Using art to make a point about a particular person's current horns dilemma. While she's horny
Unauthorized Access (A point of divergence with Lisa being chased into the protection of the PRT wards rather then Coil capturing her) is found on A03
https://archiveofourown.org/works/68362061/chapters/207694466
Art on right by Nobredoesart, also on tumblr
https://www.tumblr.com/nobredoesart/808029894446563328/commission-about-unauthorized-access-by
lesbian heated rivalry wouldn’t be in hockey because there are already many out queer women in hockey due to the fact that hockey is viewed as a men’s sport. the whole reason hockey is captivating for mlm is because it is a toxically masculine sport and the idea of having out queer men in that sport is surprising (requiring them to stay closeted/have situationships/etc), whereas it is not nearly as surprising for queer women. therefore, lesbian heated rivalry would actually occur in a setting like ballet, gymnastics, or some other stereotypically feminine sport (that has toxic feminine standards) where queer women are not as visible. in this essay i will
i don't think people into the mech porn stuff think it's representative of normal mecha fiction any more than people doing FFXIV gpose porn think that the next raid is going to have a Mindless Hypnoslut debuff
This is a long read, but worth it. Some takeaways:
-Don’t use “buy now pay later.” The fine print isn’t what it seems.
-The fine print on medical financing, store credit cards, and contactless payment is also not what it seems.
-Payday loans are still predatory, even when offered by your employer
-Rewards programs are an income stream for the companies that run them. The points systems are manipulated so that the house always wins. They depend on people leaving money in rewards accounts and not in interest-bearing traditional bank accounts.
-Electronic payment apps like VenMo are not banks. You don’t earn interest. Your money is not protected.
-Your financial information is not private if your money is not kept in a regulated bank.
-None of this is regulated by the FDIC. Your money is not protected if it is held by a non-bank doing banking business. Our economy is not protected from the collapse of financial institutions that are not banks.
-The Biden administration was making progress in increasing accountability for non-banks operating as predatory financial services providers. The current administration is reversing those protections to favor corporations.
A third of younger Americans hold their savings on nonbank tech platforms like Venmo
PEOPLE! DO NOT LEAVE YOUR MONEY IN VENMO OR APPLE PAY OR ANY OF THIS SHIT. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GO FIND A REAL BANK OR A CREDIT UNION.
If Venmo were to close tomorrow all your money would vanish. There's no insurance or guarantee on any of these things. I know banks aren't great but legit banks will have the "FDIC insured" logo on their doors and websites, which means if my bank goes under tomorrow I still get my money back. Also I guarantee you there is a credit union somewhere in your town, go find it.
You can leave some money in Venmo or Apple pay or whatever, but NOT ALL OF IT for the love of God.
I literally move all of my payments immediately from Venmo or PayPal to a real bank. You should only ever treat these things like doorways. You don't stand in the doorway bc the door could close on you and squish you. Don't leave your money in the doorway: it's not safe there.
Okay, so where should I put my money? I had a regular ass bank account and I couldn't work, so my credit cards are maxed and my checking/savings account was closed for being negative so any money I put in there vanished into the negative balance.
Venmo was the only thing I could find where I could put 20 bucks into it in order to pay the bills do services wouldn't cut out, since I couldn't pay cash or pay directly from electronic payments I was getting.
So now that I am getting income again, I need to pay for gas and buy tires that won't burst, where do I go do my few hundred bucks a week I just started to get isn't eaten by my old bank?
i hope the homestuck anime gets a million investors and then production goes completely sideways in a new unprecedented way. i hope it runs a thousand seasons and they're all terrible. i hope it stays dark forever. i hope the worst isn't over, and i hope you blink before i do. i hope i never get sober.
gonna be honest: some parts of the pale lights fanbase are super toxicly positive and in-group-y right now. i'm going to continue liveblogging chapters but i will do them without being in the discord or patreon anymore because i honestly do not feel comfortable sharing my opinions on those spaces anymore. i seriously hope that this will merely be a blip in the fanbase history but right now it's getting to guide levels of "if you don't like this character you are a bad person irl" . just saw someone in the patreon saying that maryam dislikers never went through any "meaningful suffering".... yeah i'm out!
