Chuuya tries to forget it all.

As luck — or some other manipulative force — would have it, two months later Chuuya runs into Dazai Osamu again. He has now acquired a set of walking crutches and a stack of thick textbooks, and has commandeered the table of one of the conference rooms in the headquarters. Chuuya immediately considers turning right around and exiting, but Dazai has already looked up at the noise.

Instead, Chuuya asks, “Why the fuck are you reading about quantum mechanics?”

“I’m trialling another method of suicide.”

“Right.”

Dazai glances down again as he turns a page. “I wanted to see if it was possible to bore myself to death. But this is too painful. It’s not worth it. Suicides should be enjoyable, shouldn’t they?”

“I’m just going to go,” Chuuya says. “Goodbye, nice seeing that you haven’t offed yourself yet, I guess, whatever—”

“No, no,” Dazai cuts in. He smiles at Chuuya and in that split-second, he looks so young. “Stay. Sit down.”

“What for?”

“I want to talk to you.”

Chuuya pulls out a chair and warily takes a seat. “So talk.”

“How would you feel,” Dazai says, placing a hand underneath his chin and flipping another text-heavy page casually, “about being my partner?”

“Your partner?”

“That’s what I said, didn’t I?” Dazai flicks his eyes up at him, as though bored. “Mori-san will be the next boss. I’m the mafia’s best strategist. I can help you with your ability.”

“What.” Chuuya says this flatly. He doesn’t even know where to begin to address Dazai’s statements, each one as ludicrous as the next.

“Gravity manipulation, right?” Dazai nods at the books. “I’m afraid that the current science has yet to catch up with the specifics, but I think I have an adequate understanding of how your ability should work. I also have the ability of nullification. I can ensure that nothing like what happened to you two months ago happens again.”

Chuuya stares at him, nonchalant and aloof, lounging in the chair in front of the panorama of the Yokohama bay. He carefully tries to avoid thinking about that night two months ago, but the terror rushes to his throat as though he is watching the scene unfold in front of him now. The fall of the slight figure, as though in slow motion— the wind flapping through his coat, the bile in his mouth as his fingers missed the other’s hand. Serendipity made it so that this failing ensured his survival: if he had made contact with Dazai, For The Tainted Sorrow would have been nullified and they both would have splattered onto the streets of Yokohama. But because he missed, he had done— done something and then spent the next week recovering from whatever it was, but.

But they were both alive. He didn’t fail. Not really. Well, from his own perspective, anyway, even if Dazai's peaceful face haunted his nightmares during sleepless nights.

He says, “Choose another partner. If what you said is true, I’m sure there’s someone who’s interested.”

Dazai frowns at him. “I want you.”

“Well, I’m not fucking interested.”

Dazai stares at him in silence. After a few moments, he says, “Back then, when you jumped after me like a fool. You shouldn’t have been able to use your ability on me.”

“I didn’t use my damn ability on you,” Chuuya snaps. “I couldn’t even touch you, could I?”

Dazai smiles. “So how did you do it?”

Chuuya looks away, into the glare of the afternoon sun. “I don’t know.”

Dazai is still staring at him. After a moment, he says, “This is my hypothesis. For The Tainted Sorrow is a gravity manipulation ability. But there is another form of your ability which is far stronger and exceedingly more dangerous. If we can figure out how you can use that, you’ll be an unstoppable force.”

Chuuya blanches, half at the suggestion, half at the distinctly-remembered pain. “Do you even hear yourself? First you say that you’ll make sure that nothing like that happens again. Then you say that you want to figure out how it works.”

The smile has entirely faded from Dazai’s face. Now he just looks back at him, expression grim and betraying nothing.

Finally, Chuuya says, “Just tell me why you did it.”

Dazai Osamu had the grace not to pretend at ignorance, but Chuuya knew that the tilt of his lips promised nothing but bullshit. “The lights were really pretty that night,” is what Dazai says. “I was just thinking that I liked this city a lot.”

#portmafiaweek #bungou stray dogs #dazai osamu #nakahara chuuya #soukoku #fic

22 notes · View notes

enddaysengine · 7 years

Text

Non-Fiction Resources for Chronicles of Darkness by Gameline

June 6th Update: It seems that Tumblr has a limit to how many links you can put in one post. As a result, I’ve moved the resources for Dark Eras, as well as the links organized by topic, to a separate post that you can find at this link.

*************

Much like I did for Eberron, I’m putting together some links to non-fiction materials you could use for Chronicles of Darkness. Since CofD is set in a dark mirror of our world, there are a lot of materials that could go in this post, but I will try to be selective. While I am keeping Chronicles in mind while I do this, you could use these links for any other RPG that is set on historical Earth (I’m looking at you, Call of Cthulhu!) Some links may show up more than once if they fit in multiple categories.

This post is very much a work in progress and probably will never be complete because of the broad availability of applicable materials. If you know of a resource that you don’t see on my list, please feel free to reblog/reply/DM me to say what the resource is and why it should be included on the list. I’ll do my best to add it in.

General Websites

Crash Course: It’s free, it’s on Youtube, and it’s in a ten-minute episodic format.

Coursera: Coursera is a website where university level classes are available for free. You can also get certifications from Coursera for a fee so you can build your resume while planning your next chronicle.

Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History: Dan loves historical “What if?” moments, and with good reason. If you want to hear the most badass historical stories, examine how drugs, alcohol, and human stupidity impacted history, or get a sense of what it was like to live through the most brutal historical eras, this is the place for you.

edX: Another excellent site with free courses that you can upgrade for a certificate. A good place to look for courses in the humanities and religion.

Great Course/Great Courses Plus: GC and GC+ are not free services, but they have such an extraordinarily high production value that you can understand why. History, science, culinary theory, economics, anything you can think of is covered in the Great Courses catalogue. Great Courses Plus is their streaming service, which at $15/month for an annual subscription is a killer deal.

Google Books/Google Scholar: My first goto for research of any kind, and the first place I advise my students to begin their research. Seriously, I’ve written papers, then had them published just using these two. Use them.

JSTOR: If you have operated in any kind of academic circle for the last two and a half decades, you know JSTOR. Full access is tough to come by unless you are currently enrolled in a university, but you can still sign up for free to get access to journals on topics you just can’t find anywhere else (like the Mutapa Empire). Sign up with multiple users if you have to. It works. Trust me.

Open Yale Courses: University classes, taped lectures, and course materials, all from one of the best educational institution in the world. Take advantage of them.

The Vault: Declassified FBI documents. A lot more of them involve the paranormal than you may expect. An excellent source of inspiration both for things that actually happened or that people think happened.

Writing with Colour: The best place to go to check yourself for unintentionally problematic depictions of POC in your games. Also a great read if you are looking for details and cultural beats for NPCs you don’t share a background with. They are awesome and you’d be surprised how many chronicle ideas you can get just by binging their archive.

******************

Mortal Chronicles

Foundations of Eastern Civilization

Maya to Aztec - Ancient Mesoamerica Revealed: Awesome resource if you are planning to run a Skinchangers game using the Aztec Dark Era.

Medical School for Everyone - Pediatric Grand Rounds: A good place to look for ideas for Innocents

Understanding Japan - A Cultural History

Beast the Primordial

General

Ancient Marine Reptiles: Yeah, I know, Beast is supposed to be about dragons and monsters, but I guarantee you that plenty of ancient reptiles are also stalking the Primordial Dream. Plus, aquatic reptiles are awesome and don’t get enough face time with the public, so you might want to think about your next Beast being one.

Dino 101: The ultimate course about Dinosaurs. Very beastly.

Early Vertebrate Evolution: What’s so scary about ancient fish, you ask? Only razor jaws and bone for skin.

Secrets to Sleep Science

Theropod Dinosaurs and the Origins of Birds: At five lessons long, this course is pretty short, and the content matter is fascinating (says the biology teacher).

Dark Eras

African-American History: From Emancipation to the Present

The Civil War and Reconstruction Eras

History of the United States 2nd Edition

Signature Settings

Foundations of Eastern Civilization

History of the United States 2nd Edition

Mountains 101: If you are going to visit Kathmandu, you better be thinking about how mountains will impact your Chronicle!

Understanding Japan - A Cultural History

Changeling the Lost

General

Secrets to Sleep Science

Successful Negotiation - Essential Strategies and Skills: A very, very Changeling course.

Dark Eras

Atlas Historique de Paris: I can’t read French, but I am assured by people who do that this is an excellent resource.

Foundations of Eastern Civilization

Underground Atlas of Paris

Signature Settings

Foundations of Eastern Civilization

History of the United States 2nd Edition

Understanding Japan - A Cultural History

Demon the Descent

General

Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies

Crash Course Computer Science

Crash Course Games

Digital Signal Processing

Internet History, Technology, and Security

Inventions That Changed the World

Robotics - Ariel Robotics

Successful Negotiation - Essential Strategies and Skills: Also a very, very Demon course.

Dark Eras

Living in the French Revolution and the Age of Napoleon

Maya to Aztec - Ancient Mesoamerica Revealed

Ottoman Empire

Signature Settings

Cultural Competence - Aboriginal Sydney

A History of Hitler’s Empire

History of the United States 2nd Edition

Hollywood: History, Industry, Art

Ottoman Empire

World War II - A Military and Social History

Geist the Sin-Eater

General

Death: Seriously, that’s all the course is called. It’s Yale, its good, the name is just to the point.

Soul Beliefs 1 - Historical Foundations

Soul Beliefs 2 - Belief Systems

Soul Beliefs 3 - How Does It All End?

Dark Eras

Foundations of Eastern Civilization

The Great War

History of the United States 2nd Edition

Indigenous Canada

Signature Settings

The Early Middle Ages (284-1000)

History of the United States 2nd Edition

World War II - A Military and Social History

Hunter the Vigil

General

Introduction to Forensics

Aegis Kai Doru

Archaeology - An Introduction to the World’s Greatest Sites

Introduction to Ancient Greek History

Ahl al-Jabal (Source)

Ismaili Gnosis: Okay, breaking alphabetical order here, but this one is special. If you have a passing familiarity with Islam, you may have had the initial thought that the write-up of Ahl al-Jabal doesn’t look like anything you’ve seen before. That’s because Ahl al-Jabal are Nizari Ismaili Shiites and trust me when I say it is extremely accurate (minus the vampire hunting). Ismaili Gnosis is an excellent source for current events, history, and particularly metaphysics as it applies to Ismailis.

Assassin Legends: The Assassin State of the Crusades is legendary, but what most people know about them is just that: legend. If you are using the Ahl al-Jabal, either in historical or modern chronicles, let Farhad Daftary bust the myths about the Nizari State for you. This link only gives you a preview on Google Books, so some pages will be missing, but it is still worth a read.

Ama-San (Source)

Oceanography- Exploring Earth’s Final Wilderness

Understanding Japan - A Cultural History

Ascending Ones

History of Ancient Egypt

Ashwood Abbey

Wine Tasting - Sensory Techniques for Wine Analysis: Are you really part of the Abbey if you aren’t a wine connoisseur?

Ave Minerva (Source)

The History of Rome Podcast

Azusa Miko (Source)

Understanding Japan - A Cultural History

Barrett Commission (Source)

Crash Course US Government & Politics

The Bear Lodge (Source)

Mountains 101

Bijin (Source)

Understanding Japan - A Cultural History

The Cainite Heresy (Source)

Gnosticism - From Nag Hammadi to the Gospel of Judas

Lost Christianities

Cheiron Group

Critical Business Skills for Success

Economic History of the World Since 1400

Division Six (Source)

Crash Course US Government & Politics: Division Six may not actually be a part of the US Government, but they sure think they are, so understanding how they think they fit in isn’t a bad idea.

The Faithful of Shulpae (Source)

The Ancient Near East - History, Society, and Economy

Habibti Ma (Source)

The United States and the Middle East - 1914 to 9/11

Hototogisu (Source)

Understanding Japan - A Cultural History

The Hunt Club (Source)

Forensic History

Illuminated Brotherhood (Source)

Addiction and the Brain

The Addictive Brain

Drugs and the Brain

Keepers of the Source (Source)

Understanding the Mysteries of Human Behaviour

Keepers of the Weave (Source)

Indigenous Canada

Knights of Saint Adrian (Source)

Why Evil Exists

Knights of Saint George (Source)

The History of Christianity

Les Mysteres (Source)

Crash Course Mythology

Cultural Literacy for Religion

Great Mythologies of the World

Les Voyageurs (Source)

Indigenous Canada

The Long Night

The Apocolypse - Controversies and Meanings in Western History

The History of Christianity

Lost Christianities

The Loyalists of Thule

A History of Hitler’s Empire

World War II - A Military and Social History

The Lucifuge

Why Evil Exists

Maiden’s Blood Sisterhood (Source)

How to Become a Superstar Student

The Modern Political Tradition

Malleus Maleficarum

The History of Christianity

Lost Christianities

Why Evil Exists

The Merrick Institute (Source)

Medical School for Everyone - Pediatric Grand Rounds

Secrets to Sleep Science

Network Zero

Internet History, Technology, and Security

Night Watch (Source)

Why Evil Exists

Null Mysteriis

Animal Behaviour

Introduction to Forensics

Mountains 101

Otodo (Source)

Understanding Japan - A Cultural History

Why Evil Exists

The Promethean Brotherhood (Source)

Decoding the Secrets of Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Greek 101

Latin 101

Miracles of Human Language - An Introduction to Linguistics

The Story of Human Language

Protectors of the Light (Source)

Indigenous Canada

The Reckoning (Source)

Heroes and Legends - The Most Influential Characters in Literature

The Scarlet Watch (Source)

History of the United States 2nd Edition

Task Force VALKYRIE

Crash Course US Government & Politics

History of the United States 2nd Edition

World War II - A Military and Social History

Talbot Group (Source)

Psychological First Aid

The Union

Cities Are Back in Town - Urban Sociology

Utopia Now (Source)

Great Works of Utopian and Dystopian Literature

Vanguard Serial Crimes Unit (Source)

Introduction to Forensics

The Vault: The FBI’s online archive of popular declassified documents. Lots of weird stuff, and the perfect source of inspiration for VSCU.

Yuri’s Group (Source)

De-Mystifying Mindfullness

Healing with the Arts

How Music Can Change Your Life

Dark Eras

Foundations of Eastern Civilization

History of Ancient Egypt

History of the United States 2nd Edition

Indigenous Canada

Understanding Japan - A Cultural History

Signature Settings

History of the United States 2nd Edition

Mage the Awakening

General

Addiction and the Brain: Mage 2e’s theme is “Addicted to Mysteries.” Understanding that addiction is a good place to start.

