Friday Ephemera (834)
Not entirely sure what’s happening here. (h/t, Dicentra) || You want one and you know it. || Situational awareness. || Spear protocol. || Pressure suit, 1934. || For all your vaporising needs. || On progressive out-group bias. || It’s a job. || You’ll want one of these buggers, too. || And she can bend it backwards. || His is bigger. || Battle of the sexes, or “windmilling fat birds.” || The Bashinator 9000. || On the coming of decimal currency, 1970. || A ruler was used. || Regurgitation of note. || Incoming. || Traffic camera tunes, a live entertainment of sorts. || “Now that it’s inserted, we are ready for a conversation.” || How to make an origami typewriter. || Oral Care for the Mentally Retarded, 1966. || Film poster restoration. || The glamour of flight. || Place in food chain negotiation. || A project for the weekend.
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There’s another half-hour gone, down one of David’s rabbit holes.
Time flies: It’s already been 4 years since the Mercedes Lackey affair.
Still thinking about the rotating budgies.
David, has the “men in sheds” phenomenon been covered here?
How Women Nag Their Way Into Men’s Spaces
Fitness and hydration.
Band name.
You should come to the Calgary Stampede. You can watch horses buxom cowboys!
And yet, all these black folk in MI will vote for El-Sayed.
I see what you did there.
[ Reaches under bar, presses button. ]
Violent mutual hatred will only increase. Diversity!
“A multi-racial society that approaches equal proportions of the different groups… is not workable.”
Charles Murray, around 2:30, here.
At this point, whenever any F/SF writer opens their cake hole, my only response is “what did you know about Marion Zimmer Bradley and Walter Breen, and when did you know it” (also Ed Kramer).
I’ve had more that one exchange with an old-school fantasy author that boiled down to “You wanted more women in this field, and you got it. Now it’s all D&D, r*ape and monster porn. Oops?”
Anyone not willing to admit that the genre and the community has a serious p*rn and CSA problem isn’t worth engaging with.
It has. Fellas, always maintain your frame.
Somewhat related:
It’s still not clear to me just how widespread the problem is. I’ve encountered a few names, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley, Arthur C Clarke, and Samuel R Delany, but I pay too little attention to the genre news to have a clear understanding.
The prevalence of radical leftism, on the other hand, is much more obvious.
Should I change my screen name to Arthur No Sheds Jackson?
“Share your love of tentacles”
But it’s utterly gasp-inducing that a buxom 29-year-old actress should make the most of her assets while everything is still optimally positioned.
This.
Further to this – reminds me of the video Critical Drinker did on The Male Gaze which we’ve been hearing about ad nauseum for years now. The Feminazis (Rush Limbaugh’s term for the militant arm which is now ascendant) were riding high on their MeToo-ing of everything a few years back, and the DIE and ESG crap forced on the world where ugly obese people were suddenly everywhere in media – ads, film, tv. Even the gaming world got taken over, and everything was ugly and covered up almost to burqa level.
Funny thing is – that kind of thing goes against human nature, and requires applied force to maintain. If that’s your only choice, that is what you will consume. Take away the external applied force, and someone like Sweeney can come in. Once that happens, the whole ugly edifice comes crashing down, because once people have a choice for something different, they’ll take it. And all the scolding, nagging actresses who covered up and women who uglified themselves (or just plain aged out of buxom youth) are now on the back foot and boy are they mad. It’s a story as old as time.
The joys, wonders, and benefits of multiculturalism.
Florida man;
Important and probing question for one seeking high office.
AceOfSpadesHQ is currently named “James Talarico’s Musky Heterosexual Urges”.
It is this barging in that makes alarums about gynephilic men invading women’s spaces fall a bit flat with the spear side.
Meanwhile, in York, PA, black folk know who are the real victims.
Kurt Eichenwald joins the chat.
‘Sir, Walmart is down the road.’
“Besides yourself.”
Katsushika Hokusai asks, “What am I, chopped liver?”
It’s not just the black thugs; it’s also the blacks who make excuses for them.
They are not fellow citizens.
Muslim boy bullies classmates. Teacher disciplines him and invites father for a chat. Father threatens to behead teacher.
Why not move them to, say, Algeria? Or the middle of the Mediterranean?
If that’s your act, well, OK, but when there are very obviously kids right there at the edge of the stage ….
