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An ocean of red surrounded him, stretching as far as the eye could see. The landscape was featureless, just a constant crimson that engulfed even the horizon. Picking up a foot he took a step forward, then he felt it, the feeling of something breaking beneath his feet. It reverberated through his leg, the ripples from the disturbed crimson surface spread outwards from him as the feeling spread inwards. He gritted his teeth, the feeling wouldn't relent, the ocean was draining away, a sense of dread filled him, he didn't want to see, he didn't want to know what he stepped on, but it just kept draining. He would see it soon, he would know, he didn't want to, he didn't want to, he didn't want to, he didn't want to, he didn't...
David woke with a start, he was breathing heavily and shaking uncontrollably in a cold sweat. He took a few deep breaths and rubbed his face to wake himself. Just a dream. He brought his breathing back down to normal and looked at the clock on the wall, It was early morning. David sighed and laid his head back down, he would doze a bit till it was a more appropriate time to wake. At least he tried to, he couldn't seem to get even a nap in. Cursing it all he just grabbed the controls for the entertainment system to find something to preoccupy himself.
He swapped through a series of shows over the next couple of hours. He watched recent news for a bit, then a couple of different nature documentaries on various planets, and then a brutal version of football where the players were all remotely piloting heavy robots they could slam around with impunity. Eventually the hospital came to life again and the Vildune doctor entered into his room.
It gave him a quizzical look before speaking. "Oh, you're awake, didn't expect you to be up this early."
David gave a smile in return. "Yeah I guess I'm just an early riser." He turned the entertainment system off so he could properly listen.
"Well since you are up, we could start your final examination so we can get you cleared to leave."
David perked up a bit. "Sounds like a plan to me." The doctor started testing his body, poking, prodding and recording his reflexes. He shined a light in his eyes and questioned it's reflective properties, to which David gave a summarized explanation. The doctor was intrigued but didn't push him for more details, instead continuing with the examination. He finished by having him stand and conducting a basic mobility test. David went through a range of motions and stretches to make sure everything was working as intended.
Content with the tests the doctor had David sit. "Looking good, everything seems to be in order. Do you feel that something's off or otherwise not operating as it should?"
David just shook his head. "No everything feels fine."
The doctor nodded. "Alright, once I submit this form you'll be cleared to leave, if you could just sign here, thank you, any questions?"
Something popped into his head that he had forgotten. "Actually yeah, where did my stuff go?"
"You mean your pants? We were keeping it stored for you after we had it cleaned."
"Was there a blue scale in one of the pockets, do you still have that?" David was getting concerned.
"Yes I believe there was, we stored it with the pants if that's what you are wondering about."
David let out a relieved sigh. "Thanks, I would like that returned to me please."
The doctor nodded. "Of course, a nurse will bring your effects as well as a new printed shirt and pair of shoes."
"Appreciate it doc, thanks again." The doctor gave him a smile then left to file the paperwork. David sat down on the bed again to wait for everything to be processed. It was maybe ten minutes before a nurse showed up to deliver his clothes. The pile was deposited on the bedside with a polite nod, then they left.
David noticed the scale on top and picked it up to examine it again, It still had its luster but the edges were scuffed and scratched now, a testament to its use in his escape. He smiled to himself, I should make this into a necklace or something. He set it aside while he stripped down and got his clothes on. After he was properly dressed he slipped the scale into one pocket and the credit chip into his other before exiting his room.
Stepping into the hall he inhaled deeply, enjoying the freedom that he had missed. A call from down the hallway got his attention as he turned to see Sky and Solomon sitting in some chairs, evidently waiting for him. He smiled and approached to pair who stood to greet him. "Morning Sky, Solomon, were you guys waiting for me?"
"Not for very long." Solomon responded. "We decided it would be appropriate to congratulate you on your release from the hospital."
David chuckled a bit. "Thanks, but it was just one night, no need to stand on ceremony."
Solomon did a 'shrug'. "Well it was that, and Sky here doesn't seem to want to let you out of his sight." Sky snapped to Solomon with a look of betrayal before looking at the ground embarrassed.
David laughed and ruffled his head feathers a bit. Sky actually flinched a little at that, and a needle of sadness pierced David's heart. "Don't worry Sky I'm not going anywhere fast. I got to contact my boss and let them know the situation, then I have to get a new ship, supplies, equipment and a general sense of what I'm going to do next." Sky just nodded and continued staring at the floor. "Well, I'm going to go send a message, so you guys can wait for me at the front if you want."
With a nod they left to wait and David went off at a brisk pace to the public terminals. Following the signs on the walls he found them fairly quickly and signed in to his account. Labeling the message as an emergency situation update, he summarized the events of what transpired to the best of his abilities.
Before he hit send, he hesitated as he thought about something. His boss technically did belong to a branch of the government so maybe they could pull some strings for him. He added a p.s. to his letter asking for a favor and sent off the message. With that done he signed out of everything and left to meet up with Sky and Solomon.
He found them waiting in the lobby and with a wave joined up with them. "Sorry to keep you waiting. So, what's the plan for today then?"
Solomon responded. "I was going to research where I may be needed as a doctor or if there was a hospital that could use my services."
"Well wherever you go they will be lucky to have you. I think I'm going to get a new ship first, if you find out where you want to go, I can give you a lift so you don't have to hire a shuttle."
Solomon raised a manipulator at him. "I don't want to impose on you more than I have already."
David scoffed. "Impose? Come on, you're not imposing. We can just take a jump gate and be anywhere with another orbital station, and even if there wasn't a jump gate it would still be no big deal. Just accept the offer already, you might hurt my feelings if you don't." David got him with that one, his manipulators slumped a bit as he was caught between a rock and a hard place, and he knew it.
"Twist my tentacles why don't you. Fine, I will graciously accept your offer."
David smiled a devious little smile at his success. "Excellent, lets meet up later tonight to talk about things. If I remember correctly, I think there is a bar on level 23 called Zarg's bar 'n grill, sounds plain but they fix up a damn good drink. Lets meet around seven, standard Terran time, tonight for a bit of celebration and planning."
"Sounds good. I take it you are going to stay with David, Sky?" Sky was still embarrassed and just nodded. "Well then, I will see you both later." With that he turned and left leaving the two of them alone.
David turned to Sky who looked at him finally. "Well we should get going and find a new ship." Sky nodded and followed slightly behind him as they walked. They found an unoccupied lift and David set in a command to take them to the market level. Sky was being quiet the whole time and David felt kind of awkward with the little guy just standing there like some kind of attendant.
David decided he should try and start a conversation. "So how are you doing?"
Sky looked up at him quizzically. "What do you mean?"
"I mean with everything that's happened. You doing alright?"
Sky looked back down apparently thinking about it. "I'm not sure, I guess I'm a little nervous. I've never been anywhere but the Dread Throne before, I have no idea what to expect or do."
David bobbed his head a few times. "I see, well don't worry, I think you'll like freedom more than you know." A soft chime sounded in the lift and the door opened to reveal the market, bustling with life as people went to and from different shops and stalls talking to the various vendors selling goods from their planets. The diversity of life in the crowd was always exhilarating. Many different species walking, sliding, crawling, and flying all over the place while talking to the vendors, haggling and buying what they wanted, was energizing to say the least.
David was about to step out of the lift when he felt a hand grab onto his pocket. David looked down to see Sky, wide eyed, staring at the crowd of people like a deer in headlights before blinking a few times and noticing what he did. His hand quickly shot back down to his side and he mumbled a quick "I'm sorry."
David gave him a soft smile. "It's ok, just stay close and you'll be fine." Sky nodded and they exited together. David started weaving through the crowd Sky kept close to his side as he did. David found Sky's reaction to be quite funny as he stared at everything, mouth slightly agape like a little kid. Sky's gaze lingered on a vendor who was selling some hefty looking alien fruits, and David thought he might have saw Sky gulp a little bit at the sight of them.
Why not. David weaved his way over to the vendor with Sky in tow. Stopping in front of the stall the vendor gave him a warm welcome and insisted they buy his merchandise. David, not one to disappoint, scanned over the fruits for a moment before he saw one with good size and color to it. Selecting it from the pile, the merchant presented a device to pay with and David inserted his new chip into it, then scanned his hand. A second later a green light came on and the vendor gave him a polite bow in thanks for the patronage.
David turned back to Sky and presented the fruit to him. His eyes went wide as he stared at it, mouth hanging open, and David thought he might start drooling. He reached for it but stopped part way, hesitating. He looked up and David and asked "Can I?" Icy cold needles of sadness were everywhere in his heart now.
David managed to keep smiling and replied. "Yes, go ahead." Sky grabbed hold of the fruit with both hands and looked upon it like it was the most valuable thing in the world. He opened up and sunk his beak into the fruits flesh, slicing into it with an ease born of his natural affinity towards it's consumption. A look that could only be described as ecstasy flooded across his features as he practically melted on the spot, savoring every ounce of flavor.
David just smiled at his friends, but the sadness ate at his insides. This was probably the first real fruit Sky had eaten since he was a little kid. Anger at the snake bitch rose from the grave, but with nowhere to go, it evaporated into the ether. "Can you eat and walk Sky?" Sky snapped out of his own personal rapture and took a moment to process the question before giving him a quick nod. David smiled and started walking again, making sure he kept an eye on Sky as he ate his fruit so he didn't wander off.
He found a directory at a junction and looked over it for the shipyard. Target located he headed in that direction and into an interior lift which he keyed the correct sub level to go to. Sky had managed to finish an impressive amount of the fruit by the time they stepped out.
The entire level was dedicated to the creation and selling of ships of all shapes and sizes. The reception lobby was all clean polished metal with a large desk manned by three individuals of various species. David walked up to the desk with Sky behind him taking in the sights as he munched on his food.
A polite greeting was had and they asked how they could be of service. "Yes, I'm in the market for a high end exploration ship, powerful scanners, good for long journeys, and preferably a method of self defense." No way was he gonna be caught with his pants literally down again.
The individual talking to him gave him a once over before replying. "Such a ship would be quite expensive sir."
David felt a twinge of irritation, he knew he didn't look great in his plain white shirt and worn pants, but he adopted a smug grin. Pulling over the credit scanner he inserted his chip into it. "Is this enough?"
David watched with immense satisfaction as their eyes widened in surprise and they tripped over themselves trying to apologize. "M...my apologize sir, please follow me we will get you a custom ship to your exact desires." They proceeded to lead the pair down a hallway and into a private room.
The doors money opens, David mused. He sat in a really nice leather chair, Sky just finished the last of his fruit as he sat next to him. The receptionist excused themselves to retrieve a representative that could help them. They waited in the room for a few minutes before the door opened again revealing a four armed biped, Quallexen David believed the name was, fifth seat of the alliance. The light green skin on its body was indicative of the foliage of its planet, it had skin that looked like a lizards, its slender form was incredibly flexible putting even the best of earth contortionists to shame.
It entered and raised an eyebrow at the two of them for a quick moment before adopting its practiced business face. "Hello, my names Cathol, I heard you would like to order a custom ship?"
David nodded. "Indeed, I'd like to see all your options if you wouldn't mind." Cathol walked over and handed them a data-pad prompting a holo-display to appear in the middle of the room, and then sat across from them. David examined the information on the pad, a complete list of ship types, features, and cosmetic preferences. David looked across at the dealer who was apparently not expecting much from the pair. David fought to keep the smug look under control and began to make his selections.
Selecting the newest line of Venture series ships he sifted through the options and saw an impressive list of function and comfort items. He began selecting some of the options such as, nice pilot seats, lounge, gym, fabricator, and fully stocked kitchen. This got another raised eyebrow from Cathol but David wasn't done yet. Moving on to the functional features he specified complete control of the ship from the cockpit, Biometric scanners, Reinforced doors, localized environmental controls for each room, customized suites with one set to the preferences of Aoulooron's and the others defaulted to human preferences, shields as heavy as were allowed on a civilian vessel and equally heavy armament, then finished it off with a few cosmetic changes.
Cathol was now quite surprised by all the selections, but to their credit they did a fairly good job at hiding it. He cleared his throat before speaking. "Well sir, if you are done with your selections I can give you a quote." He used a data-pad of his own and input a few things, then a number appeared that was quite large. David had the money most definitely but his mother would strangle him if he didn't at least try and haggle it down.
"Seriously? I know its custom but I could probably get this same ship at a discount at Atlas station."
Cathol's brow furrowed a bit "Sir I assure you this is an accurate estimate of the price."
Tough cookie huh. "Alright Sky come on, we'll try at the next station." Sky looked slightly confused at what was going on but got up anyway and followed him towards the door.
"Sir, please wait, I can maybe adjust the price a bit for you." He tapped on his pad again and the number was shaved down a little bit.
David walked back into the room a little bit but didn't sit down. "You have my interest, but not my business yet."
"Sir you must be reasonable, this is a tall order to fill."
"I'm not asking for much Cathol, just a price that we can both be happy with at the end of the day." Cathol stared at him for a moment but David was putting on his best poker face. With a sigh Cathol tapped once again on the pad and the number dropped a little again. David gave a smile at the new price. "There we go, that is a more acceptable number." He sat back down in the chair. "Now how soon can I expect this to be done?"
"We have a ship in this model ready, we would just need to add all your preferred features. It should be done by tomorrow afternoon."
"Sounds good to me, where do I sign?" A image appeared on his pad, standard agreement for this kind of deal. He gave a quick once over of the forms and then signed his name at the bottom. Cathol now smiled and stood to offer him a hand, which David took.
"Pleasure doing business with you sir. Your order will arrive at hanger C on the 54^th floor after midday tomorrow."
"Thank you Cathol, I will expect it then." Cathol escorted the pair to the exit and saw them off with a polite bow as the lift door closed. David released the tension in his body with a sigh. Sky was looking at him with a questioning look.
"What just happened?" He finally asked.
David chuckled a bit. "It's called haggling Sky, some places let you negotiate on the price, and sometimes you have to be aggressive about it." Sky just thought on it for a second before shaking his head apparently giving up on the concept for the moment. David chuckled again but turned his mind towards stocking his new ship and getting equipment. Time for some shopping.
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As usual let me know what you think down below and of anything that could improve my writing.