The Addictive Brain

Ancient Philosophy - Aristotle & His Successors

Ancient Philosophy - Plato & His Predecessors: If there is one course on philosophy you take for Mage, it should probably be this one. At four lessons, this is a pretty quick one to complete.

Gnosticism - From Nag Hammadi to the Gospel of Judas

Magic in the Middle Ages

Dark Eras

Great Zimbabwe in Historical Archaeology

History of Ancient Egypt

Introduction to Ancient Greek History

Politics and Long-Distance Trade in the Mwene Mutapa Empire

World War II - A Military and Social History

Signature Settings

Foundations of Eastern Civilization

History of the United States 2nd Edition

Hollywood: History, Industry, Art

Understanding Japan - A Cultural History

Mummy the Curse

General

Archaeology - An Introduction to the World’s Greatest Sites: Let’s go find some Relics!

History of Ancient Egypt

Introduction Ancient Egypt and Its Civilisation

Soul Beliefs 1 - Historical Foundations

Soul Beliefs 2 - Belief Systems

Soul Beliefs 3 - How Does It All End?

Dark Eras

The Early Middle Ages (284-1000)

Foundations of Eastern Civilization

The Great War

Great Zimbabwe in Historical Archaeology

Ottoman Empire

Politics and Long-Distance Trade in the Mwene Mutapa Empire

Signature Settings

The American Revolution

History of the United States 2nd Edition

Promethean the Created

General

Introduction to the Biology of Cancer

Understanding Cancer Metastasis

Dark Eras

African-American History: From Emancipation to the Present

Epidemics in Western Society since 1600

Signature Settings

Antarctica: From Geology to Human History

Foundations of Eastern Civilization

History of the United States 2nd Edition

National Geographic Polar Explorations: Follow the steps of Doctor Frankenstein.

World War II - A Military and Social History

Understanding Japan - A Cultural History

Werewolf the Forsaken

General

Animal Behaviour

Dark Eras

African-American History: From Emancipation to the Present

The Ancient Near East - History, Society, and Economy

Cybele: The Great Mother of the Augustan Order

The Great War

Hardcore History - Punic Nightmares

The Early Middle Ages (284-1000)

History of the United States 2nd Edition

Signature Settings

The Civil War and Reconstruction Eras

Foundations of Eastern Civilization

History of the United States 2nd Edition

Mountains 101: An awesome course in general, but especially useful for Werewolf’s signature setting, the Colorado Rockies.

Understanding Japan - A Cultural History

War for the Greater Middle East

Vampire the Requiem

General

Clans

Animal Behaviour

History of Ancient Egypt

Introduction Ancient Egypt and Its Civilisation

Carthian Movement

Circle of the Crone

Magic in the Middle Ages

Invictus

Lancea et Sanctum

Magic in the Middle Ages

Ordo Dracul

Ottoman Empire

Dark Eras

African-American History: From Emancipation to the Present

The Civil War and Reconstruction Eras

The Early Middle Ages (284-1000)

Epidemics in Western Society since 1600

The Great War

Living in the French Revolution and the Age of Napoleon

Ottoman Empire

Digital Tour of Tutor London

Signature Settings

Foundations of Eastern Civilization

History of the United States 2nd Edition

Introduction to Ancient Greek History

Understanding Japan - A Cultural History

#chronicles of darkness #cofd #nwod #onyx path publishing #OPP #RPG #worldbuilding #resources #learning #education #continuing education

235 notes · View notes

imaginemycroftholmes · 7 years

Text

Name: Rachel

Age (note that if you are under the age of consent your score will be significantly lower for Marriage, Friendship and Partnership): 27

Gender: F

Occupation: Teacher

Nationality: Caucasian

Country of origin: US

Personality type (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator): ISTJ

Education: Bachelor’s Degree

Marital Status (if not applicable put N/A): N/A

Number of children (if not applicable put N/A): N/A

Who would you shoot out of John, Sherlock, Mycroft and why: John. He’s been shot at before, knows what to expect, knows how to handle wounds and trauma. He is also very good in high pressure situations.

Height: 5’2”

Position in the family (oldest, youngest, middle): Youngest (by a minute I’m a twin! :P )

Best subject: English

Favorite Subject: English/Music

Worst subject: Biology

Last song listened to: Emperor’s New Clothes by Panic at the Disco

Favorite color: Purple

Thoughts on Molly and Sherlock’s impending relationship: Good luck. I hope she has the patience of a saint. Though I have a feeling she will keep his butt in line!

Illness/allergies/impairments: Seasonal allergies, eczema

Last sentence uttered to another living human being: Could you please help me? I can’t reach.

Hair color/length: Collar bone length; orange and red

Who do you feel more sympathy for Sgt. Donovan or Anderson’s wife: Anderson’s wife. Not only did she have to go through the cheating, she also had to go through the downward spiral that was Anderson after Sherlock “died.”

Eye color: Hazel

Constantly cold, hot or prefect: Cold

Seven Noteworthy skills (ex: can play an instrument, fire most guns, ride a unicycle, etc.): Classically trained musician (Opera, piano, ukulele, guitar), can pick locks, can change a tire, handy with tools, organizational master, good at memorization, and good at negotiating/deescalating situations

Nine noticeable sins: (ex: moody, bad listener, selfish, etc.): Perfectionist, overthinking, moody, anxiety, terrible sweet tooth, self-deprecating, frequent shopper, pessimism, and sarcastic

Languages known/spoken: English, some Spanish, Does music note reading count as a language (it should! :P)

Cats, dogs, both or other: Dogs, allergic to cats L

How often you help your community (1 never, 2 sometimes when prompted, 3 average, 4 often, 5 weekly): 4

Favorite Holmes family member: Mycroft

Body type (1 obese, 2 overweight, 3 averages, 4 fit, 5 skinny): 2

Number of past lovers (put N/A if virgin or not seeking marriage): N/A

Level of cleanliness (5 slobs, 4 messy, 3 average, 2 pretty clean and 1 spotless): 2

Would you rather piss off Sherlock or Mycroft: Sherlock. To really piss Mycroft off…may God have mercy on your soul

Rate your mental health on a scale of 1-5 with one being terrible and 5 being fine: 3-4

Rate your confidence on a scale of 1-5 with 1 being poor and 5 being Sherlock levels: 3

Combat level (1 sitting duck, 2 somewhat okay, 3 can hold their own, 4 pretty damn good, 5 a proficient fighter): 3

Circle of friends: 2-3

Who do you side with more Sherlock or Mycroft: Probably Mycroft. Sherlock throws himself into insane situations, many times without a lot of planning.

Level of intelligence on a scale of 1-5: 4-5

Who do you side with more Mycroft or Mrs. Hudson: Mrs. Hudson. She sees things that he simply cannot because she thinks in a different way than he does.

Introvert or Extrovert: Introvert

Political alignment: Left

Who would your rather be trapped in a long car ride with Mummy Holmes or Holmes Senior: Holmes Senior

Go to outfit for everyday: T shirt and jeans when I’m not at work, casual dress and flats when I’m at work

Go to outfit to impress: A-Line cocktail dress, nice heels, curled hair, smart makeup with a bold lip

5 hobbies (not to be confused with noteworthy skills): Singing, crocheting, writing, reading, and playing room escape games lol

Opinion of Rosie Watson and Mary Watson: Rosie is the most precious child to ever grace this Earth and Mary Watson was a loving wife and mother

Favorite music/book/movies: Music: folk, rock, oldies Book: murder mystery Movies: Action/Comedy/Science Fiction/Classics

How well you take rejection on a scale from 1-5: 3

Religious or religious affliations: None

Kids or no (note this is wanting them not the ability to have them): Maybe? Not sure.

Out of the Holmes family (Siger, Violet, Sherlock and Eurus) who would you kill, maim, kiss or roommate with and why:

Kill: Eurus—Any other option would leave her a danger to herself and others Maim: Violet—Her mind would still be intact and Siger would still be able to take care of her Kiss: Siger—Wouldn’t make it awkward, and dealing with his family he deserves a peck on the cheek :P Roommate: Sherlock—he seems like as annoying as he might be as a roommate, he could be very handy and useful in certain situations

Do you think what Mycroft did with Eurus (at the time) was justified and needed: I believe that Eurus was and is still a threat to herself and others. She is extremely mentally unstable and needs constant surveillance, which any kind of civilian service would not be able to provide for her. While she seems to be happier now, I don’t believe she will ever be allowed to be released into the public. I think, which the decision is extremely tough, and will impact the lives of those around her, that the decision is both justified and needed.

Please bold the following that you wish to have with Mr. Holmes:

Friendship

Partnership

Marriage

Mentorship

=======================================================================

There are 10 sets of 10 coins. You know how much the coins should weigh. You know all the coins in one set of ten are exactly a hundredth of an ounce off, making the entire set of ten coins a tenth of an ounce off. You also know that all the other coins weight the correct amount. You are allowed to use an extremely accurate digital weighing machine only once. How do you determine which set of 10 coins is faulty?

I think what you have to do is take one coin from the first set, two from the second set, three from the third set, going all the way up to ten. When you weigh them, you will know which set is the one with different weight by how many hundredths the weight is off by, e.g. if the weight is off by five hundredths of an ounce, you will know that it was the fifth set that had the irregular coins.

Bruce is an inmate at a large prison, and like most of the other prisoners, he smokes cigarettes. During his time in the prison, Bruce finds that if he has 3 cigarette butts, he can cram them together and turn them into 1 full cigarette. Whenever he smokes a cigarette, it turns into a cigarette butt. One day, Bruce is in his cell talking to one of his cellmates, Steve. “I really want to smoke 5 cigarettes today, but all I have are these 10 cigarette butts,” Bruce tells Steve. “I’m not sure that will be enough.” “Why don’t you borrow some of Tom’s cigarette butts?” asks Steve, pointing over to a small pile of cigarette butts on the bed of their third cellmate, Tom, who is out for the day on a community service project. “I can’t,” Bruce says. “Tom always counts exactly how many cigarette butts are in his pile, and he’d probably kill me if he noticed that I had taken any.” However, after thinking for a while, Bruce figures out a way that he can smoke 5 cigarettes without angering Tom. What is his plan?

If you take 1 of Tom’s cigarette butts, on the 5th cigarette you will be left with a butt to put back into Tom’s pile (See drawing)

What is the true origins of a fortune cookie?—Okay this may be wrong. But don’t they originate in the US…I think in California.

Answered correctly: 2/3

Mycroft’s answer:

Dearest Rachel,

It is nice to find your submission gracing my hands once again as finding educators is a very herculean task with the increasing demand needed in the colonies. Although I am not a religious man myself I pray that your career receives the needed assistance and respect that it deserves considering the amount of work most teaches put into their craft for the sake of the students and on a grander scale; the future of civilized society. It almost takes a person worthy of sainthood in order to find people that are willing to teach with such a large dagger hanging precariously over their heads should they fail to meet state standards but to those that stay or choose that journey I salute them.

While I find it a bit disconcerting that you would hold favor with Mrs. Hudson over me when pitted against one another I can see why the choice would be made should we be too similar in nature however, with political aliment I have no doubts we would see differently enough not to need Mrs. Hudson’s interference in order for us to butt heads metaphorically on a subject. I find no surprise that most are choosing to maim mummy and kill Eurus but am colored surprised when people would actively share a space with Sherlock even after the whole debacle with Mary. Sherlock is not an easy person to room with and I say that as both his brother and former co inhabitant from when he was detoxing, then again rooming with my father would also be rather strange so the question tells me a lot about the person when the choose between the four.

I do agree however that reading sheet music should constitute for a form of language as few outside of musicians themselves can read it. I know in the beginning Sherlock had some trouble learning it unlike Eurus who took to it faster than anyone could anticipate. In fact I would dare say that Eurus was only ‘playing dumb’ in order to get Sherlock to play with her. I appreciate that you would choose to piss off my baby brother as you would indeed be correct that crossing me would be...detrimental to any persons social, financial, and mental well-being but rest assured I am not prone to overly emotional outbursts and dramatic plots at revenge unlike some people in the Holmes family I could name.

Moving forward I would find it interesting to talk more about this over coffee but sans the sweets (I’m on a diet currently and Sherlock has taken to texting me ‘Hey fatty’ almost every hour on the hour until I lose a stone) but I predict that such a exception won’t put you off too much correct?

See you at precisely at 2:54. My assistant will text you the location and details.

-M

Friendship: 8.79/10

Partnership: 9.1/10

Marriage: 7.99/10

Mentorship: 10/10

#mycroft holmes #submission

8 notes · View notes

fuckyeahtattoogirls-blog1 · 5 years

Text

How the Keto Diet Became Palatable

New Post has been published on https://bestrawfoodrecipes.com/how-the-keto-diet-became-palatable/

How the Keto Diet Became Palatable

It was 2017, and Neil Thompson’s friend was about to be kicked out of the military for being overweight. Spurred into action, his friend announced that he was going on a diet and started to lose weight – and fast. Very fast. “In 20 days, he’d lost almost 10kg,” recalls Thompson, who works in IT for the navy. “So, I asked him, ‘How did you do it?’”

His friend explained that, while browsing online for a quick weight-loss plan, he had stumbled upon a Reddit thread about something called the “ketogenic diet”. People on the 1.4 million-strong r/keto subreddit posted about losing 25kg in a couple of months, while never feeling hungry and finding it easier to focus during their working days. However, the diet was, to put it mildly, contrarian in the same way that Brexit is “divisive”.

First, you almost completely eliminate carbohydrates. Low-carb diets are no longer considered radical – the macronutrient has steadily been falling out of nutritional favour for at least a couple of decades – but keto typically advocates an intake of less than 40g per day. (For context, most of us will hit that at breakfast.) Fruit is largely frowned upon, and there’s a strict cap on veg. Yes: fresh, wholesome vegetables.

If you assume that you’ll make up for those lost calories with generous servings of lean chicken, or copious whey shakes, you’re wrong. Next, you’re limited to about 100g of protein per day, though ideally less. What’s left? Lots of fat: marbled steak, oily fish, egg yolk, streaky bacon. Top it all with butter, olive oil or lard, then a scoop of smashed avocado. A classic keto diet provides 90 per cent of your daily calories from fat, 6 per cent from protein and 4 per cent from carbs. In short, it’s a giant middle finger raised at Public Health England’s “Eatwell Plate”.