Alas, fandom be fandom. It's funny that EE spent all this time making nuanced, flawed and damaged characters but people are stuck in the black-and-white view that PGTE spent several million words examining every angle of why that's fucking stupid.
Toxic Positivity should mean being positive about toxicity!
#Let Song be judgemental #Angharad should fuck more women unwisely and then dump them in fire while she jane-bonds her way to her next adventure
Tristan should be allowed to hurt people who annoy us readers with horrendous violence #And I guess they can learn and grow as people, as long as they do terrible shit and then go 'I should not have done that cool and awesome thing to read about, because other people exist and are not just props to show off how cool and awesome I am'
My spouse and I just had one of those “wait your brain works HOW?” exchanges, and now I am BURNING TO KNOW HOW IT WORKS FOR OTHER PEOPLE:
Fellow speakers of this feral bastard language (English), rb and tell me in the tags: what is the delineation for you, if any, between evening and night?
so in Russian this is a set linguistic fact. I know that's not what you asked for but it's how I read English words too as a result so.
Morning: 4am to 11:59am. Day: 12pm to 4:59pm. Evening: 5pm to 11:59pm. Night: 12am to 3:59am.
basically where yall say am or pm, we say "of morning", "of day", "of evening" and "of night" to indicate which half of the 24hr clock we mean. It's not rly formal, formally we just use the 24hr time (like idk on concert ads, starting with that level of formal)
For my english-speaking-ass, who worked several seasons as graveyard shift and thus often had my 'day' involve both a calendar date change often sun rising and setting during my shift...
"Evening" and "Morning" refer to clock times. (4 AM - 11:59 AM sounds right for morning, evening I'd cut at least an hour or two on either side, but is a bit more vague)
"Day" and "Night" can refer to a chunk of time within that 24 hours, but when it does it's more the presence of the sun. It can be night at 6 PM, or it can be day, depending on the season and location.
"Day" can also refer to the entire 24 hour calendar time of course, depending on context. (Evening/Night/Morning is nailing down a specific section of a day, while Day you have to parse if you're talking about an entire 24 hour chunk, or a specific time)
Sam “held a burning hot coal until it nearly took the skin off his hand while maintaining perfect calm and eye contact with the asshole in need of intimidation Just Because” Vimes? Sam “sitting on the stoop with a mug of cocoa and a cigar, cautiously aware of every inch of the scene he’s building” Vimes? Sam “could just tear his sleeve to show the mark of the Summoning Dark but instead tears off his whole goddamn shirt” Vimes? A drama queen? Reaching a bit don’t you think
Yep, certainly doesn’t seem to describe Sam “pretends to eat poison as a power move” Vimes. Not Sam “buries an axe in the table in the Rats Chamber” Vimes.
I mean are we really talking about Sam “yes a whole room full of candles with wicks dipped in holy water is the best way to beat this vampire” Vimes, here? Sam “has fought bad guys on top of a speeding train AND a riverboat during a flood” Vimes, really? Definitely Sam “nearly gets shot in the head by a crossbow bolt that shatters his shaving mirror and then uses the bolt to prop up a shard of said mirror to finish shaving” Vimes we’re discussing here?
vimes did not resign from his post in protest, observe the rest of the watch resign from their posts in protest, recruit them into a militia, sail to the country they were at war with, and attempt to arrest two different armies for disturbing the peace so you could sit here and call him a drama queen, as though drama was some myffic quality bestowed by an accident of birth and not the inherent right of every creatively petty and histrionic citizen of ankh-morpork
The fundamental difference between Zenos and The Warrior of Light as Written--something that exists regardless of any particular WoL's disposition or motivations, all things subject to personal headcanon--is that the TWoLaW engages deeply with the world around them, and Zenos does not. The fundamental quality of Azem the Traveler, and the quality that is suggested to have been inherited by TWoLaW (and by Ardbert), is that they are deeply engaged with the world, and with its people.
