How To Choose The Right Cloud Computing Training Program
Introduction:
Cloud computing has become one of the fastest-growing fields in the IT industry, transforming how businesses store data, run applications, and deliver digital services. From startups to multinational enterprises, organizations are increasingly adopting cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to improve scalability, security, and operational efficiency.
The demand for skilled cloud professionals continues to rise across industries, creating excellent career opportunities for students, fresh graduates, and working professionals. To meet this growing demand, training institutes such as Vio Technologies offer industry-focused Cloud Computing Courses that help learners build practical skills, gain hands-on experience, and prepare for successful careers in cloud computing. For more details viotechnologies.in
One of the most important steps in selecting the right cloud computing training program is understanding your career goals.
If you're a beginner, look for a Cloud Computing Course that starts with the fundamentals. A beginner-friendly cloud computing program should cover essential topics such as cloud concepts, virtualization, networking basics, storage, security, and an introduction to leading cloud platforms like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud.
1.Cloud Support Engineer :
This role is ideal for those starting their cloud journey. Cloud Support Engineers assist customers in resolving technical issues, monitoring cloud services, and maintaining system performance.
2.Cloud Administrator:
Cloud Administrators manage cloud infrastructure, user accounts, storage, backups, and system security. If this role interests you, choose a course that includes cloud management, identity and access management (IAM), monitoring tools, security best practices, and platform administration.
3.Cloud Engineer:
Cloud Engineers design, deploy, and maintain cloud-based applications and infrastructure. This career requires strong practical skills in cloud platforms, networking, virtualization, scripting, and infrastructure management. A hands-on training program with real-world projects and lab exercises is especially valuable for aspiring Cloud Engineers.
Why Choose Vio Technologies for Cloud Computing Training?
Choosing the right Cloud Computing Course provider can make a significant difference in your career journey. Vio Technologies is committed to helping students and professionals develop practical cloud skills that align with current industry requirements. Whether you're starting your IT career or looking to upskill for better opportunities, the training program is designed to provide both technical knowledge and hands-on experience.
Industry-Focused Curriculum
Updated with the latest cloud technologies and industry trends.
Covers AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Includes cloud architecture, networking, security, virtualization, and storage.
Hands-On Cloud Labs
Practice in real cloud environments.
Learn by deploying and managing cloud services.
Gain practical experience through live lab sessions.
Experienced Trainers
Learn from industry professionals with real-world expertise.
Get practical insights and guidance on cloud technologies.
Receive mentorship from certified cloud experts.
Real-World Projects
Work on industry-based cloud projects.
Build a portfolio to showcase your skills.
Apply theoretical concepts to real business scenarios.
Interview Preparation
Resume and LinkedIn profile optimization.
Mock technical and HR interviews.
Communication and soft skills training.
Guidance on cloud certification interview questions.
Placement Assistance
Dedicated placement support.
Job referrals and interview opportunities.
Career guidance from industry experts.
Assistance until you secure a suitable IT role.
Suitable for Beginners
No prior cloud experience required.
Step-by-step learning from basic to advanced concepts.
Ideal for fresh graduates and career starters.
Perfect for Working Professionals
Flexible learning schedules.
Upgrade cloud skills while working.
Prepare for career growth, promotions, or job transitions.
Certification Support
Preparation for AWS, Azure, and GCP certifications.
Practice tests and exam guidance.
Tips to improve certification success rates.
Affordable Training
Cost-effective course fees.
High-quality training with practical learning.
Excellent value for career-focused education.
Career-Oriented Learning
Focus on job-ready skills.
Practical assignments and case studies.
Industry-relevant knowledge that employers value.
Continuous Learning Support
Access to study materials and recorded sessions.
Doubt-clearing sessions with trainers.
Ongoing technical guidance throughout the course.
Placement Assistance Matters:
Resume Preparation
Build an ATS-friendly resume.
Highlight cloud certifications, technical skills, and projects.
Get personalized resume reviews and improvements.
Mock Interviews
Attend technical interview practice sessions.
Prepare for HR interview questions.
Receive feedback to improve performance and confidence.
Soft Skills Training
Improve verbal and written communication.
Learn professional email and workplace etiquette.
Develop presentation and teamwork skills.
Enhance problem-solving and critical thinking abilities.
Internship Opportunities
Gain hands-on industry experience.
Work on live cloud infrastructure projects.
Build practical knowledge before applying for full-time roles.
Placement Support
Dedicated placement assistance team.
Regular interview scheduling.
Job referrals to partner companies.
Career counseling and job search guidance.
Support until you receive a suitable job offer.
Industry Connections
Access to hiring partners and IT companies.
Networking opportunities with cloud professionals.
Industry expert sessions and webinars.
Recruiter interactions and hiring events.
Additional Factors to Check:
Portfolio Building
Create real-world cloud projects.
Showcase practical experience on GitHub or a portfolio website.
Certification Guidance
Training for AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud certifications.
Practice exams and certification preparation sessions.
LinkedIn Profile Optimization
Create a professional LinkedIn profile.
Learn how to attract recruiters and hiring managers.
Career Mentorship
One-on-one career guidance.
Advice on choosing the right cloud career path.
Live Project Experience
Work on enterprise-level cloud deployment scenarios.
Learn cloud migration, monitoring, and security practices.
Technical Assessments
Coding and cloud skills evaluations.
Regular quizzes and practical assignments.
Salary Negotiation Tips
Learn how to discuss salary confidently.
Understand current market salary trends for cloud roles.
Job Application Support
Guidance on applying through job portals.
Best practices for submitting applications and following up.
Post-Placement Support
Assistance after joining a company.
Guidance for career growth and cloud certification planning.
Alumni Network
Connect with successful alumni working in top IT companies.
Get referrals, mentorship, and career advice.
Regular Hiring Drives
Campus recruitment events.
Exclusive hiring drives with partner companies.
Opportunities to interview with multiple employers.
Conclusion
Choosing the right Cloud Computing Training Program is an important step toward building a successful career in the IT industry. Focus on factors such as an industry-relevant curriculum, hands-on cloud labs, experienced trainers, real-world projects, certification guidance, and strong placement assistance instead of choosing a course based solely on price.
A quality training program helps you develop practical skills and prepares you for real job opportunities. If you're looking for comprehensive cloud training with practical learning and career support, explore the Cloud Computing Course at Vio Technologies and take the next step toward a rewarding cloud computing career.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
1. Which is the best Cloud Computing Training Program for beginners?
The best Cloud Computing Training Program for beginners includes cloud fundamentals, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), hands-on labs, real-world projects, and placement assistance. Choose a course that offers practical learning and industry-relevant skills.
2. What should I look for in a Cloud Computing Course?
When selecting a Cloud Computing Course, look for an updated curriculum, experienced trainers, hands-on cloud labs, live projects, certification preparation, flexible learning options, and strong placement support to help you become job-ready.
3. Is Cloud Computing a good career choice in 2026?
Yes. Cloud Computing is one of the fastest-growing IT fields, with increasing demand for professionals skilled in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. Completing a quality Cloud Computing Training Program can open opportunities for roles such as Cloud Engineer, Cloud Administrator, and Cloud Support Engineer.
4. Does Vio Technologies provide Cloud Computing Training with placement assistance?
Yes. Vio Technologies' Cloud Computing Course offers practical cloud training, live projects, interview preparation, certification guidance, and dedicated placement assistance to help students and professionals secure IT jobs.
5. Which cloud certifications should I pursue after completing a Cloud Computing Course?
After completing a Cloud Computing Course, you can prepare for globally recognized certifications such as AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner, AWS Solutions Architect – Associate, Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900), and Google Associate Cloud Engineer, which can improve your career opportunities.
Like this newsletter? You should listen to the Better Offline episode!
In the first quarter of 2024, Meta made $36.45 billion dollars - $12
When you look at Instagram or Facebook, I want you to try and think of them less as social networks, and more as a form of anthropological experiment. Every single thing you see on either platform is built or selected to make you spend more time on the app and see more things that Meta wants you to see, be they ads, sponsored content, or suggested groups that you can interact with, thus increasing the amount of your “time spent” on the app, and increasing the amount of “meaningful interactions” you have with content.
I also want you to realize that anything bad that you see on the platform is a symptom of Mark Zuckerberg’s unwillingness to rate-limit or sufficiently moderate the platform. Logically-speaking, one would think that Meta would want you to have a high-quality Facebook experience, pruning content that might be incendiary, spammy, scammy or unhelpful, or at the very least, comes primarily from those within your own network, but when your only concern is growth, content moderation is more of an emergency measure.
And to be clear, this is part of Meta’s cultural DNA. In an interview with journalist Jeff Horwitz in his book Broken Code, Facebook’s former VP of Ads and Partnerships Brian Bolland said that “building things is way more fun than making things secure and safe…[and] until there’s a regulatory or press fire, you don’t deal with it.”