But Thompson’s friend told him that the ketogenic diet, while bizarre, was rooted in science. The absence of carbs and the abundance of fat push your body into a metabolic state called ketosis, during which you burn fat instead of glucose. The 5ft 9in Thompson – who was, by his own admission, “a bit portly” at 90kg – was intrigued. His online digging led him to a podcast called The Joe Rogan Experience. Rogan, an American UFC commentator, comedian and self-described “silly bitch”, is well known for unpretentiously unpacking complex topics. In one episode, he interviewed top keto researcher Dom D’Agostino, a professor of physiology at the University of South Florida.

“It was interesting to hear a scientist talk about what he eats and why,” says Thompson. D’Agostino is not a salesman, and he did not create the diet (of which more later). But Thompson didn’t care about keto’s history. He just wanted to know if there was any substance to the hype. “I threw out all of my carb-heavy foods,” he says. “Then, I picked up as much bacon, grass-fed butter and steak as I could afford.”

Fact to Fad

If you’re like most fitness-minded people, you’ve probably dabbled with trendy eating plans at least once. But what makes a fad diet tip? That’s a question that Adrienne Rose Bitar, a nutrition historian at Cornell University, has spent her career answering. “Most diets start with some unhappiness we have with our lives and bodies,” she says. This makes us susceptible to simple, counter-intuitive messages that blame our dissatisfaction on a single culprit. Low-fat diet: fat is bad, so don’t eat it. Paleo: processed foods are bad, so stick to the kind of “pre-industrial” food that your ancestors ate.

With keto, you do exactly what your doctor (and likely mother) told you not to

With keto, you do exactly what your doctor (and likely mother) told you not to: eat the delicious, fatty foods and skip the vegetables. While this might partly explain keto’s rise in popularity, it overlooks a crucial aspect of the story. The keto diet, it turns out, was not developed to aid weight loss. It was designed for epileptics.

Fasting has been used as a treatment for epilepsy since at least 500BC. Your body usually runs on sugars harvested from the carbs you eat. You store around 2,000kcal worth of sugars in your liver and muscles. Your body burns through that in about 48 hours, which is when an evolutionary survival mechanism kicks in. Your body switches to its stored fat, some of which is converted to a fuel called ketones. This state is called ketosis (defined as registering 0.5 to three millimoles of ketones per litre of blood).

In the 1920s, Mayo Clinic doctor Russell Wilder started tinkering with a fat-centric diet that mimicked the effects of fasting by depleting the body of sugar. He tested his “ketogenic” diet on people with epilepsy and, ever since, it has been an effective treatment for seizures.

Weight loss entered the frame in 1972, when cardiologist Robert Atkins published his first diet book. The initial weeks of his eponymous diet plan centred on eating fat and very little carbs to induce ketosis, a “happy state… [in which] your fat is being burned off with maximum efficiency and minimum deprivation”. That was when keto first appeared on the radar of Stephen Phinney, an MIT-trained biochemist, who began researching its potential applications for endurance sports.

Then, in 1976, the “Last Chance Diet” took off. How it works is exceedingly simple: you drink a fat- and protein-rich concoction until you shed your desired amount of weight. The diet, created by osteopath Robert Linn, quickly spawned a lucrative industry, with £30m of the elixir sold in less than two years. You were supposed to consult a physician, who would ensure that you were getting the necessary vitamins and minerals – but most people didn’t bother.

Your body can survive for a long time in a carb deficit, but it requires micronutrients. Robbed of minerals, it can’t perform certain crucial functions, like sending electrical impulses to your heart. Between July 1977 and January 1978, the US Food and Drug Administration received more than 60 reports of deaths among “liquid protein” users. The fallout included new regulations, and a negligence lawsuit for Linn. As for Phinney, he and his research on ketosis were, in effect, banished to academic Siberia.

Still, Phinney forged on, conducting studies that, for example, showed that liquid ketogenic diets with adequate nutrients wouldn’t cause heart problems. In 1988, Optifast emerged. Like Last Chance, it was a liquid diet, but with sufficient vitamins and minerals, plus a celebrity enthusiast in Oprah Winfrey. “She did it for four months,” says Phinney. “One day, she opened her show pulling a red wagon that contained 30kg of pig and beef fat. And she points to it and says, ‘That’s how much weight I’ve lost.’” Optifast immediately received more than 200,000 inquiries, and keto research surged in the early 1990s.

It was at this point that the diet was adopted by the hard-core bodybuilding underground, evolving into the version you know today. “I first heard about keto from this guy named Dan Duchaine,” says D’Agostino, a name cited by several other nutrition researchers interviewed for this story. (Duchaine, who died in 2000, was a two-time felon credited with promoting the steroid movement of the 1980s and 1990s, and reviving keto as a way for bodybuilders to drop fat quickly for competition.) Then, with the rediscovery of the Atkins diet in the 2000s, new generations – and perhaps you – warmed to the idea that low-carb could be a dietary tool.

THE VOORHES

Early Adopters

The scaling up of keto started with a study published by a San Francisco-based research centre in 2013. Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes found that a ketone, produced when you limit calories or carbs, can activate powerful anti-ageing genes. This keto diet, as the press release put it, “may one day allow scientists to better treat or prevent age-related disease, including heart disease, Alzheimer’s and many forms of cancer”. Nutritionally woke bio-hackers – interested in keto for fat loss, athletic performance, productivity and longevity in equal parts – began to self-experiment.

Among them was Tim Ferriss, the Princeton-educated, Silicon Valley-based podcaster and author. He’d dabbled in keto, writing that it’s “incredible for simultaneous fat loss and lean muscle gain, though perhaps needlessly complicated for non-athletes”. In 2013, he posted a video of Peter Attia, a longevity expert. In it, Attia talks about his battle with metabolic syndrome and how keto changed his health in ways that the conventional avenues of exercise and a vegetable-rich diet could not; he uses graph after graph to plot the positive impact on his triglycerides and blood glucose.

This sort of dietary evangelism is not without precedent. Diets have traditionally been religious: halal, kosher, Lent. As Bitar puts it: “Many diets were actually plans to purify the soul.” Now, in place of dogma we have data. But the sentiment is very similar: the right diet can make you not just trimmer but better. Following Ferriss’s endorsement, the number of people searching for the keto diet immediately doubled and continued to trend upward as other lifestyle gurus, such as Dave Asprey and Mark Sisson, jumped aboard.

Keto’s side benefits – a reduced desire to eat and increased focus – appealed to productivity-fixated, bio-hacker bros. “Keto does control hunger,” says Guyenet. The reason, he says, may be the extreme nature of the diet. “Carbs and fat together stimulate dopamine release and activate motivational circuits in the brain that drive us to eat,” he says. Consider ice cream: you find it so appetising because it’s both sweet and fatty. As for your promised mental clarity? This remains controversial. Any effect is probably due to eating less junk food, which can cause your blood sugar to rise and dip, impacting energy and mood.

As keto’s popularity continues to increase, the medical establishment has cautioned that – although the diet is considered safe when done correctly – the emphasis on saturated fat and the lack of micronutrients may affect your heart health over time. “We still don’t have enough long-term evidence on what happens to your body after 10 years of ketosis,” says nutrition researcher Stephan Guyenet. And an effective diet should be for life, not just for the summer.

Still, as the buzz around keto intensified, the claims became grander and more outlandish. In November 2015, Ferriss aired a podcast with D’Agostino. That was the tipping point, “the moment at which the diet entered the vernacular and zeitgeist”, says Andy Galpin, a performance researcher at California State University, Fullerton.

The episode’s rather hubristic title was “Dom D’Agostino on Fasting, Ketosis, and the End of Cancer”. Ferriss told the story of a friend with testicular cancer who would fast for three days to enter into ketosis before chemotherapy. D’Agostino noted that anyone with cancer needs medical supervision of their diet, but also said: “If you put your physiology into a state of fasting ketosis, that puts tremendous metabolic stress on cancer cells that are highly dependent for survival and growth on high levels of glucose and insulin. By subtracting them of those growth needs, they can [die], and you could potentially purge yourself of some precancerous cells.”

When asked about that statement, D’Agostino concedes, “This episode’s title is unfortunate,” but he points out that his research does suggest keto can help slow the progression of some cancers, though it speeds up others. “It’s much more complicated than ‘starve your cancer of sugar’,” he says. (Ferriss declined to be interviewed for this article.)

The Ferriss podcast was a gateway to The Joe Rogan Experience, and soon Rogan’s 30 million monthly listeners were learning about the “new” diet. As keto spread from Silicon Valley to the rest of the US, the emphasis shifted from self-optimisation to a key concern of the everyman working 40-hour weeks: weight loss.

No Dead Weight

Keto thrives on social media, in part because its swift results are so photogenic: you’ve likely seen the before-and-after shots on Instagram. “Short-term carb restriction can cause 3-4kg of almost immediate water loss,” says Galpin.

But ketosis isn’t the same for everyone, every time. It’s a moving target: you might only lapse into it when you drop your carb intake below 20g per day, or you might be able to eat 50g and still reap the rewards. To carry out the diet properly, you need to track your levels using a device. And since a single carrot can toss you out of ketosis, you need to quantify each meal, weighing your food and consulting a nutrition app to calculate the exact ratio of fats to proteins to carbs.

Hunger Management

Within a year of Rogan’s podcast, keto cookbooks flooded the market, searches for keto hit 17 million per month, and Orian Research estimated keto had become a £3.8bn industry. And because people on keto often lack nutrients such as vitamin C, magnesium and fibre, there’s been a supplement gold rush for brands behind products that make staying on the diet easier.

Which brings us back to Thompson and they key question: does keto work for weight loss? In the short term, yes. “But the weight-loss effects are driven primarily by appetite suppression, which in turn regulates calorie intake,” says D’Agostino. In other words, when you limit what you eat, you, well… limit what you eat. As scientific as many purport to be, weight-loss diets usually come down to eating less food.

Consider the results of a recent study in Jama journal, which found no significant difference in the amount of weight loss after one year between people on a low-fat diet and those on a low-carb diet. But the study’s results suggest an important fact about the efficacy of diets. Some people lost 30kg, while others on the same diet gained almost 10kg. Whether it works or not can depend on the individual.

Neil Thompson is now 12 months into his keto journey. “I’m down 23kg,” he says. His friend, meanwhile, bailed after three months, when a cross-country move made it hard to continue. “You can’t cheat, or it knocks you out of ketosis,” says Thompson. He prepares all of his meals at home. A go-to is steak topped with butter and asparagus spears.

Thompson plans to stick to the diet, even though it makes him “that picky arsehole” in social settings. “I recently listened to this debate on The Joe Rogan Experience with D’Agostino and Layne Norton, an expert who was more moderate,” he says. “The conclusion was that the best diet is whatever works for you. Keto works for me.”

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lopezdorothy70-blog · 5 years

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What Traits Entrepreneurs Need to Succeed

Audacity and courage are among the hallmarks of successful startup founders, according to panelists at the recent Wharton India Economic Forum.

Launching a startup and building it is fraught with unforeseen risks. It calls for passion and commitment that extend beyond business goals, according to participants in a panel discussion at the Wharton India Economic Forum held recently in Philadelphia. Four startup founders spoke about how they began their entrepreneurial journeys, found the right partners, went about raising capital and scaled their businesses. They shared stories of struggles to keep their ventures afloat when failure seemed imminent; battles against gender bias; and threats to work-life balance.

An episode of gender bias that dates back 23 years “deeply influenced” Prasanna Krishnan, founder and chief product officer of SmartyPal, a five-year-old firm in Philadelphia that uses game-based tools and adaptive algorithms to make learning fun, easier and personalized for students. She had that experience during an internship as a software developer at the Bhabha Atomic Research Center in Mumbai, India. Back then, she was the only woman in her department, and her supervisor refused to let her use the restroom, saying it was reserved for men. “I had to walk past two nuclear reactors to get to the administrative building where I could use the ladies' room,” she said.

More discrimination was in store for Krishnan. At the end of the internship, her supervisor highlighted the contributions of each male colleague but ignored her. Eventually, he turned toward her and said, “Prasanna, when you get married, remember to invite me.” Krishnan recalled that she was only 19 and couldn't think of a quick retort at that time. “But the lesson it taught me, which I go back to as a startup founder, is there are all these moments when people question you … and it is important to know when to speak up and say, 'I don't agree.'”

Cisco chairman emeritus John Chambers noted in a recent Knowledge@Wharton interview that more than 70% of all startups fail. Sometimes, when death seems near, survival might well be within reach if the startup team is enthusiastically involved. That is a lesson that a near-death experience at his startup taught Gautam Tambay, co-founder and CEO of Springboard, a three-year-old firm that provides online education courses in “new economy” skills such as data analytics and AI/machine learning.

A couple of years after its founding, Springboard faced a crisis. Tambay and his team realized that though they had a good product and decent user reviews, usage was dropping, revenues were flat or declining, and they had only enough money to survive three months. They determined that their distribution model was flawed, and the only way out of the crisis was to raise more capital. If they failed to do so, Springboard would have to close.

That was when the 20-person team - which was “young and hungry” - took Tambay and his co-founder, Parul Gupta, out to lunch. They said, “We've seen the numbers. They are not good, and you must be stressed. Why aren't you involving us?” Tambay said he was afraid that sharing the firm's troubles might have led the team to quit. The team members reassured the founders that “they wanted to be part of the story,” which is why they chose to work for a startup like Springboard and not for a big company. “That was one of the biggest lessons, [although] it was counter-intuitive to me at the time,” Tambay said. A more involved team then worked together to revive the firm's fortunes, he added. He changed his approach from one of being “the umbrella to protect everybody from bad news” to one where “you let the bad news flow as soon as possible, so you get more people working on the problem.” With offices in San Francisco and Bangalore, Springboard has grown since that frightening experience. It has now trained more than 200,000 students in 77 countries.

Team strength came to the rescue also of a startup founded by Sashi Reddi, managing partner at SRI Capital. The firm is an early stage venture capital fund with offices in Philadelphia and Hyderabad, India, that invests in technology startups in the US and in India. Reddi is a serial entrepreneur having founded four startups, including AppLabs Technologies, a software testing firm that Computer Sciences Corporation of Tysons Corner, Virginia, bought in 2011 for an undisclosed amount.

Reddi said each of the four startups he founded had “a couple of serious horror stories,” as he narrated an experience from his first venture. The firm had come to a point where it had to raise more capital to survive. It had two offers. One was from a financier who promised to buy the firm as soon as it went public, but that meant a three-month wait. The second buyer was ready to close the deal immediately. Reddi's firm did not have the resources to last three months, so he chose the second offer. The potential buyer completed the due diligence exercise and went on to finalize the necessary documentation. But much to Reddi's horror, on the day that the transaction was to close, the buyer significantly dropped the price.

