The Big Book of Writing Sex; A Tactless Resource!

rpedia:

          Writing sex scenes. If you read those three words and you’re interested I don’t have to say much more huh?

       A disclaimer if you will that this is just covers the two physical genders we see the most, with a bit about managing with non/neutral genders, xeno sex, jellies, hermaphrodites, and gender shifters, and stuff. If anyone has a problem with any gender doing anything, then they can skip that part. If you have any issues with any of the terminology I use, you can go elsewhere. I’m not here to be PC or make you feel better about what you’re reading or take care of your issues, I’m just here to drop information for people who might need it and I’m not nice about it. Trigger Warnings I guess for general sexuality, but I keep the really nasty harder triggers out of it. Oh and it’s REALLY LONG AND DETAILED (It’s 13,400 words or so if you’re asking.)

       So: suck it up, put on your big girl panties, and deal with topics you might find uncomfortable or badly phrased as maturely as possible. Get ready to giggle like 13-year-olds at the word nipple. We’re going into the five-alarm-flame-bait-NSFW-headache known as sex! (No seriously, this is NSFW. 18+ only material.)

Keep reading

Do yourself a favor. Learn to code. Here’s how.

boomeyer:

piggywheel:

boomeyer:

I’ve said this to my non-techie friends countless times. It’s no secret that being able to code makes you a better job applicant, and a better entrepreneur. Hell, one techie taught a homeless man to code and now that man is making his first mobile application.

Learning to code elevates your professional life, and makes you more knowledgeable about the massive changes taking place in the technology sector that are poised to have an immense influence on human life.

(note: yes I realize that 3/5 of those links were Google projects)

But most folks are intimidated by coding. And it does seem intimidating at first. But peel away the obscurity and the difficulty, and you start to learn that coding, at least at its basic level, is a very manageable, learnable skill.

There are a lot of resources out there to teach you. I’ve found a couple to be particularly successful. Here’s my list of resources for learning to code, sorted by difficulty:

Novice

Never written a line of code before? No worries. Just visit one of these fine resources and follow their high-level tutorials. You won’t get into the nitty-gritty, but don’t worry about it for now:

Dash – by General Assembly

CodeAcademy

w3 Tutorials (start at HTML on the left sidebar and work your way down)


Intermediate

Now that you’ve gone through a handful of basic tutorials, it’s time to learn the fundamentals of actual, real-life coding problems. I’ve found these resources to be solid:

Khan Academy

CodeAcademy – Ruby, Python, PHP

Difficult

If you’re here, you’re capable of building things. You know the primitives. You know the logic control statements. You’re ready to start making real stuff take shape. Here are some different types of resources to turn you from someone who knows how to code, into a full-fledged programmer.

Programming problems

Sometimes, the challenges in programming aren’t how to make a language do a task, but just how to do the task in general. Like how to find an item in a very large, sorted list, without checking each element. Here are some resources for those types of problems

Talentbuddy

TopCoder

Web Applications

If you learned Python, Django is an amazing platform for creating quick-and-easy web applications. I’d highly suggest the tutorial – it’s one of the best I’ve ever used, and you have a web app up and running in less than an hour.

Django Tutorial

I’ve never used Rails, but it’s a very popular and powerful framework for creating web applications using Ruby. I’d suggest going through their guide to start getting down-and-dirty with Rails development.

Rails Guide

If you know PHP, there’s an ocean of good stuff out there for you to learn how to make a full-fledged web application. Frameworks do a lot of work for you, and provide quick and easy guides to get up and running. I’d suggest the following:

Cake PHP Book

Symfony 2 – Get Started

Yii PHP – The Comprehensive Guide

Conclusion


If there’s one point I wanted to get across, it’s that it is easier than ever to learn to code. There are resources on every corner of the internet for potential programmers, and the benefits of learning even just the basics are monumental.

If you know of any additional, great resources that aren’t listed here, please feel free to tweet them to me @boomeyer.

Best of luck!

I’d also like to add some more specialized resources!