Horwitz also cites that Meta engineers’ greatest frustration was that the company “perpetually [needed] something to fail — often fucking spectacularly — to drive interest in fixing it.” Horwitz’s book describes Meta’s approach to moderation as “having a light touch,” considering it “a moral virtue” and that the company “wasn’t failing to supervise what users did — it was neutral.”
As I’ve briefly explained, the logic here is that the more stuff there is on Facebook or Instagram, the more likely you are to run into something you’ll interact with, even if said interaction is genuinely bad. Horwitz notes that in April 2016, Meta analyzed Facebook’s most successful political groups, finding that a third of them “routinely featured content that was racist and conspiracy-minded,” with their growth heavily-driven by Facebook’s “Groups You Should Join” and “Discover” features, algorithmic tools that Facebook used to recommend content. The researcher in question added that “sixty-four percent of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools.”
When the researcher took their concerns to Facebook’s “Protect and Care” team, they were told that there was nothing the team could do as “the accounts creating the content were real people, and Facebook intentionally had no rules mandating truth, balance or good faith.”
Meta, at its core, is a rot economy empire, entirely engineered to grow metrics and revenue at the expense of anything else. In practice, this means allowing almost any activity that might “grow” the platform, even if it means groups that balloon by tens or hundreds of thousands of people a day, or allowing people to friend 50 or more people in a single day. It means allowing almost any content other than that which it’s legally required to police like mutilation and child pornography, even if the content it allows in makes the platform significantly worse.
As a result, Meta is kind of like an absentee parent, occasionally looking up from their phone and muttering “don’t do that” when something obviously awful happens, and even then they’re extremely hesitant to intervene.
What are your thoughts of all the layoffs announced by the tech companies? How would you navigate this if you were laid off or not from one of these companies?
Great question!
Unfortunately I'm not surprised by the tech layoffs. Before I retired in early 2022 my company was regularly losing good (and not so good) software engineers to Microsoft, Facebook, Salesforce and Amazon. The compensation offers were off the charts and I didn't believe it was sustainable. I didn't blame them for leaving, but the compensation seemed too good to be true and in my experience situations like that rarely last (ex. real estate prices going up 15% year after year).
Although some tech firms had begun to announce minor trimming of their work force in Q3, it seems like Twitter really opened the floodgates. Now more companies could follow and once all the big tech employers were cutting, there was less risk of losing the most valuable, talented staff to competitors. My heart goes out to anyone impacted by the layoffs, but I firmly believe this disruption is temporary and talented software engineers will be in demand for a very long time.
What would I do if I was laid off?
Set a deadline (no more than a week) by which time you will stop feeling sorry for yourself, etc. Most people can probably think of reasons why they shouldn't have been cut, but it doesn't matter any more. Accept the unfortunately reality of your situation and get to work.
Take advantage of any outplacement services offered by your former employer, especially resume writing. The last time I sent a resume it was read by a human. That's not the case today. Make sure your resume has the necessary key words to get past the AI screener.
Work your network - personal, college, family, previous employers, LinkedIn. It still helps to have someone recommend you to the hiring manager and/or recruiter. At the very least it may help secure an interview. Don't be shy about telling people you've been laid off. Anyone with any professional experience knows that this isn't a personal shortcoming. Layoffs can happen to the best employees.
Get your financial house in order. Do a cash-flow forecast and assume you'll be out of work for six months. Eliminate/minimize unnecessary expenses but be sure to sign up for COBRA medical coverage. Don't let a mountain of debt accumulate - take part time gigs if you need to.
Update your skills/certifications.
If you're a software engineer, make sure your profile/projects in GitHub are a positive reflection of your skills.
What would I do if I wasn't laid off?
I was a senior executive in the corporate travel industry before and after 9/11 and the financial meltdown on 2008/9. In both cases business travel plummeted and the survival of the company required layoffs. Unlike the tech companies today, we weren't guilty of mindlessly pursuing growth at any cost, but we had to do layoffs just the same. I helped determine how many cuts were necessary across the company and had to layoff members of my team. In each case we tried to minimize the number of layoffs by cutting expenses/compensation at all levels.
When laying off people it is important to act with as much empathy as possible and to try to do it all at once, rather than leaving the remaining employees with the fear that their job may be cut later. It just as important to be fair - HR has to carefully review the recommendations to make sure that no group (especially protected groups) is being unfairly targeted.
As an executive who hadn't been laid off, I had to accept that many current and former employees would view me as one of the bad guys. In a situation like this, people need someone to blame and for some people that person was me. Layoffs destroy or at least significantly degrade a company's culture, impact productivity, damage it's reputation with customers and potential employees and it takes a long time (years) for those things to recover. Time, patience and genuine empathy are required.
Regardless of your job situation, it is a good habit to update your resume every year. Your CV shouldn't keep growing longer, but you should keep it current with your latest accomplishments while trimming the details of past.
How does one join the red army, I’m uhhhh… asking for a friend
"FINALLY A GOOD QUESTION"
“Hey this is still my-”
“SEND US AN EMAIL AT [email protected] WITH AN APPLICATION! AT THE MOMENT WE’RE LOOKING FOR SCIENTISTS AND MORE ENGINEERS AND PILOTS BUT MORE FOOT-SOLDIERS ARE ALWAYS GOOD. IF YOU SEEM LIKE A FIT WE’LL SEND YOU MORE INFORMATION AND SET UP AN INTERVIEW ON OUR SECURE NETWORK.”
“our discord server”
“IT’S NOT A DISCORD SERVER, YOU KNOW THIS”
“yeah but it looks like one”
“YOU’RE WELCOME!!!!! IT TOOK US FOREVER TO CODE IT TOGETHER!!!”
“...BUT ANYWAY UH, YOU SHOULD PROBABLY BE IN EUROPE IF YOU WANT TO APPLY? I MEAN IF YOU’RE SUPER DUPER QUALIFIED WE CAN ARRANGE A PICK-UP BUT-”
“steal a plane”
“IF YOU CAN GET HERE SOMEHOW THAT’S GOOD JUST DON’T LIKE DIE”
“rip our flag twirlers it was so sad”
“YES IT WAS VERY TRAGIC BUT WE HAVE TO MOVE ON PILOT IT’S WHAT THEY WOULD HAVE WANTED”
“Uh-”
“ANYWAY THANK YOU FOR THE INTEREST IN OUR HUMBLE OPERATION SUNGLASSES! TELL YOUR FRIENDS!”
Ugly Man Chronicles Reignition Book 2 Chapter 2: My Breakfast With Evan
Just a couple dudes getting to know each other.
“If you must know,” Evan sighed, spearing a glistening sausage on the end of a flimsy plastic fork, “my jackass older sister thought it would be hilarious to give me a cupcake she'd baked with about a dozen powdered viagra for my fifteenth birthday. I wound up passing out eventually. Burst a lot of blood vessels. Damaged the erectile tissue beyond usefulness.”
Titus froze mid-coffee-sip. “Seriously? What a bitch!”
“Buddy, you don't know the half of it.”
“So... no signs of life down there?”
“Nothing for twelve years.”
“I think I would literally kill myself.”
“It's not so bad, I guess. At least I don't have to drain the blood out of it any more.”
“Eugh! Fuck! Did not need to hear that!”
“Well, maybe you shouldn't ask questions you don't want the answer to.”
“Do you get, like, blue balls all the time, then?”
“That's basically my ground state of being.”
Titus whistled flatly, avoiding looking Evan in the eye. He settled for staring at the table. There wasn't a lot of Evan's face that he felt comfortable looking at; every part seemed to at least be adjacent to some unpleasantry or another. About the only safe area was his right eye, which, as luck would have it, was directly opposite Titus's 'good' eye. Titus rallied and met Evan's gaze again. “Alright, your turn.”
They'd agreed on a sort of mutual interview process, taking turns asking questions to suss out what the other was capable or if he was worth having around. Evan took a bite out of the sausage and chewed thoughtfully for a moment.
“Who's Moreno?”
Titus hissed through his teeth. “A real piece of shit.”
“I'm going to need more than that.”
“I'm getting to it. He's basically, like... a freelance henchman? Like, sort of a mercenary criminal. Sells his services to the highest bidder.”
“And why's he matter?”
“That's another question.”
“No, it is not,” Evan said, quiet and serious. “Do not argue with me in bad faith, Titus. I have very little patience for it in the best of times.”
Titus regarded him for a long moment. The man across from him was wider than the table they sat at. His muscles were so pronounced in some points that Titus could tell when he was about to move by the way they bulged and contracted. Yet he gave the impression that he was constantly trying to pull himself inward, to make himself smaller. He spoke quietly and with a simple formality, but only hours before Titus had watched him single-handedly beat down some of the nastiest people he'd met in the past month.
