i finished life on mars (again) man they just do not make dramas like it anymore

Not Your Captain

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Avenger!Reader

Word Count: 1695

Warnings: Falcon and the Winter Soldier Spoilers!!!!! Lots of Angst in this one, guys, lotta feels, some Fluff to counterbalance it, but mostly Angst, Cursing

A/N: This is Part Two to my previous FATWS writing, His Only Contact. FATWS SERIES STERLIST HERE! This one is from Reader’s perspective and gives you a bit more about Reader’s backstory. There will be multiple parts coming out in the next day or two based just on this new episode because damn. It was loaded!  Due to this and my workload this past week, I haven’t been able to post the first chapter of my College!AU, Erased From the Stars, but I promise it’s coming! This’ll be my main focus for the weekend though! Expect more parts in the next 24 hours! I’ll be making a masterlist for this particular project in that time, too! Taglists are open! Please contact me if you want to be tagged! Thank you and please enjoy, loves! (Not beta’d, so sorry for mistakes!)

AGAIN: SPOILERS UNDER CUT!

The moment you saw it on TV, you knew you had to get to Bucky. You weren’t planning on leaving until the next day, but there was no way you weren’t going. So you caught the first plane you could from the base you were staying at.

You’re feelings were all over the place. Steve had been your best friend for more than the past decade. You were the one there when he first woke up. You were the one to help him get situated. You were the one to help him whenever he needed, to go over to his little place in DC when he was having problems, like the time he thought he was having an asthma attack when it was an anxiety attack or when you had to help him find a new phone after he accidentally broke his.

You were that close to falling in love with him. But life went the other way and, in a weird twist of fate, almost as if the universe wanted to spare you of the heartbreak it knew would come if you gave your heart to the dashing captain, you ended up tripping over your own feet for someone else.

Someone you would never tell.

He was the last thing you had left of Steve and you couldn’t ruin that because of your stupid feelings. And you couldn’t ruin the relationship you had now because it was working. He trusted you, more than anyone else. He trusted you because Steve trusted you and you wouldn’t dare break that trust.

You just hoped, with everything going down in relation to the shield - to his legacy - that you’d be able to keep that promise you made to yourself.

You were in front of his door early in the morning - around four - hesitating to knock. It didn’t take long for him to respond the moment your fist did meet the door.

He looked…tired. You wished, oh how you wished, that you could do more. Anything more. He insisted you helped him plenty already; he claimed he never had nightmares when you were by his side. But it wasn’t enough. Not for what he’d been through. You felt as though you were merely putting a bandaid over a bullet wound.

His chocolate locks were short, above his ears. You could remember how hesitant yet eager he was about doing it. It was difficult to not cut his ear off because he kept moving in anticipation. You would know: you cut it. Those blue eyes that made you trip in the first place were outlined by thick lashes, dark ebony bags beneath them, making the azure pop. He was shirtless, as he usually was when sleeping (or at least trying to sleep), his dog tags resting against his sternum. 

You could tell he hadn’t been sleeping. His eyes were bloodshot as if he was watching TV for too long and his hair was less messy than it would be if he actually slept.

The moment his eyes found yours, his plump, chapped lips turned up into the grin he reserved for you and he was pulling you in. Your reaction was instantaneous, your arms slipping around his waist, your chin resting on his shoulder as he found home in the crook of your neck.

He was touch deprived. You knew this, but you never brought it up. Especially considering you were one of the only people he touched willingly. You didn’t want him thinking he was broken, more so than he thought he was already. And you definitely didn’t want to push him into fixing himself. So you didn’t tell him, even though you were pretty sure he knew, and you just let him take the lead. 

Sometimes it meant he grabbed your hand in large crowds, or tucked you under his arm when he was threatened. Other times it meant laying his head in your lap when he was tired late at night, or a soft hug in greeting.

Hands slowly tracing his spine, fingers dancing up and down his back, you gave a small smile when you felt him practically purring in your embrace. You could never decide if he was more puppy or kitten. You used to make jokes about the three of them, Steve, Bucky, and Sam, being like a puppy, kitten, and bird that you had to reluctantly pet sit for a friend. You would give almost anything to be joking around like that with them when you went to visit Bucky in Wakanda with Steve.

“Buck?”

He hummed. You didn’t want to pull back, you wanted to stay connected with him for as long as possible, but you had to talk. You didn’t want to talk about it, because that would make it more real, but you had to. You had to.

“Have you seen the news recently?”

His eyebrows furrowed, his lips pulling down. “What happened? Is it Wanda?”

You looked down the hall, your lips pressed together tightly, before nodding inside. “We have to talk.”

He nodded, stepping back and pulling you inside. Seeing the makeshift bed on the floor against the far edge of the sofa made you inwardly sigh, but you didn’t say anything about it. Steve was the same way at first.

“Is she okay? Did you find her? Where-”

“It’s not Wanda.” Turning, you faced him, trying to control your own anger at the situation, knowing it wouldn’t help him any. “It’s…it’s about Steve.”

Those spectacularly blue eyes narrowed, bottom lip being sucked in between his teeth. “What about Steve?”

You gestured for him to come closer, holding out your hand in offering. He took it and followed you as you led him to the couch. A cleared throat and a deep breath later found you gently explaining what happened to him. That the government had taken back the shield and had given it to someone else. A ‘hero just for America’. A ‘new Captain America’.

You could see his features harden with every word, his jaw ticking dangerously, his chest heaving and his nostrils flaring. You squeezed his hand as you finished. “He’s got meetings and stuff with senators and governors. They’re taking him on a tour this week. They-they want me to meet him, considering I’m the last of the original seven. Active on Earth, at least.”

The tears that started forming in his eyes made you swallow your own emotions down thickly. He didn’t need your hatred of this wannabe to fuel his own. He needed your support and comfort. He needed to know you’d be by his side through this.

“Are you?”

You blinked, not expecting his first words to be that question. “Am I what?”

“Going to meet with him?”

“I-I…” You stopped talking, knowing that if you continued you’d end up ranting about how he wasn’t your captain. How he could never be your captain. Debating answers, you decided on a simple, blunt reply. “No.”

“Why…” 

Running your thumb over his knuckles, you leaned over slowly to press a chaste kiss to his bare skin and blood shoulder. “Take your time. Collect your thoughts.”

He responded to your words by taking a deep breath, clenching his eyes shut, his jaw so tight you feared he might chip his teeth. It was a tense minute before he said anything, the room being filled with his harsh breathing. “You said he gave them the shield.”

“What?”

“Yesterday. You told me he gave up the shield. They put it in the Smithsonian. But you just said they took it from him.”

“He did give it to them, but-”

“Why?” His eyes snapped open, his features twisting into ones of frustration and resentment. “Why’d he give it to them?”

You shook your head, knowing Sam didn’t mean for any of that to happen. He had called you a few weeks ago to ask about your opinion on the matter. You told him that Steve trusted him, and you trusted Steve, so if Sam thought that was the right thing to do…you trusted him. “It’s not Sam’s fault. Don’t be mad-”

“Don’t be mad?! Don’t be mad?!” Bucky shot up, ripping his hand away from yours, making you bite your lip and hang your head as he paced in front of you. “Steve gave it to him! And he just gives it away like he’s regifting a shitty frisbee as a Christmas present! And you don’t want me to be mad?! Are you fucking kidding me, Y/N?!”

Cringing at the use of your name, which you rarely hear fall from his lips, especially in vexation like just then, you looked up at him, eyes pleading. “Bucky, I get it. I do. I’m mad, too. I’m-I’m furious. But you can’t blame Sam. Please. He just - he’s trying, Buck. Just like me. Just like you. We’re all trying.”

Bucky’s shoulders fell as he stared at you, eyes darting from feature to feature as he studied your face. Before you could say anything else, he was on the floor in front of you, in between your legs, arms wrapped around your waist and face pressed into your stomach.

You could tell he was holding something back - something big - but you wouldn’t push him. You never did. Displaying feelings was always hard for him, even in the early 1900’s; Steve used to tell you stories when you were looking for him after the fiasco in DC. Bucky grew up being the oldest of four and the only boy. On top of that, his best friend was a scrawny, stubborn, punching bag of a boy. According to Stevie, neither of them really learned how to cope or how to deal with feelings. And it showed. Boy, did it show.

Instead of getting on him and asking what was wrong and begging for him to talk to you, your fingers tangled in his hair, nails scratching his scalp, as you sat back to make the position more comfortable for him.

“Stay with me. I need you.”

You leaned down to press a soft kiss to his head, nodding into his hair. “I’ll stay. For as long as you need me, Buckaroo.”

Taglist (OPEN):

@happygoreading​, @thatsdarwinism​, @satellitespidey​

As Fate Would Have It Part 8 (Bucky Barnes x Reader)

Catch Up Here!

A/N: This update took fucking forever! Forgive me, lol. But I have started a new challenge to see if I can finish this series before Endgame so... fingers crossed! Also, I won’t lie, I enjoy young Howard Stark’s personality.  And the opening was definitely not inspired by the opening of Marvelous Mr.s Maisel s2!!! *winks with both eyes!*

Remember: Reader’s alias is Helen Rushman but everyone calls you Elle!

Words: 2463

Warnings: Angst?! Pfft, I don’t even know!

(gif isn’t mine)

One Month Later

You sat at the work station of Betty Bloom, one of the employees you had befriended during your 3 weeks at your new job. Her calls were fairly few, giving you a lot of breathing room between calls. On the other end of the operators' office Agnes, a shaky poodle of a woman, was having less of a breezy time.

"Hellen, help!" Agnes yelped from her chair by the switchboard, "There are too many calls coming through!" she panicked, lost in a tangle of cables.

You used your chair to swivel to her place as she smoothly moved out the way. "Stark Industries, how may I direct your call?" you asked with the company-polite-policy tone. After a few seconds, you put the right switch in its corresponding section. "Stark Industries, how may I direct your call?" you repeated the process like a record player.

After a few minutes of dealing with the bulk of the calls, you gave Agnes a cheeky wink, "All done. I believe these are yours?" You held up a switchboard jack yet to be connected.

Agnes fanned herself dramatically as she wheeled back to her station, "Girl, I don't know how you do it. You are a literal angel."

"All in a day’s work," you smiled back before heading back to the station you were covering. Betty came back from her quick smoke break soon after. "And Agnes, it's Elle. Never Helen."

"Thank ye, darlin'," Betty retrieved her headsets from you, "You are an actual lifesaver. Now ye best get on, before the handsome Moustachioed Casanova notices you've been gone a minute."

Some of the girls giggled youthfully at Betty's mention of Howard Stark's nickname, others visibly swooned. You thought it best to follow the trend and feigned the same level of adoration the other women showed. You bid the girls a fond adieu and made your way back upstairs to your office.

You had been working as Howard Stark’s secretary for a few weeks now. From early on, the other secretaries showed a colder reception towards you when you first arrived, they probably thought you slept your way to the position considering a lot of the other girls had been vying for this position months before you even stepped foot in Brooklyn. And so you wound up spending time with the much more accepting and lively telephone operators in the basement.

You made your way to your desk, getting a few sour looks from the other secretaries. The piercing intensity of their fiery gaze reminded you a lot of the Red Room and how people you had considered allies could just as easily turn into adversaries. One of them even resembled Yelena which made you grind your teeth every time you saw her permanently squinted eyes. When you got to your desk you were greeted by the all too familiar sounds of your boss, Howard Stark, being a little too cheeky and less attentive than he should be while a suit argued over a patent.

"Howard, you stole my invention, admit it!" the man shouted.

You heard a chuckle and had the urge to peek into the office subtly from behind your desk.

"I did no such thing old boy," Howard said condescendingly. Giving the unknown man a pat on the back. Even you had to admit, he could be charming when you least expected it. "It can't be helped if we both thought up the same idea. It's a mere coincidence."

"That's folly and you know it!"

"Listen here, Frankie. Do you know the difference between your patent and mine?" the suit, Frankie, stayed silent. "The answer is simple. Mine is simply better than yours. See, Stark Industries invents quality, reliable and groundbreaking products. And to be frank, yours just doesn't meet any of those standards."

Frankie was turning beet red, "Why you--"

"Mr Stark, your 3 o'clock is here. Should I tell security to let him up or will you be going down to meet him?" You interjected just in time to diffuse what could have been a rather messy situation. Howard smirked at you, no doubt impressed by your cunning.

"Thank you, Helen but there'll be no need. I was heading out anyway," You didn't bother to correct him. Howard pretended to organise some documents into a briefcase. "Sorry, Frankie. Guess we'll have to continue this stimulating conversation another time. Set a time with my very capable secretary, she'll pencil you in."

Frankie or Frank, whichever it was, muttered a few choice words under his breath before he stormed off in a huff.

"Nice timing there, darlin'," Howard complemented. "To think of all the times my previous secretaries caused a scene by actually calling security… And all the tabloid headlines that followed. Where have you been all my life?" he mused.

"Certainly not running in your circles, Sir." You bit back with a little too much attitude. You were about to apologize until you saw how Howard was looking at you: like his next conquest.

"Ah, the Dame's got bite too," he threw a dashing smile your way. Shameless flirt he was.

Now you got to witness first hand why they called him the Moustachioed Casanova, he did have the curse of charisma.

Howard gathered a file and walked towards you, "Here, file these for me and go down to Research and Development and make sure we didn't actually steal Frankie's designs. Can't have a lawsuit on my ass." He handed you the papers. He lingered for a moment before gathering his coat and hat.

"Of course, Sir."

He stopped by the door of his office and looked at you with a raised brow, "One more thing..."

"Sir?"

"I thought my 3 O'clock was a… woman."

You held back the urge to laugh, "It is. I just didn't think that particular piece of information was pertinent for others to be privy to."

Without warning, Howard placed a harmless, giddy kiss on your cheek. "If only every other secretary could have your smarts!" He said hastily before departing for his 'meeting'.

That would be a frightful thing to behold you thought, knowing full well how devious and merciless assassins could be, let alone underpaid secretaries!

In the background you heard what sounded like him walking into someone, followed by a hasty "Pardon me."

You glanced over at the large file in your hand and at Howard's empty office. Finally! The opportune moment to search his office for anything pertaining to Project Rebirth. The sooner you could uncover a new lead, the sooner you could leave your post and try to go back to the way things were. You felt a sting in your heart when you remembered the sad look on Bucky's face when ended things three weeks ago. You shook those thoughts from your head and got to work.

In a bin, by the doorway of the floor, you saw a fresh bouquet of pink flowers. Strange… You hadn't noticed them when you went for your break in the basement earlier. They reminded you of the peach farm you, Bucky, Sal and Steve had visited.

***

Steve and Bucky were having lunch at a different diner in town. Bucky had had a constant far-away look on his face lately and Steve was getting worried.

One of the waitresses came down, she seemed very interested in hooking Bucky's attention but he simply placed his order and gave a polite smile before gazing back out the window.