How I discovered the KKC - in JAIL. Lol. Also do you think corners and spades are the same game?

Warning this is a long tale of many prisoners, starting with me, getting hooked on KKC while serving time. Also a tale of friendship and running a gambling empire behind bars as well as my theory that the games corners and spades are one in the same.
So I have a history with drugs and it got me on probation which ended me in jail several times bc I didnt quit. The legal system isn't great at getting ppl off drugs but it's super good at putting us nonviolent offenders in jail where private jails can make money from the taxpayers for keeping us locked up. I've completed my probation now and had my record expunged so it's all behind me now but here's the story of how I found the Kingkiller Chronicle.
So I was in jail and I had a super whiney older guy as a cellmate. He seriously wouldn't stop whining and crying about having to be in jail for 2 more weeks. I knew I would be there at least 6 months and I thought I was going to prison for a couple years after that since this was my 4th probation violation. Luckily the judge liked me and let me off super easy. Well my whiney cell mate had 3 books sent in. I didnt have anyone to send me books, write, visit or put money on my books. It sucked. I tried telling my cellmate jails not so bad, I'd been a bunch. It's mostly like a really boring camp with awful food. He was scared of the other inmates. I told him I'd protect him lol. Even tho I was new there were a couple of people i knew from other places and they'd introduced me to all the cool people and I'd made friends with the important ppl to make friends with. I did my very best to keep my short timer cellmate calm while listening to him talk about how he cant do 2 weeks while i had years hanging over me.
Then one day my cellmate does something extremely dumb. He went to the guard and said he couldnt take it anymore. That he was losing it. I'd warned him about this. Told him how they wouldn't take him somewhere nice and comfortable and hold his hand and make him some relaxing warm tea. The damage was done though and so they got him and took him to the mental health pod. The kind of place with such nice amenities as non stop 24 hour screaming, throwing and smearing feces as well as the unpredictable violently insane. Oh well. I warned him.
When he left he left his books though. Score. 2 of these books were junk but hmm what's this? The Name of The Wind. This looks cool. I'll give it a try. I was hooked. On free time when everyone's allowed out of their cells I asked some of the guys about it and no one had heard of it except a guy we will call H. H was a big guy and quite feared. I liked him and would sometimes talk to him about game of thrones, wheel of time, red rising and other nerdy stuff. The vast majority of ppl in our unit were terrified of H tho. He was big but it was more his attitude. I once saw him get into an argument with a member of the bloods. H challenged him to fight and walked over to a place where the guard and cameras couldnt see. The gang member was scared and said something about having to "talk to his people." H without missing a beat told him "bring your people!" He was ready to fight them all. There were like 4 or 5 bloods in that unit and H would've wrecked them. Aside from being bigger than any 2 of them combined you could just tell he was the last guy in there to mess with. He was like a modern day viking berserker. The bloods sent 1 of their ppl to go apologize to him. Was hilarious. Another reason everyone feared him was bc when he was in prison 3 men with knifes came into his cell to rob him of his commissary. He was stabbed multiple times but gouged one mans eye out and literally beat another to death by getting him down and punching his throat multiple times. He also didnt lose his commissary. H wouldn't talk about this until I'd known him for months. I originally heard the story from another guy who had been at that prison. When we were finally close enough for me to ask he told me the whole story, every detail, with a far off glassy look in his eyes and he showed me where they'd stabbed him up.
Anyway, he had read NOTW and WMF both and said they were incredible. Since we had discussed books a bunch I knew we had the same taste in them. I read NOTW on lockdowns and played a card game called spades on free time when we were allowed out of our cells. Spades is very serious business in jail and prison. Surprisingly H barely knew how to play and he was very bad. I however was as good as anyone in there. I was definitely a candidate for best player, if not best then top 3 for sure. I started teaching H to play well and training him to be my cards partner. Then something very sad happened. I finished the Name of the Wind.
The next free time I brought out TNOTW and gave it to H bc he wanted to reread it. I told him how empty my life had become since finishing it. He said "hold on" and went to his cell and came back with a brand new copy of Wise Mans Fear!! Even though he had read it he was such a bro he had his ppl send him a copy bc they'd send him as many books as he requested. I was elated. Those 2 books made my time so much better when I read them. I'd read straight from lockdown at 10 30pm until breakfast at 3 30 am then go to sleep after breakfast.
By this point H was a very good spades partner and wed taken to calling it "corners" like in the books. I think spades may have been the inspiration for corners bc they seemed very similar. After H finished Name of the Wind he asked if another fantasy book nerd could read it. I was happy to let them. From there the book traveled all around the unit with everyone loving it. Hardened criminals talking about Kvothe or how much they hate Denna. I once heard a member of the Mexican mafia explaining to his homeboys how badass Bast is and quoting what he told Chronicler. The "I'll make a game out of you" threat. It was crazy. If you asked around what the best book in the unit was the answer youd get was NOTW and WMF.
I finished WMF and it started making its travels around the dorm also. H had ordered slow regard for silent things but I didnt like it as much. Still glad I read it. H also started ordering this series called the Gray Man which i really liked but i had several of the gambling inmates come to me with an offer. They wanted me to be in charge of all the gambling for the unit. Basically I'd hand out poker chips and keep up with how much each person had lost or won. I'd make sure losers paid and winners got paid. Everyone recommends staying away from stuff like this bc if you get caught you go to the hole (the 3 before me were caught), ppl could lose a lot and then say they weren't going to pay so youd either have to fight them or look weak and once you look weak in there it's over for you and also you become the person with the most commissary items of anyone in the unit so you can pay the winners which makes you the very best person to rob, you are basically a 1 man casino after all. The benefit is every hand of poker played I earned 2 poker chips. 10 poker chips was worth a pack of ramen noodles/65 cents. These guys played poker for 8 hours a day 7 days a week. I made $25 to $40 worth of food every day 2 poker chips at a time.
I had no reason to hoard this stuff since i only had 5 weeks left before release when i got put in charge of poker. I also was slick with it. I was good friends with the 2 biggest meanest dudes in there and so if anyone acted like they wouldn't pay their debt I'd say "that's fine, I'll cover your debt out of my pocket and you'll just owe me but I'm going to send you to collections" then I'd point out H and the other huge guy "and if they have to go in your cell, beat your ass and take your shit they're taking everything. Not just what you lost at poker. Then they're probably going to keep doing it every week bc you cant stop them and you tried to fuck over their good friend (me)" everyone paid after that warning.
One day I even overheard the crips talking about "robbing the poker game" aka robbing me. This was laughable. By this time H and I were cellmates. There were only 3 crips in the unit and as H was fond of saying "none of them weigh more than 90lbs soaking wet that's why they joined gangs". I told them any time they want to run into me and Hs cell they were welcome. Just lmk I'll leave the door open. They later came and apologized and said they were just talking shit. Running the poker game was stressful but worth it. Myself, H and a few other ppl who looked out for me when I had nothing lived like kings with what I earned off the table. We feasted everyday and had unlimited coffee. I also helped out other ppl who didnt get any store bc they feed you dinner at 3 30pm and you dont eat again til 3 30 am so if you cant buy food you starve all evening and most of the night. They fed us very little and the food was only edible if you had to eat it to live.
I never got caught running gambling. A long time ago I learned the Masonic code that freemasons used to use bc I was a really weird kid (it's super easy) so I just kept my records in that. Not a single person refused to pay their debt to me (and risk collections lol) and I made sure winners were paid out at the start of each day. And I knew which items each player liked the most and made sure they got them. Previous ppl in my position kept all the best items and paid out BS. There was a fight once when one guy got paid with 2 bottles of water. I didnt accept bottled water and envelopes and dumb stuff like that lol. By the time I left 75% of the unit had read the kkc. None of us knew book 3 wasnt out yet so you often heard ppl saying they were going to get it as soon as they got out. Alas I said this myself. The rumor was that it was only out on hardback and we weren't allowed to get hardbacks.
Well that's my wacky story of how I got introduced to the KKC and it lead to me becoming great friends with the guy even the guards were scared of. Hes in prison now but I write him every couple of months. He was such an awesome dude bc he would say whatever he thought like "oh you're in that gang? I think they're all a bunch of pussies" and "oh you're friends with so and so? Yea I know him I beat his ass and took his dope. Knocked him out cold. Hope that's not your homeboy". I later found out he just didnt like most people bc he thought they were fake and scared to be themselves and always obsessed with appearing tough. He said my immediate willingness to nerd out about fantasy books showed I had no problem just being me and thats why he warmed up to me and not many others. I was the same book loving nerd in jail as out lol. He gets out in January. I intend to hang out with him. I still haven't broke it to him about book 3 lol.
Also let me clear up that with my history and all my trips behind bars I can definitely defend myself though I'm an average sized guy. I've never backed down from a fight in jail and always refused to show weakness but having H as my best friend definitely made life easier on me bc to fight me they would've had to have fought him also. He would tell ppl that he and I were brothers and it was us against the world. Kinda a joke since all gang members call other members their brothers. Also gang members have these intricate dumb secret handshakes so we made our own which was just doing a fist bump but as soon as our fists hit we would both put our thumbs up. It was dumb and really must've pissed off the gang members. Looking back I'm lucky he didnt get out before me or they wouldve beat the shit out of me hahaha unlike him I cant take on 3 or 4 ppl lol or 2.
It was really cool seeing groups of tattood up hardened criminals sitting around talking about how they'd break out of the jail if they could use sympathy and all kinds of crazy kkc convos hahaha.
If anyone knows how to play spades how close to the game of corners do you think it is?
Sorry if yall read this and considered it a horrible loss of time you'll never get back. Just wanted to share how I found these great books.
TLDR Went to jail and was given the Name of the Wind and loved it and it lead me to making friends that made my stay in jail much better and 75% of the guys I was locked up with read and loved KKC. Also how I ran an illegal casino in jail. Also I think corners and spades are the same games.