Video games:

Easy game engines (virtually no coding): 

More difficult game engines: 

  • Unity (lots and lots of platforms; C# and JavaScript script; 2D, 3D, VR; free and paid versions)
  • Unreal (specializes in graphics; C++ and visual script; 2D, 3D, VR; free with a royalty on successful products)
  • CryEngine (Lua script; 3D; paid subscription and full license versions)

Mobile game development: 

  • Corona (free and paid subscription versions)
  • SpriteKit (2D) and SceneKit (3D) which are built into the official compiler to create iOS apps (see iOS apps for more resources)
  • also all of the above game engines (cross-platform)

Game console development: 

  • Game Maker Studio (with a paid subscription)
  • Unity
  • Unreal
  • CryEngine

Note that games can also be created on more general platforms like iOS and Android apps, but the resources listed above are specialized for game development.

iOS apps:

In order to develop iOS apps, you’ll need to purchase an iOS developer program membership for $99 a year, which requires an Apple account. Here are some general resources:

iOS apps are developed in the 2 official languages of Apple: Objective-C and Swift, the latter of which is newer and generally much easier to learn.

Objective-C resources:

Swift resources:

Xcode also has SpriteKit, SceneKit, and Metal built in, all of which are incredibly useful for creating apps that require elaborate graphics, particularly games.

SpriteKit resources:

SceneKit resources:

Metal resources:

Also, in order to publish iOS apps, you’ll have to juggle certificates, app ids, and provisioning profiles. This process can be convoluted at times so here are some resources:

Android apps:

In order to develop Android apps, you’ll need to register as a developer for a one-time fee of $25. Here are some general resources:

Android apps are developed in Java and the layout is coded with XML.

Java resources:

XML resources:

For publishing (which is somewhat easier than publishing iOS apps):

3D modeling/animation:

  • Blender (can also be used to create games; Python script; free and open-source; can be installed on Windows, OS X, and Linux)
  • Maya (specialized script; free trial, free 3-year student subscription, and paid subscription versions; can be installed on Windows, OS X, and Linux to an extent)
  • 3ds Max (Python script; free trial, free 3-year student subscription, and paid subscription versions; can be installed on Windows and OS X)
  • RenderMan (specialized script; free for non-commercial/educational use and pay-per-license for commercial use; can be installed on Windows, OS X, and Linux)

Misc. resources:

Stack Overflow is an ask-and-answer community for programmers. It’s amazing and will save your life. Sign up and don’t be afraid to ask for help.

Github offers a student pack (here) if you create an account and prove you’re a student. This gives you free access to a bunch of great programming resources for free for a certain period of time, such as Unreal Engine. Also, Github in general is a site that you can host your code on. Other users can see it, and “fork” it to make a copy of your code and modify it.

Parse is a backend service that allows you to store data in databases it hosts on its own servers. It lets you use push notifications, create users, store and retrieve data, etc. It’s compatible with iOS apps, Android apps, Windows apps, Xamarin, React, Unity, OS X, Windows, JavaScript, PHP, .net, Arduino, and Embedded C. It’s free up to a certain limit that depends on the services you use.

Cloud9, Codebox, and Squad are online IDEs that allow for real-time collaboration and support a variety of languages, so they’re useful for team projects.

And some general advice:

  • Your program will not work right away, 99% of the time. That’s okay. Do your best to figure out where the error is. Here is some advice on debugging (written for PHP but the methods can be generalized).
  • If you’re stuck, Google. Google like there’s no tomorrow.
  • Ask questions on a community like Stack Overflow.
  • For that matter, browse relevant Stack Overflow questions. You can probably find some solutions there.
  • Don’t be afraid to copy and paste.
  • Take breaks sometimes if you’re getting burned out. But don’t stay away from your projects for too long or you’ll lose track of its status.
  • Backup your code. On the cloud, on a USB drive, wherever. If your IDE has a backing up feature like snapshots, use it whenever you hit a milestone.
  • If your project is big, split it up into milestones and set goals. Don’t tackle everything at once.

Like the OP said, coding isn’t just for professionals and “geeks” anymore. Anyone can learn it if you really try, and with the rapidly expanding tech industry, learning coding can really broaden your opportunities.

If any of the links are broken, or you have a question or some information/resources to add, you can contact me through the askbox or the OP through his Twitter (as mentioned in his post).

If you’re interested, try some of these out and best of luck!