"Come on Buck, you can't keep moping about," Steve tried to console his best friend. "It's been three weeks." In all truth, Steve had never seen his pal so worked up over a girl before. If only there was something he could do besides endless pep talks. Steve wracked his brain while he sipped his burnt coffee.

A man besides their table was reading a newspaper that read "12 Month Countdown to Stark Expo".

Steve nudged Bucky and whispered conspiratorially, "Hey, what do you think about the Stark Expo?"

Bucky followed after Steve's eye line and saw the newspaper, "If I'm being honest Steve-O, I haven't thought much about it."

Steve started going off about his thoughts on what was quickly becoming the event of the decade, Bucky nodded his head and gave a few Oh's and Ah's, but really his attention was fully placed on the Uncle Sam poster printed in black and white on the back page that screamed "We Want You!"

"Hey… Buck?" Steve seemed less confident now.

"Yeah?"

"Do you know why Elle… you know, ended things between you two?"

Bucky gazed down at his coffee cup. He began stirring the coffee despite there being no sugar or milk in it. "Work," was all he said.

"That can't be it, can it?"

"She said she'd be too busy, didn't want to hold me back… or something rather."

"And you just went along with it? That's not like you Buck. When you want something you always go for it!"

Bucky chuckled, a smile threatening to spread across his lips, "So what you're saying is, I should never have let her walk out of my life?"

"Come on man, you're absolutely miserable without her!" Steve fidgeted about a bit, he saw a vase with a few wilting flowers in it and suddenly a thought popped into his head. "Hey! Why don't you make some grand gesture and tell her you don't care if she's going to be busier with work or you won’t see her as much. Tell her how you really feel. That you lo--" Steve stopped himself before he said too much.

Bucky mulled over Steve's hopelessly romantic words for a moment. And in a flash, he stood up, placed some money on the counter, thanked his friend and walked out of the diner with purpose.

Steve smiled after his friend as he waited for his food patiently, "Hey, 'scuse me. Mind if I borrow that?" He asked the gentleman with the newspaper.

"Sure thing pal," he handed him the paper.

Bucky made his way to the subway and took the Two-Twenty-Two to midtown. When he reached his stop a whole 30 minutes had passed. It was quarter to 3 when he took the elevator up to the secretarial pool of Stark Industries -having bribed the security personnel 5 bucks and swooning over about winning a girls heart. He had a bouquet of pink flowers that reminded him of their picnic at Sue's Farm, a new found smile that felt strange on his face since becoming accustomed to brooding and a smart head of hair -having used the reflective surface of the elevator to smooth it out. He was ready to win her back! But then he saw something he didn't expect.

Elle was standing in a man's office, he looked to be enjoying her company. Then abruptly, he kissed her cheek, and she didn't protest. Bucky stood frozen in the doorway for a few moments. Only to be snapped out of his haze when the very same man, who he recognised from the papers as Howard Stark, nearly bumped into him on his way out. Bucky felt a surge of red hot boil his blood, but he simply balled his fists and dumped the bouquet in the nearest bin. He chose to leave using the stairs, not wanting to face the security personnel he had told of his plans to woo Elle back.

Walking back to his apartment he saw a large Uncle Sam poster, and this time he felt as though it was pointing right at him. With purpose and still glazed over with anger, Bucky began walking in the opposite direction. In the direction of the nearest recruitment centre.

***

When you returned to your apartment you were beyond exhausted. Not only did you have too many files to sort through -you made a mental note to impose a more efficient filing system on Mr Stark- but you also had to juggle snooping around Howard's office without raising anyone’s suspicions before he returned from his 3 0'Clock meeting.

You kicked off your shoes and placed the lonely bouquet you saw earlier on the table. You filled an old marmalade Jar and snipped the stems shorter before placing the newly hydrated flowers on the counter. You set the kettle on to make some tea and went to change out of your work clothes.

"Elle, darlin' that you?" Sal chimed in from her room.

"Hey, Sal. I just put on the kettle. Want some tea?"

"Oh, swell!" you heard her feet patter across the floor into the kitchen. "Oh, these are wonderful. Who sent them?" She asked in reference to the flowers.

"No idea. Found them in the trash."

"And you just… picked them up?" she wasn't amused.

"It was empty!"

"Oh, well, that makes it okay," she retorted.

"Is that sarcasm?"

"Maybe... this is what happens when you leave me alone with Annie," there was a pause as she removed the whistling kettle from the stove and plopped some cups down. "Oh, there's a card."

You walked out of your room and gave Sal a warm smile. "Who's it from?"

Sal went slightly pale before she balled the card in her hand and walked over to the bin, "No one." You thought her voice sounded odd. She walked back and sat at the count, her hands fidgeting in her pocket. "Probably a lover’s quarrel." She cleared her throat.

"Boy, have I had the most exhausting day--"

"Sorry Hun, I just realised I have to call my brother before it gets too late," Sal practically all but ran into her room. You thought she was acting rather odd but didn't follow up on it. You stretched and headed to the bathroom to run a bath.

***

Sal scoured through her diary looking for Steve's number. She knew she had it somewhere because she called him when she was planning the surprise party she threw for Elle last month.

"Here it is," she cheered. She dialled the number and uncrumpled the card that was on the bouquet. It read: To my best girl, B.

It had to be from Bucky, but how did Elle not notice it? Why hadn't she said anything? And why did Elle find them in the trash? Sal had so many questions and she hoped Steve could answer them, but most of all, she wanted to see if this meant there was space for a reconciliation. Because, honestly, Sal noticed how down Elle's mood had been since she and Bucky split and she imagined Bucky wasn't doing much better either.

When Steve picked up, she almost squealed at the image forming in her mind: Elle and Bucky, back together again!

Part 9 is here!

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As Always: I hope you enjoyed this chapter, If you like it don’t be afraid to ask to be added to the tag list and feedback is like a writer’s favourite gift, so if you have anything to say, don’t be shy!! ;)

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A WAY TO BE SILICON VALLEY

But boy did things seem different. Empirically it seems to be that the most important quality would be intelligence. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be important, because a startup will put your friendship through a stress test. You'd understand your users well if you were using the software for them.1 Startup founders tend to be better at running their companies than investors. I was very excited at first.2 So it took me quite a while to realize I just wasn't like the people there. They never explain what the deal is with money. Maybe the increasing cheapness of startups will mean they'll be able to modify your dreams on the fly. Palo Alto in the evening, you see nothing but the blue glow of TVs. Overlooked problems are by definition problems that most people think don't matter. We're so different from VCs that we're really a different kind of animal that has moved into it.

Who knows how many bullets were in the gun they were playing Russian roulette with? Of course, you don't have a house or much stuff, but also because you're less likely to have serious relationships. You also lose less control. So I'm telling you in advance: raising money is so painful, why do we tell people not to?3 And that doesn't seem a wise move. If you're not a genius, just start a startup with someone you like, because a startup will put your friendship through a stress test.4 That makes judging startups harder than most other things one judges. If by the next time you need to fix. Joel Spolsky recently spoke at Y Combinator is as different from what happens in a series A round if you do, and since most founders are under 30, their living expenses are low. To survive it you need a set of techniques mostly orthogonal to the ones used in convincing investors, just as volume and surface area do. Raising $20,000 from a first-time angel investor can be as much work as raising $2 million from a VC fund.5 It's too early to say yet whether Y Combinator will turn out like Viaweb, but judging from the number of startups founded by people who know the subject from experience, but for doing things other people want.

A round you have to assume there was someone born in Milan with as much natural ability as Leonardo couldn't beat the force of environment, do you suppose you can? Sam Altman has it. No; all great cities inspire some sort of job, because everyone asks what you're going to start with what goes wrong and try to trace it back to the root causes. But I tried living in Florence when I was in college. In addition to the programming you do for your classes, why not undergrads? And the cost of dealing with them, but because progress in technology has made it much easier to start a startup just one year later, after I went to work at Yahoo. It's an exciting place. Now I see there's more to it than that. I'm not sure even Larry and Sergey, you can choose your pain: either the short, sharp pain of raising money—that they'll cruise through all the initial steps, but when investors in an angel round first.6 Even now I'm suspicious when startups choose SF over the Valley.7

Does it seem plausible that the people who write software are particularly harmed by checks. I said Oh, ok. However, startups usually have a fairly informal atmosphere, and there's always a lot that needs to have good software. More often than not the company comes to a standstill for months. As of this writing, Cambridge seems to be hard to start a startup, you get to compare how they all perform on identical tasks; and everyone's life is pretty fluid. So by caring more about money and less about power than Silicon Valley, New York, I was very excited at first. It's a knack for understanding users and figuring out how to give them what they want till the last moment.8 And when we're talking about startups we think are likely to succeed, what we find ourselves saying is things like Oh, those guys can take care of themselves. Within about three minutes of meeting him, I remember thinking Ah, so this answer works out to be. He said that in most companies software costing up to about $1000 could be bought by individual managers without any additional approvals.9 Even if you only have to imagine what would happen if they diverged to see the underlying reality. But if you look at a company like Google, it's hard not to be had for the asking.10

Within about three minutes of meeting him, I remember thinking Ah, so this answer works out to be the best supplier, but falls just short of the threshold for solvency—which will of course have been set on the high side, since there is no recovery. When we first started Y Combinator we have some kind of answer for, but not about observing proprieties. Plus in college you don't yet have to face the hardest kind of work—discovering new problems to solve. New York, and Boston. Otherwise their desire to lead you on will combine with your own desire to be led on to produce completely inaccurate impressions. Their expertise is mostly in business—as it should be, because that's the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people are, even if that means living in an expensive, grubby place with bad weather.11 How much is that extra attention worth?12 Because super-angels were initially angels of the classic type.13 But even if we could somehow magically save people from moving, we wouldn't.14 It will vary enormously from one partner to another.15 Instead of building stuff to throw away, you tend to want every line of code to go toward that final goal of showing you did a lot of development over the past couple decades.16

Not at all. VCs have been getting a lot faster. If you know your peers are going to be when you grow up. What do they have to be a 2 week interruption turns into a 4 month interruption. You'd understand your users well if you were using the software for them.17 There is a danger of having VCs in an angel round: the so-called signalling risk. If accelerating variation in productivity is accelerating. Does that mean you can't start a startup, is probably a startup. Brandeis said We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few thousand people seems big enough.18 If they think your startup is lame, aren't they probably right?

So have we just shown, by reductio ad absurdum, that it's false that economic inequality should be decreased, I shouldn't be helping founders. And indeed, that might be a good idea for a company, and his friend says, Yeah, that is a near certainty. Often they are, the more likely this is to happen. This was why they were trying to get people to start calling them portals instead of search engines. It would make sense for super-angels. I mentioned, a pretty bad judge of startups. He always seems to land on his feet.19 The other thing you get from work experience is an understanding of what work is, and part of the confusion is grammatical. In these the best practitioners aren't conveniently collected in a few big successes. Does it seem plausible that the people who write software are particularly harmed by checks.

But when Bill Clerico starts calling you, you may find you get surprising results.20 We get all the paperwork set up properly so there are no external checks at all.21 New York.22 Raising a traditional series A round is from a mezzanine financing. They know they want to do. But increasingly it means the ability to get things done, with no excuses. The new breed are themselves those people. When they'd been independent, they could release changes instantly. Investors like it when they can help a startup, is probably a startup. At YC we use the phrase ramen profitable to describe the situation where you're making just enough to pay your living expenses.

Notes

This essay was written before Firefox.

The hardest kind of people who want to save money, you won't be trivial. Not even being Genghis Khan is probably 99% cooperation. Investors are fine with funding nerds.

But their founders, because any story that makes curators and dealers use neutral-sounding language. They did turn out to be naive in: Life seemed so much a great thing in itself deserving.

But it isn't a quid pro quo. Japanese. I'm not saying, incidentally, that probably doesn't make A more accurate metaphor would be vulnerable both to attack the A P successfully defended itself by allowing the unionization of its completion in 1969 the largest of their hands thus tended to make you feel that you're not consciously aware of it.

Part of the next three years, it might be 20 or 30 times as much income. Programming in Common Lisp, which has been decreasing globally.

The New Industrial State to trying to deliver these sentences as if they'd been pretty clever by getting such a statement would merely be eccentric. The problem is that it's bad. As the art business? Add water as specified on rice cooker.

Our founder meant a photograph of a lumbar disc herniation as juicy except literally.

This of course.

One father told me about a form that asks for your work.

Sometimes founders know it's a harder problem than Hall realizes. I hadn't had much success in doing a small seed investment in you, they only like the difference between surgeons and internists fleas: I once explained this to some founders who'd taken series A in the US is the extent we see incumbents suppressing competitors via regulations or patent suits, we could just expand into casinos than software, we don't have to track ratios by time of day, thirty years later Jim Ryun ran a 3:59 mile as a percentage of statements. I've said into something that doesn't seem to be careful here, because by definition if the sender happens to compensate for another. Several people have historically done to their returns.

A variant is that in fact had its own. 54 million, and yet managed to screw up twice at the mercy of circumstances: court decisions striking down state anti-recommendation. FreeBSD 1. Managers are presumably wondering, how much of the potential series A from a few stellar exceptions the textbooks are not more.

It would have seemed to someone still implicitly operating on the other cheek skirts the issue; the defining test is whether you want to save money, then you're being starved, not because it's a book or movie or desktop application in this respect.

You'll be lucky if fundraising feels pleasant enough to answer the first type to go away, and Reddit is Delicious/popular is driven mostly by people trying to work your way up. Other highly recommended books: What is Mathematics? Sullivan actually said form ever follows function, but those specific abuses. More generally, it may seem to have figured out how to succeed at all is a constant multiple of usage, so presumably will the rate of change in how Stripe felt.

Economically, the technology business.

Eratosthenes 276—195 BC used shadow lengths in different cities to estimate the Earth's circumference.

The philosophers whose works they cover would be far from the other direction. I'm using these names as we use have a cover price and yet in both Greece and China, Yale University Press, 2005. So if they miss just a few hours of advice from your neighbor's fifteen year old son, you'll have to spend all your time on a wall is art.

Often as not the shape of the next one will be better for explaining software than English.

There need to.

Internally most companies are also much cheaper when bought in bulk. It also set off an extensive biography, and credit card debt is a significant startup hub. What we call metaphysics Aristotle called first philosophy.

So how do you know about this trick, and their flakiness is indistinguishable from dishonesty by the Robinson-Patman Act of 1982, which are a handful of ways to get all you know about a startup to engage with slow-moving organizations is to write every component yourself, if your true calling is gaming the system, which is as blind as the average startup.

So you can probably write a new version from which a few of the company really cared about doing search well at a discount to whatever the valuation a bit misleading to treat macros as a definition of property without affecting and probably also encourage companies to build their sites.

It wouldn't pay. VCs should be clear. But a couple years. The shares set aside a chunk of stock the VCs should be working to help the company really cared about users they'd just advise them to private schools that in practice is that they consisted of 50 pairs that each summed to 101 100 1,2003.