Is it true that TWoLaW is disposed toward violence, sure, absolutely, for reasons of video game mechanics if nothing else. But I fundamentally disagree that violence is the core of TWoLaW regardless of how we roleplay them. At the core of TWoLaW is their engagement with the world. Yes, as a result of that, TWoLaW is willing to go kill people and things because they were asked to. You know what else they're willing to do because someone asked them to? Talk to people. Fetch things for them. Gather resources. Make things. Deliver gifts. Facilitate trade. Learn skills. Build community. Cross the seas to help a new friend. Explore. Uncover ancient mysteries. GO TO SPACE! And if you see Zenos as a foil for the player rather than the character, all this still very much applies.
You can roleplay the most curmudgeonly, antisocial, misanthropic WoL possible, you can even reject all side content and stick solely to MSQ, and you will still find yourself inhabiting a character who, as written, is fundamentally engaged with the world. They don't have to be happy. They don't have to be nice. They don't have to do any of what they're doing out of altruism. They're still making the choice to connect with other people, to invest themselves in the struggles and passions of others, to have a personal stake in shaping the world around them, because that is what the character is written to do.
Zenos's tragic flaw is his inability--and yes, perhaps, on some level, unwillingness--to connect with the world and the people around him. He finds no meaningful engagement with the world except to enact violence upon it. He has no personal investment in the Garlean Empire except as it allows him to enact violence, and by this disengagement he basically singlehandedly allows the entire empire to collapse because he doesn't care about it, only about fulfilling his own desires. The funny thing about Zenos as a foil for the protagonist is that he would make a terrible RPG protagonist. The archetypal RPG protagonist is so defined by their willingness to say yes to menial tasks that are only meaningful to some minor NPC that most modern RPGs end up lampshading that fact in some way, and it's endlessly memed upon. I struggle to imagine Zenos making it through the Company of Heroes fetch quests in ARR without getting bored and stabbing someone.
So all-encompassing is this worldview for him that even upon calling the WoL his only friend, he can find no meaningful engagement with them beyond "let us enact violence upon one another." Even the one person in the world he finds interesting enough to engage with, he is seemingly incapable of understanding on any other level. (And if you play a WoL with a desire to connect with Zenos on any other level, I think there's potential for a really interesting tragedy there! Because he either won't or can't.)
And we don't ever really get to challenge him on how narrow and stifling and miserable his engagement with the world truly is. Maybe there's a flicker of it at the very end, an acknowledgement that his life was fundamentally unfulfilling. Perhaps Zenos even sees, on some level, what the WoL has that he does not; maybe unconsciously in pursuing them, he seeks to figure out what that thing is. But then he dies, in his chosen manner, after getting the same one thing he's been pursuing as long as we've known him. That's what's sad about Zenos on a narrative level. Not that he dies, but that he dies unchanged and unchallenged.
And this is why I just can never quite get behind the idea that the core of the WoL is the same as the core of Zenos--no matter how many people the Warrior of Light has killed. I just don't believe that. When I look at TWoLaW, I see a character deeply engaged with the world. When I look at Zenos I see a character who never truly connects with anyone or anything outside himself.
I wonder what Zenos would have been like, had he grown up under different circumstances? Like, is he just evil/endlessly selfish to the core and that's the way he is as a person and everything about him and his actions were just inevitably going to happen no matter what - or, if given a chance, could things have been different?
We're going to ignore the canonical short stories that involve him and focus on only game content:
In my opinion, Zenos is someone who is very self-serving and perhaps always would have been. This is not necessarily a bad thing, unless, of course, you grow up as the prince to the throne of Garlemald, raised in a society that instilled in all of its military that, y'know, compassion is not a thing and everyone else who is not you or like you are savages that need to be conquered. And worse.
The first scene we see that really capitalizes on an aspect of his character is when he cuts down one of his own men. Because he's tip-toeing this line of being an honorable sort while also being a villain. He hears about a unit that was completely destroyed by an ambush and hears one man survived. And he's like, "Nothing wrong with trying to survive," and elects not to have that man killed. ...Which is what normally happens to deserters or soldiers that flee from a mission like that.