…. shouldn’t you stop what you’re doing? “I’m not going to do this with kids around”?
Mixing Western music styles with aboriginal stuff can work really well, but you’ve gotta be Ennio Morricone.
Hey, I could use some perspective from someone who’s worked in a similar situation as mine. I got quasi-chewed out today at work for something that I didn’t even know was a thing.
I’m on a tech-writing team, and we document the APIs for our company, including product guides and implementation guides. We have more than 100 clients, all of whose devs use our docs to integrate their apps with our APIs.
We have to check many of our changes into GitLab repos. Often, our merge requests (MRs) need approval from others on my team.
We groom Jira tickets on Tuesdays, and our supervisor says “these are the priorities for the week,” and she lists several projects, usually one or two belonging to each team member. We have standup once a week and keep a running doc where we show what we did last week and what our plans are for the coming week. Occasionally the supervisor annotates it saying, “you might want to put this at the top of your list” or “let’s put this aside for now.”
Each of us writers has our little area to work on. We don’t have projects where multiple writers contribute, or one writer’s work has to get done before another writer can start. No overlap, in other words.
Every day, writers post MRs or docs to a particular Slack channel, requesting peer review, and whoever’s got the bandwidth picks it up.
This is what I want to know from other professionals: When I grab an MR or doc to review, is it my job to wonder why the writer is working on the thing, and whether they ought to be working on it?
Because up until now I haven’t given a rip. You put something in front of me, I review it. I don’t wonder whether the writer is addressing proper priorities or whether “we ought to be doing this right now.”
Because it doesn’t affect my work one way or the other.
Am I wrong?
No. If you aren’t the author’s manager or supervisor, what they’re supposed to be working on, what their assigned priorities are, is not your concern. If the divergence from stated priorities is egregious you might mention it to the author but that’s a courtesy, not a responsibility.
You are proofreading, not playing assistant manager. Whoever chewed you out is trying to shirk their own duties.
It was my supervisor, in response to complaints from at least one other writer (a friend of hers from a previous job).
We got access to an LLM-assisted writing harness that you can link up to a repo (or multiple) and then get it to write stuff for you, or at least validate existing docs against code. We have two main projects, the older standing project (A) and a newer one (B).
I was required to whip up some docs in project B using the harness, because someone needed them fast. So starting from zero knowledge, I spent long hours telling the bot (AI agent) what the contours were of the project and how everything related to everything else. It was a steep learning curve because I’d never used anything like it, and the way the bot thinks about information is odd.
Anyway, I got the stuff generated, then I had some extra time, so I created some git branches so I could answer the question: how might this harness help us with project A?
I ran a few prompts, then I posted the MRs so that my teammates could see the results. It was all very proof-of-concept, just exploration, highly preliminary. “Oh look, we can get the bot to perform this kind of analysis. Maybe that will be useful later on.”
They freaked out. “What’s going on, what’s this for? Why are we doing this?”
I said, “No, we’re not doing anything. I just wanted to do a little exploration with the bot. I’m not trying to change workflows, not asking for decisions to be made. Not even asking to merge these MRs. I just thought you might find it interesting.”
Nope. The context-switching was disrupting team harmony, throwing people off their game. They weren’t even required to look or care.
Then I did a terrible thing. I thought: hey, we can use the bot to verify some stuff against code in project A, which would improve the accuracy of the reference section. I wrote up some Jira tickets with prompts.
In grooming, there was sharp pushback from one teammate, C. (Our supervisor wasn’t there.) “Why would we prioritize this? No, there are more important things.” She was close to panic.
From my PoV, this was a nice quick fix, a quick win that we could just do in less than an hour. Something that we’ve needed to do for a long time, but haven’t done because it was manual, and now we could automate it.
So yesterday I went ahead and did the thing, creating several MRs in the process. 40 minutes, while I waited for a DoorDash order and finished up another Jira ticket.
I didn’t post the MRs, I just DMed the supervisor to show her how easy it was.
Nope. It would require other people to look at it, people who don’t think it should be worked on right now, people who don’t want to do a peer-review unless it’s in line with “the biggest business impact.”
Apparently, C has been complaining to my supervisor (S) about me coloring outside the lines. I get my actual work done on time, and so I do side-quests to fix little things, but because there’s peer review involved, I’m the bad guy.