Hmm.
“Fine. Moreno matters because I'm after the guy he's working for. You see, Moreno isn't just a normal scumbag. He works for people who need nasty things done. Not like regular nasty, either. How much do you actually know about magic?”
“I've got some... notes. So far I'm not able to find a lot of coherent rules. It mostly seems like it relies on things that nobody would normally do.”
Titus snapped his fingers and pointed at Evan. “Hit it right on the head. Rituals, reagents, that kind of thing... the reason—well, one of the reasons—magic doesn't just happen all the time by accident is that it's all weird little things. A lot of the more heavy magic relies on some pretty elaborate and obtuse shit to get it going.”
Evan momentarily thought back to the Book of Fate and his ritual in the woods. “So Moreno does these things for people?”
“Yeah. Thing is, though...” Titus stopped raising a forkful of eggs halfway to his mouth and set it down again, as if he'd momentarily lost his appetite. “The people who use his services generally practice some pretty vile magic. Real depraved shit. And to empower depraved magic, you need depraved rituals. Moreno is the guy you go to when...”
“I think I get it,” Evan interjected, since Titus seemed to be struggling with deciding whether to continue. “Your turn.”
Titus tapped his fingers on the table for a moment, then looked Evan in the eye. “How smart are you?”
The scars on Evan's face squirmed around as he actually smirked. “What kind of question is that?”
“Hey, we agreed no 'whys'.”
“Alright, alright. Well, there's really no objective metric for it, but... I have Master's degrees in computer science and theoretical physics, Bachelor's in those in addition to mathematics and electrical engineering, and associate's degrees and certificates in everything from EMT training to ballet. I should have my doctorate in physics, but...” he said, with a bitterness that Titus made a note of, then changed gears. “Oh, and I also speak Mandarin, Spanish, Japanese, French, and Arabic pretty fluently. I also know ASL. I can get by in German and Russian, too. I don't know if any of that is what you meant but--”
“Jesus, I get it,” Titus muttered, rubbing the side of his head. “How the fuck do you make money?”
“Software consulting, mostly. I specialize in security and processing efficiency. People pay me to break into their systems and then patch the holes, or to make their code run quicker or make their programs smaller. I've got a few patents I've licensed that bring in most of my income nowadays, though.”
“Anything I would have heard of?”
“If you've used a computer made in the last four years it probably has something I wrote integrated somewhere into it. I also helped develop a protein-sequencing program that helped develop a vaccine for this nasty SARS variant that broke out in China last year. They say if they hadn’t nipped it in the bud it could’ve spread worldwide and we’d be looking at millions of deaths by now.”
Titus scrunched up his face. “Oh yeah, just say that like it’s no big deal.”
“I’m just glad it turned out not to be one. What I'd really like to do is get my compression algorithm out there, but if I do that, somebody's going to try to hoard it all for themselves.”
“Are you talking to yourself or me?”
“Look, I... a few years ago I figured out a way to compress memory down by a exponential factor of six with zero loss. All it takes is a couple software plugins that don't take up much room themselves. Essentially, I could make a gigabyte fit in a kilobyte with very little trouble, now that the math's figured out.”
“Holy fuck, that's insane! Why haven't I heard anything about this?”
“Mainly because I don't tell people. If I put it up on the market, some ISP would buy it and bury it. If you make information smaller, you make it faster. Can you imagine what it'd do to internet access if dial-up and barebones cellular networks suddenly had the bandwidth of fiber optics? It would... maybe not revolutionize our society, but it would level a lot of playing fields. Bring a lot of underdeveloped areas of the world—hell, this country—up to modern levels with no extra cost. The telecomms would crash and burn so hard. But I don't have the means to get it out there without going through someone else. Yet,” Evan added. “So I basically work watered-down versions of the compressor into the software I make. Nothing that can be duplicated, and nowhere near its full potential, but enough to get me hailed as some kind of genius and pay the bills.”
“So why aren't you on your own private island or something somewhere instead of puttering around God's Ashtray in a shitty old Bug?”
“Hey, the Beetle is not shitty,” Evan said, defensively. “And I'm just waiting for the AC in my RV to get fixed or I'd be driving that.”
“Oh hot damn! Now that's the way to live!”
“Not the one I'd choose voluntarily, but it could be worse.”
“How come you're doing it, then?”
“I think it's my turn to ask,” Evan said, mildly.
“Fine,” Titus said grumpily, crossing his arms.
“How do you make money?”
“That's easy. I'm basically a freelance bailbondsman. I just roam around, drop my advertising around bars and courthouses.”
“You get many clients that way?” Evan asked, cocking his remaining eyebrow.
“Oh, you'd be amazed how desperate people can get,” Titus said, shrugging. “Of course, they're usually not the most responsible people, so when they bounce, I track 'em down myself, drag ‘em back to jail, get the money back. My eye usually makes it super easy. Sometimes they don't even see me before I get the cuffs on 'em.”
“Why did you feel the need to rob a bunch of drug dealers, then? The thrill of it?”
“I had a pressing need for a large amount of cash that my normal work doesn't bring in. That got me enough to hold it off for a while. My turn.”
Evan waved down a waitress for a refill of his coffee, trying not to take it personally when she gasped upon seeing his face. “Go ahead…”
“No, no, hang on.” Titus waved a hand dismissively. “I want to try something. Take your hair out of the ponytail.”
“What? Why?”
“Humor me.”
Evan groaned and reached back, removing his hair tie. After shaking his head, his hair fell over his face, obscuring everything but his nose and mouth. Titus pursed his lips and regarded him seriously for a moment.
“Can you see?”
“Yeah, I guess. Well enough to not walk into things, I think, and I could probably read if I had to.”
Titus snapped his fingers. “Good. Go with that from now on.”
“Why?”
“Because now you don’t look like God’s mistake. Now you look like a big, dumb-but-lovable goon. Like Jack Black would voice you in a cartoon.”
“And that’s a good thing?”
“Do you like seeing people contemplating their own mortality and the general cruel absurdity of the tragic farce that is human existence when they get a glimpse of your face?”
Evan felt his cheeks burn and was actually grateful his hair was covering most of his face. “…not particularly, no.”
“Then there you go. You’re welcome. Okay, question time. Uh… how did you get your powers?”
“Which one?”
“Oh, now who’s arguing in bad faith? Fucking all of them, you thick-lipped gargoyle.”
Evan had the feeling he hit a sore spot. Titus's easy-going, jocular tone had bled away from him, leaving behind the hard-edged razor-blade of a man that had ambushed him the night before. He decided not to belabor the point.
“I don't know why I can rege—why I heal so quickly. No, I'm serious, as far as I know, it just started happening sometime in the past few months. I can't remember. Don't look at me like that, I'll get to that in a minute. When I was younger I recovered from a lot of injuries a lot quicker than the doctors thought I would, so maybe it's something I was born with and it just got stronger recently for some reason.”
Evan took a sip of coffee, mainly to buy a few seconds to think of how much to explain for the next part.
“The ability to shut off powers... that's part of, well, I guess you'd call it a magic ritual, because I don't know what else to call it. I found a weird old book that said it contained the key to making someone an instrument of universal justice, or something of the sort. Since then I can see... I guess they're souls? Maybe? I can sort of move mine and when I run it into someone else's it seems like I can shut off their powers. Or... take them entirely, if they're dying.”
“Horseshit!” Titus scoffed. “That's... that's like meta-magic. I don't even know if that's real.”
“No, seriously! I don't think it's just magic powers, I think it... 'normalizes' things.” He briefly recounted his encounter with the pain monster.
“Are you kidding me? That...” Titus took off his hat and ran his hand through his hair, exhaling slowly and loudly. “Look, I don't know much, but the fact that you even ran into something like that, let alone survived... those odds are astronomical. And you say you negated not just its powers, but its whole form?”
“Yeah. Once I... reached into it, like I did with you—oh don't make that face. Grow up—I kind of disrupted what made it... different, I guess? Like I cut it off from its special qualities. Like it was...”
“Disjuncted,” Titus cut in.
“Yeah, that's a good word for it. Like the old Mordenkainen spell?”
“Fucking nerd.”
“Eat my ass. Anyway, after I killed it, I was able to reach into its... soul? Animating force? Aura? I don't know what to call it. I was able to grab something and pull it out and it just got pulled into me.”
“Not aura.”
“What?”
“Aura's a different thing,” Titus said, dismissively. “So what did you get from doing that?”
“I.. I feel pain differently. I don't flinch or get adrenaline rushes from injuries that don't actually impede my ability to function. I think I have a better sense of what is actually dangerous to my body now. It still hurts, but I don't react to pain like people normally do. It's like...hmm.” Evan drummed his fingers on the table. “Do you know anything about video games? Fighting games, specifically?”