Nisio Isin Chronicle : Interview Between Hirohiko Araki and Nisio Isin

Source : JoJo Wiki)

Nisio Isin Chronicle (01/2006)

Nisio Isin: Author of Monogatari Series, Katanagatari, etc.
Hirohiko Araki: Author of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures.
Interviewer: MYST
Points in common between Araki’s and Nisio’s works
Interviewer: So apparently, Araki-sensei made his debut in the same year that Nisio-san was born.
Nisio: I was born in 1981.
Araki: I made my debut in the 1981 New Year’s issue [of Weekly Shounen Jump].
Nisio: It feels like fate…if you can call it that, haha.
Araki: That’s amazing. At 24, you’ve already written so much in 4 or 5 years.
Nisio: I’m not sure how long I can keep writing, but for now I’ll keep writing as much as I can. I’m on my 15th book now.
Interviewer: Araki-sensei, did everything go smoothly after you debuted?
Araki: Not at all, it feels like I only started polishing my skills after I debuted. They let me debut before I had any style or originality as a manga artist. I had to learn a lot then, and it wasn’t until Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures that I really got started.
Nisio: I also loved your manga before Jojo, like Mahou Shounen Biitii, Gorgeous Irene, and Baoo Raihousha. Your manga all feel like my roots, there’s so much I’ve learned from them.
Araki: Oh yes, your novels do seem to have some points in common. I’ve started reading from Kubikiri Cycle [first book of Zaregoto Series] and haven’t read your latest books, but your characters all seem modern. It might also because a lot of them are geniuses, but they all think they’re superior and don’t respect others. It was interesting how the main character tries to confront those geniuses despite feeling inferior.
Their dialogue sounds like advertising slogans. I like that. Like those lines at the beginning of each chapter. The main character keeps banging out lines like that. That was very fresh and interesting.
Nisio: Thank you. My hands are trembling. I’m so happy that you’ve read my books.
I think Jojo is a wonderful manga, and I wish I could have all of humanity read it. It’s so good that it makes me want to recommend it to other people…somehow it feels like I have to go out of my way to say how much I like it.
Making characters seem powerful using powerful lines
Nisio: Earlier you said that I write lines like advertising slogans, but I think that’s partly because of your influence. It’s more than a verbal tic, it’s a single line that encapsulates a character. A line that only that character could say…
Araki: I try to include a character’s personal philosophy in what they say. Their unique way of thinking.
Nisio: That might why you’re different. Even in another story, no one else could say those lines. Even if somebody else used your lines, they wouldn’t become famous quotes. “Road roller!” only leaves an impact because it’s Dio who says it.
Araki: You have some great ones, too. “There’s always someone better, but at the top they’re all below you.” and a lot of others. Those are really good. They make you think. I think everyone likes those. They make you stop and think ‘that’s true’.
Interviewer: They’re cool and hook you in, and they’re convincing.
Araki: Lines like that make characters seem more powerful. It makes you wonder what would happen if that character was the culprit. It’s hard to stop reading.
Nisio: Jojo had a big influence on that. The enemy characters in Jojo all have depth.
Araki: Yes, I was going for that.
Nisio: There are no throwaway characters. Especially after Stands come into the story, there are Stands that seems weak but can be strong depending on how they’re used. Like (Stand: Bad Company. Only 10 cm tall, but 500 in number!) might just be the strongest.
Araki: That’s right, haha. Well for manga in the eighties, the enemies always keep getting stronger and stronger. But there has to be a limit somewhere, and it gets tremendously exhausting.
Nisio: Like when they go ‘the one you just defeated was the weakest of us.’
Araki: To break through that, I tried to have characters that are strong from an alternate point of view, or who are only strong in a single aspect.
Nisio: So like ‘There’s no such thing as strong or weak.’
Araki: It’s so exhausting to write manga where the enemies keep getting stronger and stronger. It’s like, “they’re already this strong, and they’re still getting stronger!?” and every week you worry about what you’re going to do. And then you get to the height of the bubble and it’s like, what now? It’s a very scary writing method. It’s fine if you do it once. When the strongest enemy gets introduced, you’ll get so popular that the publisher tells you not to stop. But as a writer, you can’t go any further.
Nisio: I wonder who started this inflation of power. It must have been a really crazy idea at first… Whoever it was, using this technique is like reaching a dead end or slash-and-burn farming. I think Jojo was a revolution in that area.
Araki: It was more like an escape route than a revolution, haha. But I think that’s how people work.
It’s like how someone with a strong punch isn’t necessarily strong.
Nisio: Someone you could beat depending on your strategy, I guess.
Interviewer: If you’re fighting Bush and he has nuclear missiles, you still might beat him with a bat. For example, Hara Tetsuo wrote Fist of the North Star so that whoever says the most powerful lines wins.
Nisio: That makes sense.
Araki: That seems like something you’d be familiar with.
Nisio: Novels are only words, after all. The main thing is dialogue. So characters that say powerful lines do become stronger.
Araki: I’ve also noticed something unique about your characters. They’re mentally strong somehow. They’re complete geniuses, but also lacking things or searching for things. That’s something refreshing, and it makes the story’s world interesting.
Nisio: Thank you. I have no words. Speaking of characters, I like Part 4 of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures because it has so many unique characters. I like Tonio the most, but it’s such an all-star cast.
Araki: Thank you. I hear that the writer Otsuichi-san [mystery/horror writer] also likes Part 4 the most. I wonder if it’s a generational thing.
The appeal of Jojo and its impact on Nisio Isin as a grade schooler
Nisio: When I read your manga for the first time, it was when Ebony Devil, that doll from Part 3, slices off a hotel worker’s face with a razor. I remember it being really scary.
Araki: That must have been tough to read as a kid.
Nisio: Of course, I didn’t understand what Stands were, and that made it even scarier. I was creeped out by this weird armored warrior but thought Joutarou was really cool. I didn’t understand the logic or style of it so it was completely mysterious, but I could tell that it was in a different vein from the other manga being published at the time.
Even now, Jojo hasn’t fallen behind to imitators. Nowadays Shounen Jump has more manga with Stand-like abilities, but Jojo still sets itself apart. It’s not that it’s the original, but there’s something clearly different about it.
Why Nisio Isin became a writer
Araki: What made you decide to be a writer? How did you get started writing?
Nisio: To be honest, I originally wanted to be a manga artist. But I quickly realized that I couldn’t draw. No matter how I practiced, I wouldn’t get better. Then thought that since writing get printed, it doesn’t matter if my handwriting is bad or anything. So in a way, I’m writing the novelization of a manga that’s in my head.
Araki: So you might get your novels adapted into manga?
Nisio: That’s true. There are many scenes in my head that I have an image of. Like someone standing in front of the sound effect “ゴゴゴゴゴ.” I think Kadono Kouhei-sensei said something similar. [author, mainly known for Boogiepop series]
Araki: So you start with an image and replace it with words. The desire to write feels like something that comes welling out, but I wonder how that works.
Nisio: When you read something good, it makes you want to try it. Of course, reading your manga gives me motivation. It’s something like that.
Araki: Like ‘I could make something a little better’.
Nisio: When you see something wonderful, you can’t help but want to try doing it.
Araki: That’s true. Drawing is like that for me, like when I see a drawing that makes me wonder how it was drawn. It’s like a riddle I want to solve.
For example, there are manga artists who can draw lines in unbelievable directions. Normally you go from up to down or right to left, but they’re clearly doing it differently. Like Hara Tetsuo. I don’t know how he draws those lines, if he does them upside down or what.
For painting too, I wonder how someone made a color and things like that. It fires me up somehow.
Interviewer: Did you solve Hara’s riddle?
Araki:Not quite. I tried to draw beautiful smooth lines like him, but it wasn’t the same.
Nisio: I’ve thought something similar when reading your manga. When I read Janken Kozou for example, I was surprised at how you could portray Rock Paper Scissors. I thought that I couldn’t casually play Rock Paper Scissors anymore. To me, you’re not just a manga artist, you’re an artist.
Araki: I can’t really see that, haha. I’ve always felt lacking as a person somehow, and I want to become a full person. I’m not sure exactly what a full person is, but I’ve always wanted to become one since I was young.
Interviewer: Nisio-san, when you finished your Zaregoto Series after 9 volumes, you’ve said that “after finishing this piece of work, I’m not a rookie anymore.” Araki-sensei, with which manga did you feel like you’ve finished a job?
Araki: I don’t think there is one. My publisher keeps telling me I should write something new besides Jojo, but it feels weird to start something new before finishing Jojo. So I might keep writing it.
Nisio: For your entire life?
Araki: I don’t know.
Nisio: As long as there are Jojo stories, at least.
Araki: That’s true. But I’m writing about human relationships, so it never ends. Until humanity dies out.
Interviewer: How about when you stopped feeling like a rookie?
Araki: That would have to be when new manga artists come out. Before I knew it, the only one who’s been in Jump longer was Akimoto Osamu [author of Kochikame, the longest-running series in Weekly Shonen Jump, running 1976-2016], and I thought, “Huh, there’s only Akimoto-sensei?”, so I definitely couldn’t think of myself as a rookie anymore.
Interviewer: That’s quite some time since you debuted. [8 years?]
Araki: Yeah. I was trying to write with a youthful feeling. But then at like parties, when I looked around everyone was younger than me, and I went “Wha-?”. They would say “we can’t get started until you drink”, and I thought “Oh, this is bad”. Nisio-san, a time like that will come for you, too. It’s a lonely feeling. It really is nice to have some elders around.
Defeating enemies without inflating power levels
Nisio: Before, I said that Part 4 was my favorite, but sometimes it’s Part 1 or Part 2…
Interviewer: You like all of them, haha.
Nisio: I like how the enemies were defeated in Part 1 and Part 2, before Stands were introduced. They were mental, tactical battles, and it might just be because I like mystery books, but I love those kind of strategical tricks. Even after Stands came into the story, the mental battles were the most captivating.
Araki: Ah, yes. In shounen manga, there’s this pattern of beating enemies using willpower. I couldn’t accept it. I thought, “Are you really going to use willpower here?”. There is that amazing strength people that have during fires. That makes sense, but I still couldn’t accept it. Like, “If you’re going to do it with willpower, show it in your attitude.” I wanted some kind of logic behind it.
A long time ago, Shirato Sanpei-sensei used to write ninja manga (such as Sasuke, Ninja Bugeichou, and Kamui Gaiden), and they don’t defeat enemies with ninjutsu or magic in those. They used these kind of tricks, things with logic behind them. Like digging a hole in the ground and setting off gunpowder. It made me go “wow”. That influenced me.
Nisio: Like this thing you have to explain.
Araki: It won’t seem interesting unless there’s some kind of reason.
Nisio: In Part 2, did you just come up with the idea for the battle with Wamuu to be on chariots?
Araki: No, I think I was inspired. In shounen manga, I like when the battles are one-on-one in some kind of arena. This arena could be a narrow clifftop, or one where you lose if you leave the arena, and it’s fun to make a lot of rules. I think that’s where the idea for that chariot battle came from. Having some restrictions, so it’s not everything goes.
Nisio: In Jojo, the fights are one-on-one, or at most two-on-two, aren’t they?
Araki: That’s true. If there’s too many people, it’ll become like one of those old war manga. That seems tiring to just to write, so two-on-two is the most for me.
Backgrounds in manga vs. having to describe in novels
Interviewer: As a writer, is there anything you’re jealous about Araki-sensei for?
Nisio: I’m very jealous that unlike novels, you can draw backgrounds in manga. It’s hard to portray backgrounds in novels.
Araki: But even if you don’t write anything, the reader can imagine something.
Nisio: Drawings have incredible persuasive power. There are things that you can draw, but when you write about it, it turns into an explanation.
And then, you go “oh, I wrote an explanation” and feel intense regret… It won’t be a slogan anymore. I have this obsession that once I write an explanation, it’s all over, and it’s hard to deal with. So when I have insert illustrations in my books, it makes me feel that I can’t match the strengths of visual information.
Araki: I once read a story about a beautiful picture. There wasn’t any description about the picture. But the readers can imagine something. If you wrote a manga with that story, you would have to draw the picture. Even if it was Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, it would just be a copy. It’s something that gets ruined if you draw it. But if you don’t describe the picture like that story did, if you just say it’s amazing, then the reader will believe it.
Nisio: Purposefully not writing something.
Araki: I think it’s better if you don’t write about it.
Nisio: I’ve used a technique of writing something that’s impossible to visualize a few times. I think that’s the only way to explain something that isn’t there… You can write about things that you can’t even draw.
Oh yeah, I’ve used that technique in Shin Honkaku Mahou Shoujo Risuka, which is illustrated by Nishimura Kinu-sensei. I wrote about a ‘jacket like a safety pin.’ It was supposed to be clothing from a fantasy world, and then Nishimura-sensei ended up drawing it. I thought ‘oh, it got drawn.’
Araki: That’s impressive. I’ve also drawn a few insert illustrations. There was a character who has an arm injury throughout the book. So I drew an injured arm, but then at the end it said that the injury was on the left arm, and I had drawn it on the right arm. I thought, “do I have to redo the whole thing?”
You really have to read carefully. Insert illustrations are hard to draw, too. That’s why it’s impressive. Figuring out what a jacket that’s looks like a safety pin is like…
Nisio: When I know that there will be insert illustrations, I try to make it easier for my illustrators to draw them.
Araki: The illustrations for Zaregoto Series have an atmosphere to them too.
Nisio: Take-san is the one drawing them. I remember at first, when I was talking to my editor, I asked for them to be ‘Jojo-ish’, haha. That was supposed to be about the level of realism or reality in the illustrations…and then they came out like this.
Araki: It’s nice to see that the Jojo-ish part came through. When you line up the 9 volumes like this, you can really see an improvement in skill. I like these pop-style backgrounds, too.
Which writer is the biggest Jojo fan?
Araki: Nisio-san, which authors do you like?
Nisio: I’d have to say Kadano Kouhei-sensei. He’s famous for being a Jojo fan. He’s the biggest Jojo fan among writers.
Nisio’s editor: Just a while ago, when I told him that you were going to see Araki-sensei, he went silent for a few seconds and coldly said, “Oh, is that it so”, haha.
Nisio: A long time ago, when I read an interview between you and Otsuichi-sensei in Yomu Jump [magazine associated with Weekly Shounen Jump], I was so jealous that he got to meet you.
Araki: Otsuichi-san was writing for Shueisha [company publishing Jump], after all.
Interviewer: Nisio-san, if you were going to write a novelization of Jojo, what would it be like?
Nisio: I would write about Part 2, or maybe Part 1. Where the enemies are vampires and perfect lifeforms.
Araki: Not violence.
Nisio: I would choose not to use Stands. That way there wouldn’t be anything in common with Otsuichi-sensei is doing. [Otsuichi’s Jojo novelization is set in Part 4]
Araki: You don’t want to do the same thing as him?
Nisio: I really don’t to do the same thing as anyone else. If I did, it would turn into a contest with Otsuichi-sensei. What if I lose? If winning makes you the bigger Jojo fan that’d be terrible.
Interviewer: You can’t stand losing, not as an author, but as a fan?
Nisio: They might say “you call yourself a Jojo fan, but that’s all you can write?” or “you don’t love Jojo enough”, and make fun of me, haha. So if that happens I’ll say “Oh, my favorite part is Part 1” to get away.
Interviewer: For Part 1 and 2, there’s the issue of viewpoint. Whose perspective would you write from?
Nisio: Part 4 is Kouichi-kun. For Part 1, it’s Speedwagon. Part 2 was…did he have a name? That pickpocket boy at the beginning…ah, I can’t remember. This is bad.
Araki: He was there, haha.
Nisio: Otsuichi-sensei and Kadano-sensei are laughing right now, haha.
Interviewer: When did you understand how Stands worked?
Nisio: I somehow figured it out as I was reading. Like how when Stands get injured, their users also get injured. There was an explanation of what Stands were at the beginning of one of the volumes, and it all made sense after that. That was really helpful.
Araki: It’s a good thing I wrote that, haha. Most people said they didn’t understand Stands.
Nisio: I liked the battles with the D’arby brothers. That’s how I learned how to play poker. I was in elementary school and didn’t know the rules of poker, so I didn’t know what kind of battle that was, haha. So I went to a bookstore and browsed through a poker rulebook.
Araki: Oh really? When I was writing that I assumed everybody knew how to play poker. It seemed like everybody at least knows poker.
Nisio:I was in elementary school, after all. After that I really wanted to play poker, haha. I wanted to say things like, “I bet all six chips.”
Interviewer: You’ve learned a lot from Jojo.
Nisio: That’s absolutely true. I want to keep learning more and more.
Araki: Thank you. I can tell how strong your feelings are