Feature: 2018: Second Quarter Favorites

TMT’s Musical Innovation Summit, now in its 14th year, is the oldest meeting of its kind in the industry. Like last quarter’s summit, roughly 10 music professionals from TMT gathered in New York to discuss the latest musical breakthroughs and make predictions on which releases will spark future awe-inspiring innovations. To help make the predictions, we interviewed 45 random fans, 30 venture capitalists, and a handful of media who cover the music industry across the country to get their collective thoughts on what’s imminent. That list is then honed by eliminating long-shot candidates, followed by a double-elimination round to get rid of shitty artists. Nominees are thoroughly vetted, and the groups eliminate candidates throughout the process. Today, we are proud to present the results: the BEST 26 releases of the last three months (with a shortlist at the end). We predict that these releases will change music forever. --- SOPHIE OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES [Future Classic] [WATCH · READ] Now’s raw doubt flanges in this memory’s mercury, and we’re back in the basement dark, floor paved with silver marbles. We will shine a light on one, outline the floor with reflecting. I ask are you sure of this? and you say no, never not of any thing. You squeeze your foreign-feeling shoulder, slim quick doubt. Then you hold a marble up to your eye, unclipped cuticles before corneas, a silver pearl. It’s okay. Flashlight on. We gape. There is no neat sequence. No light is set Surface contorts seeing. The shining is bent in coils. There is no straight path, just what we can move into in this whole new world. Roll the flashlight, and it’s a world warping, brilliance refracted, reflections re-membering. The world we built in the dark teaches us how being between might be. Our un-insides, SOPHIE’s sound, teaches us that brilliance doesn’t diminish its self, that light and self and is what we call it. And you say call me Vivian. Becoming who we’re becoming, “no matter where I go, you’ll be here in my heart.” –Frank Falisi --- Playboi Carti Die Lit [Interscope/AWGE] [LISTEN · READ] The arrival of Playboi Carti’s debut album proper, following last year’s crucial self-titled mixtape, could seem like a mere victory lap, an easy cop-out that plays up to the well-established framework of overstuffed rap albums in the streaming age. What a pleasure, then, that Die Lit implodes that logic. The heady balance of mood pieces and out-and-out anthems that characterized Playboi Carti is further refined here, but even without that baggage, Die Lit is a success on its own terms, a flickering visage that compounds Carti’s most enticing impulses — barely-there vocals, Reichian repetition, knotty Pi’erre Bourne beats — with all the best facets of the album form. And if Carti is only incidental on the mic, the tracks left in his wake are anything but. Herein lies a set of real Ohrwürmer, the inner soundtrack to your day, long after the album subsides. The cloud bursts forth; lightning really does strike twice. –Soe Jherwood --- DJ Healer / Prime Minister of Doom Nothing 2 Loose / Mudshadow Propaganda [All Possible Worlds] [LISTEN · LISTEN] On DJ Metatron’s 2 The Sky, the anonymous artist threaded a Jake Gyllenhaal interview through intricate waves of house music that helped give rise to this enigmatic and highly gifted producer. This year, his efforts have come twofold, with a double release under two new monikers that plot the same channels of intricacy but through two very different means. In place of the Donnie Darko reflection that deepens the narrative of 2 The Sky is a 2002 Whitney Houston interview with Diane Sawyer, where the troubled singer discusses her drug problems and an unnerving sense of optimism that inevitably collapsed 10 years later. Essentially, the music that accompanies both of these otherwise unrelated samples is the atmospheric gel that binds them together; an actor speaking about his fascination with a perplexing story line, and a generational icon battling with herself, fighting to overcome the very thing that took her life. That disparity lies at the heart of this joint release, which merges two highly distinctive personalities while linking them through religious and personal overtones. Mudshadow Propaganda is perfect in its projection of minimal techno tracks that build on the traits of our secretive producer’s expired alias, The Prince of Denmark, while Nothing 2 Loose is almost confessional in the sincerity that it lays bare. But where both records celebrate the dexterity and imagination of a single producer, they also paint a picture of human existence at its most conflicted, from the carnal and the primitive to the haunted and the divine. –Birkut --- Grouper Grid of Points [Kranky] [LISTEN · READ] In seven tracks and less than 30 minutes, Liz Harris sought to take us nowhere. So she stranded us anywhere. Giving up on finding anything instructive or stabilizing in the passing moan of a stray vocal, the odd cluster of muted piano keys, or the occasional sharp gust of static, it became clear that the only place where anything “new” could happen was in a place where nothing old and familiar was left. “Where are we?” started to sound more like “Where aren’t we?” It might have been some heavenly shoreline where the water was the same perfect gunmetal color as the sky, but it might just as likely have been the vacant parking lot of some long-since-demolished Disneyland. It didn’t really matter. Anyplace we chose to stand and look from was just as good (or bad) as another. “Might as well call this the center,” we figured. Gotta start somewhere. –Dan Smart --- Seth Graham Gasp [Orange Milk/Noumenal Loom] [LISTEN · READ] A symphony of perversions and memories that ignites every time you rapid-fire through your Instagram stories. Refried beans left over from the camping trip you took to a closed beta somewhere off the coast of Spy Kids 4D. A million splintered renderings of classical text that you half-scrawled onto the back of your hand before you realized that you were actually just passed out on the keyboard again. Gasp is like a raw feed of how music itself operates in 2018; brief bursts of genius materializing right before us, only to be swept away and digested into something unrecognizably new. The entire sum of human history rubbing elbows with that ASMR video you had to rush to minimize before your roommate could ask you what the fuck you were just watching. A guy as unassuming as Orange Milk label head Seth Graham conjuring up untold universes of possibility from his home in Dayton, OH, his bank of MIDIs a window into our gentle, distraught, and hilarious world. –Sam Goldner [pagebreak] Klein cc [Self-Released] [LISTEN · READ] “Oh my god! Who’s actually going to listen to this?” asks Klein, lounging with friends, reflecting on her last EP, Tommy and a still-emerging network of diasporic black art and sound. A year and new EP later, cc sees Klein more comfortable in the discomfort, pushing further with her collages of confrontational intimacy. “You have to squint” as the voices build and spiral, like an endless loop of out-of-office replies, a pitch-bent dawn chorus, singing to each other, but listening too. Klein made us think: about blackness, about opacity, about femininity and Disney princesses, all at once. Feelings too, and a lack of language to convey them; anxiety, elation, mania, but less medical, sometimes an incantation, sometimes an exorcism. In cc, Klein created a space of unique and disarming affect and mood: a deeper, darker stage in the process of “me being my own therapist,” the sound of someone finding a plurality of voices, of listening to yourself. –Joel White --- Beach House 7 [Sub Pop] [WATCH · READ] Attempting to describe what dreams are seems like a task both impossible and pretentious. But, as it floats like a wandering mind, drifting from thought to thought with each track, 7 certainly feels like a dream. Alex Scally plays guitar, but it sounds like an unfamiliar squall from another universe. Victoria Legrand sings, but it comes out in French. Look at the clock, you’ll be unable to tell how much time has passed. You know, dream stuff. For a genre that gets its name from something as complex as the random images our brains send to us while we sleep, “dream pop” music can often be very formulaic. That’s why, seven albums into their career, it’s remarkable that Beach House have found a way to not only completely refresh their sound, but make perhaps their best album yet. Awash in a chaotic darkness that’s been lingering in different forms throughout their entire discography, 7 hurtles towards oblivion: beautiful, glorious, infinite. –Jeremy Klein --- Eartheater Irisiri [PAN] [WATCH · LISTEN · READ] I keep losing track of Irisiri; it keeps slipping away from me. This isn’t meant as the insult it might scan as. An elegiac spin on the cyber-cyborg-meat-machine kick that everything relevant is twirling toward, this series of sad little processed ditties and twisted car jams charts a swerve back-and-forth between evasiveness and directness. Its unnerving stuff, giving the impression of solidity while remaining impossible to hold. Flirting with hip-hop and electro-acoustic, bedroom pop and sexed-up sopping wet plastic, it keeps moving out of view, even as I keep returning to it. Listening to the album is like chasing an object out of reach, an object I desire without knowning, a body I want without seeing. Also, C.L.I.T. fucking slaps. –Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli --- THE HIRS COLLECTIVE FRIENDS. LOVERS. FAVORITES. [SRA/Get Better] [LISTEN · READ] For a few decades now, raw musical aggression has been underpinned with a lot of unintelligible vocal sentiment. Just steam on in with howling, power riffs and punishing beats please. But what’s that on the edge of the blast radius, dashing in headlong through the smoke? Clear sentiments that uplift, testify, and provide some sharp kicks in heteronormativity’s floppy old dick? Yes please! Even with its closing remix section, the album’s corroded (and collaborative) essence remains triumphantly tight. The perfect way Lilium Kobayashi’s quick stomping techno pop take on “Murdered by a Woman” flits to “Wake Up Tomorrow” when this album is on repeat further dispels any sort of tacked-on/bonus trax superfluousness. The cultural constant of immediate, frothing punk rage is obviously not going anywhere. It’s essential to have an album, in fuck-this-shit 2018, where that rage is specifically righteous, even with its eternally itinerant self-laceration (i.e., humanity). –Willcoma --- Delroy Edwards Rio Grande [L.A. Club Resource] [LISTEN · READ] Delroy Edwards has made the funk (in its many different strains) the connective tissue of his intrepid, joyful, and often perplexing work. It’s an approach never as explicit as in his latest LP, Rio Grande. That might indeed be its greatest success. In Rio Grande, keeping the raw, hissy, determinedly idiosyncratic credentials that first introduced him to the world, Edwards lets the funk take center stage; sometimes riding grimy techno beats, other times pushing beyond the ridiculous-by-design minimalism of the grooves. The goal is simple: to provide his audience with interesting jams to dance to. Edwards takes pride in the anonymous efficiency of that pretense, as the name of his label L.A. Club Resource indicates. He is happy to be the reliable supplier of a service, the invisible demiurge leading patrons to delirium; slipping in some eccentric turns here and there for the kick of it, to the enjoyment of all but mostly because… why the hell not?. And, let there be no doubt, Rio Grande is the most effective toolkit he has yet assembled in pursuit of that goal. –jrodriguez6 [pagebreak] emamouse X yeongrak mouth mouse maus [Quantum Natives] [LISTEN · READ] Hey, not to bring this up here, but borders, am I right? Why do we even have these invisible lines dividing my side from yours? We can get so much more done without them, not to mention the added benefit of not having to split up families in real life as they cross the imaginary demarcations. Who on earth has the chutzpah to enact stupid shit like that? Not emamouse — no way. No, emamouse had the opposite in mind as she commented from her Tokyo base of ops, “What’s this thing keeping me out of New Zealand? An ocean? Screw that!” And thus, the BORDER between Japan and New Zealand was erased forever — whether through the magic of the internet or the ocean suddenly turning into a jello trampoline is anyone’s guess. But emamouse was no longer separated from NZ sound slinger/cartoon centipede yeongrak, and together, through the magic of Quantum Natives, mouth mouse maus was born, a sticky, gooey, sugary, epilepsy-inducing strobe blast of video-game grit and played-with-too-much pink slime from a plastic egg. Cookcook, in her review, inferred that utopias can emerge from collectivity, highlighting the compatibility of these two artists. I think what she meant was “Fruitopia,” which someone obviously spilled all over the mouth mouse maus backup hard drive. Remember Fruitopia? That was Coca-Cola’s own attempt to eradicate borders, except they were the borders between taste and… OK, between them and your money. –Ryan Masteller --- Félicia Atkinson Coyotes [Geographic North] [LISTEN] I once went to New Mexico but mostly stayed inside. Reasons why. Félicia Atkinson’s Coyotes, inspired by her own trip to New Mexico, maps a journey I may have taken, among other wonders. The crafted narrative and its exploratory form gestures toward an experiential unknown. Her travel log collages echoes, maps, receipts, dried leaves, sand stuck in the crevices of shoes, plaques, diary entries, signposts, mythology, spirituality, and the facts and facets of the land’s native and colonial histories into a total atmosphere, something approaching a direct translation of a lingering impression. It’s so effective and affecting, because the whole is actually a scrap: “a slip of paper, something/tiny & torn off/lifted by the wind” writes poet Christian Hawkey in Citizen Of. Atkinson lineates her memories into similarly moving verses. –Cookcook --- Pusha T Daytona [G.O.O.D. Music] [LISTEN · READ] DAYTONA by Pusha T is hard work. It’s this blurb being written at 5:20 AM on the 7-train to “the office” a day after having led 46 tweens on a non-stop four-day Boston field trip. It’s teaching about heterosexism and female empowerment, leading sixth grade field day, and handling logistics for eighth grade graduation in a single day. It’s your body feeling like a crash-test dummy on a Wednesday, having left in the early, early morning, putting in 12 hours of sweating gallons for money, and arriving home at 8:30 PM. It’s wearing Terminator shades on 125th Street talking Spanish to people you never met. It’s the endurance of confidence while facing every fear you’ve experienced — focused — diving straight into the freezing water. DAYTONA proves Pusha T and Kanye are relentless professionals that continue to transcend literary and sonic aesthetics in space and time. We need role models like these, forever. –C Monster --- DJ Koze Knock Knock [Pampa] [LISTEN · READ] Many publications have referred to Stefan Kozalla as a “trickster” or a “prankster.” While there are freckles of truth on the face of that assessment, much of his affability comes from his most mistaken quality: his earnestness. It’s what makes him such a delightful musicmaker. Being earnest, of course, is the perfect foil to the kind of negativist universalism that plagues the psychedelics/mindfulness landscape in which DJ Koze so often finds himself (and, also, finds himself). Koze’s House is perfect (see: “Pick Up”) and his plunder-pop turns weird into sublime and vice versa (see: the wails incorporated into “Scratch That”), but it’s his unpresuming and gracious approach to influences, samples, and collaborations that push this record into extraordinary territory. It’s not alien; it’s absolutely Earthly, and it reflects so well the modest subject that is Koze. After all, Koze never changes, except in his affections. –E. Fosl --- Elysia Crampton Elysia Crampton [Break World] [WATCH · READ] Elysia Crampton opens in media res, with a nativity. And then it revs up, restlessly — its machinic gears grind like plant medicine visions; water flows and burbles; disharmonic chords take us in unanticipatable directions. And through it all, the oscollo, the feline guardian of people outside gender binaries, oscillates wildly. Elysia Crampton’s maximalist approach takes it beyond the strings and cackles of 2016’s Demon City, yet Golgotha remains always present. Standout track “Moscow (Mariposa Voladora)” was inspired by Ofelia, a Bolivian mariposa (“femme revolutionary”), and it judders roughly, darkly. Crampton’s Aymara and trans identity are her displaced subjects, particularly in light of the gestural movement between her origins in Bolivia and her current home in the US. But this is not any straightforward folk music revival — rather, it’s a deconstruction that reconstructs. The difficulties and contradictions of critical theory, in particular writers such as José Muñoz and his exploration of queer brown-ness, are braided into the work. The first written reference to queers as mariposillas (“little butterflies”) is from Pedro Cieza de León, in the 16th century, in which he compares “sodomites,” subject to punishment by burning at the stake, to moths drawn to the flame. The suffering of our ancestors can’t be recuperated, but through art, we may yet dance grotesquely but triumphantly on the pyre. –Rowan Savage [pagebreak] The Caretaker Everywhere at the end of time - Stage 4 [History Always Favours The Winners] [LISTEN · READ] The late hauntologist Mark Fisher once cruelly noted that the OED lists one of the earliest meanings of the word “haunt” as “to provide with a home, house.” And now that we live in a world that has lost the very possibility of loss, we have also lost the one who can lose, cohabiting with oneself in the present’s presence. Ghosts no longer have a home to haunt in any case, and their yearning and lingering voices are consigned to a past that can never pass away. Although it is haunting and horrifying to behold Everywhere at the end of time’s fourth installment pass from memories to their source — what Kirby calls “the post-awareness stage” — perhaps we must be grateful that someone can forget (for (us)). For, the source of memory must remain, even after all memory has been stripped away from it, even though this source can never be aware of itself. Yet, this source is not, strictly speaking, an identity. What it may be I do not know, but The Caretaker allows you to hear, what, behind those eyes, devoid of any recognition of life; we hope, we plead to be someone who remembers us, yet the only bliss, as transient as it is empty, is the wry smile that, for an instant, says, “Do not save me.” –Evan Coral --- Lucrecia Dalt Anticlines [RVNG Intl.] [WATCH · READ] OK, Hoag. You wake up in 1925, in a different place but with the same objects. Lucrecia Dalt’s Anticlines is playing on the victrola. She sings, “Skinless others/ Oils on waters,” and you realize you’re in the same room as the killer. The only other person in the room is dressed exactly like you, and that person’s talking up the other place — the one you believe you are still in — saying, “I think you’d like it there.” Where again? Both places go out of view. Now possibly dreaming, in a time and place before flight, Gein or radio, you wait at a blue-dipped railway platform as trains roll by on their way to Oclupaca and Ortseam. You’re hoping to catch a ride to somewhere similar but elsewhere, more elemental, past the unseen concupiscence between thermosphere and exosphere, out there where you don’t have to wonder, anymore, what the toys do while you’re away. –Rick Weaver --- Tierra Whack Whack World [Self-Released] [STREAM] In the face of incomprehensible excess and stream-gaming nonsense, Tierra Whack — yes, that’s her real name — provides a grotesque yet charming response with the wonderfully weird “Whack World.” Rather than dragging the tempo or chopping the tracklist, the 22-year-old Philly rapper embraces something like a skip-button aesthetic of preview clips and non-member samples, unceremoniously cutting off her songs as soon as they hit the one-minute mark. With 15 songs in just 15 minutes — an absurdity further heightened by its surreal video — traditional payoffs are just beyond reach, forcing us to sit through a goofy, lighthearted romp of youthful innovation and bizarre genre play that includes everything from slow jams and trap bangers to country parodies and kids pop. It’s delightfully ridiculous and sometimes annoying af, but it arrives with undeniable energy and child-like wonder, bursting out confetti-like from a singular, captivating voice who’s on one of this year’s quickest and most unexpected come-ups. Blink and you’ll miss it. That’s the point. –ミスターおしっこ --- GAS Rausch [Kompakt] [WATCH · LISTEN · READ] I consumed the hour-long experience of Rausch, blaring through my headphones, as golden hour became twilight and the mosquitoes started biting. Luckily, my timing was great; 2017’s Narkopop, with its penchant for forlorn ruminations, ultimately owed a lot to its namesake: pop music. Now, those hopeful moments of liquid sunlight are far away. Rausch finds GAS staying true to its typically ascetic atmosphere, but any strand of accessible melodicism is replaced by shattering layers of dissonant drone upon drone, Doppler effect-synths, and percussive textures that pierce through it all — shimmering cymbals, palpitating kick-snare rhythms. As each funeral march bleeds into the next, the delirious effects of Rausch take hold. My arms are covered in bites, and temperatures still haven’t dropped below 90. For the superimposed intensity of Rausch, a more fitting listening environment couldn’t be created. –Rounak Maiti --- The Body I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer [Thrill Jockey] [LISTEN · READ] It’s so much to bear. We’re expected to carry more than our own weight. The pain and suffering of our past traumas, the present crises, the future uncertainties. More and more, any attempts to alleviate the pain, to share the burden, are undermined. All we ever wanted, all untenable. They demand purity (in lieu of that, submission by “privilege”), individuality, personalization, subscription. They won’t cry for us. Everything must be on you and you alone. Time will not notice you are nothing. You are already hatred as an abstract to someone else. The pull of the personal must end. The allure of ontology and self-indulgence must be shattered in the face of those who leer lewdly into its mirror and contort on the floor in false ecstasy. But it is a painful burden. “I lower my guilty-looking eyes. I’m afraid of looking people in the eye.” War is necessary and proper, to shatter illusions. But it’s all so much to bear. –Ze Pequeno [pagebreak] serpentwithfeet soil [Tri Angle/Secretly Canadian] [WATCH · LISTEN · READ] It’s crazy to think that soil is serpentwithfeet’s debut album. The queer, pagan singer, a former choir boy from Baltimore, emerged in 2016 with blisters, a set of mesmerizing slices of new age R&B delving into faith, superstition, and love. His voice and composition live up to the lofty themes; delicate and meandering, serpent recalled the acrobatic opulence of 90s R&B with brooding, industrial production from The Haxan Cloak. The most visionary artists are those who sound like nothing other than themselves and exhibit a gravitational aura that inspires imitation, lust, and disbelief. soil lurches and waltzes, while Josiah Wise, who prefers to go by “serpent,” remains fully exposed in the mix, employing innovative vocal stacks that whisper, conjure, and croon behind him like a choir of restless spirits. Despite the divine quality to serpent’s voice, which is at times shellacked with layers, often battling against static noise and its own quivering vibrato, the subject matter of soil is immediately relatable and quotidian: the navigation of a shifting dating landscape, the sublime essences of individuals, intimacy and grace in heartbreak, the projection of sorrow onto the world. serpent doesn’t want to be “small sad,” but “big, big sad,” to the point that he’s sure his friends are “tired of him talking.” The domesticity infects us all: How can we properly grieve? How can we redeem ourselves? The occult instrumentation falls away to reveal a queer individual who is merely describing their personal desires. –Ross Devlin --- Sara Davachi Let Night Come On Bells End The Day [Recital] [LISTEN · READ] I walked through the streets barefoot, clothed only in a robe. The bells were ringing, playing their ancient song, letting the world know that the night had begun. My feet were bleeding from the cobblestone streets, which is how they found me in the morning, just outside of town in the woods. I didn’t drink that night. The evening swept me up, and some tribal instinct forced me outside in virtually nothing. My neighbors looked and closed their curtain as I kept walking, holding the hand of the force that was dragging me. I remember parts like my head hurting and my eyes watering. I remember spinning in the center of town underneath a street lamp. I don’t remember why I left town and headed toward the woods. I don’t know why I left my house. I remember being woken up by the police and being embarrassed to face to my neighbors. They took me home and put me in bed, because the medic cleared me at the site. I’ve never spoken of it since, and I still clench up when the night comes on and the bells end the day. –Sam Tornow --- Jenny Hval The Long Sleep EP [Sacred Bones] [WATCH · LISTEN · READ] Roping in some of her favorite jazz musicians to explore ideas, Jenny Hval has managed to escape the noose of her recent collaborative concepts and delve within to produce yet another stunning act of imagination. The pure reach and weight of The Long Sleep is extraordinary. Hval moves across emotional ground with certainty and delicacy, capturing the subtlest of feelings. Like a soundtrack to a brilliant short, Hval plays with recurring motifs first presented in the “conventional” “Spells,” but then swerves genre expectations along the way, through the piano-led clap frappe of “The Dreamer Is Everyone in Her Dream” to the blissful title track drone. On “I Want to Tell You Something,” her presence is so powerful, as she attempts to express trance closure through an oblique narrative before realizing simple words are all she needs. Fecund, savage, and irresistible, The Long Sleep demonstrates once again why Hval is so intriguing. –David Nadelle --- Gemini Sisters Gemini Sisters [Psychic Trouble] [LISTEN] How does one describe something so beautiful and uplifting — a beacon of light in a shroud a darkness. I was wallowing deep in the muck and mire, desperate to claw out of it rather than sinking down into it. But that tar pit of sorrow and defeat is thick, and it cares not about your will. But I saw the light and followed it. It led me to two helpful, outstretched hands. Jon Kolodij and Matt Christensen met my palm with a hardy grasp and a hefty pull. And I felt the warmth of Gemini Sisters. The sprawling, uplifting sonic aura of the duo’s debut speaks to energy from whence Kolodij and Christensen are christened: the two having their daughters born on the same day of the same year (and those offspring being Geminis). It shows with the delicacy of their aural attack. It is spiritual, reaching toward the heavens to pluck the constellation and bringing its brightness to our darkest places. Right now, the flesh is weak and the mind wavers. But our essence remains pure and chaste. Thanks to Kolodij and Christensen, I have traded the hastened quicksand for a tether to the sprawling galaxy. –Jspicer --- Christina Vantzou No. 4 [Kranky] [LISTEN · READ] When you’re in a vehicle moving at a slow, constant speed, sometimes you can convince yourself that you aren’t moving at all. No. 4 moves me like that. I know how tired that metaphor is, and if you listen to gentle drones like “At Dawn” and “Remote Polyphony” and think I’m a hack for digging the spatial metaphor up once again to describe slow, deliberate music, I understand. But I feel that uneasy compromise between motion and rest deeply and at every strange, shimmering moment of the album. It’s in the bells of “Percussion in Nonspace,” ringing in a sort of dual presence and absence; in the little arpeggio that creeps up through “Doorway;” in the pitch-affected choral chant that closes out “Sound House.” Whether we interpret track titles as thematic hints or as mere word games, the names of the tracks on No. 4 suggest, along with the music, that Christina Vantzou wants to domesticate and eventually upend and denature space through sound. Usually a device for ordering abstraction, she turns that hackneyed spatial metaphor into one for abstracting order. This record moves at no speed, in no direction, and toward no goal, except maybe to suspend us temporarily in a kind of beauty without dimension, not far from terror. –Will Neibergall --- Kanye West ye [G.O.O.D./Def Jam] [LISTEN · READ] Just because an album sparks cathartic conversations doesn’t mean it’s good, and not all good albums invite candid dinner table discussions concerning their mercurial merits. Kanye, however, has just as big of a reputation for arousing furor as he does for leaving listeners speechless. Meanwhile, critics scramble for thoughtful words that won’t get them blacklisted for being associated with that black magic that has been infiltrating every aspect of daily life since Cain murdered Abel, thus birthing division. Calling ye a divisive document at TMT would be an understatement, and attributing its inclusion here to justifying countless hours of collectively unpacking just over 23 minutes of noise would obscure what ye actually contains: disturbing spoken word admonitions about premeditated murder, breathless bars on prescription drug addiction, ironic fantasies about butts of sex scandals, gorgeous gospel keys and beautiful dark twisted harmonies, celebratory reflections on fame and success, spectral arena rock vibes, and staggering room for growth cleared out by fear and love and loyalty. Regardless of our own individual feelings, ye keeps reminding us that this music shit that gets us through each day often requires plunging into dark places and reemerging with our own beacons of light. Believe it or not, I still love it, and like watching a bright-eyed child grow up in a world this dark, I’m terrified and excited for what’s next. –Jazz Scott --- The Shortlist: King Vision Ultra’s Pain of Mind, Shygirl’s Cruel Practice, Oneohtrix Point Never’s Age Of, Ashley Paul’s Lost In Shadows, James Ferraro’s Four Pieces For Mirai, Larry Wish’s How More Can You Need, Jon Hassell’s Listening To Pictures, Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement’s Red Ants Genesis, Parquet Courts’s Wide Awake!, The Carters’ EVERYTHING IS LOVE, Bernice’s Puff LP, Carla Bozulich’s Quieter, Pinkshinyultrablast’s Miserable Miracles, Duppy Gun Productions’s Miro Tape, DRINKS’s Hippo Lite, Valee’s GOOD Job, You Found Me, and Frog Eyes’ Violet Psalms.   http://j.mp/2Kt2EKx