“I used to fuck around on an old Alpha 3rd Strike cabinet when I was a kid. Why?”
“Do you know what 'super armor' is?”
“Isn't that where a move can't get stopped by being hit when you're doing it?”
“Right. I'm kind of like that now. Pain doesn't interrupt me.”
“Fucking nerd.”
Evan's fist involuntarily clenched. “I'm trying to put this in terms you can understand, you stupid reprobate. My experience with your judgment thus far hasn't given me much faith in your intellect.”
Titus burst out laughing. “So he does know how to banter! I thought you might be one of those Rainman types.”
“Oh sure, call it 'banter' to try to excuse the fact that you've been insulting me for the past half hour. Do you say you're ‘just joking’ when people get mad at you for saying stupid shit, too?”
“C'mon, lighten up! We're partners now! Tell me more about this soul thing. I still think you're full of shit.”
Evan sighed through his nose, then held up his left hand, forming his fingers into a circle and peering through them.
“Yours is... a sort of cross between a sea green and an oil slick. The tendrils of it keep reaching out and snapping back, going all over the place. It seems to keep expanding and contracting. It's almost flickering, like... it's indecisive. Very chaotic. The tendrils that aren't snapping around seem to be kept pretty close to your body, wrapping around you like... I can't tell if it's protective or restrictive.”
Titus's expression slowly became serious. “What does that mean?”
“I don't know. I have a lot of theories, but nothing solid to go on. I'm not sure if it's allegorical or a literal representation of a person's... power, maybe? Yours definitely looks a lot different than most people's.”
“I don't believe this for a second. Let me see.”
“How would I do tha—hey!”
Titus grabbed Evan's wrist and held his hand up to his eye. “Ho-lee...”
He pulled back from Evan's hand, staring at him. Then he looked around the room, mouth slack as he took in the diner's other occupants.
“Huh. Did you know it keeps working until you blink?” He said after a moment, a faraway tone to his voice.
“I didn't even know other people could do it,” Evan said, awe in his voice. “Hey, wow, you're right!”
“Jesus, yours is, like, really blue. It looks like... a bunch of steel cables. It's weird, I felt like I both could and couldn't see the edges of it...”
“I can kind of move it, but I'm not sure if I can do anything with it beyond interfering with people's powers. It's like learning to use a muscle you didn't know you had.”
“Huh.” Titus was again silent for a long moment. “Your turn.”
“Can you do anything else supernatural? Besides your time-eye?”
“Don't call it that, it sounds stupid. And... sorta. I seem to have whatever innate talent you need to actually do magic, but it's not like it's easy to find instructions. Most of the people I know who can use it just dabble with half-broken magic items—wands, amulets, charms,” he pulled the silence charm out from under his coat and bounced it at the end of its chain. “I guess I'm sort of a dabbler. I know a few tricks, I can use a lot of magic tools, I can sense magic pretty well, I can dowse... Most of the time I really never have to use anything besides the eye, though.”
“Is the eye all-or-nothing?”
“Yeah. It's not nearly as useful as you'd think, but any edge is an edge.”
“When I turned off your power and it was coming back, though, you started speeding up—or, I guess, everything else was slowing down? You were moving faster, one way or the other. You were able to touch me, and those punches hurt.”
“Huh, yeah, you're right.”
“Do you think there's a way you could learn to only partially activate it?”
“That'd be great, wouldn't it? Thing is, just using it is a huge strain, and that time spend outside of time adds up. Going by normal calendar time I'm only 26.”
“Fuck, I'm 27!” Evan laughed.
“Yeah, well, I'd rather be prematurely gray than what you've got going on. My turn. Uh... huh, I can't really think of anything else. Uh... are you gay?”
“Are you fucking serious?”
“No, but the question still counts.”
“I'm bi,” Evan mumbled, crossing his arms across his prodigious chest. “Not that it matters. And before you ask, no, you are not my type. We're done talking about this.”
“Huh. You ever sucked--”
“We. Are. Done. Talking about this.”
“Fine, God. Go.”
Evan mentally circled back to an earlier question he felt hadn't been properly answered. “Why are you after Moreno?”
To Evan's surprise, Titus didn't hesitate. “I'm actually after his current boss. He's just the best lead I have to go on.” He took a deep breath, then started talking with a rushed, deadpan pace, as if he was eager to get the words out as quickly as possible so they wouldn't be in his mouth very long.
“Moreno is working for a guy only known as the Soultaker. He has an innate supernatural ability to pull a person's soul out of their body. When that happens, the person just... shuts down, usually. No motive force behind them. Eventually they just die of dehydration, usually. I've seen some people so set in routine that they keep going without a soul, but... it's not really life.
“It seems like the extraction process takes a while, so he can't just walk past you on the street and pickpocket your entire essence. So he needs people rounded up for him, held until he can do his nasty juju. So that's where a degenerate like Moreno comes in.
“So when he pulls out a soul, it, well, it looks like this.”
Titus pulled a battered, faded Crown Royale bag out of his jacket. It bulged strangely and made a quiet clacking when he set it on the table. He pulled out what looked like a large marble, or maybe a dull pearl, and handed it to Evan.
Evan brushed his hair out of his eyes and peered into the milky depths of the sphere. After a few moments of staring, the murky clouds inside the thing seemed to clear and a face floated to the surface. A black man, maybe in his late 40s, going thin on top. His eyes were closed and he appeared to be sleeping, but his expression had a look of discomfort to it, as if he was having a bad dream.
“Jesus Christ,” Evan whispered, “I've seen this guy... Martell Calloway? I saw some news article about how his family found him tied up in his apartment and completely comatose! But he didn't have any injuries beyond being a black eye... so he's dead?”
“Life support,” Titus said, taking Mr. Calloway's soul back from Evan's unresisting fingers, “technically, he's one of the lucky ones. They found his body before it wasted away to nothing, and I was able to intercept his soul before it got to a buyer.”
“Why would someone buy something like this? What use is it? Can you fix him?”
“A human soul is a damn near exhaustible arcane battery,” Titus said gravely. In the split second between sentences, Evan noticed something—after he'd put the bag back into his jacket, Titus surreptitiously touched a pocket on the other side of his jacket, as if he was making sure something was still there.
“If you know what you're doing, you can power a lot of magic using a soul. And you can reuse them as long as you don't overdo it. If you know what you're doing, you can wring all but the last drops of essence out of a soul and let it heal or recover or whatever, and it'll eventually be back to full strength. Very resilient things,” Titus continued. “I don't think they're conscious in there, but... anyway, it's supposed to be really hard to extract a soul. But this guy was born with or spontaneously developed or somehow figured out a shortcut to the whole process. So the market is getting flooded with torture-batteries and ECUs are getting flooded with vegetables. And families are winding up with loved ones who are as good as dead, without having any idea why this happened to them. Dozens of them have been taken off life support in the past few months. Half these souls have no body to return to. And no, I can't fix it. At least not yet,” he sighed again. “I was hoping once I found him, I could somehow get the secret out of him or force him to put them back, or... maybe I thought if I killed him it'd reverse the effect. He needs killing, either way.”
Titus's eye widened as a thought struck him and he looked Evan in the eye for the first time since he'd started the story. Evan realized what he was thinking and looked down at the tattoo on his left arm, flexing his fingers.
“If you can take people's powers after they die...”
“...then we can save these people.”
Titus put a hand over his mouth and for a moment Evan thought he saw his eye well up.
“I'm in,” Evan said, a sense of righteous purpose welling in his heart. “I don't really know what the universe wants, but I doubt... I know it's not this. We'll find him, we'll stop him, and we'll save as many of these people as we can.”
“...thanks,” Titus mumbled behind his hand. He swallowed hard, then seemed to come back to himself. “We're back to square one, though.”
“You said you could dowse? Like, for real?”
“Yes, for real. I can find things and people with the pendulum method. It's handy for tracking down bounties.”
“Why don't you dowse Moreno?”
“Why didn't I think of that?!” Titus said incredulously, smacking his forehead. “Because he's warded. He's not magic himself, but he's collected enough gear through his career that my normal methods don't work.”
Evan rubbed his chin. “What if we used an abnormal method?”
-------------------
An hour later, they were in the RV. Titus was poring over the collection of Evan's notes and the strange papers he'd bought from Delmann's shop. Evan was very carefully slicing a strip of skin from his own ankle up all the way up his leg. The Guiding Light—the Finder's Follysat on the table between them, filled with fresh blood.
“Even if this works, he's going to know we're coming,” Titus muttered, engrossed in the pages. “Remember what I said?”
“That's why we're not going to look for him,” Evan said, adjusting his grip on the potato peeler. “I don't know how we'd even write his name. Can you read that, by the way?”
“Kind of. This is... most of this is written in, like, arcane pidgin. Who compiled these notes?”
“I did, I think.”
“You think?”