[Table] I am Dave Plummer, author of Windows Task Manager, Zip Folders, and worked on Space Cadet Pinball, Media Center, Windows Shell, MS-DOS, OLE32, WPA, and more. (pt 1/2)

Source
Note: Based on observing question-taker's profile, he is still taking answers, so two parts may or may not completely summarize the AMA.

Questions	Answers
Space Cadet Pinball, how does it feel to be the most played "bring your child to work day" game? I remember it fondly.	The best part is that I used to "teach" computer lab when my kids were in K through 6th grades, back when Pinball was still included and well known. The kids could care less about anything technically hard or interesting that I'd worked on, of course, but Pinball gave me instant street cred with them.
	Especially cool was being able to walk over and enter a secret code that only I knew that would turn on all the cheats, like infinite lives. They thought I was a wizard at that age!
	The code, by the way, is "hidden test" without the quotes! Then various keys do different things, you can click and drag the ball around, and so on. Google it for the gory details!
	I always like to point out that I was working with a full set of original IP from Maxis, so I had nothing to do with the design of the game, or it's art, etc... that was all done! My contribution was volunteering to port it, including a partial rewrite from asm to C, to work on MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, IA64, ARM, and so on, which was actually a lot of work. But I got it into the Windows box, which is how and why everyone knows it today. But all credit for the gameplay and so on goes to Maxis, all I did was not screw it up in that case!
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To add a bit of detail re Space Cadet Pinball: we built Space Cadet originally at my company Cinematronics and did a deal with Microsoft to ship it with the Plus Pack that accompanied Win 95 and Win 98. While it technically didn't ship w/ Windows, the Plus Pack had something like a 25% attach rate and pinball wound up on most systems anyway. Microsoft actually had an option in our original contract from 1994 to ship it with the OS itself or the Plus Pack. Maxis was our publisher for the subsequent retail version, and later bought my company. More germane to this thread: I believe Dave's port entered the picture a few years later, after Win 98, and was likely critical to pinball continuing to ship on later iterations of the Windows OS (i.e. 32-bit). I definitely appreciate the time he put in to give the game extra years of life on the Windows platform. Kevin Gliner, game designer and producer for 3D Pinball, and co-founder of Cinematronics.	Pleased to FINALLY put a name to the game design! You should update the Wikipedia article for the game, as I think it lists Matt Ridgway, who might have been sound? I've been crediting Maxis for years, not knowing the role of Cinematronics who was who. One thing that confused me: wasn't there a company that did video games in the 80s called Cinematronics? Any relation? Star Castle, Armor Attack, etc...
	As for timing, this likely between the Win95 and Win98 Plus! packs. It was very early on at least, and shipped at least in NT4, and perhaps earlier in "SUR" release that ran atop NT 3.51, but I don't have access to any source files to check dates!
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I keep meaning to fix that wikipedia article, there's a significant number of people that worked on the game and for some reason only Matt (an independent sound guy who did some excellent part-time contract work for us) is listed. There's also a lot of confusion about the timing of various releases and the companies involved, and who owns it now (EA). I actually have all the original source, although no rights to any of it anymore. Hard to say on the timing of the port. I was working in Redmond in '99 when I got word someone had done an NT4 and Win2000 port (I'm assuming that was you), so that was the first time the port showed up on my radar. I have a more confident memory (and contracts, email, etc) of all the events related to how pinball came about and the first couple years after it was released. I like to think pinball was the very first Win95 game (it was fun to watch Gates and Leno pretend to play it on stage at the Win95 launch event), but of course there were other games that shipped with the launch too. You're correct, there was an 80s arcade game company called Cinematronics that went out of business long before we started in 1994, and someone had let the trademark lapse. How we came to be called Cinematronics is a long story for another time...	NT shipped in 96, so the version I did for it would have been done in 95. I remember working on it about the time Win9X was shipping or in late beta. I could be wrong on that part, but Nov 95 would be my guess.
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Damn dude, porting assembly? You are a legend!	Thanks - we actually did all of our debugging in assembler. We didn't have any source-level or line-level debugging at all (except as noted below). So you'd connect to a machine through an ssh-like tool and then, if the symbols were right, you could get a callstack and inspect memory, disassemble functions, and so on. But since we spent much of our day staring at assembly, I became reasonably adept at it.
	I say "reasonably" as I was lazy enough that I would compile the components of interest to me with Visual Studio PDB symbols so that, if I could repro on my own machine, I could then source-level debug it. That made me fast at some stuff that others were slow at, but I likely never got as proficient at asm debugging as someone who never had an alternative. I had a developer friend named Bob whom was an ntsd (our debugger) superstar, and he'd write expressions inside of breakpoints to fire conditionally, that kind of thing. So I did learn that trick, but I'm sure there were dozens I just never knew.
	That all said, we rarely if ever coded in assembly. All coding was in C/C++.
	In the Pinball case, parts of the original were written in hand-coded in asm by Maxis, like the sound engine, and wouldn't have had a hope of working on anything but an x86. Rather than be lame and not have sound on the RISC platforms, I opted to rewrite that stuff in C so that it was portable.
	The RISC platforms also bring their own set of problems like 32-bit alignment for data. And being on Windows NT (now just "Windows") meant being Unicode, but fortunately there isn't a TON of text in a pinball game!
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boytekka: damn, the only time that I did assembly language is when we tried moving a small machine through the printer port.. I miss those days LordApocalyptica: Only time I did assembly was when I wanted to make a game on my TI-84, and decided that I didn't want to. I miss those days too.	First game I wrote in assembly I did in a machine language monitor on my C64. You can't (easily) relocate 6502 so to add code you'd have to jump out, do stuff, and jump back... Crazy!
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If I can ask a question, how does it feels to go from coding with basically zero help to working with modern IDE and code editors that give you a lot of infos, tips, error notifications and so on? I've started programming like a year ago from zero, and I don't think I could be able to program like y'all did 20 years ago or more. Thanks for doing this AMA anyways!	You're very welcome! The progression in tools has been amazing, really. I remember HESMON and my first machine language monitors for the PET and C64, then really nice ROM dev environments, and CygnusEd for the Amiga... all the way up to PlatformIO and Visual Studio Code.
	My most recent "WOW" moment was adding a line to my lib_deps line in platformio, which magically included the library being developed at the URL on github. So you can link to online projects... cool.
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Just wanted to say thanks for the Alpha port!	Alpha AXP was by far the hardest to debug! "Branch later, maybe"
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I just want to thank you for my first experience with pinball. I am now a top 100 competitive pinball player and own 16 pinball machines.	That's cool, which do you collect primarily? I was always a fan of Williams, and am FB friends with a couple of their older devs like Steve Ritchie, Larry DeMar, and Eugene Jarvis (but I should be careful, Bill Gates warned me never to name drop :-) )
	I have a Black Knight 2000 as my own machine right now!
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I have a wide range. Some modern Sterns like Metallica, Jurassic Park, Tron and Iron Maiden. Older Bally’s like Frontier and Fathom. 2 classic Bally/Williams Dr Who and Attack From Mars. Plus a few EMs. I like them all! Attack From Mars was the game that got me into the physical world of pinball. Collecting has been more of a recent pandemic thing since I can’t go out and play. I miss traveling around the country playing in big tournaments. Oh yeah and Steve Ritchie is quite the character. You must meet him some day. I’ve met him a few times and each time has earned a place in my pinball stories I talk about with friends.	Congrats on the collection, that's a nice set! I've never met Steve - I did meet Larry DeMar in vegas. I was playing at a slot machine and he was next to me, and had a name tag, and I was like... "Excuse me sir, but does the word Robotron mean anything?" and it turned out to be him!
Asking as someone pretty new in software development, did you experience impostor syndrome? If so, how did you deal with it?	My first couple of years were very productive, so I wasn't insecure about my output, but even so I definitely experienced imposter syndrome. I think most people who achieve aspirational roles do... I have a friend who was in the NFL who describes the same feeling.
	Being as productive as your peers is sort of the pre-requisite, and if that's true, then remind yourself that when you were in fifth grade, the eighth graders on the playground seemed so old and mature! It's odd in that I started in 1993, but to me anyone who started in the 80s was a "true" Old Timer and remains so in my head to this day. And similarly I'm no doubt the grizzled veteran to people I hired a few years later.
	I know when I started I felt like the dumbest guy in the room, and by the end I felt like the smartest guy in the room, and I don't think I'd gotten any smarter along the way. So it's all relative and perception. Well, that and the stock caused some serious attrition of the "really smart"!
	I remember visiting Google a couple of years ago in the bathrooms they had posters that read "YOU ARE NOT AN IMPOSTER", and info about seminars and so on about it, so it's very common! I wish I had a concrete strategy for you, but I don't other than "It's commonplace, and I bet there are a ton of resources on the Web. Don't be surprised you're experiencing it!"
What would you encourage someone to start learning today related to your field?	I'm learning React at the moment. Let's face it, the web development experience is utter nonsense. So I kept hoping for something that would make it clean, and easy to make components, and to work with REST apis. So I went looking for a solution. Then I read about Angular, and it seemed like "too much" to learn for the sake of making a SPA.
	But React seems understandable enough and solves a ton of problems with web development, not the least of which is being able to intermingle HTML and Javascript (via JSX).
	As for languages, I'd probably start with Python. I prototyped a complicated LED system a couple of years ago and it was admirable what it could accomplish for an interpreted language. And you probably have to know modern Javascript as well.
Now, would you be rather interested in working for windows, macos or linux ?	I work in all three. For my own projects I write to the ASP.NET Core 3.1, and that's available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. I originally wrote my LED server to it under MacOS, then moved it to Windows with about 5 minutes of changes (related to the consoles being somewhat different). Then I moved it to Linux, where I made it work and then containerized it with Docker. I got it up and running on my Raspberry Pi and in a Windows HyperV and under WSL using Ubuntu. To me that kind of stuff is super cool.
	Once I had it working in a Docker container I deployed it to my Synology NAS, which is some variant of Linux. So my NAS runs my Christmas lights!
	I love stuff like that when it works!
	My main workstation is a Dell monitor that has an internal KVM. I have a 2013 Mac Pro connected to it, which is maxed out and then has an eGPU and eRAID setup via Thunderbolt. And then I have a 3970X Windows PC connected as well, and I can jump back and forth with a button.
	I spend most of my day in Windows now, unless it's video related, in which case I use Final Cut Pro.
Hi Dave, thanks for the AmA! In regards to task manager - often times I have to click the 'end task' button more than once to get the frozen program to actually close. Why is this? Thanks again.	Remember that, at least in my day, End Task is different than End Process. The former sends a "Please close yourself" message to the app, and if it's hung, it should then detect it and so on, but doesn't always. Imagine the app is in a weird state where it's still pumping messages, it's not hung, but it's broken. End Task likely won't work.
	That's when you need End Process, which tears everything down for you. The substantive difference is that the program gets no choice in the matter and no notification. End Task can be graceful. End Process is brutal.
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What about when the task manager stops responding? We need a task manager manager to manage the task manager. Lol	I've never seen that happen, ever, unless the system itself or the window manager is bunged in some way. Your puny Task Manager cannot save you now.
	Then again, nothing can, save a reboot.
What cool new tech are you excited about?	Right now I'm actually trying to productize something of my own, a system for doing hidden, permanently-installed LED holiday lighting. It receives the effect entirely over WiFi, or it can fall back to built-in effects and so on. Quick demo from 4th of July here:
	https://youtu.be/7QNtj2hZtaQ
	I'm done the software on the ESP32 and on the desktop, and working on the phone app now. So the next step is to find someone to manufacture the actual addressable LED strip fixtures. They'd be like under-counter LED strips that snap together end to end, but weatherproof, and with WS2813 LEDs internally.
	In terms of stuff that I'm just benefitting from, the latest CPUs from AMD are amazing. I have the 32-core 3970X and the raw computing power is hard to comprehend. That you can buy a 32-core chip for $2K (or 64-core for $4K) amazes me! Now I need to learn AI or something to make use of all of that hardware...
After the rise of WinRAR, did you continue to use the trial or did you pay?	From: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])
	Sent: Saturday, April 29, 2006 3:14 PM
	To: Dave
	Subject: Your BuyRAR.com Order #: 122229610 License Key