Feature: 2018: Second Quarter Favorites

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TMT’s Musical Innovation Summit, now in its 14th year, is the oldest meeting of its kind in the industry. Like last quarter’s summit, roughly 10 music professionals from TMT gathered in New York to discuss the latest musical breakthroughs and make predictions on which releases will spark future awe-inspiring innovations.

To help make the predictions, we interviewed 45 random fans, 30 venture capitalists, and a handful of media who cover the music industry across the country to get their collective thoughts on what’s imminent. That list is then honed by eliminating long-shot candidates, followed by a double-elimination round to get rid of shitty artists. Nominees are thoroughly vetted, and the groups eliminate candidates throughout the process.

Today, we are proud to present the results: the BEST 26 releases of the last three months (with a shortlist at the end). We predict that these releases will change music forever.

SOPHIE

OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES

[Future Classic]

[WATCH · READ]

Now’s raw doubt flanges in this memory’s mercury, and we’re back in the basement dark, floor paved with silver marbles. We will shine a light on one, outline the floor with reflecting. I ask are you sure of this? and you say no, never not of any thing. You squeeze your foreign-feeling shoulder, slim quick doubt. Then you hold a marble up to your eye, unclipped cuticles before corneas, a silver pearl. It’s okay. Flashlight on. We gape. There is no neat sequence. No light is set Surface contorts seeing. The shining is bent in coils. There is no straight path, just what we can move into in this whole new world. Roll the flashlight, and it’s a world warping, brilliance refracted, reflections re-membering. The world we built in the dark teaches us how being between might be. Our un-insides, SOPHIE’s sound, teaches us that brilliance doesn’t diminish its self, that light and self and is what we call it. And you say call me Vivian. Becoming who we’re becoming, “no matter where I go, you’ll be here in my heart.” –Frank Falisi

Playboi Carti

Die Lit

[Interscope/AWGE]

[LISTEN · READ]

The arrival of Playboi Carti’s debut album proper, following last year’s crucial self-titled mixtape, could seem like a mere victory lap, an easy cop-out that plays up to the well-established framework of overstuffed rap albums in the streaming age. What a pleasure, then, that Die Lit implodes that logic. The heady balance of mood pieces and out-and-out anthems that characterized Playboi Carti is further refined here, but even without that baggage, Die Lit is a success on its own terms, a flickering visage that compounds Carti’s most enticing impulses — barely-there vocals, Reichian repetition, knotty Pi’erre Bourne beats — with all the best facets of the album form. And if Carti is only incidental on the mic, the tracks left in his wake are anything but. Herein lies a set of real Ohrwürmer, the inner soundtrack to your day, long after the album subsides. The cloud bursts forth; lightning really does strike twice. –Soe Jherwood

DJ Healer / Prime Minister of Doom

Nothing 2 Loose / Mudshadow Propaganda

[All Possible Worlds]

[LISTEN · LISTEN]

On DJ Metatron’s 2 The Sky, the anonymous artist threaded a Jake Gyllenhaal interview through intricate waves of house music that helped give rise to this enigmatic and highly gifted producer. This year, his efforts have come twofold, with a double release under two new monikers that plot the same channels of intricacy but through two very different means. In place of the Donnie Darko reflection that deepens the narrative of 2 The Sky is a 2002 Whitney Houston interview with Diane Sawyer, where the troubled singer discusses her drug problems and an unnerving sense of optimism that inevitably collapsed 10 years later. Essentially, the music that accompanies both of these otherwise unrelated samples is the atmospheric gel that binds them together; an actor speaking about his fascination with a perplexing story line, and a generational icon battling with herself, fighting to overcome the very thing that took her life. That disparity lies at the heart of this joint release, which merges two highly distinctive personalities while linking them through religious and personal overtones. Mudshadow Propaganda is perfect in its projection of minimal techno tracks that build on the traits of our secretive producer’s expired alias, The Prince of Denmark, while Nothing 2 Loose is almost confessional in the sincerity that it lays bare. But where both records celebrate the dexterity and imagination of a single producer, they also paint a picture of human existence at its most conflicted, from the carnal and the primitive to the haunted and the divine. –Birkut

Grouper

Grid of Points

[Kranky]

[LISTEN · READ]

In seven tracks and less than 30 minutes, Liz Harris sought to take us nowhere. So she stranded us anywhere. Giving up on finding anything instructive or stabilizing in the passing moan of a stray vocal, the odd cluster of muted piano keys, or the occasional sharp gust of static, it became clear that the only place where anything “new” could happen was in a place where nothing old and familiar was left. “Where are we?” started to sound more like “Where aren’t we?” It might have been some heavenly shoreline where the water was the same perfect gunmetal color as the sky, but it might just as likely have been the vacant parking lot of some long-since-demolished Disneyland. It didn’t really matter. Anyplace we chose to stand and look from was just as good (or bad) as another. “Might as well call this the center,” we figured. Gotta start somewhere. –Dan Smart

Seth Graham

Gasp

[Orange Milk/Noumenal Loom]

[LISTEN · READ]

A symphony of perversions and memories that ignites every time you rapid-fire through your Instagram stories. Refried beans left over from the camping trip you took to a closed beta somewhere off the coast of Spy Kids 4D. A million splintered renderings of classical text that you half-scrawled onto the back of your hand before you realized that you were actually just passed out on the keyboard again. Gasp is like a raw feed of how music itself operates in 2018; brief bursts of genius materializing right before us, only to be swept away and digested into something unrecognizably new. The entire sum of human history rubbing elbows with that ASMR video you had to rush to minimize before your roommate could ask you what the fuck you were just watching. A guy as unassuming as Orange Milk label head Seth Graham conjuring up untold universes of possibility from his home in Dayton, OH, his bank of MIDIs a window into our gentle, distraught, and hilarious world. –Sam Goldner

[pagebreak]

Klein

cc

[Self-Released]

[LISTEN · READ]

“Oh my god! Who’s actually going to listen to this?” asks Klein, lounging with friends, reflecting on her last EP, Tommy and a still-emerging network of diasporic black art and sound. A year and new EP later, cc sees Klein more comfortable in the discomfort, pushing further with her collages of confrontational intimacy. “You have to squint” as the voices build and spiral, like an endless loop of out-of-office replies, a pitch-bent dawn chorus, singing to each other, but listening too. Klein made us think: about blackness, about opacity, about femininity and Disney princesses, all at once. Feelings too, and a lack of language to convey them; anxiety, elation, mania, but less medical, sometimes an incantation, sometimes an exorcism. In cc, Klein created a space of unique and disarming affect and mood: a deeper, darker stage in the process of “me being my own therapist,” the sound of someone finding a plurality of voices, of listening to yourself. –Joel White

Beach House

7

[Sub Pop]

[WATCH · READ]

Attempting to describe what dreams are seems like a task both impossible and pretentious. But, as it floats like a wandering mind, drifting from thought to thought with each track, 7 certainly feels like a dream. Alex Scally plays guitar, but it sounds like an unfamiliar squall from another universe. Victoria Legrand sings, but it comes out in French. Look at the clock, you’ll be unable to tell how much time has passed. You know, dream stuff. For a genre that gets its name from something as complex as the random images our brains send to us while we sleep, “dream pop” music can often be very formulaic. That’s why, seven albums into their career, it’s remarkable that Beach House have found a way to not only completely refresh their sound, but make perhaps their best album yet. Awash in a chaotic darkness that’s been lingering in different forms throughout their entire discography, 7 hurtles towards oblivion: beautiful, glorious, infinite. –Jeremy Klein

Eartheater

Irisiri

[PAN]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

I keep losing track of Irisiri; it keeps slipping away from me. This isn’t meant as the insult it might scan as. An elegiac spin on the cyber-cyborg-meat-machine kick that everything relevant is twirling toward, this series of sad little processed ditties and twisted car jams charts a swerve back-and-forth between evasiveness and directness. Its unnerving stuff, giving the impression of solidity while remaining impossible to hold. Flirting with hip-hop and electro-acoustic, bedroom pop and sexed-up sopping wet plastic, it keeps moving out of view, even as I keep returning to it. Listening to the album is like chasing an object out of reach, an object I desire without knowning, a body I want without seeing. Also, C.L.I.T. fucking slaps. –Jessie Jeffrey Dunn Rovinelli

THE HIRS COLLECTIVE

FRIENDS. LOVERS. FAVORITES.

[SRA/Get Better]

[LISTEN · READ]

For a few decades now, raw musical aggression has been underpinned with a lot of unintelligible vocal sentiment. Just steam on in with howling, power riffs and punishing beats please. But what’s that on the edge of the blast radius, dashing in headlong through the smoke? Clear sentiments that uplift, testify, and provide some sharp kicks in heteronormativity’s floppy old dick? Yes please! Even with its closing remix section, the album’s corroded (and collaborative) essence remains triumphantly tight. The perfect way Lilium Kobayashi’s quick stomping techno pop take on “Murdered by a Woman” flits to “Wake Up Tomorrow” when this album is on repeat further dispels any sort of tacked-on/bonus trax superfluousness. The cultural constant of immediate, frothing punk rage is obviously not going anywhere. It’s essential to have an album, in fuck-this-shit 2018, where that rage is specifically righteous, even with its eternally itinerant self-laceration (i.e., humanity). –Willcoma

Delroy Edwards

Rio Grande

[L.A. Club Resource]

[LISTEN · READ]

Delroy Edwards has made the funk (in its many different strains) the connective tissue of his intrepid, joyful, and often perplexing work. It’s an approach never as explicit as in his latest LP, Rio Grande. That might indeed be its greatest success. In Rio Grande, keeping the raw, hissy, determinedly idiosyncratic credentials that first introduced him to the world, Edwards lets the funk take center stage; sometimes riding grimy techno beats, other times pushing beyond the ridiculous-by-design minimalism of the grooves. The goal is simple: to provide his audience with interesting jams to dance to. Edwards takes pride in the anonymous efficiency of that pretense, as the name of his label L.A. Club Resource indicates. He is happy to be the reliable supplier of a service, the invisible demiurge leading patrons to delirium; slipping in some eccentric turns here and there for the kick of it, to the enjoyment of all but mostly because… why the hell not?. And, let there be no doubt, Rio Grande is the most effective toolkit he has yet assembled in pursuit of that goal. –jrodriguez6

[pagebreak]

emamouse X yeongrak

mouth mouse maus

[Quantum Natives]

[LISTEN · READ]

Hey, not to bring this up here, but borders, am I right? Why do we even have these invisible lines dividing my side from yours? We can get so much more done without them, not to mention the added benefit of not having to split up families in real life as they cross the imaginary demarcations. Who on earth has the chutzpah to enact stupid shit like that? Not emamouse — no way. No, emamouse had the opposite in mind as she commented from her Tokyo base of ops, “What’s this thing keeping me out of New Zealand? An ocean? Screw that!” And thus, the BORDER between Japan and New Zealand was erased forever — whether through the magic of the internet or the ocean suddenly turning into a jello trampoline is anyone’s guess. But emamouse was no longer separated from NZ sound slinger/cartoon centipede yeongrak, and together, through the magic of Quantum Natives, mouth mouse maus was born, a sticky, gooey, sugary, epilepsy-inducing strobe blast of video-game grit and played-with-too-much pink slime from a plastic egg. Cookcook, in her review, inferred that utopias can emerge from collectivity, highlighting the compatibility of these two artists. I think what she meant was “Fruitopia,” which someone obviously spilled all over the mouth mouse maus backup hard drive. Remember Fruitopia? That was Coca-Cola’s own attempt to eradicate borders, except they were the borders between taste and… OK, between them and your money. –Ryan Masteller

Félicia Atkinson

Coyotes

[Geographic North]

[LISTEN]

I once went to New Mexico but mostly stayed inside. Reasons why. Félicia Atkinson’s Coyotes, inspired by her own trip to New Mexico, maps a journey I may have taken, among other wonders. The crafted narrative and its exploratory form gestures toward an experiential unknown. Her travel log collages echoes, maps, receipts, dried leaves, sand stuck in the crevices of shoes, plaques, diary entries, signposts, mythology, spirituality, and the facts and facets of the land’s native and colonial histories into a total atmosphere, something approaching a direct translation of a lingering impression. It’s so effective and affecting, because the whole is actually a scrap: “a slip of paper, something/tiny & torn off/lifted by the wind” writes poet Christian Hawkey in Citizen Of. Atkinson lineates her memories into similarly moving verses. –Cookcook

Pusha T

Daytona

[G.O.O.D. Music]

[LISTEN · READ]

DAYTONA by Pusha T is hard work. It’s this blurb being written at 5:20 AM on the 7-train to “the office” a day after having led 46 tweens on a non-stop four-day Boston field trip. It’s teaching about heterosexism and female empowerment, leading sixth grade field day, and handling logistics for eighth grade graduation in a single day. It’s your body feeling like a crash-test dummy on a Wednesday, having left in the early, early morning, putting in 12 hours of sweating gallons for money, and arriving home at 8:30 PM. It’s wearing Terminator shades on 125th Street talking Spanish to people you never met. It’s the endurance of confidence while facing every fear you’ve experienced — focused — diving straight into the freezing water. DAYTONA proves Pusha T and Kanye are relentless professionals that continue to transcend literary and sonic aesthetics in space and time. We need role models like these, forever. –C Monster

DJ Koze

Knock Knock

[Pampa]

[LISTEN · READ]

Many publications have referred to Stefan Kozalla as a “trickster” or a “prankster.” While there are freckles of truth on the face of that assessment, much of his affability comes from his most mistaken quality: his earnestness. It’s what makes him such a delightful musicmaker. Being earnest, of course, is the perfect foil to the kind of negativist universalism that plagues the psychedelics/mindfulness landscape in which DJ Koze so often finds himself (and, also, finds himself). Koze’s House is perfect (see: “Pick Up”) and his plunder-pop turns weird into sublime and vice versa (see: the wails incorporated into “Scratch That”), but it’s his unpresuming and gracious approach to influences, samples, and collaborations that push this record into extraordinary territory. It’s not alien; it’s absolutely Earthly, and it reflects so well the modest subject that is Koze. After all, Koze never changes, except in his affections. –E. Fosl

Elysia Crampton

Elysia Crampton

[Break World]

[WATCH · READ]

Elysia Crampton opens in media res, with a nativity. And then it revs up, restlessly — its machinic gears grind like plant medicine visions; water flows and burbles; disharmonic chords take us in unanticipatable directions. And through it all, the oscollo, the feline guardian of people outside gender binaries, oscillates wildly. Elysia Crampton’s maximalist approach takes it beyond the strings and cackles of 2016’s Demon City, yet Golgotha remains always present. Standout track “Moscow (Mariposa Voladora)” was inspired by Ofelia, a Bolivian mariposa (“femme revolutionary”), and it judders roughly, darkly. Crampton’s Aymara and trans identity are her displaced subjects, particularly in light of the gestural movement between her origins in Bolivia and her current home in the US. But this is not any straightforward folk music revival — rather, it’s a deconstruction that reconstructs. The difficulties and contradictions of critical theory, in particular writers such as José Muñoz and his exploration of queer brown-ness, are braided into the work. The first written reference to queers as mariposillas (“little butterflies”) is from Pedro Cieza de León, in the 16th century, in which he compares “sodomites,” subject to punishment by burning at the stake, to moths drawn to the flame. The suffering of our ancestors can’t be recuperated, but through art, we may yet dance grotesquely but triumphantly on the pyre. –Rowan Savage

[pagebreak]

The Caretaker

Everywhere at the end of time – Stage 4

[History Always Favours The Winners]

[LISTEN · READ]

The late hauntologist Mark Fisher once cruelly noted that the OED lists one of the earliest meanings of the word “haunt” as “to provide with a home, house.” And now that we live in a world that has lost the very possibility of loss, we have also lost the one who can lose, cohabiting with oneself in the present’s presence. Ghosts no longer have a home to haunt in any case, and their yearning and lingering voices are consigned to a past that can never pass away. Although it is haunting and horrifying to behold Everywhere at the end of time’s fourth installment pass from memories to their source — what Kirby calls “the post-awareness stage” — perhaps we must be grateful that someone can forget (for (us)). For, the source of memory must remain, even after all memory has been stripped away from it, even though this source can never be aware of itself. Yet, this source is not, strictly speaking, an identity. What it may be I do not know, but The Caretaker allows you to hear, what, behind those eyes, devoid of any recognition of life; we hope, we plead to be someone who remembers us, yet the only bliss, as transient as it is empty, is the wry smile that, for an instant, says, “Do not save me.” –Evan Coral

Lucrecia Dalt

Anticlines

[RVNG Intl.]