“Oh yeah, I forgot to clarify on that. Apparently a couple months ago, before the ritual, I drilled a hole in my own brain to erase some kind of very dangerous memory.”
“You what.”
“That's not a metaphor or anything. Really did it. I could show you the video.”
“I'll pass. So you don't remember where this came from?” Titus shook the Book of Fate at him.
“Nope.”
“Jesus shit, do you have any idea--”
“How reckless that was? Yeah, yeah, I'm still here and I'm the answer to your fuckin' prayers, aren't I?” Evan gave a whoop as the peeling skin reached his thigh. “Got it this time!” he said cheerfully, snipping the flesh-ribbon off with scissors.
“God, that's so fucking gross. Anyway, you haven't explained how we're going to use that thing to find Moreno.”
“We don't set it to look for him. We look for somewhere he's been. Maybe the last place he slept. Do you think you can describe him well enough in that language for it to work?”
Titus looked like he might actually be impressed, but he hid it well. “Yeah, probably.”
“Good. I've got a dictionary I've put together on that tablet next to you, but I'm not sure how accurate it is. Maybe it'll help?”
---------------------
Two hours later, they had it.
Find where a man born between the 27th and 28th north parallels during a new moon under the sign of capricorn with black hair and green eyes who has killed at least 10 people slept in the past week.
They really had to squeeze the letters in, but when Evan put a flame to the wick, it sprung to life, wavered for a moment, and then pointed east. Both men cheered. Evan threw Titus the keys.
“Drive! Drive north until I tell you otherwise!”
While Titus started the engine, Evan spread a map of the United States on the table in front of the lamp, then produced a protractor and a notebook from a drawer. “Okay, you bastard... let's see where you've been hiding...”
It took three days—one spent driving north, one spent driving back to where they'd started, and one spent driving south. While Titus drove, Evan made meticulous notes of the flame's direction, marking angles on the map. Finally he threw the pencil down triumphantly.
“He's in Salt Lake City.”
“Well, that narrows it down a little, I guess. So what, do we just go there and hope this thing points us in the right direction?”
“Too slow,” Evan called, stepping back into what used to be his bedroom and sitting at his computer. “Now I work my magic.”
After parking, Titus walked back to look over Evan's shoulder. The half-dozen monitors on the wall were flickering between rapidly-changing pictures of faces and what appeared to be CCTV footage.
“What is this?”
“This,” Evan said with dramatic pride, “is Blaccat. Facial recognition algorithms that the CIA wishesit had. I actually started working on it years ago before I thought about the implications of it, but I shelved it. I figured since I may be needing to, uh...”
“Be Batman?”
“...yeah...that I should get back to work on it. Right now it's comparing faces to the description you gave me and cycling through every damn security camera in the city looking for it.”
“How illegal is this?”
“Soooooo illegal.”
“Oh, hey, can you get into police department records?”
“Does the Pope shit in the woods?”
“See if you can get into the Las Vegas mugshots from... February 2019. Run your face-recognition thingy there.”
“Alright.... and... is that our boy?”
A handsome Latino man in his early 30s with shoulder-length jet-black hair and piercing green eyes stared at them from over a booking clipboard.
“That's him,” Titus breathed.
“Perfect! Now I just have to feed that into... wow.” Evan made a gesture and a black and white video popped up on the biggest monitor. The man in the mugshot was walking along the street, flanked by a short stocky man in bandanna and a lanky man with the ugliest white-boy dreads Evan had ever seen.
“That's him! Where is that? When is that?”
Evan grinned up at Titus. “That's live. I can track him and put us at the nearest intersection.”
Titus smiled, eye overbright, and began breathing heavily through his nose. “We got him.”
Corona has probably hit a lot of people hard and it has been a tough time for everyone, especially people who just left college to enter the work force or have been out of a job and had been looking to get back into the force. While this might not solve much, I want to provide some additional advice piggy-backing off a previous post.
<Previous Resume Advice Post>
Again, Your Mileage May Vary (YMMV) since this is entirely subjective and very US-centric. A lot of the resumes that come across my desk are for specialized jobs and higher-levels, so I’ve had a bit of a disconnect with entry-level and recent grad-level resumes. Regardless, I still want to help answer some questions that people have and hopefully give a bit of a push to help you into the jobs you want.
There’s more of this sort of stuff under the tag: ‘adult drivels’.
"What do I write for my Objectives/Summary of Qualifications?"
To be very honest, I only ever see Objectives from people trying to switch careers or from internship/entry-level resumes. At least 98% of the time, we know what your objective is. It's money. I don't care if the objective is to help save the world--believe me, I've seen enough resumes that say something along those lines (worked at a place that kind of championed that and boy is the reality nasty).
Anyway. Write a short paragraph (usually 2-3 sentences, but no longer than a full paragraph) about your skillset. Give me enough detail to want to read the rest of your resume.
Examples:
Finance student with 2 years volunteer experience in business accounting, correspondences with the Federal Reserve, and federal financial law. Specializes in XYZ, etc.
I couldn't make this any more detailed, but you get the gist of it. If not, here's another one.
Recent college graduate with experience in freelance computer repairs for Windows, Mac, and RedHat Linux. Customer-oriented from # years in customer service, and willing to learn new things especially more about network infrastructure and engineering. Currently studying to pass Network and looking to pass Security+ within the next year.
This is just a personal nitpick, but be careful with very subjective character traits like ‘loyal’ or ‘hard-working’ or ‘effective leader’. Anyone can put that on a resume, but I need you to prove it in your resume. Some industries like this sort of self-description/self-evaluation, but I really don’t trust when people write that stuff down.
(Ex. Someone wrote they were detail-orientated and their resume was littered with typos. Mm, don’t trust like that.)
"I don't know what to write for my job experience. I don't have sales numbers or percentages like these websites are telling me."
You do. You have them, just not consciously.
You worked at Starbucks and trained newcomers? Fine.
"Trained ## new hires on all store procedures, safety, and customer service, and one was promoted to store manager with # months/one new hire won Employee of the Month/and I received formal recognition from corporate."
Or
"Created new training plan/procedures/whatever and implemented it over the course of # months, reducing the time needed for training and increasing effectiveness."
Didn't work at Starbucks? Just joined a club and helped organize a bake sale? Cool.
"Sold $# worth of merchandise for [school club] [sale] which contributed to #% increase in funding for the year's activities, allowing the club to do XYZ.
Don't have the percentage? Do a reasonable guess, or ask. Or just say it helped you guys earn your field trip to wherever. Whatever it helped do.
Didn’t do anything involving cash or numbers? No problem.
“Tutored # students at least # times a week in [subject], working with them using different teaching methods such as [example] and [example]; # students were able to pass their courses with satisfactory grades (insert grades somewhere, if you’re proud of that).”
The point is: [Action] --> [Result].
What did you do, specifically? And what was the direct result? That’s what I’m looking for.
“But I’ve never held a job. This’ll be my first one. How do I write my resume?”
That’s always tough. In this case, you’ll have to play on anything you do have. Volunteer work, school activities, extracurricular activities, personal projects, awards, personal achievements, etc. Sometimes people go for a skills-oriented resume which I don’t actually see a lot.
Basically, standard resumes have your regular stuff:
Personal Information
Summary of Qualifications/Objectives
Education
Job Experiences in chronological order
Extracurricular Activities
Skills
Awards/Certifications
Whatever else
A skills based resume usually replaces the ‘Jobs’ section with a huge-ass ‘Skills Set’ section which contains several main skills you want to highlight for the job and examples of how you demonstrated these skills.
Communication
- Corresponded and tutored students struggling in [subject] class, restructuring and explaining lessons using easy-to-understand anecdotes, resulting in students passing the class with scores of no less than a B. (This is lengthy as fuck, but you get the idea.)
- Successfully led one 24-person raid a month for 2 years in an online game where quick and clear communication and timing was vital.
So, that but multiple times until it fills out your resume.
This goes against my personal opinion about subjective traits, but if it works, it works.
“Anything else?”
I turn my entire Word document into a table for formatting and then just hide all borders when I’m done.
Always, always export to PDF and do a test print. You never know how it’ll look on someone else’s screen or program. (Especially if you have LibreOffice or something, that really messed up the formatting sometimes.)
I kind of like Google’s resumes, the one they have in Google doc templates.
To make different things stand out, I mess with fonts. Like sans serif for section titles and with serif for body text. Sometimes I just start going nuts with them, but not too nuts because again, it might not be a font on someone else’s computer.
To test the visual appeal of my resume, I’d usually print it out, paste it on a wall, walk away, turn around, and try to see if I can spot my name and the different section breaks instantly from a distance. If I can’t, I know I fucked up. If I can, great, formatting is clean. One thing I hate as an interviewer is searching through walls of text for important info or section breaks.