“We decided we'd rather go under rather than deal with someone so unethical,” said Reddi. With support from his team, Reddi slogged through the next three months and accepted the first offer. The lesson he learned was that startup entrepreneurs must ensure they have the right “cultural fit” with their financial partners in terms of expectations and the way they do business, he said.

Startup founders who get too involved with their ventures at the cost of their family lives risk other horror stories, according to Abhay Singhal, co-founder and president of advertising cloud at InMobi, a Bangalore-based global provider of cloud based “intelligent mobile platforms” for enterprise marketers. “In the end, you go home to a family. That family is what grounds you as a human being,” he said. “I don't want to be a successful entrepreneur with a broken family.” He added that, according to one study, “some 60% to 70% of successful founders end up getting divorced.”

Entrepreneurial Bug

Deciding to take the plunge into entrepreneurship and giving up the security of a regular paycheck is the first big challenge startup founders face. Before she began her entrepreneurial journey, Krishnan had worked in business and product development roles at large companies including Microsoft and Comcast, as a venture capital investor, and as an executive at venture-backed startups. “I had seen it being close to the founder, but not being the founder,” she said. For Krishnan, the prime driver was her passion to make an impact in the education space by using technology “to make learning more fun and engaging.” According to her, startup founders must ask themselves if they would pursue their venture even if they knew that they wouldn't make “significant amounts of money. If that drives you, you will fight all the fights along the way to get to the end point,” she said.

Singhal's entrepreneurial journey began in 1999 when he was a student at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur where he won a business plan competition. He pursued his idea for seven years with little success before launching InMobi. “There's no entrepreneurial gene in my family remotely,” he said, citing his middle-class upbringing; his father was a bank executive and his mother a homemaker.

“I had zero risk. The only risk was - what would my parents think about it? But that was manageable.” The security of a job could be compelling, he noted. “For all of us who think entrepreneurs are these geeky, rich people, the risk-adjusted probability return of a working professional is more than that of an entrepreneur.”

When Tambay had to choose between a career as a software engineer or becoming an entrepreneur, he followed a piece of advice someone had given him: “Find a person who is 10 or 15 years ahead of you or older than you and whose life you want – and then do what they did,” he said. That exercise didn't take long: his models happened to be entrepreneurs. “I jumped right into it. I didn't overthink it. If you want to be an entrepreneur, don't overthink it.”

For Reddi, it was enough to know that his friends who worked for big companies were unhappy in their jobs. So, when a friend approached him and asked if he would be interested in starting a venture, he said, “That's a great idea. Why work when I could hang out with my friends and do something?”

Reddi had some tips for aspiring entrepreneurs. “Don't over-analyze. If you want to do something, do it early when you have little to lose. Soon after your undergrad course or MBA is not a bad time to start. Experience is overrated. People think they need to go work somewhere and learn things before starting a venture.” He also rejected the notion that founders must first research their target market and plan their moves in detail before launching. “Keep the big picture in mind and get going; don't analyze too much,” he said.

Assembling the Right Team

“When you are mad, you have this amazing ability to attract other mad people,” said Singhal. His experience told him that interviews are not the way to find the right co-founders. Instead, he looked for people “who shared the same level of madness as me.” He assembled InMobi's founding team from among people he knew since his college days and who had grown up together. For example, in 2006 he met Naveen Tewari, a batchmate from IIT Kanpur. Tewari joined InMobi as a co-founder when they launched the firm in 2007; he is now its CEO. According to Singhal, you may not find “a perfect partner,” but you must be prepared for “continuous adjustment.” Making the adjustments to work with your partner “is a better skill set to have” than interviewing and selecting a partner, he said.

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“The madness you are looking for is the audacity to dream,” said Tambay of the chief attribute he looked for in identifying the founding team. He said he realized in hindsight that the key attribute he and his co-founders “tested each other for … was a shared set of values.” Tambay noted that one important aspect is “knowing each other and respecting each other; not necessarily being friends.” To be sure, fights may erupt among a startup's founders, “but that is part of co-founding,” he said. “You need to just figure out how to [deal with disagreements] productively.” The shared set of core values ensures a common vision on aspects like how to treat people, he added.

Is it a good idea to have a friend or a family member as a business partner? Krishnan's husband, Wharton Professor Kartik Hosanagar, is a co-founder at SmartyPal. Finding that shared set of values was not an issue, but they also agreed that Hosanagar would serve as an adviser. “[The venture] literally becomes your whole life, even when you are at home, so we wanted to have a gap of sorts,” Krishnan said. It helped that her other co-founder is a college-mate and a friend. “There are times we disagree, but having a personal relationship that goes many years back definitely helps us get over those disagreements,” she said.

The Inequality Test

Singhal said while it is important for a startup's co-founders to treat each other as equals, the first test of equality comes when you have to decide how to share the equity among the partners. “That is where the real demonstration of the values starts,” he said. “I have seen people settling for equal distribution because they are not OK taking on the conflict, and I have seen people who are OK with taking unequal distribution and settling into that. If you can achieve the latter, you are more likely to succeed as a team, because running a startup is all about dealing with conflicts every day.” He added that he has also seen cases of teams that avoided taking on the initial discomfort of unequal equity stakes but ended up breaking apart years later.

Reddi, who has made some 35 investments in startups over the past few years, said that unlike some venture capital investors, he prefers solo founders. “If you have a bunch of co-founders, I'd like to know who is going to make the decisions. I get very nervous when I see these co-founders who are all from IIT and have equal stakes. I know it's going to lead to trouble down the road.” He added that a leadership arrangement with co-CEOs is “the worst thing to have” in startups.

How to Scale

Although InMobi was founded in India, which accounted for an abysmally low share of the global advertising market, it could scale its business globally because it went against conventional wisdom in some respects. In one big defining move, InMobi decided against doing business in the US market as its founders weren't sure they understood it well enough at the time. Instead, it entered the US last in 2011-12, after India, Indonesia, Africa, China and Europe.

Singhal said it has taken InMobi six years to make its mark in the US market. He wondered how the company might have fared had it invested all its resources in that market at the beginning of the journey. “I still remember, when we hired our first US employee, we almost doubled our payroll,” he said. He took pride in setting InMobi off on its “east to west” journey. He was also proud that InMobi managed to “crack the China market” and bring its share of revenues from that country to equal that from its US operations. “Our heritage of being an Indian company allowed us to look at all markets equally. Our reluctance to put the US at the front and center of our universe [made that possible]. Those are the two significant decisions in InMobi's history of scaling.”

According to Reddi, in trying to build scale, “it is critical” for a venture “to start small and to have focus.” He said that for example, AppLabs started small and worked its way to become a leader in its narrow space, and then went on to progressively claim similar leadership positions in bigger and bigger markets. “We ended becoming the largest independent software testing company in the world,” he said. He follows that same principle as an investor in startups and dislikes it when promoters of the firms he invests in want to take a “broad-based” approach. Tambay added that he followed the same philosophy at Springboard: “Win one market and then move to the next one. Don't spread yourself too thin. Focus really matters.”

Colonial Hangover

Singhal was passionately optimistic about the Indian ecosystem for entrepreneurs. “We can build world-class product companies in India,” he said. “We just need to believe in it. We have this overhang of colonialism and a service mindset that we need to break.”

Tambay, too, found a colonial mindset among Indian consumers, and it found its way into Springboard's business strategy. He said that as a company focused on education, it wanted to start by catering to the Indian market, but that was not to be. “When we had to decide on which market we would go after first, one of the factors was this colonial hangover of taking a US product to the Indian market. We thought that had a better chance of success than bringing an Indian product into the US market, even though there is no difference in where it is being made,” he said. Springboard is based out of San Francisco and Bangalore, and all its engineers are based in Bangalore, even though most of its business is in the US, he pointed out.

Singhal noted that most large, successful Indian startups are based outside India. That reflects the quality of the prevailing business environment in the country. He and other entrepreneurs felt the need to form a new industry association called iSpirt to lobby with the government to build the infrastructure for Indian product companies. Those are serious obstacles for Reddi, who has funded some 20 startups that use technology built in India for the US market. “We insist that the company is incorporated in the US or Singapore just because it is a real nightmare to put money in an Indian company and have to deal with all this other stuff,” he said.

*[This article was originally published by Knowledge@Wharton, a partner institution of Fair Observer.]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer's editorial policy.

The post What Traits Entrepreneurs Need to Succeed appeared first on Fair Observer.

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battybat-boss · 5 years

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What Traits Entrepreneurs Need to Succeed

Audacity and courage are among the hallmarks of successful startup founders, according to panelists at the recent Wharton India Economic Forum.

Entrepreneurial Bug

Assembling the Right Team

youtube

The Inequality Test

How to Scale

Colonial Hangover

*[This article was originally published by Knowledge@Wharton, a partner institution of Fair Observer.]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer's editorial policy.

The post What Traits Entrepreneurs Need to Succeed appeared first on Fair Observer.

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our-beginnings · 7 years

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Lena Groeger: Developer, designer, and journalist at ProPublica

First thing’s first: tell us a bit about who you are, and what you do now.

Sure! I’m Lena, I’m a journalist/designer/developer at ProPublica. My job is a mix of reporting, writing, designing and coding, and I mostly make interactive graphics & data visualizations. I’ve also got a column called Visual Evidence where I write about how data & design affects people’s everyday lives. I was living in Brooklyn until a few months ago when I moved to San Francisco... and now live & work a block away from the beach!

What’s your favourite thing about ProPublica?

As an organization, I love our mission: to do journalism in the public interest, to give people context for what’s happening in their world right now (especially these days), and to have a real impact. But my favorite thing is definitely the people. I work with incredibly talented and accomplished journalists who at the same time manage to be some of the most humble people I’ve ever met. I consider myself ridiculously lucky to get to learn from them every day and to have a chance to try out crazy new ideas together.

Talk about some recent projects. How do you come up with those crazy ideas, and how do they become reality?

Usually it’s a random mix of things. Sometimes it’s another reporter going “Hey look, this health agency publishes emergency room waiting times on their website, what if we did something with that?” which led to an app called ER Wait Watcher. Other times it’s an editor saying, “We have this complex cast of characters for a story about narco-terrorism, what if we made it into a comic?” which also turned into an interactive piece. And sometimes it’s just me surfing the internet and stumbling upon a French researcher’s website that happens to have county-level presidential election results going back to 1828.

Above: “The Making of a Narco-Terrorist,” a ProPublica interactive examination of whether the DEA is stopping threats or staging them.

The latter was probably my favorite recent project, a piece called Lost Cause that we published right before the election. It framed past American elections through the lens of the losers: showing maps of who voted for the candidate that ultimately lost. The best part was interviewing a bunch of historians and geographers about what was going on in the country at the time and what they could “see” in the maps. Those conversations were endlessly fascinating (pro-tip: interview academics as much as possible – they are extremely eager and excited to talk to you about their work!)

Above: The “Lost Cause” project, showing past American elections from the standpoint of the loser.

On the technical side, creating almost 50 maps for the piece was an interesting challenge, because not only did we need to map dozens of election results, but we needed to create historically accurate maps that corresponded to each election year. Turns out shape of the country has changed a lot since the 19th century (who knew!) and each year the county boundaries were slightly, or in some cases drastically, different.

Thinking back, what was your ‘eureka' or origin moment?

I went to graduate school for science journalism, thinking I would write long articles about discoveries in neuroscience and psychology (I was really into that stuff in college, but didn’t want to be the one in the actual lab doing the actual work). I had never heard of data journalism or data visualization, and I certainly didn’t know that people working in news made graphics for the web. But when I found out (right around Hans Rosling’s famous wealth & health of nations video) it was instantly appealing. I had always really loved graphic design (mostly in a print context, posters and such), and suddenly here was this thing in journalism that let you tell incredible visual stories and meant that I could sometimes use Photoshop? I was so in.

One of the requirements of NYU’s science journalism program was to do an internship over the summer. I did mine at WIRED, and the vast majority of it I spent writing articles for the the Danger Room blog about drones and spies and other sci-fi worthy military projects. Somehow my editor Noah Shachtman agreed to let me do a data visualization project for the ten-year anniversary of 9/11 (keep in mind I had not published a single other graphic and all Noah knew was that I was capable of Photoshopping words onto petri dishes and chickens onto tanks).

suddenly here was this thing in journalism that let you tell incredible visual stories and meant that I could sometimes use Photoshop? I was so in.

But we did it, and the final graphic was an attempt to tally up the cost of the war on terror. I realized at that point that this was precisely what I wanted to spend all my time doing.

Above: ‘The Dead, The Dollars, The Drones’, Lena’s ‘eureka’ moment.

What path did your career take from there? How do you find yourself where you are today?

It wasn’t long after that I started an internship at ProPublica. It was a writing internship – I was mostly writing stories about health and the environment. But every so often I would pitch a visual idea to Scott Klein, the editor of the data/graphics team (or “news apps” team, as we call it), and ask if I could design and build it myself. The first one I ever did was a side-by-side comparison of two types of airport body scanners. Then a fellowship on Scott’s team opened up and I moved across the office, and a few months later was hired full-time as a news apps developer.

Turns out that to make news graphics today, you need to know how to code. Whether that’s Javascript, R, Ruby or some other language often depends on the project, but knowing at least one programming language and being open to learning more is pretty important. When I stumbled into data visualization I knew only maybe a tiny bit of HTML and CSS. So my first year at ProPublica was a crash course in all kinds of programming challenges that I now encounter all the time but then were totally new: how to scrape a website, how to put dots on an map, how to make an interactive chart.

each project is less “Holy shit I have no idea how to do that,” and more “I’ve solved this other problem, I can probably do that one too.”

That year was probably the most insane and frustrating and rewarding year of work in my life. I was very lucky that ProPublica in general and Scott in particular care a great deal about giving reporters the time and space they need to learn new things. And it has its benefits – I joke with Jeff Larson and Al Shaw (two developers on our team) that they’ll never have trouble reading my code because they literally taught me all of it.

These days, I’m still learning a ton of new stuff for every project, but I’m familiar enough with the basics that each project is less “Holy shit I have no idea how to do that,” and more “I’ve solved this other problem, I can probably do that one too.” So, for example, when we wanted to make a visualization of human body parts for a project about America’s disastrous workers comp system, I was able to cobble together some pieces of code plus some shapes I made in Illustrator into an interactive that worked. For more on that project (I’m sure some of you may have a question or two) here’s a longer explanation.