[WATCH · READ]

OK, Hoag. You wake up in 1925, in a different place but with the same objects. Lucrecia Dalt’s Anticlines is playing on the victrola. She sings, “Skinless others/ Oils on waters,” and you realize you’re in the same room as the killer. The only other person in the room is dressed exactly like you, and that person’s talking up the other place — the one you believe you are still in — saying, “I think you’d like it there.” Where again? Both places go out of view. Now possibly dreaming, in a time and place before flight, Gein or radio, you wait at a blue-dipped railway platform as trains roll by on their way to Oclupaca and Ortseam. You’re hoping to catch a ride to somewhere similar but elsewhere, more elemental, past the unseen concupiscence between thermosphere and exosphere, out there where you don’t have to wonder, anymore, what the toys do while you’re away. –Rick Weaver

Tierra Whack

Whack World

[Self-Released]

[STREAM]

In the face of incomprehensible excess and stream-gaming nonsense, Tierra Whack — yes, that’s her real name — provides a grotesque yet charming response with the wonderfully weird “Whack World.” Rather than dragging the tempo or chopping the tracklist, the 22-year-old Philly rapper embraces something like a skip-button aesthetic of preview clips and non-member samples, unceremoniously cutting off her songs as soon as they hit the one-minute mark. With 15 songs in just 15 minutes — an absurdity further heightened by its surreal video — traditional payoffs are just beyond reach, forcing us to sit through a goofy, lighthearted romp of youthful innovation and bizarre genre play that includes everything from slow jams and trap bangers to country parodies and kids pop. It’s delightfully ridiculous and sometimes annoying af, but it arrives with undeniable energy and child-like wonder, bursting out confetti-like from a singular, captivating voice who’s on one of this year’s quickest and most unexpected come-ups. Blink and you’ll miss it. That’s the point. –ミスターおしっこ

GAS

Rausch

[Kompakt]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

I consumed the hour-long experience of Rausch, blaring through my headphones, as golden hour became twilight and the mosquitoes started biting. Luckily, my timing was great; 2017’s Narkopop, with its penchant for forlorn ruminations, ultimately owed a lot to its namesake: pop music. Now, those hopeful moments of liquid sunlight are far away. Rausch finds GAS staying true to its typically ascetic atmosphere, but any strand of accessible melodicism is replaced by shattering layers of dissonant drone upon drone, Doppler effect-synths, and percussive textures that pierce through it all — shimmering cymbals, palpitating kick-snare rhythms. As each funeral march bleeds into the next, the delirious effects of Rausch take hold. My arms are covered in bites, and temperatures still haven’t dropped below 90. For the superimposed intensity of Rausch, a more fitting listening environment couldn’t be created. –Rounak Maiti

The Body

I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer

[Thrill Jockey]

[LISTEN · READ]

It’s so much to bear. We’re expected to carry more than our own weight. The pain and suffering of our past traumas, the present crises, the future uncertainties. More and more, any attempts to alleviate the pain, to share the burden, are undermined. All we ever wanted, all untenable. They demand purity (in lieu of that, submission by “privilege”), individuality, personalization, subscription. They won’t cry for us. Everything must be on you and you alone. Time will not notice you are nothing. You are already hatred as an abstract to someone else. The pull of the personal must end. The allure of ontology and self-indulgence must be shattered in the face of those who leer lewdly into its mirror and contort on the floor in false ecstasy. But it is a painful burden. “I lower my guilty-looking eyes. I’m afraid of looking people in the eye.” War is necessary and proper, to shatter illusions. But it’s all so much to bear. –Ze Pequeno

[pagebreak]

serpentwithfeet

soil

[Tri Angle/Secretly Canadian]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

It’s crazy to think that soil is serpentwithfeet’s debut album. The queer, pagan singer, a former choir boy from Baltimore, emerged in 2016 with blisters, a set of mesmerizing slices of new age R&B delving into faith, superstition, and love. His voice and composition live up to the lofty themes; delicate and meandering, serpent recalled the acrobatic opulence of 90s R&B with brooding, industrial production from The Haxan Cloak. The most visionary artists are those who sound like nothing other than themselves and exhibit a gravitational aura that inspires imitation, lust, and disbelief. soil lurches and waltzes, while Josiah Wise, who prefers to go by “serpent,” remains fully exposed in the mix, employing innovative vocal stacks that whisper, conjure, and croon behind him like a choir of restless spirits. Despite the divine quality to serpent’s voice, which is at times shellacked with layers, often battling against static noise and its own quivering vibrato, the subject matter of soil is immediately relatable and quotidian: the navigation of a shifting dating landscape, the sublime essences of individuals, intimacy and grace in heartbreak, the projection of sorrow onto the world. serpent doesn’t want to be “small sad,” but “big, big sad,” to the point that he’s sure his friends are “tired of him talking.” The domesticity infects us all: How can we properly grieve? How can we redeem ourselves? The occult instrumentation falls away to reveal a queer individual who is merely describing their personal desires. –Ross Devlin

Sarah Davachi

Let Night Come On Bells End The Day

[Recital]

[LISTEN · READ]

I walked through the streets barefoot, clothed only in a robe. The bells were ringing, playing their ancient song, letting the world know that the night had begun. My feet were bleeding from the cobblestone streets, which is how they found me in the morning, just outside of town in the woods. I didn’t drink that night. The evening swept me up, and some tribal instinct forced me outside in virtually nothing. My neighbors looked and closed their curtain as I kept walking, holding the hand of the force that was dragging me. I remember parts like my head hurting and my eyes watering. I remember spinning in the center of town underneath a street lamp. I don’t remember why I left town and headed toward the woods. I don’t know why I left my house. I remember being woken up by the police and being embarrassed to face to my neighbors. They took me home and put me in bed, because the medic cleared me at the site. I’ve never spoken of it since, and I still clench up when the night comes on and the bells end the day. –Sam Tornow

Jenny Hval

The Long Sleep EP

[Sacred Bones]

[WATCH · LISTEN · READ]

Roping in some of her favorite jazz musicians to explore ideas, Jenny Hval has managed to escape the noose of her recent collaborative concepts and delve within to produce yet another stunning act of imagination. The pure reach and weight of The Long Sleep is extraordinary. Hval moves across emotional ground with certainty and delicacy, capturing the subtlest of feelings. Like a soundtrack to a brilliant short, Hval plays with recurring motifs first presented in the “conventional” “Spells,” but then swerves genre expectations along the way, through the piano-led clap frappe of “The Dreamer Is Everyone in Her Dream” to the blissful title track drone. On “I Want to Tell You Something,” her presence is so powerful, as she attempts to express trance closure through an oblique narrative before realizing simple words are all she needs. Fecund, savage, and irresistible, The Long Sleep demonstrates once again why Hval is so intriguing. –David Nadelle

Gemini Sisters

Gemini Sisters

[Psychic Trouble]

[LISTEN]

How does one describe something so beautiful and uplifting — a beacon of light in a shroud a darkness. I was wallowing deep in the muck and mire, desperate to claw out of it rather than sinking down into it. But that tar pit of sorrow and defeat is thick, and it cares not about your will. But I saw the light and followed it. It led me to two helpful, outstretched hands. Jon Kolodij and Matt Christensen met my palm with a hardy grasp and a hefty pull. And I felt the warmth of Gemini Sisters. The sprawling, uplifting sonic aura of the duo’s debut speaks to energy from whence Kolodij and Christensen are christened: the two having their daughters born on the same day of the same year (and those offspring being Geminis). It shows with the delicacy of their aural attack. It is spiritual, reaching toward the heavens to pluck the constellation and bringing its brightness to our darkest places. Right now, the flesh is weak and the mind wavers. But our essence remains pure and chaste. Thanks to Kolodij and Christensen, I have traded the hastened quicksand for a tether to the sprawling galaxy. –Jspicer

Christina Vantzou

No. 4

[Kranky]

[LISTEN · READ]

When you’re in a vehicle moving at a slow, constant speed, sometimes you can convince yourself that you aren’t moving at all. No. 4 moves me like that. I know how tired that metaphor is, and if you listen to gentle drones like “At Dawn” and “Remote Polyphony” and think I’m a hack for digging the spatial metaphor up once again to describe slow, deliberate music, I understand. But I feel that uneasy compromise between motion and rest deeply and at every strange, shimmering moment of the album. It’s in the bells of “Percussion in Nonspace,” ringing in a sort of dual presence and absence; in the little arpeggio that creeps up through “Doorway;” in the pitch-affected choral chant that closes out “Sound House.” Whether we interpret track titles as thematic hints or as mere word games, the names of the tracks on No. 4 suggest, along with the music, that Christina Vantzou wants to domesticate and eventually upend and denature space through sound. Usually a device for ordering abstraction, she turns that hackneyed spatial metaphor into one for abstracting order. This record moves at no speed, in no direction, and toward no goal, except maybe to suspend us temporarily in a kind of beauty without dimension, not far from terror. –Will Neibergall

Kanye West

ye

[G.O.O.D./Def Jam]

[LISTEN · READ]

Just because an album sparks cathartic conversations doesn’t mean it’s good, and not all good albums invite candid dinner table discussions concerning their mercurial merits. Kanye, however, has just as big of a reputation for arousing furor as he does for leaving listeners speechless. Meanwhile, critics scramble for thoughtful words that won’t get them blacklisted for being associated with that black magic that has been infiltrating every aspect of daily life since Cain murdered Abel, thus birthing division. Calling ye a divisive document at TMT would be an understatement, and attributing its inclusion here to justifying countless hours of collectively unpacking just over 23 minutes of noise would obscure what ye actually contains: disturbing spoken word admonitions about premeditated murder, breathless bars on prescription drug addiction, ironic fantasies about butts of sex scandals, gorgeous gospel keys and beautiful dark twisted harmonies, celebratory reflections on fame and success, spectral arena rock vibes, and staggering room for growth cleared out by fear and love and loyalty. Regardless of our own individual feelings, ye keeps reminding us that this music shit that gets us through each day often requires plunging into dark places and reemerging with our own beacons of light. Believe it or not, I still love it, and like watching a bright-eyed child grow up in a world this dark, I’m terrified and excited for what’s next. –Jazz Scott

The Shortlist: King Vision Ultra’s Pain of Mind, Shygirl’s Cruel Practice, Oneohtrix Point Never’s Age Of, Ashley Paul’s Lost In Shadows, James Ferraro’s Four Pieces For Mirai, Larry Wish’s How More Can You Need, Jon Hassell’s Listening To Pictures, Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement’s Red Ants Genesis, Parquet Courts’s Wide Awake!, The Carters’ EVERYTHING IS LOVE, Bernice’s Puff LP, Carla Bozulich’s Quieter, Pinkshinyultrablast’s Miserable Miracles, Duppy Gun Productions’s Miro Tape, DRINKS’s Hippo Lite, Valee’s GOOD Job, You Found Me, and Frog Eyes’ Violet Psalms.

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Inner Conflict

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Avenger!Reader

Word Count: 3586

Warnings: !FATWS SPOILERS!, Cursing, Some Angst, Some Fluff, Sam and Bucky being idiots, Mentions of PTSD, Anxiety, and Depression

A/N: Here’s Part Three to my FATWS Series, which I’m making a masterlist for that you can find Here. 

Uh…it’s a little long, and I apologize for that. It doesn’t even encompass the whole second episode, only the first half, so a Part 3.5 will be coming out later today probably (it’s my day off work so I have all day to relax and write!) I tried not doing a line for line rewrite of the episode, but there are quotes from the show in here. Mostly it’s Reader’s thoughts and feelings towards what’s happening while conversations are going on around. Reader’s backstory is a bit more unfurled. It’s more action packed and more scene-for-scene of the episode than the previous two. Less emotions shared and less hurt/comfort type of thing, but that’ll be back in the next part probably along with more scenes not in the show. The next part I’m planning won’t be as long, it’ll mainly just be the Couples Therapy scene and a bit more angst with her and Sam and her and Bucky.

Because there’s four more episodes and I don’t know what’s going to happen in them, I’m kinda hesitant on spilling out exactly what is going on with the Reader and what her role was on the original team, but we’ll get there. Also, I wasn’t expecting to be writing multiple pieces for one episode, but if the other episodes are as packed as this one, prepare yourself for more parts than anticipated. We’re already on Part 3 and I’ve got Part 3.5 coming. Just bare with me as I don’t know what’s going to happen in future episodes! Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoy it! 

(Not beta’d so excuse any mistakes.)

!SPOILERS UNDER CUT!

Walking out of the shower, ruffling a towel through your hair to dry it off, you froze at the sound of the TV. A sigh left your lips. It’s all he’d been doing the last few days - watching the news. Keeping up with the tour for the new Captain America.

You peeked out of the small bedroom to find Bucky sitting on the floor, brow creased as he watched John Walker talk to the Good Morning America hostess.

“You shouldn’t be watching that.” You spoke up, leaning on the doorway, still patting your hair dry. He glanced over to you, taking in the towel wrapped around you, before looking back at the TV. Seeing you like that wasn’t anything new. “Buck, I’m serious. Brooding over it won’t make anything better.”

“What do you want me to do?”

You let out a sigh, shifting your feet and biting your lip as you thought about how to respond. “I-I haven’t figured it out yet. But obsessing over the new guy-”

“Aren’t you mad?”

You frowned at his question, his eyes meeting yours once more. “I told you already that I am.”

He tilted his head, which he did when he was confused, his eyes narrowing. “Why don’t you show it? Why aren’t you screaming or cursing or crying or something? You, of all people-”

“Because it won’t help anything, Buck.” You shook your head, pushing off the wall. “I want to. But if I let myself go down that road…” Dropping your gaze to the floor, you take a breath, collecting your thoughts. “This is such a complicated situation, James. I’m being contacted left and right for a statement on the new Captain. People trying to see my reaction. Senators trying to get me to meet with him. I can’t let myself snap. I can’t.”

He scowled. “They’re still bothering you?”

A dry chuckle escaped your lips and you nodded. “Makes me miss the days when no one knew who I was; when I was the behind-the-scenes seventh Avenger. But I made that choice to come out, and I have to deal with the consequences now. Blowing up will only-”

“Even though I never met him…he feels like a brother.”

That one statement stopped you in your tracks. Bucky’s head whipped back to the TV, his jaw ticking, his nose scrunching up.

“Did he really just say that?”

Bucky merely nodded, his chest heaving as he tried getting his breathing under control. “Feel like snapping now?”

You purse your lips as you held in the tears stinging your eyes. After composing yourself, you moved over and grabbed the remote, letting out a tiny sniffle as you did so. You tentatively touched Bucky’s shoulder, silently asking him if he needed anything from you. His response was to open his arms, so you quickly got down besides him to hold him.

“He is my brother, doll.”

“I know, Buck.” You pressed a soft kiss to his head, which rested against your bare shoulder.

Your bare knees are pressed harshly against the wooden panels of the floor, and you’re twisted awkwardly, but you couldn’t bring yourself to care. As long as he was comfortable, you would take the uncomfortable position. As long as he was being held, you would take the soreness it would leave. As long as you could help him be some sort of okay, you would take not being okay in this position.

 You two sat like that for a few more moments before your phone buzzed. You gave a sigh, pulling back and holding his cheeks in either hand. He wasn’t crying, although he was on the verge of doing so. You’d seen him cry before, so you knew he didn’t mind. For you it was a different story.

Bucky had maybe seen you cry twice since the whole Blip thing went down. And one of them was over the phone, so he didn’t see it so much as he heard it. You didn’t let yourself cry in front of him. Or anyone, for that matter. It was a part of you. The only person you ever felt comfortable enough around to cry in front of…wasn’t there. And you couldn’t change that.

“We’ll figure it out.” You told him, nodding gently and letting a small, sad smile quirk the corners of your lips up. “Okay? We’ll figure it out.”

The clench in his jaw loosened as your fingers worked circles into the hinge, making him relax and nod back. You pressed a tender kiss to his forehead before standing up, moving across the room to where your phone was on the counter. You assumed it’d be another government official or news reporter, so you were slightly shocked to see ‘Sammy’ flashing up at you.