If you can, only submit as PDF. I swear, half the time, the Word doc gets mangled by the application platform that people send them through (you know, the automatic uploading thing?) It had definitely cost a few good candidates a job simply because the program mangled the resume’s formatting.
Following these steps still won’t necessarily get you the job. This is cruel, but reality. It could be your resume. It could be just because the role is meant for someone else with a different skillset. It’s not personal. You have to keep trying.
For the last time, TAILOR, TAILOR, TAILOR. You’re fighting with about 30 other people who have put in a hell of a lot of effort to get jobs. They also want the job and have been searching just as long or longer than you. You have to give yourself an edge by not blasting a generic version of your resume at the recruiter. That’s wasting our time and your own time.
Again, all of these opinions are my own and should be taken with a handful of salt and two handfuls of personal judgement.
Good luck on your searches and may the job you want be yours.
How Apollo 8 Delivered Christmas Eve Peace and Understanding to the World
It was the final months of 1968 and throughout the year, the stability of American democracy had been called into question again and again. When Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in April, civil unrest erupted throughout the United States. The “confidence of America’s allies and friends around the world” had been shaken, Leonard Marks, the United States Information Agency (USIA) director told President Lyndon B. Johnson. “We have suffered a blow from which it will take a long time to recover.”
Two months later, on the other side of the country, presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy was fatally shot shortly after he made his California Democratic primary victory speech. Then, in late August, violent clashes between protestors and police at the Democratic National Convention broke out in Chicago, casting more doubt on the U.S. political system. Parallels were quickly drawn between the Chicago riots and the Soviet Union’s suppression of the Prague Spring that same month. At the end of the year the USIA concluded that the Vietnam War, protests, assassinations and upheaval throughout the country led “many persons abroad to question whether the vaunted American system might be on the verge of decay and disintegration.”
Tear gas, body counts, protests and riots all appeared on television sets around the globe and in international newspapers. The House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Subcommittee observed that “the mental picture that many foreigners have of our nation is increasingly that of a violent, lawless, overbearing, even sick society.”
Operation Moonglow: A Political History of Project Apollo
Since July 1969, Neil Armstrong’s first step on the Moon has represented the pinnacle of American space exploration and a grand scientific achievement. Yet, as Smithsonian curator Teasel Muir-Harmony argues in Operation Moonglow, its primary purpose wasn’t advancing science. Rather, it was part of a political strategy to build a global coalition. Starting with President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 decision to send astronauts to the Moon to promote American “freedom” over Soviet “tyranny,” Project Apollo was central to American foreign relations.
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Then, in late December, Apollo 8 offered an antidote: an image of a nation striving for grand goals, inclusive and focused on peace and unity. The crew’s broadcasts from the moon would capture the attention of a billion people worldwide. Inclusive language during the broadcasts, as well as the soon-to-be-iconic photo Earthrise, amplified the USIA and State Department messaging that the American space program was “for all mankind.” When the world felt divided—between democracy and Communism, among generations, races and genders—it would be Apollo 8 that would offer a moment of unity and a sense of connection.
From the start, Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman understood his flight and then later promotion of the space program abroad as part of his service to the country, not as a purely scientific pursuit: “If you think I would’ve devoted that much of my life simply to exploration or science, I wouldn’t have, I’m not built that way, that’s not my thing.” The cold war threatened the security of the U. S., and his role as an astronaut was part of confronting that threat, lessening Soviet influence on the geopolitical landscape.
Shortly before his launch, as Borman engrossed himself in training, his phone rang. It was Julian Scheer, NASA’s deputy administrator for public affairs.
“Look, Frank,” Borman recalled Scheer explaining. “We’ve determined that you’ll be circling the Moon on Christmas Eve and we’ve scheduled one of the television broadcasts from Apollo 8 around that time.” Scheer pointed out that more people would hear the crew’s voices than had heard any voice in history. NASA estimated that a billion people around the world would be following the flight. He then added the simple but imposing instruction: “So, we want you to say something appropriate.”
One in four people on Earth—roughly a billion people spread among 64 countries—listened to the broadcast on Christmas Eve from Apollo 8 (from left: James A. Lovell Jr., command module pilot; William A. Anders, lunar module pilot; and Frank Borman, commander).
(NASA S68-50265)
For help, Borman turned to his friend Simon Bourgin, the USIA science advisor. The two had become close during the Gemini 7 diplomatic tour of Asia. When Borman prepared for interviews, he would ask Bourgin for advice.
Bourgin suggested a simple and short broadcast. “With six television transmissions, you are overexposed . . . and with that much time you could be tempted to pad, ham it up, or try to entertain. Avoid all of these.” In other words, he explained, “Keep your audience hungry.”
For the Christmas Eve broadcast, start with a description of what you see, he suggested: “I have a feeling that any direct message that you might compose reflecting on Christmas Eve, conditions on Earth, and the way you feel about it at the moon, could get awfully sticky; it would be difficult not to sound pretentious or patronizing.” In its place, end with a quotation.
Bourgin had called his friend Joe Laitin, assistant to the director of the Bureau of the Budget, and his wife, Christine, for advice. Christine came up with the idea of reading Genesis. “Why don’t you begin at the beginning?” she asked.
The first ten verses of Genesis from the Old Testament would have “universal appeal and a sense of reverence that is called for,” agreed Bourgin. As he told Borman, “About the only thing I can think of to match the majesty of the occasion, and the evening, is to read the opening lines of Genesis.” When Borman shared the idea with crewmates James Lovell and William Anders, they also agreed. The passage, typed on fireproof paper, was inserted into the Apollo 8 flight plan.
On December 21, like much of the nation, the first thing on President Lynden B. Johnson’s agenda was to watch the early-morning launch of Apollo 8. At 7:51 a.m. EST, Borman, Lovell and Anders became the first humans to ride the huge Saturn V rocket into space, one of countless firsts that the astronauts would claim on the mission. Susan Borman, Frank’s wife, found it “awesome . . . like watching the Empire State Building taking off.” As the spacecraft glided out toward the stars, the astronauts departed the Earth and stopped experiencing sunrises and sunsets. Another first.
An entry pass to the viewing stand for the Apollo 8 launch at Kennedy Space Center, December 21, 1968, is held in the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.
(NASM)
Also in the museum’s collections is Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders’ spacesuit, engineered to provide a life-sustaining environment during unpressurized spacecraft operation.
(NASM)
Lunar module pilot William Anders wore this intra-vehicular glove during the launch of Apollo 8.
(NASM)
The Genesis scripture that the astronauts read on Christmas Eve 1968 can be found neatly typed in the pages of the Apollo 8 flight plan.
(NASM, courtesy of the Alder Planetarium and Astronomy Museum)
When Apollo 8 astronauts splashed down on December 27, 1968, they were airlifted safely aboard this rescue net to hovering Navy helicopters.
(NASM)
The image Earthrise, taken aboard Apollo 8, swiftly became a culture touchstone, appearing on this bumpersticker and elsewhere across the American landscape.
(NASM)
The mission would prove a boon for American ambassadors and other officials, who were invited by local media for interviews on the flight. “An excellent opportunity to get positive exposure through a variety of media in many countries,” the USIA advised. The agency would record the heaviest placement of its media material in memory, providing hundreds of photos, thousands of feet of TV film, and “reams of copy” to local newspaper, radio and television outlets around the world.
The Voice of America radio network provided live coverage of each stage of the mission, from launch to splashdown, in English, Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic. American embassies in Eastern Europe assembled exhibits in their windows with pictorial explanations and a step-by-step schedule of the flight. As the crew completed stages of the mission, embassy staff would post announcements. The U.S. Embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria, reported that the window display “drew exceptionally large crowds, despite cold and snow.” In warmer climes, inhabitants of Martinique followed radio coverage of the flight so carefully that consulate personnel reported walking down the street and hearing status updates from shopkeepers and acquaintances.
Apollo 8 reached the moon three days later. The crew fired the service module engine, slowing the spacecraft down just enough to put it into orbit around another celestial body, another first. On the fourth orbit, Borman rotated the spacecraft, tilting its nose back toward Earth. Its small windows framed the Earth seemingly rising above the lunar horizon. The view caught the crew by surprise, even though mission planners had anticipated that the moment would come.
“Look at that picture over there!” Anders called out. “Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!” With a Hasselblad camera in hand, Anders snapped a photo. Most of the photography scheduled for the flight focused on the moon. NASA needed detailed images of potential landing sites for future missions. As Anders watched the Earth rise above the lunar horizon, the black-and-white film magazine mounted to the camera’s boxy body would not do. Only color film could capture the contrast of the gray moon and the bright-blue Earth that Borman called “the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life.” Anders called out, “You got a color film, Jim? Hand me that roll of color quick, will you . . . hurry up!” After a swift swap of film magazines, Anders started snapping again.