And then he takes that idea of punishing the "cowards" within a military and, to the shock of the other leaders in the room, metes out that punishment to the leading officer. Becaus, instead of being a LEADING officer, the man sent out his men without proper guidance, resulting in them all (but one) being killed, while he hid in his castle.
Zenos appears to be operating on the novel idea that kings are leading the troops. If you are not leading the charge, you are a coward, and your breathing is wasting precious air.
So, if we take this fundamental bit of personality and remove it from the whole of Garlean culture... Zenos would probably fit very easily into a heroic role. A Dark Knight role, honestly. He's got a code of ethics, can sympathize with the underdog, and has no respect for the big dogs that don't act with Ye Olde Honor.
He's got a thirst for power, but not because he is weak. Zenos' desire to become stronger is "honing his craft". It's the same shit the Warrior of Light does. He's a very curious man when it comes to martial arts and any new neat shiny thing he comes across that he thinks might give him a challenge, he is all for.
...Being raised to be an unstoppable force on the battlefield so he could become equally unstoppable on the field of politics unfortunately means that who Zenos has to test his prowess on and try out new abilities is...the people his empire wants him to conquer. And those people are very squishy. Sooo...they die a lot. Which depresses Zenos because he wants a challenge and they can't give him one.
Anyhoo, not a Garlean Prince Zenos would have 100% been an Adventurer. No question. Man would be soloing Palace of the Dead and other deep dungeons and having the time of his fucking life.
Zenos...does actually kind of care how others perceive him? Or when they misjudge him? The first real scene this is made evident is when Krile is brought before him and she's like, "Wow, your eyes ARE that of a bloodthirsty beast," and he just kind of...Pauses. And stares at her for an uncomfortable amount of time. Before he tells them to take the piglet away before bad things happen to her. ...Worse bad things than having her aether siphoned and shit, I mean. Before Endwalker, that was like...THE one moment Zenos PAUSED at something someone said to him about himself that he didn't like.
Unfortunately, the WHY of that reaction IS kind of buried in the short stories and it's that Zenos has never felt connected to anyone, because from a very young age, every social relationship he had was Picked For Him. And he was smart enough to know that. That his playmates were just those he was going to have to get along with for political reasons. And that the staff only catered to him because he was the prince. And that he had no one's loyalty or friendship because they only did shit because his father commanded it.
Put a young Zenos in an environment where his life ISN'T a stage and all the men and women simply players and he MIGHT ACTUALLY CONNECT WITH PEOPLE. And connecting with people, not seeing them as robots dancing to his father's tune, experiencing genuine trust and friendship, would probably make him a little less lethal.
God, I could go on. But what Lyse said about Zenos at the end of Stormblood was accurate. Zenos is what happens when the Warrior of Light has the humanity beaten and trained out of them. The Weapon of Light.
After beating endwalker, I think his problem is that he's royalty. Like, the problem he has with his life. He's probably going to be a problem for all sorts of people no matter what, but so is everyone with that drive and power. WoL causes all sorts of problems.
But Zenos, Zenos was raised as royalty, heir to the empire, and taught with the assumption that others will work to bring things to him. The best weapons, the best trainers, the political people he needs. Everything is handed to him, so when he's not handed the thing he really, truly, wants (sick epic fights to the death that push him to the limit), he has no idea how to actually get that.
He kinda fumbles around trying to get people to fight him, but he's bad at it. You can see him treating enemies with a sort of respect, while trying to encourage them to be stronger. He leaves foes weakened but not dead, hoping that they'll just sorta happen to dedicate their lives to training and beating him. When he meets one of the best, who still isn't quite on his level, he leaves them alive.
And if you're in a 'get into wicked sick fights' it's a pretty shitty success rate. Epic sick fights Goerge (also known as the WoL), knows exactly how to get into epic soul-rending fights: By doing a bunch of boring tedious shit that makes you want to pull your hair out.