	Attachments: rarkey.rar
	My WinRAR order number, from about 15 years ago, is above. And my WinZip license is much older than that. As someone who (a) made their real living in shareware and (b) worked on Product Activation, I'm the kind of guy who always licenses everything! You'll notice in my PlatformIO/"Arduino" video I even walk people through how to contribute to show how easy it is. I love good, cheap software.
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Would you download a car?	My wife's Tesla downloads update all the time. I'm sure they're just as complex as the mechanical components of the car, so in a sense, we already do!
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But... why did you keep the email?	I have a folder on my OneDrive called Registrations where I keep copies of license keys and registrations. So it was handy. Looks like Telix is my oldest registration from 1989 or so.
Also what was Microsoft really like back in the 90s? As a user of MS-Dos 3.30 forward till now. I’m assuming there has just been a whole tide of changes. Was double space really as funny on the dev side as it was on the user side with the slowness and the pufferfish as a logo :)	I worked on Doublespace in that I wrote a thunking layer that could live in low memory and then moved the rest of the code into the HMA. I didn't work on the compression, but odds are the guy who did is reading along right now, I bet!
	I don't really know if it was faster or slower than its contemporaries like Stacker. I wrote one for the Amiga, though didn't get it quite finished before starting at MS, and it's an interesting and hard problem to do well. At least on the AmigaDOS it was, FAT would be a tad easier.
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I mean for its time it was great. But back then floppy disks and 10M RLL-MFM drives were more the norm. It was actually awesome to have it included IN the OS instead of having to buy stacker. I think this is why I get so much of a kick out of every phishing AD that says download this to double your RAM. It just takes me back.	RAM Doublers are a whole 'nother ball of wax. Raymond Chen, in his blog "The Old New Thing", covers them well. If I understand it correctly, in the most famous case the code to do the actual memory compression was disabled, so it literally did nothing, but did it with overhead.
	On the other hand, I note that current Windows, the HyperV, and even my Synology NAS offer "Memory Compression" now so perhaps there's a time and a place on modern cpus and systems.
I'm an Engineer and regularly use MS Office to produce reports and calculations. Subscript and Superscript are something I use all the time. For at least the last 15 years, in MS Word I can hit "Ctrl +" & "Ctrl Shift +" to make the highlighted text Subscript or Superscript. But MS Word sucks for calculations, so I use MS Excel. But MS Excel it's about 8 clicks to make something super or subscript, and the hotkey technology hasn't made it in. So my question is, why was MS Office 2003 the best version of office that was ever produced?	I retired in 2003. Coincidence? I'll leave that one up to the scholars.
If you could go back and change anything about Windows without consequences or worrying about backwards compatibility, what would it be?	Format! I wrote that and since I was used to using the Visual Studio Resource Editor for dialogs, but couldn't in this case, I just laid out a stack of buttons and labels, content in the knowledge that a Program Manager or Designer would come up with a proper design for it that I would then code up. But somehow, no one did, and no one has for 25 years! So it's a big tall stack of buttons like a prairie grain elevator.
Ever met Bill Gates or have an interesting personal experience with him or another higher up you can share?	Yes, even when I was a new college hire he had the 30 of us or so over for beer and a burger in his back yard. It was a nice touch and quite informal. Obviously, at some scale, it wasn't 30 people anymore and they couldn't continue it!
	Ever play the video game Star Castle? It was like that. Concentric circles of people standing around BillG each armed with what they hope is a question or comment so clever they'll stand out in some way!
If every software you need would be available for both systems. Would you use a Linux distribution or Windows 10?	Right now I'd use Windows 10 because, if the same client software is available, I'd do it on Windows simply because I have a new 3970X w/ 128G of RAM and triple RAID0 SSDs plus an Optane stick. All for about 1/10th the price of a Mac Pro. Since the hardware is so cheap and powerful, it's really hard to resist.
	Even if all the client software were magically available, or Parallels for Linux were a thing, I'd stick with Windows because I haven't seen a Linux UI that I really like. I know everyone has a favorite... if there's an actually good and attractive one that works out of the box, let me know what distro, and maybe link a screenshot!
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Give Mint 20 with Cinnamon a fair shot! I have struggled for years trying to like a Linux distro but never found one that felt and looked right which I think had been the reason Linux hasn't been adopted mainstream but Mint20 with Cinnamon is possibly it..if not its very very close.. Has awesome multi-desltop winodws feature and you can make it basically just like Win10.. Would love to know what you think of it! 20.1 BETA just dropped and has a super interesting feature called Web Apps that needs to be checked out asap! Heres a link to the 20 long term support version.. some people do not like the Minto Logos/Backgrounds out of the box..keep in mind there are a ton of nice ones included and many more you can get quickly if that's something you don't like..what is really neat is that you can make Mint20 look like any OS.. there are themes that make it exactly like MacOS I just have not personally tried those out yet. https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3928	Thanks, I'll check out Mint!
I am looking at my copy of Douglas Coupland's "microserfs". Although it's fiction, do you think it resembles the Microsoft Culture of the time?	Lord no, that book bugged me. On the one hand, they're a bunch of pretentious and precocious, annoying kids. I worked on a team (NT) where the tone was set by Dave Cutler and the guys he brought over from Digital, so it was rather different. On the other hand, it's such a big company that odds are those four main people DID exist somewhere in the company. Just not around me!
Why was (is) a monolithic registry preferred over distributing the settings in a number of files like Unix? Why did windows remain single-user focused for so long when Unix was multi-user since the 70s? In my understanding, if there is just one user, that user has to be admin which opened Windows up to security issues. (I don't even recall any sudo-like privilege escalation in pre-XP Windows.)	Windows NT was multiluser from birth. And there's nothing about the Windows architecture that requires users to be admin; the reality, I think, is that most apps started out in Win95 land and just didn't work if they were run as non-admin, so people ran as admin because the apps required it.
	We couldn't just break all those apps and say "Oh well, get better apps" so what you got was a convention of people running as admin. But again, there's no need to. Same as Unix.
	The one exception is that under Unix it's easy to sudo and so admin work briefly. I wish Windows had (or exposed) a simpler mechanism for letting me run as a non-admin credential and escalate when needed. I know UAC does the same thing, more or less, if used cautiously.
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Yeah NT did eventually get around to fixing it. My question was really about the earlier systems, because I think you said you worked on MS-DOS? Since there were existing systems with multi-user and privilege escalation even before the first Windows, somebody must have made a conscious decision to not include that functionality.	MS-DOS was only the second or third OS I can think of for a Microprocessor (CPM, SCP, then MS-DOS). What existed for mainframes and minis didn't matter much in the memory limits available on the desktop.
What was the inspiration for Space Cadet Pinball and what is your high score?	I don't know, I wasn't the designer, the inspiration part happened separate, I provided the perspiration part! I was actually pretty good at the game, since I was literally paid to play and test it... but I don't know the score, sorry! I do have the world high score on Tempest, though! But not Pinball :-)
1. What's something super useful within Task Manager you think even seasoned Windows users don't know they can do? 2. What do you think a future version of Task Manager should be able to do?	I think CTRL_SHIFT_ESC is a surprise to a lot of people!
	I think Task Manager needs Dark Mode, and a way to show who has locked what file or device so you can kill the offender when needed.
Why is it that I can still find dialogs in Windows 10 that were clearly built using 16 bit Visual Studio 97 version?	This should explain it. When you achieve perfection, you leave it alone:
	https://youtu.be/l75a8CvIHBQ
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Please for the love of God, use your Microsoft contacts to stop the snipping tool from going away. It's literally perfect but they keep trying to discontinue it.	One Compound Word: SnagIt. It's what you need to make your life complete.
	After my time, but I heard the new snipping and history that's being built in to replace it is pretty good. It better be if they kill snipping tool!
Thanks for task manager! I use it for so many things. How do you feel about newer versions of Windows de-emphasizing the control panel in favor of their new settings app?	I'm all for it if they made sure they had 100% coverage of all settings. It's sort of weird that in this day and age, with an R&D budget in the billions, we still have a mix of new control panel and old property pages. But I like the new stuff if it covered all cases!
Hello Dave! Why does Windows have such a rough time transferring a lot of small files? Is it a limitation of NTFS?	It's not Windows, it's all operating systems. Part of it is filesystem related:
	Imagine copying a file takes 200ms of overhead plus 10ms per MB. Coping 100M of large files will take 200ms + 1000ms = 1.2 seconds.
	Now imagine you have 100M of 1M files. Now you have 100*200ms + 1000ms = 20000ms or 20 seconds. 20 times as long for the same amount of data.
Did you ever get a chance to work in/on OS/2? I stuck with OS/2 until 2005/2006, before moving onto Linux, and would love to hear any opinions and stories you might have.	I didn't! I used OS/2 a bit but never had a chance to work on it. Many of the people I worked with did, though... but if OS/2 were Kevin Bacon, I'm one degree removed.
I had waited more than 20 years to ask this... What the fuck is Trumpet Winsock?	That's what you need to use TCP/IP on Windows before it was included in Windows. You're welcome.
What was the idea behind having "generic" activation keys starting in Windows XP that would activate any version, it was said they were for [educational purposes], did Microsoft provide them to 501c3/non-profit schools, or was there a different reasoning?	I'm not sure what you mean by "generic". I remember retail and oem, but what was a generic key?
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There was a set of keys that became public knowledge partway through XP life that appeared to activate unlimited machines as valid, though added a banner "For Educational Purposes Only". I remember trying it back in the day and always wondered what the intention was that was important enough the key activations were never blocked. [I did have multiple legal keys, but curiosity killed the cat and I had to swap one to the "educational" key to see for myself, lol]	I don't actually know! But I can surmise that if it was displaying a banner down in the bottom right corner of the screen, it knew it was not licensed and was likely limited or time-limited in some way. Unless you could actually ACTIVATE them with that key, which would surprise me.