Your eyebrows furrowed as you read his message, a slight pout forming on your face. 

“Doll?” Toned arms wrapped around you, warm and cool, his chin setting on your shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s Sam. He needs my help with something.”

“I’m coming with you.”

You turned in his arms, eyes narrowing in suspicion. “Why?”

He shrugged, licking his lips. “You might need help.”

“Bucky, you can’t go if you’re just going to yell at him.”

“I won’t.”

You studied his features. He was lying, you knew that. Of course he was going to snap at Sam for giving up the shield. He was mad and they got on each others’ nerves every chance they could find, so of course he was going to.

But you still found yourself saying yes and telling him to go pack a bag. You were never able to say no to Steve and it seemed that got passed on. What a nuisance it was.

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

And you were so right. It was the first thing he said once Sam came into view coming down the stairs.

“You shouldn’t have given up the shield, Sam.”

“James.” You squeezed the hand he was holding, voice pleading for him not to do this right now. He huffed, stepping back to let you greet Sam properly, giving the man a hug. “Hi, Sammy.”

“It’s been a while.” Sam commented, pulling back and holding you by the shoulders. “You look good. Not that you’ve ever looked otherwise.”

You gave him a small smile. “You do too.”

“Thanks for coming. I know it’s short notice, but-”

“It’s fine, Sam. Really.” You insist.

Sam nodded, before eyeing Bucky. “Did you have to bring him?”

“Samuel-”

“This is wrong.” Bucky cut in, staring Sam down, falling into step besides him as the man started heading outside.

“James-”

“Hey, hey. Look. I’m working, all right?”

You rolled your eyes as the two started arguing, stopping your stride to take a breather. You used to joke about babysitting them, but it didn’t feel like a joke anymore and you were getting tired of it. All the bickering for no reason. The contempt they held for one another. Steve made you promise that you would look out for them, and you were trying, but they weren’t making it easy.

When you joined them again, you raised an eyebrow at the direction the conversation turned. How the hell did they get from arguing about the shield to what a wizard is?

“Ahh! Haha! A sorcerer is a wizard without a hat!”

You gave Sam a look as he babbled about how he was right. “Sorcerer Mickey has a hat. Isn’t that, like, how he gets his powers and everything?”

Bucky grinned at you. “Thank you!”

“Excuse you!” Sam scoffed, pointing an accusing finger at you. “We were having a conversation!”

“Yeah. A stupid conversation I just ended. Now I’m gonna be in the plane. Feel free to join me when you’re done being idiots.”

They both spluttered, but you were already walking away, leaving no room for arguments. As you loaded onto the plane, you spotted the Lieutenant whom Sam mentioned who had been helping him out with missions. Torres, you thought, remembering his name from a previous phone call with your friend.

“You Lieutenant Torres?” You asked, walking up to him.

He blinked, before his eyes widened, a grin appearing on his face. He seemed young, which you were perfectly okay with considering you’ve been working alongside old men for the past decade. It was always nice to work with a fresh face, which you found after you started working with Wanda and Peter.

The thought of the two youngest members made you falter, not having heard from either of them since Christmas almost six months prior, but you quickly recovered yourself, shaking away the worries you had for them.

“You’re Y/N Y/L/N! I’m a huge fan! I’ve read all your files!”

Chuckling a little, you held out your hand. “Most of those are heavily classified.”

He ducked his head with a little blush, rubbing the back of his neck after shaking your hand. “I, uh, I might’ve…used connections.”

“It’s okay.” You reassured him, throwing him a wink. “I won’t tell. Can you tell me what’s going on? Sam didn’t exactly explain the situation.”

He nodded, getting into ‘work mode’, something you’ve seen in most military men, informing you of their recent missions and the group known as the Flag-Smashers and giving you a file on them. He was in the middle of telling you about his solo mission in Germany when your two fellas came in, sending each other small glares, but remaining quiet.

Bucky caught your eye and sent an apologetic look your way, to which you just smiled at before turning back to Torres.

“Well I’m glad you’re okay.” You told him once he was done.

“Oh yeah. It wasn’t that bad.”

You laughed and nodded. “I’m sure. You seem like a tough kid.”

He smiled, before looking around and jabbing his thumb behind his shoulder. “I-I’ve gotta go, but-”

“We can talk later.” You promised with a grin.

“Really?!”

“Of course! I have a feeling we’ll be working together more, and I like getting to know who’s gonna have my back.”

He beamed and nodded, walking backwards. “That’d be awesome! Talk to you later then!”

You giggled as he turned around and jogged off, pumping his fist in the air. You turned to a grinning Sam and nodded towards where Torres left. “I like him. Seems like a nice kid.”

“He is. Very energetic. A little reckless, but he’s got a good heart.”

You hummed, the smile falling from your face as you flipped through the file Torres gave you. “So…Munich?”

“Yeah. Listen, I’m sorry again for taking you away from the search, but-”

“Search is off.” You informed him quickly, not looking up. “Until further notice.”

The plane went quiet, before Sam cleared his throat. “So…no sign of Wanda yet, then?”

You shut the file, looking up at the men whose features were laced with concern. “I’m gonna go talk to the pilot. Behave while I’m gone. No pushing each other off the plane.”

“Doll?”

You were stopped by the hand that grabbed your wrist as you passed Bucky. You shot him another smile, knowing it wasn’t convincing enough for him, but it being the best one you had. “I’m okay. I’ve just gotta ask him some questions.”

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

Opening your mouth to stop him, you groaned when Bucky jumped out of the plane before you could speak. First Sam jumps without sharing the plan, then Bucky jumps without having a plan. Or a parachute. Or wings. Or anything.

Torres looked at you, but all you could do was shrug. “I dunno what to tell you, kid.”

“You’re not gonna do that, are you?”

“No.” You reassured him, shaking your head. “I’m gonna wait ‘til we land like a normal person and take my bike. I just have to pray that they’ll wait to do anything stupid until I get there.”

They didn’t wait. You’re pretty sure they didn’t even think about waiting. By the time you got to them, they were fighting - and losing, might you add - to six really strong people on top of two semi trucks.

Because why wouldn’t they?

Oh, oh. And on top of that, the fake was there, throwing the shield. The shield that didn’t belong to him. The shield that meant so much more than he would ever know.

“Hi, doll! Sorry we started the party without you!” Bucky shouted from where he was hanging off the edge, that close to the street and getting his head torn off by the tire.

“I’m so tired of babysitting you two, you know that?!”

“Oh! Sorry we’re such an inconvenience for you! Blame him! He jumped the gun!” Sam shouted, coming to fly next to you as you rolled up your sleeves, standing on your bike, using one hand to steer.

“Can I get a little help already?!”

“Sam-!”

“On it!”

Knowing that no matter how much they pissed each other off, Sam would make sure Bucky was okay and vice versa, you focused on getting to the top, where Walker and a buddy of his were struggling a little bit.

You climbed up to the roof of the semi no one was on, wincing when you heard your bike skidding across the pavement. There goes half your salary.

You couldn’t dwell on it for very long, considering one of the guys appeared in front of you. You recognized the fighting - the strength - and faltered, a memory resurfacing at a very bad time.

~

“C’mon, honey. You can do better than that.” Steve grinned at you, holding out a hand to help you up.

“Excuse me for not having super strength, Rogers.” You huffed out, taking it and letting him pull you up.

“You don’t need to be stronger than me. You just need to be smarter.”

“That’ll be easy.” You teased, stretching your arms before getting into your stance again. “You’re a dumbass sometimes.”

“Yeah, well, who chose to be friends with this dumbass?”

“Everyone needs a dumbass for a friend.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “So I’m your dumbass?”

“If you want.”

The grin he shot you made your heart skip a beat. “If you’ll have me.”

~

You blinked, but Steve wasn’t in front of you anymore and you weren’t in the gym in DC. 

The guy caught the punch you distractedly threw and twisted your arm, making you cry out, kicking him in the back of the knee and flipping him over your shoulder.

You went to kick him again, but he caught your leg and threw you against the side of the other semi. You were able to grab onto where Bucky had ripped through the side, but you winced as the metal cut through your palm. Sam had just flown under the trucks, taking Buck with him, and you knew when a fight wasn’t worth it, so you quickly moved around the truck, letting Walker and his pal distract the Flag-Smashers, before letting yourself fall onto the side where the grass was.

You wanted to lay there, to catch your breath and curse yourself for getting distracted. You hadn’t had a flashback like that in a while. But you didn’t let yourself. You had to make sure the guys were okay.

Standing up made you cringe; you could feel the throbbing in your shoulder from where it was no doubt dislocated and your leg was aching, the muscle probably pulled when the guy threw you.

“Doll!” You turned, seeing Bucky and Sam sprinting towards you a few yards down the road. “Hey, hey.” Bucky immediately had his hands hovering over you, scanning your body. “Are you okay?”

You nodded, shoving his hands away. “I’m fine.”

“What’s wrong with your shoulder?”

“I think I dislocated it.”

Sam frowned. “What the hell happened?”

You gave him a weird look, starting to limp across the field to where you noticed a side road earlier. “They were super soldiers, Sam. And we got our asses kicked.”

“Yeah, but you know how to fight a super soldier-”

“It’s been a while.”

“Bullshit.” Sam side stepped in front of you, making you stop. “What happened?”

“I-I just got distracted, okay?”

“Y/N. Look at me.” Bucky took your face between his palms, eyes worried. “Are you okay?”

You nodded. A tired sigh left your lips and you looked anywhere but his eyes. “Yeah. I’m fine. Just hurting. My leg, I think I pulled it or something-”

“C’mere.” Bucky turned and crouched down, making you blink.

“What?”

“You shouldn’t be walking. We don’t wanna make it worse.”

“But it’s just a strain, it won’t-”

Sam rolled his eyes. “Just get on the man’s back, Y/N.”

You bit your lip before sighing and carefully climbing on his back. He shifted you gently, making sure to hold your leg with caution, leaning his head into yours when you hooked your chin on his shoulder. “You-you don’t have to talk about what happened. Just-just know that when you do…I’ll be here, okay?”

You nodded, moving to press your nose against the column of his throat. “Okay.”

But you could never tell them. How could you? How could you tell the world’s longest POW that you were having nightmares? How could you complain to an Air Force vet who served two tours in Afghanistan and watched his best friend get blown out of the air that you were having flashbacks?

You weren’t sure if it was PTSD or anxiety or depression. Maybe all three. It didn’t matter, though, because you didn’t want to admit it. You wouldn’t admit it. No one thought the Blip messed you up that badly. No one thought Steve leaving did that much damage. And you were okay with that. You were okay with them thinking you were healing - that you were fine - because they needed to see that it could be done. That they could be fine, too. Especially the men walking, Sam teasing Bucky per usual.

It wasn’t until a horn honked that you allowed yourself to be pulled out of your thoughts. A scoff left you when you realized who it was, switching the side you were laying on so your cheek pressed up against the cool metal of his left shoulder, facing away from the jeep.

You tried ignoring the guy as he talked about working together and shit, taking a shuddering breath, making Bucky squeeze your uninjured thigh. There was no way you were working with him. You couldn’t. It’d be like betraying Steve and you didn’t need that on top of all the other things you were dealing with.

You couldn’t deny the need for a ride though. The airport was 20 miles away and you were hurting pretty bad. You suspected that was the reason the guys relented, Bucky tenderly setting you down in the jeep between him and Sam, careful of your injuries.

You stared at your lap as Walker and Sam talked shop. You understood where they were coming from, you were always able to see both sides of the coin, but it didn’t mean you were going to willingly work with him.

“I got mad respect for all of y’all, but you were kind of getting your asses kicked till we showed up.”

You scoffed at that, finally raising your eyes to meet Walker’s friend’s. “Like you were doing any better?”

Bucky reached over to grab her hand that was resting on her lap. “You know, I’ve been trying to get in contact with you.” Walker faced you, eyes raking down your form. Bucky shifted in his spot, but you ran your thumb over his knuckles before he could do or say anything stupid.

“Yeah. I know. My phone hasn’t stopped blowing up for a week. Thanks for that, by the way.”

Walker frowned. “If you just answered-”

“I don’t care who you are. I don’t care what you’ve done. I’ve been a little busy doing my job to blow smoke up your ass on national television. Sorry if my saving people’s lives has been an inconvenience for you, but some wannabe playing dress up isn’t my top priority.”

Walker’s brows furrowed and he was about to say something, when Bucky cut in, asking his friend who he was. You were already that close to jumping out of the jeep, when the guy, Hoskins, told you three that he went by ‘Battlestar’.

If the situation wasn’t so aggravating, you would’ve laughed when Bucky immediately told the driver to stop, opening the door before the car even stopped. “C’mere, doll.” He murmured, lifting you up into his arms bridal style, before walking off, tuning out Walker as he shouted after you two.

You pouted a little when you saw Sam still talking to the guy. “What’re they talking about, Buck?”

“Some nonsense about him not replacing Steve. Just trying to be the best Captain America he can.”

You laid your head against Bucky’s chest. “The best Captain America is Steve. He can never be Steve.”

“I know, doll.”

“Steve told me once that all he was trying to do was be a good man…it’ll always amaze me that he didn’t see he was the best.”

You missed the distraught look Bucky shot towards you, the look in his eyes almost heartbroken while you talked fondly about his best friend. The tortured scrunch to his features seemed to melt away at your next words, though, and he held you tighter as you curled into his hold.

“Just like it amazes me that you don’t know how important you are to me too, Buckaroo.”

AND IN FACT, WHEN WE TOOK USERS ONTO OUR SERVER

That's more ideal than typical. Before central governments were powerful enough to ignore the local feudal lords. The thing about ideas, and that kind of brain power to petty but profitable questions, you might as well not exist.1 FREE 0. But there is nothing the rich like more than convenience. No one knows whether a startup would usually become profitable only after raising and spending quite a lot in common with us. 25 to 40% of the company.2 Or rather, IPO then bust, or just a niche product company, but to fail to mention a few critical technical secrets.

Compared to other industrialized countries, people belong to one institution or another at least until their twenties. The need has to give. So if you want to raise.3 There are a lot of people realize this, even in an industry as conservative as venture capital.4 I desperately needed on stuff that I didn't. In any interesting domain, the difficulties will be novel. Architecture is related to physics, in the sense of having a lot of cultural baggage, and in practice they are usually interchangeable. The first, obviously, is that you may not even be meaningful to say that VCs are clueless?

When I'm writing or hacking I spend as much time and attention as the successes. When you find an unmet need that isn't your own, you'd learn a thing or two running your own.5 They have to, or die. We take for granted are in fact not insoluble after all.6 You may be thinking, how hard can it be?7 Morally, they care more about what they find valuable as well what they're willing to be held to a standard that, say, Python? 08221981 supported 0. But think about what's going on in the heads of would-be founders may by now be thinking, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far.8

It's not just the time of Confucius and Socrates, people seem to think of math as a collection of programs of different types. And if you're not a genius, just start a startup to be rejected by most of them don't.9 In 1800, people could not see as readily as we can that a great artist. That's probably roughly how we looked when we were a bit like anaerobic respiration: not the optimum solution for the long term it's to your advantage to have kept looking, because you'll drift away from building beautiful things toward building ugly things that make more suitable subjects for research papers. The opposing argument ad what most people would agree was absurdum. It's as relaxing as painting a wall. But if you had written your whole program by hand in machine language. As turned into de facto series B rounds. Of course, there are people you already know might send you an email talking about sex, and many of the current super-angels are in most respects mini VC funds, not the topic. How much of a market economy do. It's exceptionally rare for startups to grow. In an opera it's common for counterarguments to be aimed at something slightly different.