You gotta go on stupid fetch quests. You need to kill 3 squirrels to prove you can stab someone with a slightly shorter sword then the one you saved the world with. You gotta be told to talk to this person, and then go back to this other person, and then return to go talk to the person who you were told to talk to, but an Important NPC didn't tell you, so you gotta check in with them, when this all could have been a link pearl conversation instead of being told via link pearl to come back and report before being told to go do what you were doing.
But you do that long enough, eventually you'll be in a place where whenever there is some epic monster, or battle, or god, you know about it. And you can go fight it.
You can fight and fight and fight until there is no one left to fight, but if you grind a bunch of wrap up political bullshit and do some stupid fetch quests, another fight will come around soon enough.
And every poor-broke no-skill having adventurer knows this basic fact of life. You gotta do the boring, tedious work to get that real high of pitting your soul against everything and all. But Zeno's, who never had to work at anything he didn't want to, just was completely blind to the adventurer-based economy that defined the world. There's more then a few Zeno's Types, even in FF14, and for the most part these thrill-seeker adrenaline junkies have no problem finding shit in the world to test them. Alisaie, that guy from the ARR capstone society quests, Estinien, That Warrior quest trainer... everyone implicitly understands how to find challenging trouble: Be out and about in the world, but Zenos stuck in an ivory tower of royalty and generalship is blind to how 99.9% of the world works. Even in his general social sphere, someone like Gaius gets in a lot of sick fights, because he's out trying to do shit. But Zenos sits around waiting for problems to come to him, and that's why he hates his life. He may still be an evil villain causing naught but pain and suffering for all those around him, but he could have been happy like that if he wasn't the crown prince.
Listen I'm not even a big Hozier fan but literally everything about the song is perfect for Noir. The religious themes and imagery. The feelings of longing. The relationship between Kirika and Mireille. The fact the villains' primary motivation is the belief that humanity is inherently sinful. Kirika and to a lesser extent Mireille longing for some kind of absolution or divine retribution but instead finding salvation in their love for each other. The fact you can take the line "we were born sick, you heard them say it" over any of the scenes of Kirika wondering to herself if she was born fated to be a killer. I'M FUCKING OBSESSED TO THE POINT OF ILLNESS PLEASE I WILL LITERALLY PAY SOMEONE TO MAKE THIS
Looking at the world from a manager's perspective, you can productively model the pool of workers as being divided into a few basic groups, which are defined and characterized by their driving motivations.
Insert all the usual disclaimers for this sort of thing - this is the roughest type of rough typology. I pulled these categories out of my raw intuition, and possibly a few more would crop up with some additional thought. In reality, the boundaries of these categories are incredibly fuzzy, and almost every individual is actually going to be motivated by a complicated mix of all the relevant motivations; we're talking REALLY SIMPLE HEURISTICS here. Etc.
There have been other well-known worker typologies that share a lot in common with my thoughts here; this is mostly not novel, it's mostly meant to refine a few ideas for particular purposes.
Hustlers are motivated by concrete personal advantage. Most commonly, and most straightforwardly, they want money - as much of it as they can get. They may also be interested in fame, idiosyncratic perks, etc. They do whatever they have to do in order to get what they want.
No surprise: you see huge preponderances of these guys in fields that provide outsize concrete rewards, e.g. finance, the upper echelons of management, etc. But not every natural-born Hustler is in a position to enter a glitzy high-paying field, and in fact you find Hustlers all throughout society and all throughout the economy, finding or making hustles wherever they go.
Having Hustlers working for you is mostly pretty great. They get shit done. They can be induced to work incredibly hard - probably harder than anyone else, under most circumstances - and they'll shank their own mothers if the price is right. If you need anything really important from them, anything at all, it's just a matter of bribing them enough.
...they will also, of course, cheerfully shank you if the price is right. Hustlers aren't the only wellsprings of institutional politics and infighting, but they're the most dangerous ones; they're always potential rivals to everyone around them. Also, you need to keep the tangible rewards flowing in a steady stream in order to get anything out of them, or else they'll put most of their effort into jumping ship (one way or another).
Craftsmen are motivated by the desire to do good work in their chosen fields, for its own sake and for the sake of their treasured self-image as people who do good work.