“Look at that picture over there!” Anders called out. “Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!” The image Earthrise became one of the most famous of the Space Age.
(NASA )
He caught the Earth above the gray-chalky lunar horizon, the sun illuminating parts of Africa and South America. Eddying clouds suggested an alive, dynamic planet. Earthrise, as the photograph would come to be known, amplified the beauty—and rarity—of humans’ home planet. Shortly after the crew splashed down a few days later, this photograph would grace the front page of newspapers around the world and become one of the most famous images of the Space Age.
Food packed for the crew that day was tied up in fireproof plastic green ribbons and labeled “Merry Christmas.” Inside Borman, Anders and Lovell found turkey with gravy and a fruit-cake coated with gelatin to prevent crumbs from floating into the spacecraft’s systems.
At 9:30 p.m., during the second-to-last lunar orbit of the flight, the crew began their last broadcast from the moon. Taking a cue from Bourgin, they turned the camera toward the moon and took turns describing their perspectives. Borman called the moon a “vast, lonely, forbidding-type existence, or expanse of nothing, that looks rather like clouds.” Lovell agreed, commenting that “the vast loneliness up here of the Moon is awe inspiring, and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth.” Anders added, “The sky up here is also rather forbidding, foreboding expanse of blackness, with no stars visible.”
“We are now approaching lunar sunrise,” Anders explained to the television and radio audiences around the world. “For all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 have a message that we would like to send to you.” Minutes before the spacecraft slipped behind the moon for the last time, the crew took turns reading from Genesis.
“In the beginning, God created the heaven and the Earth,” Anders read.
Borman ended the passage, adding “and from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.”
Around the world, television sets glowed with the broadcast. One in four people on Earth—roughly a billion people spread among 64 countries—listened to the reading. Within 24 hours, recorded broadcasts of the address from the moon reached people in another 30 countries. Audiences in North and South America as well as Europe tuned in live thanks to the recently launched Intelsat 3 satellite. Comsat put the satellite into operation a week ahead of schedule so that international audiences could follow the flight.
Frank Borman had at first been skeptical about the addition of heavy television equipment on missions because weight and time were at a premium. But the broadcast, and world reaction, would change his mind. “Probably [the] most important part of space,” he later reflected, “in view of [the] impact on people of the world.”
Reactions to the telecast were unprecedented, and the USIA won a significant public diplomacy victory with the carefully chosen, inclusive wording of the Christmas Eve address. A BBC correspondent commented that the reading “struck on instantly as a stroke of genius.”
In Latin America alone, 1,353 stations carried the VOA broadcast, breaking records. Even Radio Havana picked up VOA coverage, an anomaly for the official Cuban-government–run station known for transmitting programming created by the North Vietnamese, North Koreans and Russians. The station cheered the mission as “a total success.” Borman received some 100,000 letters of appreciation for the Christmas Eve broadcast from around the world, with just 34 letters making complaint.
The Apollo 8 crew had traveled farther and faster than any humans in history. They saw what no other eyes had seen: the far side of the moon, and the Earth from a great distance, blue and white and shining. They became the first humans to ride the mighty Saturn V rocket, break the bonds of Earth’s physical pull, and enter the gravitational field of another celestial body. But the mission, and the program more generally, “did much more than just advance the country scientifically and technically,” Borman, argued. “It advanced it—in my opinion—diplomatically just as much. It cast the country in a favorable light, at a time when there were many things that cast it in an unfavorable light.”
On Christmas Day, the front page of the New York Times carried an essay by the poet Archibald MacLeish inspired by the mission: “To see the earth as it truly is, small blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”
Starting as early as 2015 when Trump was still a candidate, Facebook executives started crafting exceptions for the president and making changes to the company's products to accommodate him. Those changes have transformed the company and the world's information battlefield for years to come.
Hours after President Trump’s incendiary post last month about sending the military to the Minnesota protests, Trump called Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.
The post put the company in a difficult position, Zuckerberg told Trump, according to people familiar with the discussions. The same message was hidden by Twitter, the strongest action ever taken against a presidential post.
To Facebook’s executives in Washington, the post didn’t appear to violate its policies, which allows leaders to post about government use of force if the message is intended to warn the public — but it came right up to the line. The deputies had already contacted the White House earlier in the day with an urgent plea to tweak the language of the post or simply delete it, the people said.
Eventually, Trump posted again, saying his comments were supposed to be a warning after all. Zuckerberg then went online to explain his rationale for keeping the post up, noting that Trump’s subsequent explanation helped him make his decision.
The frenzied push-pull was just the latest incident in a five-year struggle by Facebook to accommodate the boundary-busting ways of Trump. The president has not changed his rhetoric since he was a candidate, but the company has continually altered its policies and its products in ways certain to outlast his presidency.
Facebook has constrained its efforts against false and misleading news, adopted a policy explicitly allowing politicians to lie, and even altered its news feed algorithm to neutralize claims that it was biased against conservative publishers, according to more than a dozen former and current employees and previously unreported documents obtained by The Washington Post. One of the documents shows it began as far back as 2015, when as a candidate Trump posted a video calling for a ban of Muslims entering the United States. Facebook’s executives declined to remove it, setting in motion an exception for political discourse.
The concessions to Trump have led to a transformation of the world’s information battlefield. They paved the way for a growing list of digitally savvy politicians to repeatedly push out misinformation and incendiary political language to billions of people. It has complicated the public understanding of major events such as the pandemic and the protest movement, as well as contributed to polarization.
And as Trump grew in power, the fear of his wrath pushed Facebook into more deferential behavior toward its growing number of right-leaning users, tilting the balance of news people see on the network, according to the current and former employees.
Facebook is now confronting a mounting advertiser boycott that has pushed down its stock price as companies demand stricter policies against hate speech. Starbucks became the latest on Sunday to say it would hit pause on social media advertising.
Facebook is also facing a slow-burning crisis of morale, with more than 5,000 employees denouncing the company’s decision to leave Trump’s post that said, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” up.
Bowing to those pressures on Friday, Zuckerberg announced a rash of new policies aimed at better policing content on the site. That includes affixing labels on posts that violate hate speech or other policies — even on those from political leaders.
But the company said the post wouldn’t have qualified.
As the United States heads into another presidential election while facing a pandemic and civil unrest, the latitude given to Trump may afford him a potential advantage. In recent months, he has used Facebook and other platforms to tout misleading information about coronavirus cures, election fraud and the motives of protesters, frequently targeting a left-wing movement as a cause of violence without citing evidence.
It also places Facebook in growing conflict with its counterparts in Silicon Valley. Twitter has labeled several presidential tweets as abusive and misleading, and social media platform Snapchat curtailed the reach of the president’s account.
“The value of being in favor with people in power outweighs almost every other concern for Facebook,” said David Thiel, a Facebook security engineer who resigned in March after his colleagues refused to remove a post he believed constituted “dehumanizing speech” by Brazil’s president.
Facebook contends the use of incendiary populist language predates social media. Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president for global affairs and communications, said in a statement that populism wasn’t invented in Silicon Valley, pointing to centuries of political history before social media companies‘ existence.'
“From the Arab Spring to local candidates challenging political incumbents, social media has also helped to open up politics, not favor one side over the other,” Clegg added. “Studies have shown the drivers of populism are complex and cannot be reduced to the use of social media, in fact political polarization has fallen in many countries with high internet use.”
Facebook declined to make Zuckerberg available for an interview, although it pointed out that Zuckerberg opposed Trump when his Muslim immigration ban went into effect. The White House declined to comment.
Zuckerberg talks frequently about making choices that stand the test of time, preserving the values of Facebook and subsidiaries WhatsApp and Instagram for all of its nearly 3 billion monthly users for many years into the future — even when those decisions are unpopular or controversial.
At one point, however, he wanted a different approach to Trump.
Setting the stage
Before the 2016 election, the company largely saw its role in politics as courting political leaders to buy ads and broadcast their views, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking.
But that started to change in 2015, as Trump’s candidacy picked up speed. In December of that year, he posted a video in which he said he wanted to ban all Muslims from entering the United States. The video went viral on Facebook and was an early indication of the tone of his candidacy.
Outrage over the video led to a companywide town hall, in which employees decried the video as hate speech, in violation of the company’s policies. And in meetings about the issue, senior leaders and policy experts overwhelmingly said they felt that the video was hate speech, according to three former employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. Zuckerberg expressed in meetings that he was personally disgusted by it and wanted it removed, the people said. Some of these details were previously reported.
At one of the meetings, Monika Bickert, Facebook’s vice president for policy, drafted a document to address the video and shared it with leaders including Zuckerberg’s top deputy COO Sheryl Sandberg and Vice President of Global Policy Joel Kaplan, the company’s most prominent Republican.