In general, I’ve also gotten significantly better at Googling for the answer – that’s not nothing. 😜

Do you think that this convergence of data, design, and journalism is the way forward for the news industry more broadly?

I don’t want to make any sweeping predictions about the news industry, but I do think having data, programming and design skills can make you a better journalist, for a bunch of reasons. Here are a few: first, knowing a bit of programming lets you find and tell stories that no one else can. If I had to copy and paste all the data that went into this project about health and safety problems on cruise ships, it would have taken me years (not even kidding). But knowing how to scrape a few websites let me grab all that data and sort, filter and analyze it into its final form.

knowing a bit of programming lets you find and tell stories that no one else can.

Second, having some data wrangling skills let’s you verify information on your own – you aren’t dependent on PR people or government officials to tell you what’s true. You can see for yourself what the data says! (That said, it’s probably a good idea to talk to a bunch of experts and do enough reporting to back up what you find).

Finally, knowing a little bit about design helps you create projects that are easy to understand and use. Most people know how to read a story that’s made entirely of words. But some of the interactive graphics and data visualizations making their way into the news these days are pretty complex, and being able to design them in a way that’s easy to follow and also tells a compelling story is important. That doesn’t happen by accident – designers spend a lot of time thinking about the user, ideally testing out different approaches on real people. Constantly keeping the user in mind usually makes for better journalism.

You teach design and data visualisation as well; what prompted you to do this, and how have you found the experience of teaching?

Teaching is both much more difficult and much more fulfilling than I ever thought. It’s really amazing to see students applying the things you’ve mentioned in class to their own work, or getting them super excited about a new technique or a chart form they’d never seen. Then again, it’s really humbling to realize that even though you thought your lecture about, say, design principles was awesome and intuitive and the best explanation yet, some students are still totally mystified. It’s always a learning process for me also, since I’m constantly reworking lectures or tutorials to make them easier to follow or adjusting exercises to better capture the ideas I’m trying to explain.

One thing I do try to do is make all of my teaching materials, slides, etc, totally public and free for anyone to use. I’m constantly learning from free online resources, and feel like it’s important to put materials back into that space for others. We do this at ProPublica too, my colleague Sisi Wei and I run a 2-week workshop called the Data Institute, and put our entire curriculum up online for anyone to look at. It’s not the same as being in a classroom for 2 weeks, but it’s a way we try to give more people access to what we teach (at no cost to them).

A final note on teaching: showing students the Web Inspector for the first time is always a joy. That collective gasp probably makes the entire class worth it.

Finally: if you could do everything all over again, do you think your journey would be the same? Would you want it to be?

I’m sure if I did everything over again my journey would look very different. It’s easier to tell a nice linear narrative in retrospect, but along the way my path felt very random. Even going into journalism in the first place feels a lot like an accident (I applied to NYU after a good friend told me about the program, and just happened to get a full scholarship to go). But I do think I would have eventually come across data visualization, especially now that it’s become so much more mainstream. And it was probably inevitable that I was pulled towards some combination of design and writing.

And what about the future?

We’ll have to see! Luckily the intersection of journalism, technology and design is so broad that I don’t think I’ll be bored anytime soon.

Anything you’re particularly excited about?

I really like gifs that explain things.

Endless thanks to Lena for her patience with this interview! Find her on her website, or on Twitter.

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apostleshop · 6 years

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Fun Summer Hoorahs

Great News has been shared on https://apostleshop.com/fun-summer-hoorahs/

Fun Summer Hoorahs

Every loving parent wants to see their kids have a good time on their break from school. Sometimes we even feel successful in our attempts, and this summer was no exception for me! Kids have high expectations in our privileged society, so it’s tough to keep them balanced and yet entertained. You want to give your child the opportunity to learn new skills, to explore, and to appreciate nature and beauty. I spent my summer days making sure that my kids got just that. Any mom knows that this is an exhausting yet rewarding job as activity director to today’s youth. I am going to share in this article what our family did to keep it interesting, and maybe inspire your activity calendar for the next school break.

If you live in Southern California or are planning a trip to California, you can borrow these ideas, or modify for your own area.

I started in the spring with archery lessons. It was a skill that our whole family could try, and it was something new to them. When it’s new, if it’s competitive and active, I can usually get my kids on board for at least a short amount of time before it loses its charm. I took them for several lessons in the springtime and then we resumed with more lessons on the weekends this summer. The kids were doing something that many kids in our urban area aren’t trying. They have also seen this in movies and video games so the sport is a familiar sight as well. The kids enjoyed the encouragement of the instructors, and the competition with themselves and our family members. When the balloon popping challenge started the kids got even more excited.

We have two children with summer birthdays. This summer I decided to give the children a pass to the local arcade as a birthday present. It was a 25-minute drive each way but I was able to take them about 5-6 times per month this summer. This was an excursion. One kid didn’t sit on the couch at home; instead the three of them did this as a group activity for a couple hours. Even though it wasn’t educational, it was still entertaining, and air conditioned!

Thanks to the power of Groupon, I took an activity that could have cost me $10 an hour per child and turned it into about $3 per visit per child ($1 an hour). I was able to set the parental settings to avoid anything mature at the arcade. Since this was a cut-and-dried activity start and end time, it cut down on the fighting that many parents experience with home video game playing. The catch was that the boys had to do 20 mins of math study to earn the trip to the arcade each time.

There were all the usual summer stops to have ice cream, In-N-Out, and trips to our local lake or beach to play. On the weekends there were trips to the park to play horse shoes, walks, TV nights, and bocce. For the two birthdays we took an afternoon to go to our local trampoline park, and a full day of zip lining and ropes courses. If I could recommend two activities that made a real impact it would probably be the zip lining/ropes course and the science museum. No summer is complete without trips to the local library for books to read and movies to watch. In addition, we made a visit to Nana, and enjoyed a few picnics complete with internal soccer matches.

Our big trip this summer was to Lake Tahoe in Northern California. Unfortunately there were major fires in the nearby forests (Yosemite) which affected the air quality 75% of the time, but we took advantage of the good days with a trip to Treetop Adventures. This park has zip lining and ropes courses for all levels of ability. My children did all the intermediate and advanced courses. They went for 2.5 hours and begged for more. They begged to come back the next day, but with a price tag of $300 for 5 people it was a highlight of the trip and will have to wait for next time. We hit our favorite beach in Tahoe a couple of times to enjoy the cold water and inner tubes we brought for the occasion. Surrounded by picturesque mountains, trees, crystal waters, and the sound of my giggling children, I couldn’t have been more relaxed.

We also did a family hike to a lake vista and a day trip to Fallen Leaf lake for a picnic. This was our nature adventure for the summer.

My son who loves to surf decided that he really wanted to go to the Vans US Open. I made it a special mother/son date, and we braved the summer heat, parking and crowds to experience the fair-like atmosphere in Huntington Beach for this surf and skate competition. My son was on cloud nine just being part of the action, and getting a souvenir shirt (his new favorite shirt).

On our last week of the summer, I planned a 5-day getaway to San Diego. My husband had to work in San Diego that week, so we made the best of incorporating a full day at the science museum on Sunday with him. The children absolutely loved their day at the science museum, complete with a workshop called Impossible Science. The workshop had fun with lasers, water, magnets, and virtual reality walk.

At the end of the day, there was a final magic/science show by world-renowned magician Jason Latimer. Jason offers annual Impossible Science Labs and Festivals in science centers all over Southern California, and he is also the curator of the iconic Fleet Science Center in San Diego, CA. Latimer’s events combine science fiction with hands-on interactive experiments.

The following day I arranged a tour of the world’s largest floating hospital, the USNS MERCY. I was hoping that this would be a good introduction to our nation’s humanitarian efforts, their step-father’s navy base and ship experience, and an eye opening moment to what it’s like to be aboard a military ship. Luckily my husband was able to break away and attend the tour as well. The tour did not disappoint. One day I hope the kids see that ship on TV saving people in a natural disaster situation and realize they have been on that ship!

Later that day I took the kids to the windy Tidelands park on Coronado Island to fly their brand-new kites. In my mind it was a risk. Would the kites work? Would the park actually have wind in the two hours that we would be there? Would the kids be able to do it? I couldn’t have asked for a better experience. Everything worked, and the kids were a hot sweaty mess from all the running around the park with their kites.

What an experience! The kites were at their maximum height, and the kids were so entertained. This is good clean summer fun that every kid should have. When I asked them what they enjoyed the most, they said “the science museum and the kite flying.”

The following few days were a combination of using the water slides at the hotel and learning how to bowl. Since we are a military family and we don’t live anywhere close to a base, we decided to go to the nearby Marine base while on vacation in a Navy town and use the bowling alley and arcade. The kids didn’t really know how to bowl since they had been twice in their lives a couple years prior. They had a blast again doing this old-school summer activity. The competition and the newness of the sport made it extra fun.

Thanks for letting me show and tell about our summer fun, and hopefully we inspired your next vacations well. All in all these kids had one amazing summer that I can be proud of as a mom.

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3ezentrum3-blog · 6 years

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Colon Cancer That Spread to the Liver - We Can Only Help Those Who Want Our Help

On 25 May 2007, I got an email. The essayist needed me to help her sister-in-law, Jane (not genuine name), a thirty-nine-year old female who was determined to have colon growth. She had experienced a medical procedure to expel a tumor, about the span of an orange, from her insides. The disease was likely at Stage 3 or 4. After the medical procedure, Jane experienced twelve cycles of chemotherapy over a six-month time span. The author stated: "we tried to persuade her to take your herbs by demonstrating her a portion of your tributes and documentation while she was experiencing chemotherapy. Nonetheless, she was not persuaded about herbs."

A half year after fulfillment of her treatment, a CT check uncovered various sores in her liver, demonstrating that the malignancy had spread to her essential organ. The oncologist recommended Jane experience another twelve cycles of chemotherapy.

Knowing the reality of her circumstance, the essayist conveyed Jane to meet one of my partners. After a short clarification, Jane was incredulous about our herbs! Jane continued with her next round of chemotherapy. In the wake of finishing two cycles of her second-round of chemotherapy, she endured inconveniences, for example, water maintenance, tiredness, and so on. The author expressed: "The oncologist even recommended she eat a considerable measure of organ meat, for example, liver from creatures. How silly it sounds from a man in the therapeutic club? As of now on, she felt somewhat uneasy with the oncologist and furthermore with her treatment."

The author finished with a supplication: "Can her get together with you in the event that you at any point come here? Perhaps you can be all the more persuading in your clarification about your herbs. If you don't mind help."

Remarks

It has been a long time since my better half and I began CA Care in 1995. We have seen and helped a huge number of in critical condition growth patients. The issue looked by Jane is exceptionally regular undoubtedly. Throughout the years we have learnt numerous exercises about "helping individuals". There is a maxim: "There is no hopeless illness, just serious individuals." Our measurements reveal to us just 30% of patients who came to see us advantage from our herbs and guiding, the staying 70% did not. A considerable lot of the individuals who came were looking for an "enchantment shot" and a simple way out. For this situation, Jane did not have confidence in our work in any case. She worked in a pharmaceutical organization. All things considered, maybe she has the possibility that exclusive "experimentally produced pharmaceutical medications" can fix ailments - herbs and non-ordinary treatments are all hocus-pocus. Such a disposition is justifiable. Every one of us has our own convictions and suppositions.

On our part, we learnt early that we can just help individuals who need our assistance. We would not venture to "mentally condition" or make a special effort to impact individuals to take after our treatment. Patients need to accept and be OK with what we do - at exactly that point would they be able to be conferred in their mending. We can't change individuals.

To exacerbate things, our assistance is sans given of-charge. There is by all accounts a recognition that something given for nothing is shoddy or has no esteem. For as long as twelve years we dedicated much time and endeavors doing only that. A Canadian companion of mine once asked: "Chris, what is your trap," while an Australian companion remarked: "What you are doing is against the standard of the Western entrepreneur societies." Perhaps to help kindred individuals without requesting a charge is outsider to law based, industrialist societies, however for the Oriental societies "administration to encourage humanity" or "kiu-lang (deciphered as spare individuals), do happen and is not all that much. With respect to the trap? All things considered, there is no trap - that is whether you comprehend Oriental societies.

Give me a chance to offer a couple of conversation starters for you to consider.

One, Jane had Stage 3 or 4 colon growth and experienced chemotherapy. Was chemotherapy finished with therapeudic or palliative purpose? If it somehow managed to fix, without a doubt it has fizzled. In my inquiry of therapeutic writing, I learnt that for Stage 1 or 2 colon malignancy, the commitment of chemotherapy is just 8 to 15 percent, in term of five-year survival. In my prior works, I even recommended that such saw advantages could be substituted by taking of herbs or a difference in slim down.

Two, after twelve cycles of chemotherapy, the disease metastatised to the liver. Why? What exactly degree had chemotherapy added to this spread? Do patients ever offer such a conversation starter? It is recognized that chemo-drugs are dangerous to the liver.

Three, more chemotherapy was suggested for Jane's metastasis. Again ask: Is this to fix or to vindicate? On the off chance that the goal was to fix - what might be the possibility of accomplishment this time? Keep in mind, the first round of chemotherapy had fizzled. After the initial two cycles of chemotherapy, Jane endured unfriendly symptoms - is this not revealing to Jane that something isn't right?

Four, the oncologist prompted Jane to eat more organ meat. To elective specialists, creature proteins are "terrible for growth". Jane should read more about this subject as opposed to depending on only one-see feeling of an oncologist.

Five, there is a maxim: "To know is science, to accept one knows is obliviousness." In malignancy, numbness frequently murders. By temperance of her being on the staff of a pharmaceutical medication organization does not make Jane "all knowing." To accept that she knows "every single" about medication for malignancy is undoubtedly guileless of her. While it regards be distrustful, it is clearly arrogant to thoroughly acknowledge the idea that herbs are inadequate and pharmaceutical medications are better. There is no more noteworthy disaster for the individuals who have eyes yet decline to see, have ears however decline to hear.

Six, while Jane's sister-in-law demonstrated worry for her, it is dependent upon Jane to understand that: "Her wellbeing is altogether her own obligation. She is the creator of her own biography. Others can just help. Jane needs to settle on her own choice and be prepared to live with the results of that choice." It is adequate for Jane's sister-in-law to assume the part of a "little heavenly attendant" by alarming her to an alternate probability. The rest is for Jane to act likewise following her heart.