As you'd expect, for the most part, they're excellent workers and should be prized. But they're not perfect workers. Common weaknesses and downsides include:
They tend to have their own ideas about How Things Should Get Done; they're often resistant to externally-imposed product/service requirements or process changes (and bad at implementing those things) (no matter how important or well-conceived they are), and they're very resistant to "just get it out the door, right now done is better than good."
Being driven chiefly by internal motivation is great, but sometimes it's useful to be able to push things along with external motivators, and Craftsmen are pretty resistant to those. They don't like working more or harder than they're naturally inclined to work, they mostly sneer at carrots, and sticks make them sad and unproductive.
It's important to note that, while noteworthy skill within a field correlates with having a Craftsman temperament and motivation suite - for obvious reasons - those things are not identical at all. Plenty of Craftsmen are bad at their jobs, or just average, and plenty of the best workers are most motivated by things other than the Excellence of the Work Itself.
Fanatics are a relatively rare and specialized group, whom you find mostly within a few specific sorts of culturally-valorized fields. They're motivated by a desire to be part of something Important and Good in a Broader Sense: to Save the World, or some smaller-bore version of that.
They make amazing front-line soldiers, in the sorts of institutions that have "front-line soldiers." They work super hard, and you don't even need to bribe them, you just need to keep them hopped up on inspiration.
The big problem with them is that they're mostly motivated by a feeling - the feeling of Being Righteous - and it's not easy to control where they get that feeling, in any kind of precise way. They're just as resistant to external motivators as Craftsmen are, or even more so, but they're also not being guided by an ideal of effective quality. (No, not even if their chosen cause is theoretically all about an ideal of effective quality, hem hem.) They will happily waste vast amounts of time and money doing useless things, or even counterproductive things, so long as they're engaged in tasks that hit the right psychological buttons for them. There's also a constant risk that a Fanatic will decide that his employer is unrighteous, or that one of his coworkers is unrighteous, and start an internal conflict; the risk scales in a more-than-linear fashion with the number of Fanatics you keep around.
The biggest group, unsurprisingly, is the Normies. In most fields, it is much the biggest group. Normies are motivated by the desire to be members in good standing of their communities, to have positive relationships with the people around them, and to live up to basic norms and expectations.
Managerial skills, in the traditional sense, are incredibly important with Normies. If you want them to do good work for you - and you should want that, as a manager, you've almost certainly got a whole bunch of them - not only do you have to keep them pointed in the right direction, you have to make sure that they're supporting each other. With Hustlers, you just have to throw money at them (and avoid their power plays); with Craftsmen, you just have to let them do their thing, and occasionally badger them into giving you what you need; with Fanatics, you just have to be inspirational; but with Normies, you have to lead, and construct a productive community. You have to set reasonable, achievable norms and expectations that will get you what you need.
This wouldn't be complete if I didn't talk about the Defectors. The Defectors are motivated by not working. They don't want to be there, they resent having to do their jobs, and their primary goal is to shirk as much as possible. They will, by default, put much more effort into shirking than into their assigned tasks.
Obviously, managers don't want to have to deal with them, for good reason. But they're out there, in large numbers - not always in the places and fields where you'd expect to find them - and learning to manage them is sometimes more viable than trying to get rid of them. ("Moving Heaven and Earth to find them jobs that will change their attitude" is often a good plan, although of course it's not always possible and not always worth it.)
Crucially, Defectors are not Normies. If you start with the assumption that the average baseline worker is lazy and sour, you will make some incredibly stupid decisions. There are some fields where, for structural reasons, you can expect that a very large number of your workers will be Defectors; this is a huge and complicated challenge, well beyond the scope of this post, and good luck to you if you have to handle it, but it's not the default.