The document, which is previously unreported and obtained by The Post, weighed four options. They included removing the post for hate speech violations, making a one-time exception for it, creating a broad exemption for political discourse and even weakening the company’s community guidelines for everyone, allowing comments such as “No blacks allowed” and “Get the gays out of San Francisco.”
Facebook spokesman Tucker Bounds said the latter option was never seriously considered.
The document also listed possible “PR Risks” for each. For example, lowering the standards overall would raise questions such as, “Would Facebook have provided a platform for Hitler?” Bickert wrote. A carveout for political speech across the board, on the other hand, risked opening the floodgates for even more hateful “copycat” comments.
Ultimately, Zuckerberg was talked out of his desire to remove the post in part by Kaplan, according to the people. Instead, the executives created an allowance that newsworthy political discourse would be taken into account when making decisions about whether posts violated community guidelines.
That allowance was not formally written into the policies, even though it informed ad hoc decision-making about political speech for the next several years, according to the people. When a formal newsworthiness policy was announced in October 2016, in a blog post by Kaplan, the company did not discuss Trump’s role in shaping it.
In an interview, Bickert said the company ultimately made a call to maintain Trump’s Muslim ban video because executives interpreted Trump’s comment to mean that the then-candidate was not speaking about all Muslims, but rather advocating for a policy position on immigration as part of a newsworthy political debate. She said she did not recall the document where the options were presented.
Facebook’s Bounds added that the “newsworthiness” policy was added in 2016 after content reviewers removed a photo of a naked girl fleeing a napalm attack during the Vietnam War. “Our goal was to recognize the essential public benefit of preserving content that in other contexts wouldn’t be allowed,” Bounds said. “In the case of elected officials, it also ensures that they will be held to account for their words,” so that people can judge for themselves.
In spring of 2016, Zuckerberg was also talked out of his desire to write a post specifically condemning Trump for his calls to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, after advisers in Washington warned it could look like choosing sides, according to Dex Torricke-Barton, one of Zuckerberg’s former speechwriters.
The political speech carveout ended up setting the stage for how the company would handle not only Trump, but populist leaders around the world who have posted content that test these boundaries, such as Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Narendra Modi in India.
“Though [Facebook] has cracked down on misinformation, the most problematic influencers are politicians,” said Claire Wardle, U.S. director of First Draft, an organization dedicated to fighting misinformation that has a partnership with Facebook to fact-check news articles. “You can do all the fact checking in the world, but these influencers have a disproportionate impact.”
Trump presented a unique challenge, she added. “Until then, no one would have considered a president who would have said those things.”
Protecting the right
After the election, it became clear Russia had used social media to sow disinformation. Facebook soon after became a frequent target of the president’s ire. He tweeted that the social media giant was “anti-Trump” and trying to undermine his victory.
At the same time, GOP leaders stepped up criticism that platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, with leadership ranks full of liberals, sought to limit the reach of right-leaning voices.
“There’s no credible research supporting Trump’s claim that social platforms suppress conservative content, but he still succeeded in getting them to revise their rules for him,” said former Facebook spokesman Nu Wexler, who left the company in 2018.
As Facebook scrambled to tackle foreign interference and misinformation, its executives in the nation’s capital argued that caution and deference was necessary to survive the new political environment, according to three people familiar with the company’s thinking.
Facebook’s security engineers in December 2016 presented findings from a broad internal investigation, known as Project P, to senior leadership on how false and misleading news reports spread so virally during the election. When Facebook’s security team highlighted dozens of pages that had peddled false news reports, senior leaders in Washington, including Kaplan, opposed shutting them down immediately, arguing that doing so would disproportionately impact conservatives, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking. Ultimately, the company shut down far fewer pages than were originally proposed while it began developing a policy to handle these issues.
How conservatives learned to wield power inside Facebook
A year later, Facebook considered how to overhaul its scrolling news feed, the homepage screen most users see when they open the site. As part of the change to help limit misinformation, it changed its news feed algorithm to focus more on posts by friends and family versus publishers.
In meetings about the change, Kaplan questioned whether the revamped algorithm would hurt right-leaning publishers more than others, according to three people familiar with the company’s thinking who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. When the data showed it would — conservative leaning outlets were pushing more content that violated its policies, the company had found — he successfully pushed for changes to make the new algorithm to be what he considered more evenhanded in its impact, the people said.
Isolated and divided
With the 2020 election on the horizon, Facebook and Zuckerberg’s hands-off approach to free speech was leaving it increasingly isolated in Silicon Valley.
In May 2019, Zuckerberg, citing free speech, refused to take down a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) that made her appear drunk.
Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg reached out to Speaker Pelosi. She hasn’t called him back.
That summer, company leaders held a meeting to revisit its newsworthiness exception, which until then had been determined on a case-by-case basis, with the most controversial calls made by Zuckerberg. Internally, some were unclear how far that leeway extended, according to two people.
Clegg, the company’s new head of global affairs and communications and a former British deputy prime minister, announced the outcome of that meeting at a speech in Washington in September 2019. Aside from speech that causes violence or real-world harm, Facebook would allow politicians to express themselves virtually unchecked on social media. Facebook’s network of independent fact-checkers, which had been established as a key part of the company’s response to disinformation, would not evaluate their claims and the community guidelines would largely not apply to politicians.
Facebook did not want to be an arbiter of truth in political debate, he said, echoing Zuckerberg’s long-standing position.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says in interview he fears ‘erosion of truth’ but defends allowing politicians to lie in ads
The speech angered some employees, triggering more than 250 of them to sign a petition disagreeing with the decision because they thought it gave politicians a pass.
One former executive, Yael Eisenstat, who worked to improve the political ads process, wrote in The Post that the controversy was “the biggest test of whether [Facebook] will ever truly put society and democracy ahead of profit and ideology.”
She said that she routinely experienced how the company’s efforts at integrity were often undermined by “the few voices who ultimately decided the company’s overall direction.”
Meanwhile, in October, as Facebook faced more potential regulation and political troubles, Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan went to the White House for a private dinner with Trump, a part of the CEO’s effort to cultivate personal relationships in Washington.
Tweetstorm
As the pandemic and civil unrest dominated the first half of this year, Trump continued to turn to social media platforms to spread misinformation. He touted the unproven drug hydroxychloroquine as a possible cure for the coronavirus and claimed without evidence that the left-wing antifa movement was behind the violence at George Floyd protests.
Meanwhile, Facebook employees began challenging the company’s decisions.
Two months before Trump’s ”looting, shooting“ post, the Brazilian president posted about the country’s indigenous population, saying, “Indians are undoubtedly changing. They are increasingly becoming human beings just like us.”
Thiel, the security engineer, and other employees argued internally that it violated the company’s internal guidelines against “dehumanizing speech.” They were referring to Zuckerberg’s own words while testifying before Congress in October in which he said dehumanizing speech “is the first step toward inciting” violence. In internal correspondence, Thiel was told that it didn’t qualify as racism — and may have even been a positive reference to integration.
Thiel quit in disgust.
In May, following years of internal debate of its own, Twitter chose to go in the opposite direction. It labeled two misleading tweets by Trump about mail-in ballots with a fact-check label.
Twitter’s decision to label Trump’s tweets was two years in the making
Trump responded two days later with an executive order that could hurt social media companies by removing a key exception that limits their liability for content posted on their sites.
The next day, Trump tweeted about the Minnesota protests. Twitter quickly labeled the tweet for violating rules about glorifying violence, and Snapchat stopped promoting Trump’s account the following week. YouTube told The Post that it holds politicians to the same standards as everyone else.
Facebook, on the other hand, chose to haggle with the White House, asking for a deletion or a change, said the people. Axios first reported the call, which Facebook’s Bounds confirmed to The Post.
As employees raged on internal message boards and externally on Twitter, Zuckerberg told workers that Facebook’s policies might change again in light of Trump’s post. The company had rules allowing for “state use of force,” he said, but they were vague and didn’t encompass the possibility that such pronouncements could signal harmful aggression. Bickert’s team planned a series of policy meetings for the weeks ahead.
In June, Facebook removed a swath of Trump campaign ads with Nazi symbolism, after an initial internal assessment that found the ads did not violate the company’s polices, according to documents viewed by The Post. In meetings, senior executives argued that not removing them would be perceived as pandering too much to the president, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
Last week, the advertiser boycott picked up steam. Hershey, Verizon, Unilever, Coca-Cola and others said they were temporarily pulling ads.
On Friday, Zuckerberg told employees in a live-streamed town hall that he was changing the company’s policy to label problematic newsworthy content that violated the company’s policies as Twitter does, a major concession amid the rising tide of criticism. He also said in the most explicit language ever that the company would remove posts by politicians that incite violence and suppress voting. Still, civil rights leaders said his assertions didn’t go far enough.
“There are no exceptions for politicians in any of the policies that I’m announcing today,” Zuckerberg said.
