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Posted by Thefallen1986

https://archiveofourown.org/works/86954746

by Thefallen1986

Setsuna dresses up as an Umbreon

Inspired by: https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/145892531

Words: 55, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Fandoms: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types, Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon, Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon (Anime & Manga)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Meiou Setsuna, Blacky | Umbreon
Additional Tags: Cosplay, Dresses, Plushies, Joyful, Crossover

https://archiveofourown.org/works/86954746

kane_magus

Watch on YouTube

( Partial cut/paste of video description behind cut )

When I first saw this video in my Feedly feed, I clicked on it just long enough to load the Youtube page and look at the video description to get the actual name of the game, which I then looked up on Steam. I thought it looked vaguely interesting, but I balked at the $20 USD price tag. Note, in the video above, the claim is made that it "never goes on sale," so I guess I'll never be playing it myself. I stopped the video at that point and came here to write this paragraph before going back and watching the rest of the video. So... basically, this whole paragraph here serves as an extended caveat that, no, I have not actually played the game being talked about here, and it's possible I never will, because I ain't paying $20 for that. *shrug*

TL;DR gist of the previous paragraph: Caveat: I have not played The End of Gameplay myself, nor will I ever. Probably.

(Another caveat: prior to this video, I don't recall ever hearing of this droqen guy before, or of the "kill gameplay" philosophy [or of that Dogme 95 stuff, either, for that matter]. Also, I still haven't yet played Silent Hill f or Mixtape, though both of those games are in my Steam wishlist).

So, anyway, I then watched the rest of the video.

As one of the comments (which I saw prior to starting the video) under the video muses, games like The Sims or Minecraft (OG Minecraft, anyway, back when it was really just being tossed into a huge world and being allowed to do as you want, before all the various "gameplay modes" and pre-built levels were added to it) could be analogous to the "kids in a yard kicking a ball around" thing, as opposed to the "playing in the World Cup Final" thing. At no point, however, does the video mention games like The Sims or Minecraft, mind you. (EDIT And, of course, some dipshit immediately replied to that comment with an asinine, banal "That's because Minecraft and the Sims aren't games," which spawned a huge sub-thread of people rightfully calling this guy out and him going into a bunch of semantic nonsense to try to defend his so-called point that they aren't games, which reminded me of why I so very rarely bother to look at Youtube comments in the first place. /EDIT)

That bit about Sudoku was just... weird, though. Like, personally, I fucking loathe Sudoku. I'd rather punch myself in the side of the head repeatedly, figuratively speaking if not literally, than to try to do a Sudoku puzzle. The one time I was forced to interact with a Sudoku puzzle, I immediately went online and found a Sudoku-solver and just plugged in the answer (which was tedious enough all on its own), without even bothering to try to work it out myself.

With that said, however, I don't feel like Sudoku needs to have a point or to "express something" to exist. (I don't personally dislike Sudoku because it doesn't "express something," I just don't like it at all, period.) Also, being good at painting is not inherently "better" than being good at Sudoku or any other game.

(Outside, I suppose, of its potential to make you money or whatever, if you're really good at painting [or are, at the very least, good enough at bullshitting to convince people to buy your "paint literally thrown at a canvas" style of "painting" or whatever]. But then, of course, one could make money playing video games, too, if one becomes good at (fak)e-sports, and I find that to be way more asinine than someone creating and selling a painting. But then, apparently, there are also Sudoku contests that can award upwards of $10,000 in prizes if you win, and... wow... just... wow... ಠ_ಠ ...but I digress.)

Other games I thought of as I watched this were The Beginner's Guide (this droqen dude kinda seems a bit like a real life equivalent to "Coda" in some ways) and game, game, game and again game.

But what I really thought of, based solely on the video's title and just from looking at the game's page on the Steam store, was Reality Hunger, and I still feel that way after having watched the whole thing. This game feels vaguely like the video game equivalent of Reality Hunger (minus, hopefully, all the intentional quasi-plagiarism, anyway). A lot (too much for my tastes) of Reality Hunger consisted of repeated rants against "mainstream" literature, such as novels and memoirs, and it presented itself, and works like it, to be the "future." And my response to The End of Gameplay, at least based on what I've seen of the game in the above video, is kind of similar.

To paraphrase myself from my review there of Reality Hunger:

I am glad this [game] exists. I am glad that I [watched a video about] it. I mean, after all, it compelled me to write this wall of text about it, if nothing else. However, if all [video games] started to trend toward being like this, which seems to be what the [game's creator] wants, then I think I'd probably have to just give up [playing video games] altogether.

In the end I agree more with i am a dot than with droqen: Long live gameplay.

With that said, I also don't necessarily completely disagree with droqen, either, especially based on what he has said here.