How does OLE still work? I can't think of anything else that complex and old that still runs. We've got a legacy piece in our application that uses it and I can build against it using .net 4.0, in an Azure pipeline and deploy to windows 10 hosts and a piece of 90s technology still works perfectly. How and why?	It was complex, but pretty well written and very well tested. That's not to say there aren't a lot of bugs outside the common case codepaths, but I bet if Office used it, it's pretty solid, and will be forever.
Other than your personal phone number, did any Easter eggs make it to general availability?	There was one in the Win9X shell, but I think we removed it for Windows XP and later. So not that I'm aware of!
Have you ever wanted to make a "sequel" to Space Cadet?	There are actually two other tables available in the original Maxis game that should work, in theory, but I think Space Cadet was the best of the 3, so...
Were there ever any 3rd party edit/change to shell that made you think, "Why didn't we think of that?"	Not offhand, but "Stacks" on MacOS where it tries to rescue your mess by grouping things by filetype (Images, Docs, etc) is pretty clever. So that's something I wish we'd though of!
Have you worked at all with Bryce Cogswell and Mark Russinovich?? Also, what was your initial response to Process Explorer /the Sysinternals stuff??	No, but the SysInternal guys are geniuses of the highest order, so far as I'm concerned (and I say that based on their products, no knowing them). They know their stuff.
What are your best/oddest purchases you were able to justify as a work expense (for example, were you able to get MS to buy pinball machines as an R&D cost)?	I had DirecTv in my office! I was working on the Media Center prototype and we couldn't get cable on campus, so I got the dish installed on the roof, etc....
	I had a Tempest machine in my Office but at my own expense. I started right around the days of the "shrimp vs weenies" memo, so they were pretty cost conscious.
Is it true that you and Dave Cutler got into a knife fight over a hand of poker gone bad?	A broken bottle is not a knife.
Was DoubleSpace stolen from Stacker?	No. As I understand it, DoubleSpace was licensed from an Israeli developer. Then I heard that Stacker had somehow been awarded a patent on using a hash table in compression, which sounds pretty ludicrous if true. There was a trial, and even though it revolved around hash tables and math and compression engines, and no one on the jury had been to college, as I heard it. So the big guy lost. That's the story I heard, your mileage may vary. I'm not a spokesman, etc.
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MS-DOS 6.21, the most useless version. I remember writing an extra "2" on my 6.2 OEM disks when the update came out (no point wasting disks).	You say "useless", I say "canonical".
	I think I actually worked on 6.22, not sure. It was 6.2 something. In terms of usefulness, the features I added to it personally were:
	- Moving Doublespace to HMA to free up a lot of low mem, as noted
	- Giving Diskcopy ability to do it in a single pass with no swaps
	- I wrote a new version of Smartdrv that added CD-ROM support
	- I wrote a special version of Setup that worked via deltas and put everything on a single floppy (no point wasting disks).
	Mind you, I was just a summer intern when I did that, and it took me about 3 months.
What are your favorite DOS command-line tricks that still work in Windows 10?	doskey!
What actually happens if someone deletes Win32?	Human sacrifice, cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria. Do not attempt.
Did Bill ever swing by your cubicle and tell you'd he'd take your assignment home and finish it in a weekend if you didn't hurry up?	Cubicle? It was the 90s at Microsoft! I had a corner office with a table, chairs, a Tempest machine, and a sofabed.
What is the best project you worked on or had friends work on that was canceled, that you would revive if you had the resources?	Windows Media Center, I'd say! And I wish they'd done a great AutoPC that the OEMs could have licensed and made common to most cars.
There has been a lot of hate on Windows / Microsoft from the Unix / Linux advocates. What are some narratives that you disagree / don't think are true?	I used to love the Amiga, so I know what it's like to feel a sense of advocacy for a platform that you feel is superior but overlooked in the marketplace.
	I think the most untrue narrative I've heard about them is that they all have neckbeards. I think it's only "most", not all.
How do you introduce yourself at parties?	"Does anyone here know how to update my Groove subscription on my Zune?"
What OS are you using now? What's your favorite OS of all time? What's the worst OS of all time? What's the worst Microsoft OS (if different)?	The best OS of all time was Windows NT 4.0 with the Shell Update Release.
	The worst OS of all time was the TRS-80 Model 1, Level 1 DOS that didn't have the keyboard debounce code in ROM yet so you couldn't even type on the thing.
[deleted]	No, I never put a true easter egg in anything. Especially in an operating system, I don't believe in them. You have to be able to trust the OS, and I think it goes against that.
How did you get started in this specific field?	I first wandered into a Radio Shack store in about 1979 when I was 11, where I saw my very first computer. It was not connected yet, as the staff had not figured out how to set it up yet. Being somewhat precocious, I asked if I might play with it if I could manage to set it up. On a lark they said, “Sure kid, have a shot”, and ten minutes or so later I had it up and running. This endeared me to the manager, Brian, enough that every Thursday night and Saturday morning I would ride my bike down to the store: I’d type in my crude BASIC programs and they were kind enough to indulge my incessant free tinkering on their expensive computer. So that's pretty much how I started!
Do you ever have moments where you’re like “they have it so easy nowadays” or do you think that because of the groundwork put in place 30 years ago that systems have become exponentially more complex?	Only when someone spools up an entire docker instance to pipe something to it on the command line... then it's like "Really? You're basically booting a virtual computer as a command?"
What's the best C++ expert tip you can share for fellow programmers?	If you make anything in your class virtual, make the destructor virtual, particularly if there's any chance that anyone might delete an instance of your derived class through a base class pointer. Otherwise, the behavior is undefined, I think, but even if it works, it's not what you want!
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Wow this is eerie. I literally fixed a bug a couple weeks ago that was this specific case.	They can be weird bugs to track down, too!
Tabs or spaces?	Spaces on an indent of 4, tabs set to 8.
How can I open an MS Binder file?	Push down on the metal tabs at the top and bottom of the central spine of the binder. That will release the 3-hole punch claws, and then you can remove your printed file.
"It's now safe to turn off your computer" Why was this splash removed?	I think most current BIOSes can do it on their own by now!
Do you have any insight as to why MS decided to build Windows 95 from the ground up instead of building off of an existing *nix system the way Apple did with OSX? Was it just for backwards compatibility or were there other reasons? Also, had you gone this way, how do you think Windows, and the industry in general, might be different? I'm asking as someone who thinks that WSL is the best thing to happen to Windows in years.	Windows 95 was not built from the ground up, but NT was. The most succinct reason (and just a guess, I'm not a spokesman) is that even though MS had Xenix on hand, there were fundamental problems in the way Unix handled SMP multiprocessor locks and so on at the time. I presume these have long since been solved in Linux, etc, but not without significant work.
	WSL is one of my favorite things too, but for the library of tools and software, it makes available to me, not because of some fundamental architectural superiority, I don't think!
What are your feelings about "Microsoft Bob"?	https://youtu.be/rXHu9OmLd8Y
What did source control look like in the 90's? How did MS keep its code from leaking out to the public? How did you handle versioning and different developers working on the same feature?	We used a tool called SLM, or Source Library Manager. It was sort of available briefly as a product under the name Microsoft Delta.
	It was OK for smaller teams but did not support branching, so just before I left we moved to Source Depot.
Why was Ctrl + Alt + Delete changed to Ctrl + Shift + Escape?	It wasn't! Ctrl-Alt-Delete raises the "Secure Alert Sequence" which triggers the OS to switch to the secure desktop, where you have the ability to click a button which will start task manager upon return to your regular desktop.
	Ctrl-Shift-Esc is a feature built into Winlogon that launches a TaskManager on the current desktop without switching to the secure desktop.
	There are theoretically hacks and exploits that can only be caught by switching to the secure desktop, so if you're ever in doubt, ctrl-alt-del is the more secure way to go.
How did DOS ever get away with just pulling device names like "COM1" out of thin air when it came to output redirection etc..?	That's for compatibility with MS-DOS.
What are you currently working on?	Mostly on LED and Microcontroller projects that I detail on my YouTube channel, and the channel itself takes a fair bit of my time! If you're curious, you can check out my current successes and failure adventures at http://youtube.com/d/davesgarage
Did you work with Kris Hatleid on Super Hacker and the game Evolution?	I worked with Kris on an unreleased title called "Commander Video". That's largely where I learned assembly language, since he did the bulk of the coding, I watched and did level design, etc. 1982 or so I believe!
Got any dev back door mainframe access codes for pinball?	hidden test
Dave, how did you manage to do all that without being able to google everything?	That's one of the craziest things... I got a degree in computer science before you could even look anything up!
	The hardest part was OLE2. Coming form a different platform (the Amiga) it was a monster to wrap my head around, and the book (Inside OLE2) was not the best for introducing devs to OLE. It scared me, and I sure could have used a YouTube tutorial or two!
Hi Dave! So here's a bit of an odd one. I loved your Space Cadet Pinball! I must have spent countless hours on it as a kid, and even now I still occasionally try to find ways to boot it up. A legitimate classic. But lately, the version windows offers just... don't feel the same. They aren't as nice. Is there a game you can name that you would say feels like a worthy successor to Space Cadet Pinball? Or even any more general pinball games you would recommend?	I have a real Black Knight 2000 machine here in the house that I fully restored, so I'm a fan of physcial pinball as well!
	I think the two best video games are (a) arcade Tempest, and (b) XBox Geometry Wars 3.
	GW3 is a classic, or should be!
Woah woah woah, University of Regina?!? Are you from here? Cool to see a UofR grad had such a major impact!	Yup! Check out the regina sub for a recent article
When working on MS-DOS what did you think of alternatives such as 4DOS, NDOS or DR-DOS, were they source of inspiration for new features or not at all ?	No in general, but Norton had NCD. It was a change folder command that could jump around the disk, so if you typed "NCD drivers" from the root, it could go down to "C:\windows\system32\drives". Super handy.
	So I tried to write one for NT, but it meant changing the working directory of the PARENT process (cmd.exe) and I could never figure out a clean and elegant way to do it without modifying CMD itself!
Which is the best version of Windows? (Figuratively speaking).	Windows NT 4.0

