Vined two thousands (years since BC)

Utnapishtim: Yeah you don’t wanna be immortal. Sorry you came all this way but you couldn’t handle it.

Gilgamesh: No please I can handle it. I want to be immortal.

Utnapishtim: Okay, fine. Don’t sleep for a few days to prove to me that you can handle it.

Gilgamesh: Is that it? Easy. *immediately passes out on the floor*

Gilgamesh: *wakes up* Ugh. Why is there seven loaves of moldy bread next to me?

Utnapishtim: You’ve been asleep for a full week. My wife has been making you breakfast every day in case you woke up. I told you that you couldn’t handle it.

Gilgamesh: But why didn’t you throw away the bread when it started to get moldy?

Utnapishtim: For dramatic effect, obviously.

Controversial opinion: perhaps jobs are bad.

Uncontroversial opinion: MY job is definitely bad.

At this point I don't actually know what my job is but it is definitely not good.

We've gotten me away from doing any procurement (good) and put me into customer experience but then we fired everybody else who was doing customer experience and I don't really have customer experience experience so I'm winging it and I'm supposed to be marketing and sales but because I'm also doing lifecycle management I don't get commission like an actual salesperson would because it's a core function of my job and I'm supposed to be doing service assessments and contract adjustments but we don't have information about our service agreements in the contract so when I do an assessment there's nothing for me to assess against (for instance: what level of responsiveness have we promised to the client?) and I'm doing data analysis but we aren't investing in a database so I'm just ferally building one on my own and also I'm supposed to be doing content creation and making videos (including scripting, recording, acting in, and editing those videos) to put on our website but we're not putting anything on our website because the website is being redone and we're redoing it as a wordpress site so I can in theory create landing pages and education resources but the site hasn't been relaunched and also they don't know if they want me adding pages and also many people are frustratedly waiting on me to respond to emails and I'm spearheading our AI communication strategy (the strategy for how we talk to our clients about AI which starts with "do you actually need AI or do you need a powershell script?") and I'm also still the primary licensing expert in the organization and "organization" feels like an overly-generous way of describing this mess.

Anyway, I found out that I've got a new boss today. Would love to find out what my job is next.

Look if you want me to write absolutely absurd amounts of detailed text for us to show our clients how to do things they need to do I can 100% do that for you but you have to tell me that's what you want and stop putting me in meetings where I find out that we had a server outage from the client because nobody on the team communicated to me that we had a server outage when I asked if there was anything that needed to be discussed on the monthly customer sat meeting.

I will say, part of my current job is writing the technician's names on the form that says who gets the referral commission because if I can't get it because it's a core part of my role then somebody else sure as shit should be getting that 10% from the company.

Okay so TODAY my job is:

Collecting performance metrics and service delivery information about a client for the last month and organizing that into a powerpoint

Running the meeting with that powerpoint, presenting to the executive team at that client and fielding questions about their environment and timelines for hardware replacements

Doing a software installation analysis for that client

Building a UPS upgrade quote for that client

Delivering performance metrics information for another client in their bi-monthly meeting

Finding (or writing???????????) the onboarding/offboarding checklist for that client

Delivering performance metrics information to another client

Prepping a marketing campaign for review tomorrow (generating email text, designing informative flier, writing service descriptions of the VoIP service we offer)

MARKET RESEARCH for that email campaign (checking in with technicians and clients about customer satisfaction with that service)

Verifying that a client is properly billed for a firewall license

Verifying that the firewall license is properly applied to the firewall by the techs

Creating a reporting schedule for total ESXi storage for a client and sharepoint storage for a client and building the documentation for both to be shared with the client

Calling a newly referred client to discuss service availability

Building an AI interest survey for a client interested in implementing AI and talking to the owner about what they're expecting and adjusting expectations as needed

Sourcing a consultant to teach another client how to use the AI they had us implement?

Organizing the AI onboarding documents we have to create a streamlined process

Reach out to clients about quotes sent last month

Create request for procurement department to order approved hardware

Adjust contract pricing for about 1500 items (scattered throughout the week)

Generate a report of client hardware and update the hardware information to reflect lifecycle states

Transfer leads from lead generation platform to CRM for the CEO

Explain what my job is to my new boss, who I found out about today

Okay when I write it all out like that maybe this is insane.