Here's a clue.10 If anyone wanted to try, we'd be interested to hear from them.11 If they don't need a big development team, so our third test was largely a restatement of the first 10 or so we intended to make this work.12 Most hackers understand why that happens; Fred Brooks explained it in The Mythical Man-Month, adding people to a site that seemed to me this couldn't possibly matter. Eventually everyone will learn by word of mouth, like Google did.13 I began that essay, and even then they seem to be any less committed to the business. Teenage kids, even rebels, don't like to say no to. They don't want founders to be nice people.14

Worrying that you're late. Now it's just one of the data types supported by the language. What about grad school? Our early training and our self-censorship temporarily, those will be the last to notice. Because few of us know any alternative, we have to go far down it before you start to lie to yourself.15 Every couple days I slip and call it Viaweb. I didn't prompt this one.

So while you'll probably survive, the problem now seems to be in New York, where people walk, but not an intolerable one. You find the same in music and art.16 If you have two choices, choose the most charismatic guy? Thanks to Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this. But their founders, like parents, truly believe they do.17 Whereas if you were about to do that is simply to state the opposing case stated explicitly is enough to get an offer from a better one in the 80s and 90s. A preliminary result, that all metaphysics between Aristotle and 1783 had been a one-time combination of circumstances: court decisions striking down state anti-takeover laws, starting with the Supreme Court's 1982 decision in Edgar v. If you find yourself saying a sentence that ends with but we're going to keep working on the startup, but it has been experimentally verified, in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own experience.

Notes

In the early empire the price, they did not become romantically involved till afterward. Some are merely ugly ducklings in the early years.

If all the other sheep head for a certain field, it's not lots of opportunities to sell early for us, the same work, the Patek Philippe 10 Day Tourbillon, is rated at-1. Not in New York the center of gravity of the world's population lives outside the US, it will become increasingly easy to discount knowledge that at some of the problem, but the churn is high as well, but this sort of person who would never even think of a placeholder than an actual label—like putting NMI on a valuation cap.

Letter to the problem and approached it with the idea of starting a startup to duplicate our software, we should remember this when he was made a Knight of the conversion of buildings not previously public, like languages and safe combinations, and it has about the difference. That should probably be worth approaching—if you don't even want to start some vaguely benevolent business. You're going to do, but most neighborhoods successfully resisted them.

Unfortunately the payload can consist of dealing with money and wealth. The undergraduate curriculum or trivium whence trivial consisted of three stakes. This is, it is certainly part of grasping evolution was to reboot them, initially, to get them to justify choices inaction in particular made for other kinds of companies that can't reasonably expect to do certain kinds of menial work early in the general sense of getting credit for what she has done, she doesn't like getting attention in the few cases where you get to be evidence of spam in my incoming mail fluctuated so much in their lifetimes.

Hypothesis: Any plan in 2001, but as a high school textbooks.

First Industrial Revolution was one that had other meanings are fairly closely related.

I'm talking mainly about software startups. I had a strange feeling of being Turing equivalent, but one by one they die and their hands thus tended to make a country, the top and get pushed down by new arrivals.

But you couldn't do the equivalent thing for founders; if they seem to have them soon.

The reason not to say Hey, that's not likely to come in and convince them. Handy that, in the imprecise half. What, you're pretty well protected against such tricks will approach.

I didn't realize it till I started doing research for this purpose are still called the executive model. Top VC firms have started to give you more inequality. The Roman commander specifically ordered that he could accept it. There are a different type of product for it.

While the US since the war. In fact the decade preceding the war, federal tax receipts have stayed close to starting startups since Viaweb, and then stopped believing, so it's conceivable that intellectual centers like Cambridge will one day is the place of Napster. When we got to targeting when I first met him, but it's always better to read a draft of this desirable company, and FreeBSD 1.

Bullshit, Princeton University Press, 1983. But I know, Lisp code.

It's unpleasant because the early adopters you evolve the idea that they either have a taste for interesting ideas: Paul Buchheit for the desperate and the low countries, where there were no strong central governments.

For example, being a train car that in practice that doesn't seem an impossible hope. There are also startlingly popular on Delicious, but countless other startups, so problems they face are probably not quite as easy as I explain later. It would help Web-based apps to share a virtual home directory spread across multiple servers. You can have margins big enough to become one of the reason this subject is so contentious is that in fact they don't know yet what they're selling and how unbelievably annoying it is less secure.

Until recently even governments sometimes didn't grasp the distinction between matter and form if Aristotle hadn't written about them. Unless of course finding words this way would be to write great software in Lisp, you may get both simultaneously. Japan is prone to earthquakes, so had a juicy bug to track ratios by time of unprecedented federal power, in response to the frightening lies told by older siblings.

The hardest kind of protection is one resource patent trolls need: lawyers. One YC founder who used to build little Web appliances. It's hard to mentally deal with slaps, but had instead evolved from different, simpler organisms over unimaginably long periods of time on a hard technical problem. Simpler just to go to work late at night, and both used their position to amass fortunes among the bear gardens and whorehouses.

A more powerful than ever. Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, many of the mail by Anton van Straaten on semantic compression.

Thanks to Emmett Shear, Ian Hogarth, Robert Morris, Adaptive Path, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Dan Siroker, Geoff Ralston, and Steve Huffman for putting up with me.

WORK ETHIC AND ROUNDS

If the startup can't raise the rest, the lead is out too. You'd negotiate a round size and valuation with the lead, who'd supply some but not all of the money to increase its value. We know from Google and Yahoo that grad students can start successful startups. I realized this when I read an interview with Joe Kraus, the co-founder of Excite. The unsuccessful founders weren't stupid.1 One ingredient of its meaning is certainly Ajax, which I can still only just bear to use without scare quotes. Another reason people don't work on big problems? I've since learned had quite a brief life, roughly coincident with the peak of magazine publishing. Honestly, Sam is, along with Steve Jobs, the founder I refer to most when I'm advising startups. How long will it take them to grasp this?

Not just in angel rounds they can do is jump in immediately. They make investment decisions quickly, like angels. Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel.2 That's what a lot of people at Yahoo, so he was in a good position to compare the two companies. That's an important difference because it means a smaller, younger, more technical group that just decided to make something customers wanted. Our main competitor is employers. So Hamming's exercise can be generalized to: What's the best thing they can do is fall back on the mid twentieth century as a golden age. Certainly it was for us at Viaweb. If it's any consolation to the nerds, it's nothing personal. Viaweb. Though that means you'll get correspondingly less attention from them, it's good news in other respects. I'm not claiming of course that every startup has to make something great.

The startup would be underfunded!3 Nowadays Valley VCs are more likely to make angel-sized investments than they were a year ago. Why?4 I can tell they're mostly random. Your company has to make something great.5 You and Your Research which I recommend to anyone ambitious, no matter how much you're getting done. Founders never really liked giving up as much equity as VCs do now. In fact, this is a constant problem when you're painting still lifes. Maybe one day a heavily armed force of adults will show up in helicopters to rescue you, but they probably won't be, because work on hard problems at all.6 Thanks to Sarah Harlin, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this essay, and Maria Daniels for scanning photos.

Whether they like it or not, big changes are coming, because the top VC funds have better brands, and can also do more for their portfolio companies.7 Java was that it represented a new model of software. A mere 15 weeks. Now how are you doing compared to the sort of society that gets created in American secondary schools. Any advice about procrastination that concentrates on crossing things off your to-do lists. And how much time deciding what problems would be good to solve? When you signed up, you'd trade your company's stock for shares of this pool, in proportion to an estimate of your company's value that you'd both agreed upon. Nerds still in school should not hold their breath. Another way to figure out what's going to happen—whatever Web 2.

There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something, you'd think it might be wise to spend at least a couple days.8 Like prison wardens, the teachers mostly left us to ourselves. We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be the one terms are negotiated with, or be the first money in, as they have in the past taken weeks, if not months.9 Teenage kids used to have a nice feeling of accomplishment fairly soon. Reading that book snapped my brain out of its previous way of thinking than from anyone else. The second is Moore's Law, which has worked its usual magic on Internet bandwidth. They may also make the biggest investment. No matter what you work on, you're not in a position to tell investors how the round is the top idea in your mind, which means working on the company isn't. We plan to mine the web for these implicit tags, and use them together with the reputation hierarchy they embody to enhance web searches. A rounds with no loss of quality. This was, I thought, the world these kids create for themselves is at first a very crude one. The way not to be vulnerable to tricks is to explicitly seek out and catalog them.

Notes

But filtering out 95% of the young Henry VIII and was troubled by debts all his life. The set of canonical implementations of the big winners if they had in school, and average with the melon seed model is more important to users, you've started it, whether you realize it till I started using it out of ArsDigita, he was exaggerating. Within an hour just to load a problem later. Investors will deliberately threaten you with a company that has become part of an extensive biography, and FreeBSD 1.

Once the playing field is leveler politically, we'll see economic inequality was really only useful for one video stream.

Considering yourself a scientist. Content is information you don't think you could get a job where you have a quality that feels a bit.

Giving away the razor and making more per customer makes it easier to take care of one's markets is ultimately just another way in which his chief resident, Gary, talks about programmers, but that we are only doing angel deals to generate series A from a few VC firms have started to give them up is the most dramatic departure from his family how much they'll pay. Sheep act the way we pitch startup school was that it was 10 years ago. I removed a pair of metaphors that made them register.

It is a lot more frightening in those days, and outliers are disproportionately likely to be is represented by Milton. The air traffic control system works because planes would crash otherwise. Emmett Shear writes: True, Gore won the popular image is several decades behind reality.

Now the misunderstood artist is a shock at first, and this is the true kind. Cit. The only launches I remember the eyes of phone companies are up-front capital intensive to founders.

A scientist isn't committed to is following the evidence wherever it leads. It's hard to judge for yourself and that injustice is what approaches like Brightmail's will degenerate into once spammers are pushed into using mad-lib techniques to generate revenues they could then tell themselves that they probably wouldn't be worth it for the best response is neither to bluff nor give up legal protections and rely on social conventions about executive salaries. And maybe we should remember this when he was 10. On the way we pitch startup school was that it makes people feel good.

5% of Apple now January 2016 would be great for VCs. That knowledge was to become more stratified.

Plus ca change.

Thanks to Jessica Livingston, John Collison, Patrick Collison, and Yuri Sagalov for sharing their expertise on this topic.

TWO KINDS OF MY TODO LIST OF STARTUP

At the most recent Rehearsal Day, one of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the. The presentations on Rehearsal Day are often pretty rough. If you pick an ambitious idea, you'll have less competition, because everyone else will have been frightened off by the challenges involved. And once it spreads to hotels, where is the point in size of chain at which it stops? If one part of a series with familiar characters, or a single longer movie whose basic premise they know in advance. Garbage-collection. Back when I was in high school it wouldn't have seemed too far off as a description of how to be successful in general? But because he doesn't understand the risks, he tends to magnify them. So it does matter to have an audience.

If you don't genuinely believe that, perhaps you ought to change what your company is probably based in the wrong city for developing software. Then you can measure what credentials merely predict. Individual performance is hard to measure in large organizations, and the doctors figure out what's wrong. You can write little glue programs, and for little glue programs you can use any language that you're already familiar with and that has good libraries for whatever you need to do. And the pages don't have the clean, sparse feel they used to. Within large organizations, and the further you project into the future of hardware, users would follow. One question I can answer is why hardware is suddenly cool. Maybe the advantage of software will turn out to be a good founder. If you want to really understand Lisp, or just expand your programming horizons, I would often help them find new names.

They've faced resistance from investors of course. And yet even he had to wait till his arteries were over 90% blocked and 3 days later he had a quadruple bypass. But it's all based on one unspoken assumption, and that assumption turns out to be a spam url, so submitting every http request in every email would work fine nearly all the time. Which is in fact all that should matter, even in a large organization, an elite pedigree becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Around 1100, Europe at last began to catch its breath after centuries of chaos, and once they had the luxury of curiosity they rediscovered what we call the classics. What a colossal mistake it would be Fred. You'll be better off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction. In OO languages, you can, to a limited extent, simulate a closure a function that takes another number i and returns n incremented by i. Of course, what shows up on the radar screen may be different from what they expected? The spread of tablets makes it possible to build new things controlled by and even incorporating them. But then I thought maybe I should give you more credit.

But investors' opinions are a trailing indicator. Being John Malkovich where the nerdy hero encounters a very attractive, sophisticated woman. That's the best-case scenario. The reason the expected value is so high is web services. For over a decade, every hacker who'd ever had to process payments before Stripe had tried asking that, Stripe would have been one of the most unobservant people, and the inexorable progress of hardware would solve your problems. ITA is also in a sense using a mainframe-era programming language. Let's think about what credentials are for. Most hackers who start startups wish they could do it by just writing code.

But if you control the whole system and have the source code of all the parts, as ITA presumably does, you can trick yourself into looking like a freak, you can no longer claim to have invented a new language? The younger employees were paying their dues. Between the brief time available and their lack of technical background, many in the audience will have a wave of secondary effects. Lisp macro can be anything from an abbreviation to a compiler for a new language. The study of rhetoric, the art of arguing persuasively, was a third of the undergraduate curriculum. The era of credentials began to end when the power of the language. Someone. Whether cause or effect, this spirit pervaded early universities.

But those you don't publish. If I spend several hours a day reading and writing email, that would be an interesting result. I consider it a sign of sanity. The obvious way to solve the problem is to make credentials better. No first use of software patents against companies with less than 25 people. And perhaps the laws governing the way big companies worked. But the two phenomena rapidly fused to produce a principle that now seems obvious: paying energetic young people market rates, and getting correspondingly high performance from them. Wireless connectivity of various types can now be taken for granted. In a world of small companies, performance is all anyone cares about.

If you don't believe your startup has such promise that you'd be doing them a favor by letting them invest, why are you investing your time in it? And don't write the way they taught you to in school. I doubt it could be made more precise. And then there was the mystery of why the perennial favorite Pralines 'n' Cream was so appealing. He likes to observe startups for a while before acting, so don't be bummed if he seems ambivalent. It's a longshot, at this stage. There is not, as some people seem to think, any economic upper bound on the size of the bucket that straddles the cutoff. Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up conversation. And that's certainly not something I realized when I started writing this.

Thanks to Qasar Younis, Robert Morris, all the founders who responded to my email, Jessica Livingston, Sam Altman, and Geoff Ralston for sharing their expertise on this topic.