WaykiChain (WICC) Monthly Report (December 2020)

https://preview.redd.it/oy1b98wc53c61.png?width=700&format=png&auto=webp&s=865dfb7efdf0cc5995e0caa296077985416ab94b
WaykiChain (WICC) Monthly Report (December 2020)
EN Version
Technology & Products
Public Chain Development
· Public chain 4.0: token contract deployment in a local private chain (100%)
· Public chain 4.0: exchange creation and order submission developed for DEX contract (100%)
· Public chain 4.0: initialization, matching, settlement, order cancellation, and pair adding realized for DEX contract (100%)
· Public chain 4.0: DEX order matching index designed and realized (100%)
· Public chain 4.0: DEX on-chain limit order matching realized (100%)
· Public chain 4.0: DEX on-chain market order matching realized (100%)
· Public chain 4.0: addition of the External ID field for DEX orders (100%)
· Public chain 4.0: DEX supports maximum matching number settings (100%)
· Public chain 4.0: DEX supports automatic matching when creating orders (100%)
Application Development
· Fixed bugs submitted by Turkish users in WaykiTimes Android (100%)
· Development of trading pair search interface for WaykiTimes Android (80%)
· Fixing of bugs in native functions of WaykiTimes Android (80%)
· Error code mapping completed for interfaces in WaykiTimes Android (100%)
· Synth trading fixing and improvement in WaykiTimes Android (90%)
· Tracking of some events adjusted in WaykiTimes iOS (100%)
· Linking of all interfaces with the respective logic of voluntary operations in WaykiTimes iOS (100%)
· Development of search in the trading history in WaykiTimes iOS (70%)
· Access to Wayki-X smart contract-related interfaces added to WaykiTimes (100%)
· WaykiTimes 3.0.7 released (100%)
· Token Swap: USDT/WUSD direction optimized (100%)
· Token Swap: jointly debugged and upgraded together with third parties (100%)
· Token Swap: adding of separate top-up notifications for Chinese and global users (80%)
· Staking: added Stop Staking function (100%)
· Staking: automatic redemption realized (100%)
· Staking: the bug when, after pool termination, the received quantity displayed incorrectly fixed (100%)
· Staking: iterative version tested (100%)
· Wayki-X: Market quotes push developed (100%)
· Wayki-X: default C-Ratio changed to 801% (100%)
· Wayki-X: when collecting rewards from the main page, the input status activates automatically. After closing the input window, the app stays at the current page (100%)
· Wayki-X: Request error codes added in Android version (100%)
· New synths listed (100%)
· Front-end and back-end joint debugging for the synths trading contest completed (100%)
Monthly Plan
Public Chain Development
· Public Chain 4.0: logging of DEX order matching
Application Development
· Development of search in the trading history in WaykiTimes iOS
· Logic adjustment for the biggest number of transactions on the trading page, fixing of the inability to sell a position completely
· Filter function for synths trading history in WaykiTimes Android
· Voluntary interface connection for synths in WaykiTimes Android
Market
International Market
· During November 30 — December 6, 501 new members joined WaykiChain Japan group in Telegram (https://t.me/waykichainjapanofficial).
· Since December 2, WaykiChain’s weekly and monthly reports are released in English and 7 new languages: Japanese, Russian, Persian, Korean, Sinhala, Turkish, and Filipino.
· Since December 3, WaykiChain Japan Twitter (https://twitter.com/waykichainjp) resumed operation. 150+ new followers added that week.
· On December 8, WaykiChain released the first episode of Gordon 5 Minutes Talk titled “Why Decentralized Bank Is Revolutionary?” via TikTok, YouTube, and other channels. The episode had over 1,000 likes and retweets on Twitter.
· On December 9, the number of WaykiChain followers in Twitter reached 17,500.
· On December 10, WaykiChain released the second episode of Gordon 5 Minutes Talk titled “What Makes Bitcoin Valuable?” via TikTok, YouTube, and other channels.
· On December 15, WaykiChain released the third episode of Gordon 5 Minutes Talk titled “What Makes A Token’s Price?” via Twitter and YouTube.
· On December 22, WaykiChain announced the First Synths Trading Contest on Twitter. The tweet got 1,000+ retweets.
· On December 23, WaykiChain WICC on YouTube and u/wayki_chain, u/GordonGao_WICC on Twitter released the fourth episode of Gordon 5 Minutes Talk titled “Liquidity Mining, Path to DeFi Success”.
· On December 24, WaykiChain Twitter u/wayki_chain follower count broke 18,000.
· On December 25, WaykiChain Twitter u/wayki_chain started the Christmas Airdrop event. Up till December 28, 50+ users participated. Congratulations to user u/ZhirkovRadomir on winning WaykiChain’s airdrop!
National Market
· On December 2, WaykiChain co-founder and CTO Richard Chen was invited to the Blockchain Open Source Technology Conference, China, Shenzhen Station co-hosted by jinse.com and Chainfor. Mr. Chen gave the speech “How WaykiChain uses WASM to realize the Synths DApp”.
· On December 4, WaykiChain was invited to participate in the AEX Super Brand Ambassador interactive lucky draw in Weibo. Among 105 participants, 5 users won prizes, including limited AEX An’an mascot branded gifts.
· On December 5, the announcement “WaykiChain Completes Ethereum Cross-chain, Adds Multiple Coins in Token Swap, and Accelerates the DeFi Development” was released in Chinese media. WaykiChain offers users an easy trading experience with cryptocurrencies and synths to meet more financial needs. Next, it will further increase the circulation and liquidity of the WUSD stablecoin.
· On December 11, WaykiChain and huoxun.com co-hosted The Most Influential Public Chain Brand campaign within the 2020 Guanhuo Awards.
· On December 14, planning of The First Synths Trading Contest in Wayki-X started. Multiple synths to trade, multiple prizes valued over USD 1,500, any participant can win a prize easily.
· On December 15, WaykiChain and AEX jointly hosted Christmas and New Year’s Day event and the First Texas Poker Competition. International and Chinese users could join a series of activities with abundant rewards: Daily Chip Shake, Texas Poker Competition, Trading and Asset Management.
· On December 21, the article “The First Synths Trading Contest with Prizes for All!” released across the Chinese media. It introduced the rules of the synths trading contest to let more users overcome the trading threshold using synths and directly experience the global stock indices, US stocks, and other financial products.
· On December 23, The First Synths Trading Contest started in Wayki-X. Up till December 30, users’ synth value reached 34,036.45 xUSD, the total trading volume was 93,965.53 xUSD, there were 883 orders, the number of traded synths was 22 among which xXRP, xETH, and xEOS were the most popular.
· On December 23, WaykiChain co-founder and CTO Richard Chen participated in 2020 Non-Consensus Conference & DeepChain Annual Impact Awards Ceremony hosted by DeepChain (shenliancaijing.com). Together with Ontology, NEO, Algorand, Conflux, IRISnet, Nervos, BSC (Binance Smart Chain), OMG Network, and Thor Chain, WaykiChain received the DeepChain 2020 Most Influential Public Chain award.
· On December 30, “WaykiChain’s First Synths Trading Contest Winner List” released. The First Synths Trading Contest concluded. Top 10 traders of the Yield Rank won 50 to 500 WUSD prizes. The trader with the highest yield (40.73%) won the first place and 500 WUSD. The four traders who won Prizes of Honor (the highest total trading volume, the highest profit amount, the highest single buy trade, the highest number of filled orders) got 10,000 WGRT each.
· On December 31, the article “WaykiChain 2020 Review and 2021 New Developments” released across the Chinese media. Among other achievements, WaykiChain completed the public chain upgrade to 3.0, introduced the world’s first three token economic model and the synth protocol Wayki-X, and strengthened the global consensus. WaykiChain starts a new chapter by further deepening what it has and by commitment to new developments.

Tales from 2+2: The Biggest Loser at Microstakes of All Time, A Story of Struggle

Link to Previous Tales From 2+2: Poker player steals $1m+ chips and tries to sell it on 2+2 poker forums
More Tales From 2+2: A Very Controversial $70k prop bet
Tales from 2+2: Homelessness, Grinding and the Biggest Shot of a Grinder’s Life: The Jared Huggins Story

The Blossoming of TV Poker

The Year is 2006. Online poker is thriving. Partypoker has the highest traffic of any poker site but Pokerstars are gaining new players quickly with aggressive marketing strategies. Lots of poker sites are investing heavily into marketing and one key place to channel their advertising budget is TV. New innovations, improved graphics and increasing funding meant that poker TV is at an all-time peak of popularity.
40% of the the 2006 WSOP Main Event’s attendance is from online sites and poker sites are offering large amounts of cash for players on TV to wear an advertising patch. According to Dan Goldman’s blog, Pokerstars spent over $730,000 on WSOP players’ gift bags. The WSOP is seeing more TV time and this year the $50k HORSE event is added to the TV schedule alongside the WSOP main event. This year’s $50k WSOP HORSE final table saw some huge names including Chip Reese, Phil Ivey, Patrik Antonius and Doyle Brunson.

The Path of a New Player

In Finland, Mikael Paisting is watching the 2006 WSOP on TV. He enjoys watching poker broadcasts and is fascinated by the game. It’s a very common story for players to catch an interest by watching poker TV and sign up with to one of the many poker sites available. He chooses to deposit on Partypoker. Mikael is a committed learner and player. He reads several poker books from well-known authors such as Dan Harrington and David Sklansky. He also watches many training videos. Like many players starting in online poker he begins at the microstakes cash tables.
Microstakes are a rite of passage for many online poker players. The limits range from 2nl to 10nl, so the standard buy in is $2-10. Some will play microstakes for weeks, months or even years improving their game and increasing their bankroll so they can move up to small stakes, 25nl and above. Some players see the microstakes as a job and play as many tables as they can to eke out a living wage. Some players have never played microstakes and skip it entirely for higher stakes. Mikael starts to play and doesn’t do well, this is normal for many beginners, even those who study. However, over the next few weeks Mikael continues to lose. Months go by and Mikael still hasn’t turned a profit. He discovers problems with tilt and often takes his frustration out in the chat box. An example of his rage:

Paisting:THAT IS NOT NORMAL OMG!! JUST UNBELIEVABLE

Mikael doesn’t play 10nl very often and spends the majority of him time playing 2nl and 5nl. He continues to multitable cash games on Partypoker but he just can’t win. He starts to lose big, thousands of dollars, mostly at 2nl which is known as the softest cash game on the internet.

Getting Noticed

Mikael continues to play long sessions over the next five years, he claims to play 5-7 days a week for 4-8 hours a day. By 2011 he had played 2 and a half million hands while playing 6 to 9 cash tables at one time. Mikael is still mostly playing 2nl and is down a colossal amount: $7000. Mikael has been suffering from major tilt problems and has a very wild and noticeable style of playing microstakes. He starts to get noticed on 2+2, a very popular poker forum. A player posts a link to his PTR graph, a site which tracks online cash games. They are shocked at his losses over so many hands:

yegor: wow such a massive fail
he played 2.5m hands at 2nl and 5nl and he's losing
Donkey111: I remember him from my 2NL days.
often goes on some massive tilt sessions and spews like 20 BI in 500 hands by shoving any 2 cards preflop.

He even gets hate from his PTR account where he is ridiculed on his profile comments, he also replies:

VELAir26: Spend your time with family, friends or other hobbies instead
Paisting: im fine with this you stupid idiot

Mikael continues to play his reckless and tilting style over the years. By 2014, he has been playing for 8 years and is down five figures at microstakes; he starts to look for excuses for how much he has lost. He posts a thread on 2+2 detailing how he feels that he wins at the start of the month and then inevitably starts to lose. He asks how he can take legal action against Partypoker. His fellow posters tease him:

5thStreethog: Did the thought ever cross your mind that it might be possible that the reason you cant beat NL2 in over a million hands might be because you arent very good at poker?