Oh and also updating the two 30+ sheet excel books that are decidedly not databases that are nonetheless acting as databases that I'm the only one who understands and that are probably central to whatever my job(s) is(are).

amygdalae

So so funny to me how they were like "Here's the localized title, Delicious in Dungeon!" And literally everyone went "Yeabh. Thank you but we are not calling it that 👍"

collapsedsquid

People doing Platner campaign autopsies and going "This proves that a rich boy can't just pretend to be a hick," no I'm sorry, in addition to that not being what killed his campaign, a rich kid can and does easily get a GOP house seat with strategic use of an oversized pickup truck and a pair or work boots.

centrally-unplanned

Very amusing to see takes around Platner's fall about what "voters" won't stand for, because he won the voters. Like he won the primary. He stood down over massive elite pressure. Declining polling played a role in that pressure, sure, but it was clearly not in the driver's seat. Platner's story is an object lesson in how poor and loose the standards of the median primary voter are.

(The real story vis a vis cosplaying the working class is how easily the campaign team that recruited him fell for it. But "fell for it" isn't actually right - Platner wasn't even trying to trick them. They tricked themselves with their own bad ideas.)

centrally-unplanned

Though as much as I fully believe modern primaries are bad and we need much more party authority in the mix, we should be honest that there were tons of primaries in the US this term and on the Dem side most of them had none of the "Platner problem". You are seeing the classic issue of "majority of the majority" factionalism with say Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan of course, but El-Sayed is a career policy academic with notable experience in state government. He is absolutely qualified on a personal level for the job. On average, the system works to elevate qualified people as "in the running" before voters play a big role, and many voters do still care about qualifications. The US has hundreds of elected officials at the federal level alone - of course you have some bad eggs.

The Platner scenario is honestly primarily notable because of the huge wrinkle of the Senate existing. The US system has a tiered hierarchy of reps - the Senate is more powerful, more elite, and was designed to go to the "elder statesman" of the system. They weren't even directly elected until 1913! But ofc the entire political system has shifted since then, everything is determined by partisan factionalism, and voters *definitely* don't care about making sure Senators are elder statesman anymore. The Senate is just The House Part 2 now, and so anyone can run for it. Platner didn't have to run for the House first and get tested by an election with lower stakes.

There are obviously party discipline solutions to this, but they are always going to be imperfect because the actual solution is abolishing the Senate, a stupid body that shouldn't exist. But alas.

hadesisqueer

Two World Cup finalists from opposing teams in this fucking picture, this sport isn't real

hadesisqueer

Context for anyone who is wondering: Lamine Yamal's parents won an UNICEF raffle for a charity photoshoot in which Barça players posed with kids, and 5 month old Lamine happened to get 20yo Messi. Which is like. Literally insane

joyflameball

superdark33

My goat washed

homunculus-argument

I am sooo tempted to get Warhammer books as french translations, read them as my way to start re-learning french with a translator at one hand and a dictionary at the other, and develop zero grasp between what vocabulary is regular french and what is Warhammer, and if I ever encounter a native speaker I give them psychic damage.

thelordanubis

“Tourist talks in passable French but sounds like a Space Marine” would probably be a new one for Parisians

homunculus-argument

Would it be better or worse than orks? Or better yet, necrons?

collapsedsquid

gunsandfireandshit

PLEASE READ THIS ARTICLE

gothcostco

From another article i read today 😭

hustlerose

alt link

rincewindthecheese

he wasn’t even there to be a contestant he joined the crew as a CHINESE TEACHER but the directors noticed his good looks and begged him to compete. poor guy made it to the finals and if he had been one of the winners he would have been contractually forced to be in a boy band whether he wanted to or not

lastvalyrian

this is the closest any human being has ever come to actually being sold to One Direction

whencartoonsruletheworld

hearing anything about the nolan odyssey is so funny. it's like "they cut the extremely important and infamous nobody scene" "the cyclops is a giant puppet that they put in an actual historical cave + gave circe animatronics for her pig transformation instead of cgi" "they dumped plastic skeletons in an environmentally protected location they were not supposed to be in" "they recreated ancient greek instruments in order to have an accurate score" "all of odysseus's agency is basically gone" "anne hathaway actually learned how to weave ancient looms" "the women in this movie are treated like shit" "they actually buried actors alive to get those underworld shots" "did you see what the fuck zendaya was fucking wearing holy shit you can't DO THAT, MA'AM" "what do you mean there was a legitimate epic the musical reference" "NOT A SINGLE FUCKING GREEK WAS CAST IN THIS MOVIE"

like did nolan have two guys standing at his side at all times whispering ideas in his ear and one told the truth and the other told lies and they didnt tell him which was which until they wrapped production cause

I am currently reading the Eat God playtest (0.6.2), and something I wanted to compliment you on is how directly comprehensible it is. An immense amount of my frustration with D&D is that, starting from the beginning of a PHB and reading forward, large sections frequently prove irrelevant or incomprehensible without later information -- no relevant pages given, of course! This is not confined to D&D, either, I have run across many board games that seem to have picked at random the order in which rules are explained, leading to a great deal of frustration on my part.

