54 minutes until they actually start reviewing the show.

Up until then, the video can be boiled down to:

1. fans and pundits focusing on political alignments of sci-fi should STFU and focus on real shit, and
2. sci-fi creators should stop leaning on progressive idealism in lieu of good storytelling when justifying their existence.

Even more concisely: things are good or bad regardless of their political ideology.

I have quibbles with many their arguments, including the Rotten Tomatoes demonstration of progressive-leaning media having high critic ratings and low public ratings vs conservative-leaning media being flipped the other way. You make that case by pointing out examples of modern Christian-financed movies and conservative documentaries that don’t completely suck, which they didn’t do.

That said, I’m not arguing that good Christian-financed movies and conservative documentaries don’t exist. They absolutely might, and I’d like to see them if they do. But I also absolutely do not trust the ideologues to fairly or accurately measure quality in that way.

And that’s precisely the problem they’re pointing out with modern Star Wars and Trek. The creators seem to be getting high on their own progressive ideology and forgetting to focus on making great media first, which is SUPER annoying for people who don’t share those views.

I’m a lefty type, and I get it. I’d feel the same way if the genre I loved was flooded with hella conservative content and the creators were parading around its conservatism as a reason it’s so great.

DMs containing the identities of spies and assets.

He also managed to wriggle away from multiple rape charges in Sweden by waiting out the statute of limitations.

Heroes and villains alike have complex legacies.

Everywhere; it’s a virtual conference.

⭕

Advocacy for a best-stunt-ensemble academy award sounds swell and all, but what’s to prevent that from leading to a stunts arms race that will simultaneously lead to more work and prestige in the field and absolutely lead to more people getting hurt?

A white people taco night no less…

The fact that this news follows layoffs may not be a coincidence.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-lay-off-hundreds-azure-cloud-unit-business-insider-reports-2024-06-03/

Thin steel frame, no air bags, no crumple zones.

Check out the crash tests: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roLcNwRi1Sk&t=40s

12 year SDE + 12 year TPM vet here.

Do everything you can to help your software engineers (or whoever is doing the work) have as much focus time as they need. Buffer your meetings and questions to one chunk of time per day. Encourage them to block-out and protect their focus time. And encourage the team to keep office hours so they can still make themselves available to others, but in a controlled way.

Be transparent with the business’s goals and frustrations you are facing. There’s an attitude (often among inexperienced devs) that PMs are good for nothing; just an interface to the rest of the business, and a source of where tasks come from. And some certainly are that, but a good PM is worth their weight in gold.

Find a good mentor, and start thinking about your next career step now.

Andrew Callaghan really seems interested in these semi-maligned, culturally misunderstood do-gooder figures lately.

You’ve got this guy. A short while back there was Retro Bill in the DARE Conference video. And Kevin Morse in the Kia Boys film.

This looks to me like not-so-subtle virtue signaling to fans who want to look past his sexual misconduct allegations and just get back to guilt-free consumption of salacious, cool-real-shit Channel 5 content.

I freely admit that Callaghan is dynamite at this genre and he’s comfortably sliding into a huge void that Vice has left behind, so he gets credit where credit is due there. But this doesn’t count for “doing the work” when trying to reacquire the public’s good graces after being a creep. But, you know, he doesn’t have to if he doesn’t want to. There are still thousands upon thousands of people who don’t care about any of that and are happy to let his shit behavior slide if they get to keep seeing cool new videos.

Periodic office hours are tremendously helpful as well.

Block an hour, once or twice a week, for people to come by an ask you (and your team) about literally anything they want. And open it to everyone at your organization. Have your team stop answering one-off questions and tell people to bring it to office hours.

Team leads and tpms should help with logistics, messaging and hand-slapping.

Just a reminder: yesterday (June 4 2024) marked the 35 year anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre.

Some relevant links:

• Associated Press: Silence and heavy security in China and Hong Kong mark 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown
• Hong Kong Free Press: In Pictures: Hong Kong’s US, EU consulates mark Tiananmen crackdown anniversary with candles
• Al Jazeera: Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te says Tiananmen ‘will not disappear in torrent of history’

Look how they massacred my boy…

I’m genuinely disappointed that Asbestos Cafe is basically forbidden now. That’d be a solid name for a hardcore alcoholic vegan bar.

I worked for Akamai for 7 years.

This is why, if your CDN infra is core to the operation of your business, you make your systems accommodate multi-CDN integration. Cutting one CDN off shouldn’t be significantly difficult, and it comes in handy during contract negotiations. All the major players work this way.

For a progressive, having a fascist opposition party is ultimately detrimental to the non-fascist party as well.

“The good guys” only need to hold the specter of fascism over their constituents’ heads and demand that their voters fall in line, rather than blazing trails for truly progressive ideals. It also ramps down incentives for party politicians to maintain good ethical hygiene (with no legitimate alternative for people to choose from in the event of bad behavior).

At what point do we get to stop holding our collective noses to vote for the lesser of two evils? If we’re talking about the complexity of holding multiple ideas in our heads at one time, why can’t the Biden administration publicly acknowledge that:

1. the Oct 7 2023 attack on Israel was an act of war,
2. Israel is committing a genocide in response,
3. these are both unacceptable, and
4. we’re going to fucking do something about it.

Is this really such an abominable idea? If so, why???

I like Bernie and AOC, and I’m thankful for their joy (despite their exhaustion) over growing the progressive caucus. But what’s the plan to grow the movement?

I’m trans and I’m ready to fight. When I volunteered for Biden in 2020 and they had me soft-phone cold-calling voters in swing states to make sure they’d go vote, it was the biggest waste of time I’d ever spent volunteering. Nobody wants a cold call, and even if they did, the latency of soft phones destroys the ability to communicate like a regular human person. Further, being trans, a) my voice is a perpetual betrayal, and b) I acknowledge that my identity is too marginal to be useful to reaching the centrist constituency that they so desperately seek.

So this year I’ll be volunteering in local elections, supporting local leaders who are more aligned to the causes that are important to me. I’m here to support the next Bernie and AOC.

The Biden camp is welcome to go canvas the dying malls and suburbs of the blue USA for help in their re-election army, and honestly I wish them the very best. Good luck with that.

If they want my help (and the help of so many more), I’ll be waiting for them to earn it.

That sucks too – but do stick with it, find a good consultant who can help you polish up your resume and socials. You and me both will find something soon enough. :)

Yeah, tech. Updated my original comment to clarify.

Honestly, the bit from the article that rang most accurate was this:

Lastly, it’s possible that many Americans think the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s job opening figures are overstated. For example, some job seekers have reported encountering “ghost jobs” — listings on job platforms that companies are no longer actively hiring for.

I’ve been keeping track of the roles I’ve gone after (well within qualification for) and I’m seeing a lot of re-listings for roles that closed out my application (with no outreach) and just relisted the req after a few weeks, over and over again.

I’m not saying the listings are fake, but if they were fake, this is pretty much what it would look like from the outside.

I have no earthly clue what world economists are living in where the labor market is great.

I’ve been looking for a job for over a year (in tech, over a dozen years as an SDE, a dozen more as a TPM, lead role in both titles). Whenever I can get an employer to actually respond to the hundreds of applications I send, their salary offerings are a joke.

Are people just out there taking 20% - 30% haircuts on what they make?

Dancing colors; smothered, covered and topped.