Seven, in the wake of having gotten their medications, patients should take an interruption sooner or later in time, before it is past the point of no return and assess their results. Make these inquiries: "Do I profit by the treatment? Do I show signs of improvement? On the off chance that things don't work out not surprisingly, would despite everything I like to continue on a similar way? At the point when do I say nothing more will be tolerated? Am I overcome enough to state that's it?

For more data about corresponding tumor treatment visit: http://www.cacare.com, [http://www.naturalhealingforyou.com], http://www.BookOnCancer.com

Article Source: https://EzineArticles.com/master/Chris_Teo,_Ph.D./55108

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/582279

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ramialkarmi · 6 years

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How Duolingo's CEO went from being a 10-year-old video-game bootlegger to building a $700 million company

Duolingo cofounder and CEO Luis von Ahn is a crowdsourcing pioneer and the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as a "Genius Grant."

Von Ahn grew up comfortably in Guatemala City but traveled to the United States to join the American tech scene.

He is one of the creators of "captcha" technology, as well as its "recaptcha" successor, which helped digitize a year of New York Times articles in a week.

His language learning app, Duolingo, has millions of users worldwide and is preparing to go public.

He shared his lessons on humble leadership and why he's trying to convince people to move from San Francisco to Pittsburgh.

You may never have heard of Luis von Ahn.

But if you've ever verified that you're not a robot online, you've probably used something he created.

And that's fine by him. He doesn't read stories about himself, and when he says he's not motivated by money, he sounds sincere.

"Everything that I've done has been with the goal of just having a lot of impact on a lot of people's lives," Von Ahn said on Business Insider's podcast, "Success! How I Did It."

Von Ahn is the CEO of Duolingo, the popular language-learning app now valued at $700 million. He's also one of the guys who developed "captcha," the online prompt that asks you to type in a word or series of letters to show you're not a robot.

Von Ahn grew up in Guatemala and came to the United States to be part of the tech scene. He was driven by a goal of getting millions of people to work together online. It made him a pioneer of the now ubiquitous crowdsourcing movement, which is where we started our conversation.

Listen to the full episode here:

Subscribe to "Success! How I Did It" on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or your favorite podcast app. Check out previous episodes with:

Audible founder and CEO Don Katz

Media mogul Tina Brown

Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards

Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud

The following transcript has been edited for clarity.

Luis von Ahn: Early on it was trying to get millions of people to work on something together — basically crowdsourcing. And now it's trying to get millions of people to learn something with Duolingo trying to get millions of people to learn languages.

Rich Feloni: So this idea of getting people to work together on the internet, is that something that still drives you even if it's in other projects?

Von Ahn: Yes. It's something that I think about all the time. This is something that I worked on a lot in the early 2000s: How do we get millions of people to work on a common goal?

Falling in love with computers in Guatemala City

Feloni: So this love of starting companies and working in tech, did it begin as a kid?

Von Ahn: I think so. I mean, technology definitely started as a kid. When I was 8 years old my mother bought me a computer. I wanted a Nintendo and she bought me a computer instead and I was pretty pissed off. I was forced to learn how to use it because I wanted to play games with it. She got me a Commodore 64 and I learned how to use it. So that's when I started really getting into computers. The starting companies thing, that didn't really happen until I was in my 20s.

Feloni: What was it like growing up in Guatemala City?

Von Ahn: I had a pretty normal childhood when I compare it with other people here in the United States. I was fortunate that I was kind of upper-middle class. Both my parents were medical doctors. Guatemala is a very poor, third-world country, and when I was growing up it turns out that there was a civil war going on, but I never really experienced it. It's this interesting thing. People sometimes are, like, "Wait, didn't you grow up during the Guatemalan civil war?" Which is true, I did. But I didn't experience it. I had a pretty normal childhood. I think I was very fortunate to be shielded from all of that.

Feloni: Do you remember as a kid when that computer, that your mom got you at 8, when it went from a lousy gift to something that you actually got really excited about?

Von Ahn: Yeah, it probably took about a year. So at age 8, I was pretty bummed, but by age 9 I was quite excited about it. And what started happening is, I got a few games that I convinced my mother to buy me, but at some point, she just stopped. She said, "Look, these are expensive, and you should know, I'm not going to buy more games on the computer." So I started discovering how you could actually copy games from other people. They usually had these very rudimentary copy-protection mechanisms back then, and I figured out how to get around them. So at some point, in my whole area of the city, I was, like, known as the guy who would help you pirate games. And I was only 10 years old. That's when I got pretty excited by it because I basically had access to most games that maybe somebody somewhere had bought, and I would help everybody copy them. So that's when I started getting pretty excited by it.

Feloni: So it was cool to be the guy everyone went to for these.

Von Ahn: Yes, and people would show up at my house, and usually these are much older people. It's not like they were 40 years old, but, you know, I was 10 and these people were, like, 17. And my mother just said, "I don't really want to have these teenagers coming into my house randomly." So at some point I had to do all my dealings in the front door. I wouldn't let them in. It's like selling drugs.

Feloni: That's funny. So at this point, this experience of being this 10-year-old video-game bootlegger, did that end up inspiring you, like, "Hey, maybe I could when I grow up, actually make a career out of doing stuff with the computer."

Von Ahn: Yeah, you know, I thought when I get older I could probably do something with computers.

Becoming a crowdsourcing pioneer

Feloni: So you end up at Carnegie Mellon University studying computer science, and then you get into the early days of crowdsourcing. Could you tell us what captcha is?

Von Ahn: Sure. So this is something that happened in my first semester of the Ph.D. program at Carnegie Mellon University. The guy who was the chief scientist of Yahoo came to give a talk at Carnegie Mellon about, like, 10 problems that we don't know how to solve at Yahoo. I listened to the talk, and when I went home I tried to work on all of these problems.

I couldn't come up with any great ideas for any of them, except for one. And the problem was they had these people who would sign up for free email accounts by the millions. So somebody would write a program and they would use this to send spam, because what happened is that each Yahoo account only allowed you to send, like, 500 messages a day. And if you're a spammer, and you want it to send 10,000,000 messages, you would get a couple of million email accounts and from each one you would only send 10 messages or whatever. These people wrote programs to obtain millions of email accounts, and Yahoo did not know how to stop them.

I started telling my Ph.D. adviser at the same time about this problem, and it occurred to the two of us together that the thing to do was to have something that distinguishes whether the thing creating an account is a human or a computer program, because computer programs can obtain 2 million email accounts easily. But a human, after obtaining 30 email accounts, they get bored and they stop. And so that's where we came up with this thing called the "captcha," this test that can distinguish humans from computers.

And what it is, is these squiggly, distorted letters that you have to type all over the internet. That's there because humans can read the distorted characters, whereas computers can't do it as well. And right after we came up with that idea, within a couple of months, Yahoo started using it to prevent automated signups to their service. And soon after essentially every major website in the world was using them.

Feloni: When Yahoo approached you with this, did you think, "OK, I'm going to make a deal here, maybe get rich"?

Von Ahn: No, this did not happen, actually. We were just so happy that we had made this thing that Yahoo was ready to use. We gave it to them for free. To this day I hadn't really much thought about making much money. I mean, even with the game bootlegging, it was not a moneymaking thing. I was just happy to have a bunch of games. It was similar here, and neither my Ph.D. adviser nor I thought of making too much money here, or make any money. We gave it to them for free and we were just happy that they were using it.

Feloni: So you don't have any regrets over that?

Von Ahn: No, I don't. I mean, it ended up working out pretty well for me, so I don't have regrets about that. I'm happy with it. I mean, I would've done things differently if it was now, because I now know how the world works a lot better, but at the time, I mean, it's not like I sit here regretting it.

Feloni: Are you not naturally business-oriented? I mean, you're saying that you didn't want to sell things as a kid and it didn't even cross your mind to sell to Yahoo.

Von Ahn: Yes, I don't think I am naturally business-oriented, and this is something, I mean, even with this, my latest venture, Duolingo, it took us a while to start actually making money. By now we are making significant amounts of money, but this has not been my driving force. As my driving force has really just been making products that had a lot of people use. And yeah, I don't think I am naturally money-oriented.

Feloni: When did you realize that your driving force was just making technology that lots of people use?

Von Ahn: After helping create captcha, the satisfaction that it gave me to see that, every day millions of people would use this, and that everybody I talked to had seen these or had come across them — or, well, most people actually hated them — but that just gave me a lot of satisfaction. That a lot of people had used this. And from then on, everything that I've done has been with the goal of just having a lot of impact on a lot of people's lives.

Feloni: Did you ever get annoyed at one of your own pieces of technology, having to answer one of those captchas, that maybe it's hard to understand?

Von Ahn: For sure, and then the idea was just copied a lot and many of them were not actually developed by me. I mean, sometimes the letters are very highly distorted. The most annoying thing for me is always just buying tickets on Ticketmaster, because they give you, like, 90 seconds to complete the transaction, and there you are trying to enter your credit card and everything, and then you can't read the damn thing. So yes, I became annoyed at that a few times.

Feloni: In 2006, you got a lot of attention when you got one of those MacArthur Fellowships, which people often call one of those "genius" grants. What was it like when you got that phone call?

Von Ahn: Yes, that was a completely unexpected. I mean, I was just in my office one day and I got this phone call and the guy just said, "Have you ever heard of the MacArthur Fellowship?" I said, "Sure, I have heard of it." And then he said, "Well, I'm happy to tell you that you've been selected for one of them." And it was completely unexpected. They're very secretive about how they choose their recipients. And yes, I was obviously very proud of myself, but every time that I get one of these awards, I also feel guilty. I don't know why. There's probably years of therapy there to fix that, but I also kind of felt guilty. I don't know why, but that happened.

Feloni: What do you mean by that? Guilt over what?

Von Ahn: I don't even know. I just feel like I don't deserve it. Like, "Why am I getting it and not somebody else?" I just get this feeling, it goes away, but I do get this feeling whenever I get like an award or the first time I saw myself when I originally made captcha, pretty soon after there was a pretty large spread on The New York Times, a big story about this and there's a big picture of me there. And the first time I saw myself, the feeling that I got was, "I don't deserve to be there. I don't know why I'm there." It's like guilt.

Feloni: After that, when you started getting more attention, did you find a way to make peace with that somehow?

Von Ahn: No, I've never really found the great way to do that. I don't read stories about myself. I just — that's kind of how I do it.

Feloni: So you just end up having to use it as another vehicle for spreading the technology, and if you have to talk you have to talk.

Von Ahn: Yeah, I mean, for sure and it is a good way to spread things. In the case of Duolingo, for example, a lot of the spread, we've never done any paid advertising or anything like that. So a lot of the way, which Duolingo spread is by having, for example, news stories about it. So it is very valuable. It's just not something that I particularly love.

Feloni: When you had the captcha technology, you were saying that you realize that maybe there's something else that you could do with this. What inspired you to make this "recaptcha" technology?

Von Ahn: Yeah, that was this second go at the captcha. Above five years had passed, after I had helped invent the original captcha, by then essentially every website used these. And I did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation that about 200 million times a day, somebody types one of these on the internet. And at first I was pretty proud of myself, because I thought, "There's a lot of people every day that are using something that I did." But it was the case that most everybody that I talked to hated doing these. And I also started feeling guilty that each one of them took about 10 seconds of time. And if you multiply 10 seconds by 200 million, you get that humanity as a whole was wasting like 500 thousand hours every day doing these annoying captchas. That's when I thought, "Is there a way in which we can do something else with this technology?"

And that's when it occurred to me that it could have a second purpose. And that's where the recaptcha project was born. Where the idea was that, as people were typing these distorted characters, the idea was to also get them to help us digitize books. And the way that worked is, at the time, there were a few projects that we're trying to digitize all of the world's books. Like Google had one, for example, the Internet Archive had another one, where the idea was taking all the books that had ever been written and scanning them to put them on the internet. Now, the way this works is, you take a book, you scan it, and now scanning literally what it is, is it's taking a digital photograph of every page of the book. It gives you an image for every page as an image with words in it. The next step is that the computer needs to be able to decipher all of these words. But for older books, where the ink has faded, the computer cannot recognize many of the words.

So the idea was to take all of the words that the computer could not recognize in the book-digitization process and to get people to read them for us while they type recaptchas on the internet. So basically, whenever you were typing a recaptcha, these words were coming directly from books that the computer could not recognize, and we were using what people were entering to help digitize this, and that was the idea of the recaptcha project. It became very successful. And at the height of it we were probably digitizing about a 100 million words a day, which is the equivalent of 2 million books a year. We started out actually by helping to digitize The New York Times. Old editions of The New York Times were being digitized by people on the internet typing captchas.

Feloni: How did that conversation with The Times come about?

Von Ahn: That was actually complete luck. I was giving a talk somewhere in Texas, and it's a very large audience, about captcha, and what we could do with it. And then it turned out that the CTO of The New York Times at the time was actually in the audience, and he came to me at the end, and he said, "I know what you can digitize with this. We have this huge archive of all editions of The New York Times." It was like 130 years or something like that. And pretty soon we had struck a deal on a digitizing all their content, but that was kind of luck in that respect that the guy was sitting in the audience. And then after that, midway through that project, actually Google decided to buy recaptcha to help with their book-digitization efforts. So, that's how that went. So Google now owns recaptcha.

Feloni: And with that, The Times case, you had some great results, right?

Von Ahn: Yeah. I mean, this is the beauty of captcha. It really is very accurate. It was taking us about a week of time to digitize an entire year of New York Times content.

Feloni: Oh wow.

Von Ahn: Yeah, and over time, the rate of digitalization was becoming faster and faster because more and more websites were using this version of captcha as opposed to the previous ones. I know that the rate became a lot faster when Facebook signed up. So Facebook started using recaptcha as opposed to their own version of captcha. And as soon as they signed up, basically every person who signed up to Facebook would help us digitize one word of either a book or a newspaper, and that's a lot of people.

Feloni: And with recaptcha, you sell it to Google and you actually made a good deal out of this. What had happened in terms of your perspective on your own approach to technology that changed where you actually were going to start selling some of your creations?

Von Ahn: I don't think anything had changed. At some point, I sort of understood more how the world works — and it's not like I'm against making money. It's just never been a driving factor for me. And so this was a pretty good deal for both sides. I mean, Google really needed this technology to help digitize their books, and for us it made perfect sense because we had the New York Times contract, but it wasn't like we had access to millions of scanned books like Google did. So on our end, we just had one piece of the whole process, and Google had all the other pieces. So it made a lot of sense.