Great work expanding on my humble list to include a much fuller collection of resources for learning how to code! Cheers!

Casting Glamours

juniperwildwalk:

What is a glamour?

Stemming from the old Scots word, a “glamour” (always spelt with the British “ou”, as we are referring to the spell not the trait) is a kind of magickal spell or enchantment that a person casts upon an object, a person, or themselves to confuse, bewitch or obscure the senses of other observers. For instance, a pickpocket may use glamours as a means of assisting in the avoidance of detection, and a secret Witch may use a glamour to hide their spell supplies. Glamours are also one of the primary spells that the Fae Folk use to hide their presence, and also to make mischief and cause harm to intrusive or blundering humans who offend them. 

Why have I never heard of this before?!

Probably because it’s not very flashy and, by its very nature, it’s centred around concealment. Glamours are very powerful, very useful spells, but they don’t involve love or money or luck or happiness and so they tend to be overlooked by most novice or self-taught Witches. They’re also quite hard to perfect, and so many more experienced Witches give up before they have mastered them.

They are simultaneously very simple spells to perform, but very difficult to perfect, as they require significant effort of Will and a lot of practice but if you achieve a true glamour it can be one of the most powerful spells in any Witch’s arsenal. It’s also worth noting, however, that glamours do not conceal things from machines. Machines like metal detectors, security cameras and proximity detectors don’t have minds, and as such they cannot be fooled by magick that affects the mind and how the brain perceives senses. They also work poorly on animals, especially cats. Do not try to fool a cat with a glamour. Dogs are often confused by glamours, but generally see through them with time, and snakes and lizards are completely immune as far as I can tell (since their minds are not concerned with things that glamours affect).

OK, but how do I cast a glamour?

The first step is, as with all spells, to decide to do it. Decide “I am going to cast a glamour”. Know it in your soul, know that what you will do is magick, it is a glamour, and that it’s purpose is to hide yourself. Glamours on yourself are generally the easiest to start with, because they are the easiest kind with which to tell when something needs improving. 

Secondly, you must visualise strongly – and I mean REALLY strongly, let it consume your being – the purpose of the glamour. Fill yourself with the knowledge how how it will work, what it will do, how it will work. If you are looking for a glamour of imperception, whereby you attempt to make yourself hard to see by convincing the minds of people around you that you are utterly uninteresting and forgettable, fill yourself with that. Let to complete and utter truth of that ring through your head; 

“I am forgettable, I’m not even here. You don’t remember me, I’m utterly boring, I’m just another part of the background. Everything about me is empty and dull. There is nothing here”

And similar such truths. Let your Willpower make them true, let their truth fill the world around you through the strength of your visualisation.

Thirdly, sustain it. This is the hardest step, but a glamour will only last for as long as it is sustained and remembered. If you are visualising a glamour on something that moves or changes (such as yourself) this can involve literally constant reinforcement – never ever stop thinking those reinforcing statements and pouring all your Willpower into them. For objects that are more static, for instance a chest containing spell supplies, this can simply involve a period of refreshment every evening whereby you place your hands upon it and refresh the enchantment you’ve placed upon the chest, reminding it of how completely ignorable and boring it is, reminding it that nobody will open it because nobody will care enough to try, that nobody will notice it because it’s so dull it’s not even there. 

That seems REALLY hard, is there a simpler way?

The short answer is, no. This is why glamours are often quite unpopular – despite their obvious power and usefulness, the sheer effort of Will that goes into the construction of a glamour, and the amount of practice you need to get really good, can scare off a lot of Witches from truly persisting. Those who need glamours are often the only ones who are really any good at them – the best glamour-caster I have ever known developed her skill during her life as a pickpocket, when she used glamours to avoid getting caught. The simple fact that she has no criminal record attests to their efficacy! But, it took her a very long time to get that good, and most Witches simply don’t care enough to try.

However, I urge you to do so! It’s such a rewarding skill, even if only so that you can be the undisputed champion of paintball and laser tag in your friend group because nobody ever sees you in the shadows. 

So there you are! The ancient, powerful, and mostly-overlooked art of glamours! I hope this helped all you lovely Witches!

– Juniper Wildwalk