I'm always of two minds about comments like this. On the one hand, I appreciate the the vote of confidence that I'm succeeding in making the text approachable. On the other hand, I know that I'm an average technical writer at best, so it feels kind of like I'm benefiting from other people's misfortune on account of the fact that many major tabletop RPG publishers have seemingly never even heard of technical writing!

(Incidentally, Eat God's playtest draft is up to version 0.7.2 at the moment, so if you're a full major version behind, you may wish to pick up the latest – a lot of stuff has been further clarified in the interim.)

st-just

The people who compare using AI to using hard drugs that rot your brain are I guess correct insofar as they are both subjects where people are convinced they're apocalyptic threats to society and simultaneously take active pride in their own viciously defended ignorance about any specific or accurate information on them.

The prokopetz brain worm is reading a source book and thinking "this needs more huge lookup tables"

Most sourcebooks do need more big stupid tables.

(I'll freely grant that my preoccupation is partly an aesthetic thing, but it's not just that. One of my biggest pet peeves with indie tabletop RPGs is how many of them will put the player or GM in a position where they need to Make Something Up in order to render the thing functional, then not provide any worked examples of what that might look like. Like, who exactly is the game designer here, you or me? I strive to always provide at least a dozen worked examples – and more is better – in any situation where one of my games asks the player or GM to Make Something Up, and you know what's an engaging and high-utility way to concisely present a large number of worked examples? A big stupid table.)

innumerable-voices

There's also something to be said about the size of a table in relation to its expected frequency of use and how that affects the players perception of of how long a game is meant to last

A table with only six options that's supposed to be consulted once per session caps your games total play time at less than a dozen sessions before things start getting repetitive

Quite so. I've touched on this before, but random lookup tables that are far too small for their stated purpose are a frequent vice of indie RPGs. A table of Weird Shit that's ostensibly meant to be rolled on at least once per scene but only has a dozen total entries is just making the hypothetical GM do your work for you in a more roundabout way.

rampagingpoet

This has been a recurring theme in my Arden Vul Homework series. I think the idea was that listing the individual contents of 352 burial niches would be unwieldy to navigate - but also if there's over 300 of the things you probably need more than 30 entries on the "what's in this niche?" table.

Or, you know, scrap the idea of searching niche by agonizing niche entirely. There's no decisions being made except whether you happened to roll poorly for the first few and then decided to give up (missing multiple magic items and thousands of gp worth of valuables)

The necessary corollary to "make sure your random lookup tables are large and varied enough to sustain interest across the expected number of rolls without kicking out lots of potentially annoying duplicate results" is, of course, "consider carefully why you are expecting so many rolls to be made on this particular table in the first place".

go-learn-esperanto

Hey. If people aren't aware, Microsoft admitted they know who you and where you are at all times and will give your info to the police.

They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.

Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.

You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.

This article specifically notes:

For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.

GDID is the persistent Windows ID that helped FBI trace a Scattered Spider hacker despite VPNs. Here's how it works and how to limit it.

Other important quotes:

What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.

Two things back that up:

There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.

Then there’s activation. Massgrave, the group behind Microsoft Activation Scripts, notes that Windows setup sends hardware info to Microsoft and gets identifiers back, the same tokens later used for Store access and licensing: “It’s impossible to prevent Windows from getting a GDID without breaking activation and UWP app[s].” Anyone who lost a license after swapping a motherboard has already met a smaller version of this.

phaeton-flier

"French press"

>look inside

>it's Italian

hi there. At phaeton-flier, we're always trying to improve our posting. Please select which of the following responses you prefer:

well even the french agree the Italians are the good cooks

I thought the French media was getting more fascists...!

actually when I look inside mine there's coffee

‍

I prefer 1 to 2 and 2 to 3

I prefer 1 to 3 and 3 to 2

I prefer 2 to 1 and 1 to 3

I prefer 2 to 3 and 3 to 1

I prefer 3 to 1 and 1 to 2

I prefer 3 to 2 and 2 to 1

I prefer 3 to 1 and 2 to 3 and 1 to 2. Get fucked.

Voting ended onJul 19

phaeton-flier

We will take the above into account.

One time I was at a pub trivia night with some writer friends and we almost won but there was a tie. As a tiebreaker they asked us and the other team to write down as many moons of Jupiter as we could in two minutes.

None of us are very into astronomy so at first everyone was like oh we’re gonna lose but there were three of us at the table that night who were either former classics majors or otherwise super well read on Roman mythology and the three of us were like give us that paper right now and we just took turns writing down all of the lovers of Jupiter from mythology that we could.

So of course we won lol