Changing language learning with Duolingo

Feloni: When did you realize that you wanted your next project to be Duolingo?

Von Ahn: It was soon after having sold recaptcha to Google. I thought to myself, "What am I going to do now?" I had to spend a couple of years at Google after the sale, but at some point I just realized I really like to be my own boss. I really like doing stuff by myself. So I just thought, "OK, I'm going to start a new project. What have I always really wanted to do? What has been my passion?" And I just always thought that education was my passion. I've always loved learning stuff, so I thought I wanted to do something related to education, but then I started thinking: "OK, education. Let's see."

First, I came back to my upbringing in Guatemala. It's a very poor country, and I saw firsthand how those who have access to education can basically do very well in life. And in countries like Guatemala, a lot of people talk about education as something that removes inequality or that brings the social classes together, but I always saw it as the opposite, as something that actually makes an inequality, because this was the case for me. I was able to get a very good education, and, because of that, you're able to continue having a lot of money. Whereas people who don't have very much money in countries, particularly developing countries, barely learned how to read and write. And because of that they can never kind of get out of poverty. I just got to the point where I wanted to do something that would give equal access to education to everybody. That was my driving factor when I wanted to start Duolingo.

And then the next step is education is very general. And so I thought maybe I'll just do something a lot more specific. I tried to just narrow down to one thing, and I thought of learning languages, which is huge everywhere in the world except for the United States. Learning languages in the United States is not just as big. In most countries learning English is a huge thing. In developing countries where English is not the commonly spoken language, those who know English usually can earn up to twice as much as somebody who doesn't know English. It was a thing that would really try to help or had the potential to help a lot of people get out of poverty. That's the driving factor for creating Duolingo.

Feloni: How many languages did you speak as a kid?

Von Ahn: As a kid, just English and Spanish. My native language is Spanish, but I learned English very early on, so I just spoke English and Spanish. Then I tried learning French when I was in high school, but I failed. My motivations for learning French were not great. I had a crush on a girl who was in the French class, and so I decided to enroll, but I never learned anything. I also failed at getting the girls to go out with me!

Feloni: You met President Obama at the White House a couple of years ago, to talk about Duolingo. How did that happen?

Von Ahn: Yeah, the White House had a few startups come, and it was like a startup show-and-tell. I don't know how they selected them, but we actually weren't told that we were going to go present to Obama. We were just told it's going to be a thing in the White House. But when we showed up, we were all told, "OK, there's a very special guest that's coming. The whole time it's been the case that he was going to come and listen to it, but we just didn't want to tell you guys." We had the opportunity to talk about Duolingo for a while with him, which was pretty cool.

Feloni: What did he say to you?

Von Ahn: Well, Duolingo was mainly an app on iPhone and Android devices. He said he was not allowed to use a smartphone. I guess things have changed — presidents are now allowed to use Twitter. He said he wasn't allowed to use one of those. And so he said as soon as he finished his presidency he was going to try to learn some languages. He was pretty keen on the fact that we were working on education. We talked a lot about how Duolingo is used in public schools. Duolingo is used in about 20% of the US public schools, in language classrooms. That was something else that we talked about just generally technology to improve education.

Feloni: Can this app help replace or supplement existing language courses?

Von Ahn: I wouldn't say replace. The idea is to improve it. I mean, our idea with it is you can learn a language with Duolingo by itself. If there's a teacher available, usually it's better. The teacher-plus-Duolingo is better than either Duolingo or with the teacher separately. For those people who don't have access to a classroom or a teacher, they can use Duolingo and it'll work. But if they do have access to a classroom and a teacher, it'll just work better. That's our idea. There's just some things that with an app you just can't quite do, that you can do with a teacher. Teachers are really good at answering some types of questions. Those are really good at motivating people. Classrooms are extremely huge motivators in part because you're being forced to just show up. They're extremely huge motivators.

Feloni: Are you going to be taking Duolingo public?

Von Ahn: That's the goal. We're not quite there yet, but my best guess is we're two to three years away. Our revenue is growing quite significantly year on year. That's the goal. It's one thing for it to be the goal and another thing for all the stars to align, but that's the goal.

Feloni: Are you worried at all that you might not be able to maintain a social component of it if you have to keep checking on quarterly earnings?

Von Ahn: Yes, that is a legitimate worry. So far we've been able to navigate that pretty well. It's of course very different. I cannot tell you that I understand the public market super well since I've never been the CEO of a public company, but so far this has worked pretty well with private investors. We have a lot of investment from venture-capital firms. Google is one of our investors, for example. It's worked out pretty well in terms of being able to do both, having a social good and making revenue. But yes, it's a worry. It's not our biggest worry, but it is a worry.

Feloni: Would you want to remain CEO if it becomes a public company?

Von Ahn: Yes, I think so. I think you're also supposed to say yes to that question no matter what, but yes.

What inspires him

Feloni: I saw that, at one point, Bill Gates tried poaching you. What happened there?

Von Ahn: Yes, this was as soon as when I had just gotten a job as a professor in computer science. I got a few phone calls from him really trying to convince me to join Microsoft research. I was very humbled by it, and to me it's been amazing to talk to him. Over the years I've met him — I don't know — maybe 10 times. He remains my hero. He's just amazing. Everything that he's done and just the way he thinks. He is one person that you sit there in a room and you think, "This person for a fact is significantly smarter than I am." I appreciate talking to him every time.

Feloni: What do you guys talk about when you meet up?

Von Ahn: Of late it's been really Duolingo. The last time was in January. He was interested in learning more about how we're using artificial intelligence in Duolingo, to try to teach better. He was lamenting the fact that a lot of education companies particularly are claiming that they're using AI in very sophisticated ways, but in reality it's pretty unsophisticated. He was trying to understand all the places where we use AI. I would say for Duolingo, we're about medium-sophisticated. There's no company that's using artificial intelligence to teach that is, like, "Oh my God, this is completely groundbreaking in terms of AI, and we're going to substitute all human teachers, et cetera." I don't think we're anywhere near that yet.

Feloni: Why have you stayed in Pittsburgh?

Von Ahn: Good question. I like it, and it's really on the up. At the beginning, I was in Pittsburgh because of Carnegie Mellon, which is just an amazing computer-science program, and we started it here. We didn't see any reason to move at the time, and we thought that being near Carnegie Mellon would allow us to hire a lot of great engineers, and it's been true. And over time it's just that Duolingo grew bigger and bigger, and at some point it just became impossible to move. We may start another office somewhere else, but moving at this point, it's just too many people. That's kind of why, but it's worked out pretty well. Being in a city that's on the upswing is pretty good because you're just getting a bunch of highly talented people wanting to move here. That has helped us.

Feloni: Yes, so is there an advantage to being in Pittsburgh that you might not get maybe in the Bay Area?

Von Ahn: There are ups and downs. Some of the pros: being near Carnegie Mellon really helps. We're able to hire really amazing people from there. Another big advantage is just cost of living. We're getting just a good number of people who are just either moving from the Bay Area or just don't want to go there to begin with, fresh out of college, because here you can get an apartment that's pretty nice and you can just pay, I don't know, a thousand bucks a month, and that is completely unheard of in the Bay Area. Many of our employees — I'm going to assume maybe half of the employees in Duolingo own a home, and that's completely unheard of in Silicon Valley. Those are the advantages. We actually just put up a billboard on US 101 near San Francisco that just says, "Own a home, work in tech, move to Pittsburgh." Then it just says "duolingo.com/jobs."

.@duolingo makes a very good point, in their excellent Bill Board on Rte 101 in San Francisco! pic.twitter.com/imknR1hz9b

— Andrew Moore (@awmcmu) March 26, 2018

I don't know what that billboard will do. We hear that enough, that we thought it was worth putting up the billboard.

Feloni: We talked about some plans for Duolingo maybe in the next few years or so, but what you have coming up this year?

Von Ahn: This year we're spending a lot of time teaching more advanced stuff. Duolingo has been really good at beginner to intermediate learners. We're going to be concentrating a lot on more advanced learners. We're also spending a lot of time on just making it a strong business, our monetization. One thing that I'm very excited about is one of the ways in which we monetize Duolingo is we have ads at the end of the lesson. The ads that you're going to be getting are actually going to be video ads in the language that you're learning.

For example, if you're learning Spanish, you may get a short video of a Coca-Cola ad in Spanish. I'm pretty excited by that because our users love these. People actually want to watch them and pay a lot of attention. This is one of those things that is good for the user, but also good for the advertiser because these are not ads that people want to skip. They actually want to figure out what is said in the ad.

We also just launched a podcast, which did really well. Season one ended, but while we were still in season, it was in the top 10 podcasts the whole time, now it's ranked No. 40 or something of all podcasts, which is pretty good given that it's a Spanish-learning podcast.

Feloni: I'm actually taking a look at an episode of your podcast right now, and it said that in one of the episodes that before you left Guatemala that your aunt was kidnapped. Is that a true story?

Von Ahn: That is a true story. Our podcast, the way it works, they're all real stories, and on the last episode of the first season was actually a story about me that happened to me, as the year right before I left for college here in the US, my aunt was actually kidnapped in Guatemala, and so it's the story about how that happened.

Feloni: If you chose this as the story to tell, is that something that impacted you heavily?

Von Ahn: Yeah, it did impact me. It was actually one of the decisions for me to leave for the United States. There are other reasons why I wanted to leave, but this was kind of the last nail in the coffin for me deciding to leave Guatemala. I was like, "Oh, my God, now people are getting kidnapped here too?" She was kidnapped, she was gone for about 10 days. This was a money thing. In different countries, kidnappings are for different reasons.

Feloni: Was she returned?

Von Ahn: Yes, she was returned. This was a business. Kidnapping was a business, it is not good business to kill your victims. She was taken; she was actually taken care of pretty well. They got all her medicines and they fed her pretty well and then they just waited until the ransom was paid and then they gave her back.

If it's not interesting, he won't do it

Feloni: Has there been a moment in your career where there was a particular insight that really ended up guiding you?

Von Ahn: Can you use curse words in this podcast?

Feloni: Yes, go for it.

Von Ahn: Yes, I learned this. This is a good, pithy one that always stuck with me. It's about hiring people. It is really detrimental to the organization when you hire people who are not very nice, but when you're hiring, and particularly for a startup, you're usually pretty strapped for time. You're just, like, "Oh, man, we've been looking for this position, whatever head of marketing or whatever it is. We've been looking for this position for months and this person's almost good but they just have this one little problem." There's always a huge desire to try to hire them and maybe that problem will not manifest itself in the company, et cetera.

What I have learned is this pithy line: "It's better to have a hole than an a--hole." That has worked pretty well for me. Duolingo is a very nice company; everybody here is pretty nice. We're very proud of the fact that we have no a--holes.

Nobody tells you during a reference check that somebody is an a--hole. The type of thing they tell you is you ask, "Are they good at working with others?" and the type of thing they would tell you is, like, "Yes, it depends on the person." If they say that, that usually means they're an a--hole.

Feloni: How do you define success?

Von Ahn: Oh, boy. For me, I think it's being able to do what you love. There's the thing that you love and then there's your job. To me, success is kind of when you're really able to do what you love.

Feloni: Has that understanding of what it means to be successful changed over your career?

Von Ahn: Yes, it has. When I was younger I thought, "Well, OK, success probably means you drive a Ferrari and you have a big mansion somewhere or something like that." That has changed, and it's been changed by just looking at a lot of very "successful people" on what types of things they appreciate. I've been around enough very successful people, and the things that bring them joy are just not — it gets tiring and boring to drive around in a super-fancy car or whatever. That's what has changed it.

Feloni: So it's you also finding ways to just stay interested?

Von Ahn: Yes, although for me it's been pretty natural. Maybe this is a bad thing for a CEO to say, but I just don't do the things I'm not very interested in. I have the luxury of that when I'm not super interested, I just don't do it. The fact that I have that luxury, to me, is real success. It's just I don't do things I'm not very interested in.

Feloni: Thanks so much, Luis.

Von Ahn: Thank you.

SEE ALSO: Audible's founder talks about selling his company to Amazon for $300 million, bonding with Jeff Bezos, and how he managed to have a 'nontoxic' midlife crisis

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type2diabetestreatments-blog · 7 years

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Seeing Beauty Through Artwork, Even with Diabetic Eye Disease

New Post has been published on http://type2diabetestreatment.net/diabetes-mellitus/seeing-beauty-through-artwork-even-with-diabetic-eye-disease/

Seeing Beauty Through Artwork, Even with Diabetic Eye Disease

"Complications" of diabetes are always a scary prospect for those of us living with the disease. So we're always impressed to find PWDs who have managed to not only cope successfully with complications, but to use their experience to support and inspire others.

Today, we're excited to introduce Maryanne Kass, a longtime type 2 and former school teacher in Nevada living with diabetic macular edema (DME). We received a marketing pitch in early February that Regeneron Pharmaceuticals was launching a new initative aimed at awareness about low vision caused by retinal diseases -- a campaign designed for this month since it's Low Vision Awareness Month. The biotech and sciences company launched the Look To Your Future website on Feb. 6, offering resources about retinal eye disease and encouraging people to do more to protect themselves from vision loss.

Part of this online initiative features the artwork of crazy-talented graffiti artist Bryce Chisholm, who illustrated Maryanne's experiences through a new painting. While not on physical display anywhere, this vivid painting depicts the world through her DME-affected eyes, as a way to tell her story and inspire others.

An Interview with Type 2 Advocate Maryanne Kass

DM) First, can you tell about your diabetes diagnosis, and what happened with your eyes?

MK) About 20 years ago at age 40, I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. One of the things I was told when I was first diagnosed was that I needed to pay closer attention to my vision. My doctor told me that vision loss is a risk that comes with diabetes, and that it could affect me if I didn’t take care of myself. But I always thought, “That will never happen to me.” And I felt fine, so I brushed it off and put it out of my mind.

I’m not one to miss a doctor’s appointment, so I kept up with my regular visits to my optometrist. My vision started gradually worsening, and about 12 years ago he told me I needed to undergo cataract surgery. I was surprised and thought, “That’s for old people!” But I went ahead and scheduled it.

During the cataract surgery my doctor found other damage to my eyes, and referred me to a retinal specialist. The retinal specialist diagnosed me with DME at age 49.

At first I was in denial, but I quickly made up my mind to immediately take steps to help protect my vision and do whatever I could to stop any further vision loss.

Had you really not noticed the vision problems yourself before the doctor?