An Attempt at Redemption

2019 comes and Mikael Paisting has been playing microstakes for 13 years, and steadily losing a lot of money. He got a new computer in late 2018 and has been grinding away on it. Mikael is getting mentioned more on 2+2 and he is well known on the tables of Partypoker as he drops stack after stack. Many players on Partypoker furiously try to get on his tables to call his tilt shoves; when Mikael is present other player’s stacks can get as high as $100 at 2nl as he shoves buy in after buy in to button steals. Some were said to be using seating scripts to instantly be placed on a table with Paisting. At this point he is feeling very low. But despite years of losing money and insane tilting he is determined to improve. Mikael is aware of his losses and has a fierce desire to make back the money he has lost since he’s started tracking on his new PC.
He decides get help and he looks to 2+2, the very same forum that had mocked him over the last decade. He logs in as Paisting, his last name. He starts a new thread, types out a post and chooses a title: 'Biggest loser in online poker history wants to grind $16k'. He posts this thread in the sub-forum Poker Goals & Challenges, a place where players post their goals and try to update their thread with their progress. He posts graphs of his losses from his database on his PC. He starts the thread by posting some shocking graphs of $8700 lost at 2nl, $6000 lost at 5nl and $800 lost at 10nl. At 2nl he had an incredible rate of -170BB each 100 hands. The final graph of his microstakes losses posted show $15,000 lost over 365,000 hands. An average loss of $75 a day.
The 2+2 poker community are stunned by the graphs:

HorseofHell: I'm actually shocked it's possible to lose this much at 2nl
Mahsjdj: This can't be real can it?

Mikael posts about the hard work he’s put into poker and mentions that has watched videos, read many instructional books and is honest with his astounding losses:

Paisting: I've lost literally all my money including all my life savings to online poker. I want to try one last time to win those money back and little bit of extra. That's why $16k. What I need is support and guiding.

The community react to his plan to grind all the money back at microstakes:

Fodersneso: This is really disturbing.
Why on earth would you try to grind this all back? Losing at this rate is traumatizing. You're going to grind out 3000 BIs @nl5 now or what's the plan? Really curious how you think you can turn this pile of insanity around...

The community show disbelief and doubt that his story is real but several posters claim that what he says is true. He has been active in Finnish forums for more than 10 years and players starts to share hand histories and stories about his playstyle. He posts about his regret of picking the game up:

Paisting: Never had a winning week in 13 years.
If it were possible to go back ten years I would say to myself "Do not never play single one hand!"

He then goes on to tell 2+2 posters a disturbing source of his funds for his staggering 2nl losses:

Paisting: I've taken huge amount of fast loans.

He sheds a little light into his personal life:

Paisting: My age and relationships has nothing to do with this. But not working, no kids or wife and middle aged. What I have is time to play.
I get a little unemployment benefit that goes straight to the rent. My eating costs are very little because I'm only eating one meal per day. There are times when I must take more fast loans if need of clothes, unexpected bills, sickness etc. That's why getting back those $16k is so important to me.
No disability, never played anything else than poker or lottery when pots are bigger, maybe 5 times in year. Playing poker does not give me any excitement or I'm not cheering won pots.

Posters try to give him strategy advice, they try to persuade him time and time again that shoving 100+ blinds to a minsteal isn’t a good idea. Some others question his sanity and tell him to quit:

FazendeiroBH: Not trolling, I´m actually serious here. You lost an absurd amount of money playing the easiest stake in the world (nl2). You keep losing doing the same faulty strategy. No book ever said you should jam 100 bb preflop rfi. It´s quite obvious there is something wrong with you and your brain, and the more you delay seeking professional care for your mental problems, the worst it´s gonna be for you.

Paitsing updates his thread with highlight hands from his cash sessions. He seems to cherry pick hands to post and will only post hands where he loses all ins as a 70-95% favourite. He delusion leads him to blame the site, his luck and the other micro grinders. He often writes about specific players and gives his opinion on how badly they play. He often quotes their HUD stats and wide calling ranges while ignoring that they are probably adjusting heavily to his own playstyle. Some time passes and he discloses that he has lost almost $500 at 2nl since starting the thread three weeks ago.
He updates his followers with the first monthly graph of the thread from his 2nl play in April 2019. He plays for 90 hours in April and his average daily loss is $50, 25 buy ins each day. 2+2 players start to analyse the graph. They notice that there are several breakeven spots where he may be playing reasonable poker but also huge 150 buy in downswings, some drops in the graph are so steep that he is losing about a buy in every 5 hands for periods of hundreds of hands. He says:

Paitsing: Only trying to get my money back from guys who are playing nl2 forever and never moving up. When I started poker long time ago I tought it's exciting to read watch videos if it gives me more money. After 2 years figured out it's just sitting on computer like in work and if I'm someday +-0 never ever playing this stupid game. This is like war.

The thread goes on like this for almost a year. The thread repeats itself over and over. He will post a few selective bad beats, ignore good advice and berate his microstakes tablemates. A fellow microstakes grinder makes his first appearance in the thread: 6betpot. 6Betpot would play at Paisting's tables and often win many buy ins, 6Betpot would go on to post highly contrasting hand histories to the bad beats that Paisting posts, he would also reveal Paisting’s preflop 3 bet is around 30%. Some players would criticize 6Betpot for predatory behavior but 6Betpot would maintain that he would try to persuade Paisting to stop playing in a spewy manner. Someone asks to see the hands and 6Betpot posts some, here is one:

888 Poker - $0.02 NL (6 max) - Holdem - 6 players
BTN: 250.5 BB
SB (Paisting): 425.5 BB
BB: 101.5 BB
UTG: 100 BB
MP: 106.5 BB
CO: 84.5 BB
Pre Flop: (pot: 1.5 BB) BTN has Ad Qs
fold, fold, fold, BTN raises to 2 BB, Paisting raises to 425.5 BB and is all-in, fold, BTN calls 248.5 BB and is all-in
Flop: (502 BB, 2 players) Kh 4s 4c
Turn: (502 BB, 2 players) 3h
River: (502 BB, 2 players) Jc
BTN shows Ad Qs (One Pair, Fours)

Paisting shows 5s Js (Two Pair, Jacks and Fours)

Paisting wins 471 BB<
Later in the thread Paisting would reveal his line of thinking during hands like these; a poster asked why he though 3 betting hands like J5 was a good idea. Paisting replies:

Paisting: If you don't want them to run over you, you must do something. Blind play is very important and you can't let them run over you. When 80+ habit stealer gets shoves straight to his face he must learn at some point that I'm not giving blinds.

Many tried to reason with him and show him clearly why this was wrong, he not only refuted their strategy but would argue against them, often citing his opponent’s HUD stats.
Later on in the thread Mikael posts horrifying news. He explains that he didn’t transfer hands from his old computer to his new computer. The graphs he posted at the start of the thread only showed the tip of the iceberg. He reveals that $16k loss from the graphs was from just 7 months of play!:

Paisting: That 16k is in 209 days and in about 1 year as you can see from the first post. Big part of my losings has left to hard drive of my old crashed computer. That's past and I don't wanna think about it anymore. Main goal is this database I have here in my computer. But yes what I have been repeating many times, moving to 888 poker has sky rocketed my losses although I can play only 6 tables compared to party's 9 tables.

Posters speculate that his lifetime microstakes losses probably amount to six figures:

SpinMeRightRound: I mean if he's lost $20k in the last year, and he's been doing this for more than 10 years, he may have lost $200k or more.

In late 2019, Paisting claims that there was a ring of players were colluding against him. He goes on to say that the new site he plays on, 888, were asking for hand histories from certain players. He showed emails of his communications and posted that 8 players had had their account frozen. He also shows screenshots that his account is temporarily frozen during the investigation. Posters speculated:

CrunchyBlack: Pretty sure they think you're chip dumping lmao
.isolated: They think you're chip dumping to him. Funniest. Thing. Ever. The irony here is nearly palpable.

2020: The Struggle Continues

At the end of the year Paisting posts his 2019 graphs. He says that he hasn’t had a winning week yet and he’s still committed to making back 2019’s losses. His graphs show down 12k from 320k hands of 2nl in 2019.
In January 2020 he continues to post regularly and makes comments about him hunting down players worse than him:

Paisting: When you hunt really bad player (yes enzet there are plenty of worst player than me on 888 look those hand histories really carefully) hours and hours and wait good hand just to site let them to suck out it is affecting your game really badly.

He posts about his continuing struggle to win back the $16k:

Paisting: I have years dedicated for this project and anything back from that amount is winning to me. At this point it’s impossible to make any profit because of horrible suckouts.

He also posts about the high interest loans he’s taken out:

Paisting: I have huge amounts of loans that are basically all taken for poker. I don't eat much and all my other costs are very low.
And because of those loans I must get back so much money that is possible and these suck outs must stop.

February 2020 arrives and he posts his January chart, the worst posted yet. He takes a gigantic loss of $1,550 at an eye-watering rate of 210bb/100 hands. Often when he posts monthly graphs he would highlight that he ran a few buy ins below EV when he would be down hundreds of buy ins for the month.
The months pass and the cycle continues. Paisting posts the usual bad beats, posters berate him and try to give him advice and Paisting resists their efforts. Here is one of many similar hands posted in February:

888Poker, Hold'em No Limit - $0.01/$0.02 - 6 players
UTG: $1.46 (73 bb) Paisting (MP): $7.45 (373 bb) CO: $15.44 (772 bb) BU: $2.00 (100 bb) SB: $3.47 (174 bb) BB: $2.00 (100 bb)
Pre-Flop: ($0.03) 1 fold, Paisting(MP) raises to $7.45 (all-in), CO calls $7.45, 3 players fold
Flop: ($14.93) 6c 7c 4d (2 players, 1 all-in)
Turn: ($14.93) Ts (2 players, 1 all-in)
River: ($14.93) 8h (2 players, 1 all-in)
Total pot: $14.93 (Rake: $0.93)
Showdown: Paisting (MP) shows 7d Tc (two pair, Tens and Sevens) (CO) shows Js Jc (a pair of Jacks) Paisting (MP) wins $14

March comes and the regular monthly graph is posted. The uploaded graph shows is he down $1900 or 950 buy ins for last month. Mikael refutes that he is a gambling addict:

Paisting: 888 has given many 10 dollar bonuses to me play slots. I have never played them and in fact my account has 20 dollars freeplay bonus to play their slots. I will not use those money now or in future. So that's gambling addict to you.

April and May roll by and the monthly graphs are posted. He played fewer hands than normal, 43,000. But is down $1,250, all at 2nl.
In June he posts the usual monthly graph with -$1900 and it’s the lowest win rate he’s posted before, a colossal -335b/100hands, the graph has some alarmingly steep downswings with one section where he loses $500 in 1000 hands. That’s a loss of one buy in every 4 hands. Getting these monthly updates shows how quickly he loses money at 2nl and collaborates with earlier estimations that he is likely down more than $100k at microstakes over the past 14 years. Approximations indicate that Mikael has paid over $20k in rake to poker sites over the years.

The End, for Now

Mikael is still playing microstakes to this day. His poker story isn’t over yet but so far it is a sad one. My previous two Tales from 2+2 stories had mostly happy endings but not this one. This story is like a car falling down a cliff and it hasn’t hit the bottom yet.
Let this story be a lesson that poker isn’t for everyone. Players with addiction or mental issues should reconsider if the game is best for their lives. Serious poker players should consider bankroll management and how tilt affects their winrate if they do choose to play.
Seek help if you think you or others need it.
Original thread (Still active)

I Raise You One Ruckle.

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Tales from 2+2: The Biggest Loser at Microstakes of All Time, A Story of Struggle

The Blossoming of TV Poker

The Path of a New Player

Getting Noticed

An Attempt at Redemption

2020: The Struggle Continues

The End, for Now

I Raise You One Ruckle.

poker chips quotes video

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