Supposedly, we’re supposed to be serving the needs of client devs, and IMO making everything excruciatingly accurate is 100% in line with that goal.
But no, I have to be thwarted by someone else’s neurosis.
Two years from retirement. I’m too old to go learn another system. grRRRRRrrrr.
Six years retired from SW dev, so the modern AI stuff is entirely outside my professional experience, but that’s not all that relevant. What you describe sounds more like a general team dynamics problem, the kind of which I am at least tangentially familiar. Curious about this:
This being a tech writing project, what is the percentage of females involved? Is supervisor’s friend a female? Are any gay men of the more catty persuasion involved? Is this a government/DoD contractor project?
Five women including me, one on maternity leave. They’re all millennials.
We recently acquired a new writer with a company acquisition. He’s the one who developed the LLM harness that I’ve been tinkering with. He’s got a super sharp mind and might be gay.
I was the first writer the private company hired in 2020 to get the docs into shape. As a result, I learned all the ins and outs of the system quite well before the others were hired. We used to have two male devs on the team but they were laid off (a colossal mistake, IMO).
I’m very much the oddball. I’m a generation older, and I’m pretty sure I’m the only conservative. Fortunately, there’s a tacit understanding company-wide that politics and religion and other hot-button issues are just not mentioned. Despite the HQ being in the bay area, there’s minimal woke imposition. The corporate training on harassment is 100% CYA for the company. No “anti-whiteness” harangues.
So one of them, C, has always had a problem with me, or rather she alternates between having a problem and being almost obsequious. She has a lot of anxiety about taking on too much work as a team. My inclination is to just do the thing, but she wants to offload stuff as “not our job.”
She’s also a stickler with following procedure. This is hard for me, because procedure feels like a calcification of common sense, a thing you do for people who can’t figure out how to function. There IS a legit function in the sense of leaving audit trails in case we get in trouble.
She hates how I color outside the lines, considering it arrogant, and maybe it is, but I have so much more experience than they, and I understand the system so much better (they can’t be arsed to learn outside their current areas).
Since she’s pals with S, she complains to her a lot about me, and half the time I’ve crossed a line I didn’t even know existed (such as this latest). I also got reported to HR because of something I wrote that C grossly misinterpreted. (I don’t know if it was C or S who reported me), so I had to go through some kind of tact-and-diplomacy exercise.
I think they consider me the problem child. That’s galling, because I am far more productive, far sharper with tech docs, and have far better instincts than they do. (Well, S is pretty sharp, but she doesn’t write docs.)
And the RUMINATION over everything. Both C and S talk a LOT. Grooming tickets can become agonizing as they have to pick at this and that and ponder.
Argh.
They prize team cohesion over excellence, is what. That drives me nuts. I’d far rather work with devs, who don’t care about tact, and who just want accuracy.
Tinned cheese is a thing that exists.
And in degrading-society-because-I-can news:
But hey, according to the Guardian and the Observer, they’re poor vulnerable mites:
Death it is, then.
poor, poor widdow crime rings.
It’s not unlike being randomly punched in the face by some feral creatures, for shits and giggles, and while you’re getting to your feet and looking for your spectacles, being punched in the face again, by the very same creatures, who are laughing at this point, and then being told by a chorus of onlooking Guardian columnists, “Just let them hit you again.”
The dynamic, the perversity, is, I think, much the same.
Hollywood needs original content.
Sigh. Procedure over results, one might say.
For the repeat offenders and for the Guardian and Observer columnists, yes?
Tinned cheese is a thing that exists
That reminds me of the nightmare that was “possessed“ cheese
What in the name of all that is holy is that?
In totally unrelated news, today’s word is testicle.
Hey, I don’t make the rules.
I believe this news item fits perfectly in that category:
Homicidal empathy.
It’s epidemic.
Having experienced similar – what are you doing? why are you doing that? what about this super-duper important project we can’t be arsed to whip up specifications for? why are you asking questions? – I have some sympathy for your position.
And herein lies the problem – you’re better at what you do, have more knowledge, and refuse to be content in your nesting box. It’s resentment, the malice of the mediocre.
Me too. I earned repeated reprimands for fixing small bugs when I found them. Also for taking the time to document mystery kludges when I discovered clues to their intended purposes.
Has been for quite a while, pro tip: the crackers are nigh inedible, save it for the ham slices or spaghetti and meatballs.