As noted, I didn’t take my doctor’s warnings that my vision could be at risk seriously. Then a few years after my diagnosis, I did notice that my vision kept gradually worsening, and I needed stronger and stronger glasses. My optometrist mentioned my eyes were a little swollen, and said it was probably due to the diabetes. He recommended starting with a cataract surgery. That surgery was what unvieled other damage to my eyes and eventually led to a diagnosis of DME by a retinal specialist.

How did you cope with the eye disease diagnosis?

My DME diagnosis was both a shock and a relief. For years, my family knew that whenever we were all watching TV, I would ask, “What does that say?” I couldn’t read the captions, and I kept needing stronger glasses. I also take a lot of classes educating me on my diabetes, and I always had to sit way up front. I never imagined that some of these vision issues could be connected to DME and the damage caused by my diabetes, so it was good to learn what my condition was. Being able to put a name to what I was going through allowed me to take the steps I needed to take better care of my eyes and to help protect against further vision loss.

Are you now on insulin as a type 2 or oral meds?

I am on oral metformin and two types of insulin.

So you became an advocate for DME?

Yes, because of what I went through, I now always encourage people to stay on top of managing their diabetes.

I travelled to Atlanta last year to help others with DME learn about the condition. The visit was to talk with a focus group on what would catch people’s eyes and ears to encourage them to get early treatment. We all got to share our stories, and everyone’s story was kind of the same with blurry vision. However, of the 14 of us there, I was the only one who had experienced what looked like black threads across my eye. By sharing our experiences – both common and unique – I’m hopeful we can be better at reaching others like us before they get to a point where they’re losing their vision.

Can you tell us more how you connected with Regeneron to become part of this awareness project?

Regeneron worked with a (marketing) partner to connect us, and I agreed to work with this Look To Your Future initiative in the hopes that my story will help spread awareness about the impact of low vision caused by DME. The website features patient stories, resources, and walks people through "the journey with DME." I have lost enough of my vision to know that the sight I do still have is a blessing, and I want to help others avoid repeating the same mistakes.

What’s the story behind this colorful painting by Bryce Chisholm?

Bryce is an artist living in my home state of Nevada, and he was the right choice because of his vibrant pieces that capture all those things I hold dear and love to see. Because of our close proximity, we were able to meet, and I was able to communicate my story in person so Bryce could bring it to life in his work.

As the initiative's messaging says:

"Set at a particularly beloved beach in San Diego, the painting shows Maryanne’s grandchildren, who she loves spending time with and who makes up an important part of her life. The painting also illustrates Maryanne’s eyes, which represent the importance of the steps she took to help protect against vision loss. With this art and her story, Maryanne hopes she can inspire others to never lose sight of what’s important."

That is Mission Beach in San Diego and it's kind of my sanctuary. My family used to rent a beach house near Mission Beach to escape the heat of where I grew up in Brawley, CA. It’s where I go to think and take in everything, and just really reflect on my life. Seeing it in the artwork is powerful, because it makes me think of all the things I cherish still being able to see despite my DME.

For me, the artwork represents those things that I don’t want to miss out on -- my grandchildren and all the special people in my life, the beach and my love for travelling. My grandchildren make up a huge and important part of my life, and I love spending time with them. Finally, the bright colors capture how much beauty there is in the world to see every day, and the large eyes in the background are that constant reminder not to take good eye health for granted.

Of course, this isn't limited to T2D, but impacts all of us regardless of the type of diabetes…

Yes, anyone with diabetes can be at risk for DME, especially as they get older. I think it’s important for anyone with diabetes to have more candid conversations with their doctors and, if they’re not getting the information they need, to not be afraid of asking their doctor to communicate with them with visuals or in other creative ways. It’s important that diabetes patients understand what could happen so they know what’s at stake – which in my case was my vision.

As someone who has been living with type 2 diabetes for many years, I know how hard it can be to manage the disease. Between remembering to take my medications every day and carefully watching my diet and blood sugar levels – it’s not easy to stay on top of it all. But you can’t let that stop you from making your eye health a priority; your vision is too precious to neglect taking good care of yourself and really taking ownership of your diabetes treatments.

I’d also like to add that one of the things that surprised me most was that I was often the youngest person in my doctor’s office having these vision problems! I think that goes to show how this can really happen to anyone with diabetes, and that they need to be proactive about taking care of their eye health.

Any messages you’d have for the Diabetes Community at large?

I would tell anyone diagnosed with type 2 diabetes not to brush off the warning from your doctor that vision loss might occur as a result of your diabetes! Take it all seriously, or it can creep up on you. I would also encourage anyone who is experiencing symptoms of vision loss or is at increased risk to make an appointment with their eye doctor to discuss how they can help protect themselves against vision loss.

Thanks for taking the time to talk with us, Maryanne! And thanks for working to inspire others, to let people know that even with complications, you can see and appreciate the beauty in life.

Disclaimer: Content created by the Diabetes Mine team. For more details click here.

Disclaimer

This content is created for Diabetes Mine, a consumer health blog focused on the diabetes community. The content is not medically reviewed and doesn't adhere to Healthline's editorial guidelines. For more information about Healthline's partnership with Diabetes Mine, please click here.

Type 2 Diabetes Treatment Type 2 Diabetes Diet Diabetes Destroyer Reviews Original Article

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lopezdorothy70-blog · 5 years

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What Traits Entrepreneurs Need to Succeed

Audacity and courage are among the hallmarks of successful startup founders, according to panelists at the recent Wharton India Economic Forum.

Entrepreneurial Bug

Assembling the Right Team

youtube

The Inequality Test

How to Scale

Colonial Hangover

*[This article was originally published by Knowledge@Wharton, a partner institution of Fair Observer.]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer's editorial policy.

The post What Traits Entrepreneurs Need to Succeed appeared first on Fair Observer.

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battybat-boss · 5 years

Text

What Traits Entrepreneurs Need to Succeed

Audacity and courage are among the hallmarks of successful startup founders, according to panelists at the recent Wharton India Economic Forum.

Entrepreneurial Bug

Assembling the Right Team

youtube

The Inequality Test

How to Scale

Colonial Hangover

*[This article was originally published by Knowledge@Wharton, a partner institution of Fair Observer.]

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer's editorial policy.

The post What Traits Entrepreneurs Need to Succeed appeared first on Fair Observer.

0 notes

type2diabetestreatments-blog · 7 years

Text

Rookie Impressions of the Big ADA Conference - Lost in Translation?

New Post has been published on http://type2diabetestreatment.net/diabetes-mellitus/rookie-impressions-of-the-big-ada-conference-lost-in-translation/

Rookie Impressions of the Big ADA Conference - Lost in Translation?

Too many medical professionals are disconnected from us people with diabetes (PWDs) and they're missing the point on how to help us manage our diabetes. Yet, they are passionate and so want to reach us.

That's my main takeaway from the American Diabetes Association's 72nd Scientific Sessions, as a newbie attending this mass diabetes conference for the very first time.

Rookie observations are what you'll find here, now that I've had a chance to stop sprinting around downtown Philly — a place that seemed like the hub of the diabetes universe for five days, where circa 17,000 professionals converged (60% from outside the U.S.) to talk diabetes.

This conference showed me I really need to brush up on my diabetes science lingo, rather than relying only on my 28 years of experience of living with type 1. You know, the insider baseball stuff that gets lost in translation between these conferences and the offices where we go to visit our docs. These doctor-to-doctor and research-heavy mass meetups are full of stats and conceptual scientific mumbo jumbo, and it's never been aimed at the patient to get as much out of it as the professionals. This is just the nature of the conference.

But as a patient-blogger, I did manage to find some gold nuggets and interesting tidbits scattered throughout the sessions. And individually, many of the speakers seemed very excited and brilliant about whatever the topic might have been.

Being a non-science-type, it seemed to me that the most dynamic aspects of the entire conference happened in the evenings and outside the convention center meeting rooms, where brilliant minds came together to actually discuss issues that really resonated with me on the patient-level. Abbott, Taking Care of Your Diabetes and the Helmsley Charitable Trust and T1DExchange were some of the forums I checked out, witnessing great discussions about how progress in science, technology, patient care, and the development of the D-community are making real changes for patients living with this thing.

The rest of the "official business" during the day? Kinda boring in the context of my average PWD eyes.

The Missing Point

My observation in attending a dozen or so sessions is that many of the questions researchers seem to believe are unanswered or need more study come down to a simple point: we PWDs aren't stats, slides or textbook scenarios. We are people, with lives that are complicated by many more things than just diabetes.

As inspiring as it was to see the mind-power and passion of thousands of people working on diabetes, my heart was a bit sad that it didn't feel like the medical community is connecting the dots — even some very obvious dots.

I heard multiple times: Peer support seems to help, but we don't know why and need to study that more. Online resources appear to help, but the "quantifiable evidence" doesn't tell the docs why and so they only scratch the surface (I suppose many never heard of the supportive DOC or are threatened by its lack of physician involvement?!).

A quote from Dr. Kevin Volpp, in a talk on how to motivate PWDs to change their behaviors, sums it up for me: "We need a more effective way of hovering over patients that will be well-received." He wondered if health care social media could be a way, but left it at that.

To me, it was like watching my favorite baseball player hit the ball and seeing it soar into the outfield toward the wall, only to have it fall short and stay inside the ballpark. What a letdown!

(OMG, isn't it OBVIOUS why peer support helps? Apparently not, to people who've never had to struggle with BG control, day-in and day-out)

Another obvious point: please don't hover over me! Unless you want to be kicked, or you're auditioning to be my butler. Instead, try talking and listening to me. And not being threatened when I don't agree with you or question the wisdom of your medical guidance. Know that often talking to my PWD friends who "get it" can be just as powerful, if not more, than anything you might tell me.

Others talked about the wonders of the Internet being a way to reach patients, and the need for peer support, but no one seemed to recognize (at least in the sessions) that you can connect the two without the doctor and that has so much potential to change behaviors and help PWDs on every level (!)

Grrr.

Cynicism aside, though, what shines through that disconnect is the passion packed into every corner of the conference, a desire to help PWDs that radiates into clinic's offices throughout the U.S. and world. That can't be ignored. Maybe they're missing the point in presentation, and not really understanding how to bring this home to us, but every single person I encountered seemed passionate and caring. I do believe they're in this for us, and they're making a difference.

Translating Good Intentions?

Some presentations and talks I attended were outstanding. Just a sampling of those I saw talk throughout the sessions include: Bill Polonsky in San Diego, Bruce Bode in Atlanta, Korey Hood in San Francisco, Lori Laffel in Boston, and Julio Rosenstock in Dallas. There are probably many more who really know diabetes. Some of them live with it, so they know it's complicated and so many psychosocial issues play into every aspect of our management.

But when you go up to presenters or audience members after the sessions, introduce yourself and ask them how they plan to take the scientific info back to their patients, and a majority of those brilliant minds can't adequately translate the stats and science into "patient-friendly" terms... There's something amiss.

The poster hall was also a great place to get the nitty-gritty on new research and concepts, but most of the boards had large charts and loads of stats that were often difficult to understand unless you had the presenter right there to explain it simply. Or you already knew what you were looking at.

Even if this conference isn't "for the patient," you have to wonder if this stuff will ever trickle down to us PWDs in the trenches in ways that mean something to us...? That's how I would define success, if anybody asked me.

News-poolza

Everyone had news to share. Seriously. Did you SEE the number of press releases sent out before, during and right after the conference? This is prime time for those wanting to unveil anything D-related, but c'mon people... Spread things out. With everyone coordinating their announcements with this conference, one of my tasks was to attend the press briefings, the nuts and bolts of which can be found in the June 8-12 releases online.

The briefing room was slotted right next to where the ADA Press Room sat, where dozens of reporters from various publications hunched over PCs to plug out stories and updates. Some were PWDs and pump users, but most of the media folk didn't seem to have any obvious D-connection and a couple could be even be overheard asking each other basic questions about differences between types, the meanings of basal/bolus, and whether the term "diabetic" should be used (he, he).

I couldn't help but think of all the coverage in papers and on TV stations throughout the world exuding from conference, and how so many accuracy issues might arise... seems like something Diabetes Advocates might be interested in getting involved in for the future, as part of our push for media awareness about diabetes.

Oh, did I mention that the exhibit hall was HUGE? With elaborate company booths at every turn where you could find their particular gadget, gizmo or med in all its glorious hype?

But you know what? There wasn't anything really "new or novel" that I haven't seen before in some form or another. Lots of meters, pumps, CGMs and programs that all seem to basically do what every one of their predecessors have done. Except some are fancier, more colorful and modernized for the 21st century. But even those weren't anything that hasn't been announced before. I was hoping for the "next coolest thing you've never heard of before," but just didn't see it.

You had to go behind the scenes to talk with the execs, not the fleets of sales reps on the exhibit hall floor, to get the real story. It was like finding Willy Wonka inside a factory full of candy and oompa loompas, who really only sing the songs they're scripted for and aren't allowed to tell you anything about the real impacts of the candy they're making because of regulatory push back. (And yes, a Pharma company sales rep tells me that there are FDA "secret shoppers" who visit the Pharma and device-maker booths to listen to what's being said to people on the exhibit hall floor and make sure nothing off-limits is being pitched).

So, while the experience was a lot to absorb, much of it seems just for show.

It all seemed kind of disappointing, even if you could do cool things, like get your taken photo and transposed onto the cover of the newly-redesigned Diabetes Forecast magazine, visit any of the dozen or more free coffee stands scattered around, or get the usual kind of flashy propaganda about the newest products and services.

Value = Relationships

In the end, the biggest value of this conference is networking, IMHO. It's a giant mixer to help diabetes pros establish, maintain and strengthen relationships. It's about recognizing each others work, and hopefully acknowledging that it takes everyone's voice to achieve greatness.

We need the science exploring the theory. But we also need the translation to the real world. We need Pharma and device-makers to give us the tools to do these jobs, and we need both the docs and us patients to communicate clearly about what works and doesn't. We ALL have to listen to each other.

I'm excited and energetic about the brilliance, passion and desire to help PWDs. Now, I just hope the dots get connected.

So, that's that.

Back home in Indiana now, I'm finally starting to see "normoglycemia" rather than the stream of lows caused by the fast pace of covering the conference. Never a dull moment for us PWDs who are always on our feet (literally and figuratively!).

Oh, and I should probably mention there's one other golden truth that can't be ignored about the conference:

Next time, I need to listen to that old adage about wearing comfortable shoes for all the running around; this year's conference left me flat-footed in addition to brain-fried!

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