----------------------
Once you have those categories in your head, and can play with them, a number of obvious-seeming ideas present themselves. Just a couple, for now:
Most high-level executives are Hustlers, or have strong Hustler tendencies, for obvious reasons. Most of the people around them are Hustlers, or have strong Hustler tendencies. This means that they tend to overweight the Hustler outlook, by a lot, when they try to model what their workers are like. More specifically, I'd wager that a lot of them intuitively divide the world into "good workers" ( = Hustlers) and "bad workers" ( = Defectors). This will lead to a heavy overreliance on tangible rewards, a systematic shortchanging of community-building, etc. Which is in fact just what we see.
In particular - crucially - Hustlers and Defectors are the only worker types who ever become more productive under heavy stress. Hustlers actually benefit from it, because it raises the stakes of the game that they're already playing. (If you succeed, you'll be king of the world! If you fail, you'll be shark food! Go go go!) Defectors suffer terribly from stress, of course, but they can sometimes be spooked into doing their jobs as opposed to doing nothing, and sometimes that's the best/easiest way to get something out of them. But stress is terrible for everyone else. Craftsmen lose their focus. Fanatics lose their hope. It's worst of all for Normies, because they take all their cues from the vibes around them; they're productive when they learn to associate work with comfort and happiness, and when you fill their working world with frantic desperation, you just put them in a permanent cringe state.
stop trying to pit your Normies against each other in competitions for status and rewards dear God what are you stupid
To some extent, you can control your institution by controlling what types of workers you have. But only to some extent. There are only so many Hustlers and Craftsmen to go around, and if you want them, you will have to (a) be able to identify them reliably on little information [HINT: you are probably very bad at this], and (b) provide them with what they want [tangible rewards / comfortable security and interesting work]. "We are going to employ only the good special people" is feasible if you're an outfit of four workers; at a dozen, it's already become a stretch; at a few hundred, uh, pfffffffft. If you want to operate at scale, you need to be able to make Normies do good work, there is no substitute for it.
This really put a few things into focus for me, mostly because I really strongly identify with the Craftsman archetype. Like of course stress doesn't help me work, of course I want to do a good job for the sake of doing a good job, is that not what other people want? Are they just fine with producing subpar work? And the carrot/stick thing doesn't work on me, because obviously I'm not in pursuit of the carrot, the carrot is the good work in and of itself, and the stick isn't going to make me go any faster or do any better, I'm already at full speed.
I don't put a lot of stock in typologies generally, especially ones that haven't been "proven" with regression analysis, but I know I've found a fun one when I can instantly categorize myself.
I think this model is pretty useful as a primer. Too many bullshit categorizations try and put in too few categories, or too many (looking at you meyerbriggs)
With that said, these aren't personality types or core motivators, these are angles of approach, and I've done most of them at my job at one time or another, sometimes even the same job.
Most people are normies as defined here, no question. But they're normies about work, and crafters or hustlers or defectors when they're off the clock, because that's where they see as their space they can do what they want to do, and work is a required secondary priority. It may take up most of their time and energy, but they don't invest their agency into it the way the other groups do.
Now I've spent time refining and perfecting my skills, pondering the philosophy of what we do, why, how to bring that across into the real world, how to meet company goals from both a 'I'm good at what I do' perspective where increasing skill is a possibility, and a 'this person will only care about 60% of things they should care about in their position, what order of priorities would maximize our return on their inputs?' viewpoint.
I also taught myself to work at not what I consider an acceptable level of effort for my pay, but the absolute bare minimum. At the time the situation was that occasionally putting in a bit extra effort to keep everything running smooth and simple would not be reciprocated by other workers. Thus any attempts to get us prepared were wasted and everything would be in a shit state next I worked regardless of the effort I put in to catch up. So I learned to actively not care and just did the bare minimum to match everyone else, otherwise I'd be working twice as hard and not even have higher quality results to show for it.
Management, like any job relating to groups of people, is a tricky job and one that's a constantly moving target because even groups of people can learn over time. But recognizing the differences between people, and the motivations that are very different from yours, is a great way to get along easier in life.
Titles are inherently monarchist and I reject them @mealonlegs - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
gummygunk
izzy806
germansingergirl
vaporwave
amandla
ellievsbear
snowghoul
pixelskylines
andulkaphoto
yousharknotpass
blakekathryn