The main difference is that I don't have any qualms about labeling something "uninteresting" if I find it to be uninteresting. I've admitted many times in the past that I've straight up abandoned a lot of games when I lost interest in them. It doesn't frighten me to say that. I don't feel a need to equate games that don't interest me with those games being "bad" or "evil," or whatever. Gameplay, as droqen himself apparently came to realize there, is not inherently "evil." But it can most certainly be "uninteresting" or "boring" (though I have come to dislike the latter word on a visceral level [enough so that I've taken to immediately downvoting reviews on Steam if any variant of the word "boring" appears in them, even if I might have otherwise completely agreed with them]). Grinding can be uninteresting. Fetch quests can be uninteresting. Hours of non-interactive (or even interactive) cutscenes can be uninteresting. Mindlessly gunning down endless waves of "enemies" can be uninteresting. There have been a lot of games that I may play for 1 or 10 or 100 hours, but then, at hour 2, 11, 101, it's like a switch flips in my brain and I'm like "no, suddenly, this is no longer doing anything for me," and then I just exit out and uninstall, even if I haven't actually finished the game yet. I may reinstall the same game and try again later, after an hour or a day or half a decade, and I may actually get through it on the second or third or fourth or fourteenth attempt, or I may never finish it at all or even ever make it even as far as I did on the first attempt.

(Also, tangentially related, I also do that whole "is today still 'today' if it's after midnight, as long as I haven't gone to bed yet?" thing. Is it "tomorrow" if I stay up until 4am or whenever, or does it only become "tomorrow" after I go to bed and wake up again at noon or whenever? Like, I'll be sitting here thinking "well, today I did such-and-such and... wait, no, technically I did that 'yesterday' not 'today,' because it's after midnight already, but I still think of it as 'today.'" The mysterious 報復性熬夜 is usually in full force at that point. ¬_¬)

Post started at 2:45pm. Post actually posted at 7:08pm.

Current Mood: blah
Current Location: Stokesdale, NC

princessofgeeks

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nnozomi posting in

guardian_learning

部首
阝 part 5
院, courtyard/institution; 除, to remove; 险, danger ( pinyin )
https://www.mdbg.net/chinese/dictionary?cdqrad=170

词汇
大巴, bus; 大大, greatly; 大夫, doctor; 大量, a large amount; 大赛, major competition; 大厅, hall; 大约, about; 大自然, nature ( pinyin )
https://mandarinbean.com/new-hsk-4-word-list/

Guardian:
你知不知道危险两个字怎么写, do you even know how to spell danger?
之后所有人在大厅集合, after that everyone gather in the hall

Me:
我想在院子里种花儿。
朋友们，咱们快上大巴吧！

princessofgeeks

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Current Mood: awake

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Posted by Ask a Manager

https://www.askamanager.org/2026/06/updates-the-chatgpt-mansplainer-protecting-interns-from-drama-and-more.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=38507

It’s a special “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager and I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past. Here are four updates from past letter-writers.

1. My coworker mansplains via ChatGPT

Ultimately, for several reasons, I left the role. Though perhaps in hindsight, this should have been a signal that they weren’t the right fit.

The ChatGPT guy did get more obnoxious, at one point even suggesting we rewrite our entire codebase in another programming language using ChatGPT. Alison, this guy didn’t know how to write code at all and just assumed it would go fine. We’d literally be on Zoom together and I’d ask him something and watch him type it into ChatGPT. He just seemed to stop thinking for himself as time wore on.

Beyond that, there was some ugly corporate restructuring where I was given a title demotion and extra work but no extra pay, and the small amount of travel I had agreed to ended up being a large amount of travel. Corporate growing pains kind of stuff — it was a very small company that was trying to sort itself out and I just was caught in the middle.

So I left, and took a role more in line with my experience for a lot more money. Last I checked, they were hiring my replacement under the old title but less pay, and I wish them luck with that!

The new job unfortunately just handed us an AI usage mandate I’m not happy about and I think the vibe coding here is a bit off the charts too. But at least I feel like my experience and input and questions are valued and answered appropriately.

I don’t know if this will be a long-term role but it makes a difference to at least feel respected. I keep my tech skills sharp with projects outside my job, and I wait eagerly for the days where we can be more normal about LLM usage rather than shoving it in everything.

2. Protecting interns from office drama (#2 at the link)

Thanks so much for answering my question earlier this year and to the people who commented on it!

I had the conversation with both interns; both took it well and were grateful but I also think they (thankfully) were too inexperienced to grasp the full extent of the situation. No luck with Collins, though; in a related situation, she said she’d be grateful if I could be the one to talk to Trinity and I was able to steer her in the right way by framing the change of behavior I needed in a “please help me in this very tricky client situation by doing ABC.”

Robby and Langdon were fired a few weeks after I posted. There was more drama with clients, Robby was maneuvering hard against Collins in that time, but what ultimately did him in was that he had also made a number of decisions that didn’t make any sense on the business side. I have since found out that Robby managed to piss off pretty much every senior woman in the office by being condescending, mansplaining, and disrespectful to women specifically. Langdon was a goner when our CEO reached out to senior leadership of the client of a very big project and they gave not good, very bad feedback. I did share my concerns about Robby with our CEO as well (more about the business side of things) when the conversation pretty naturally came up when Robby managed to completely exasperate our generally very patient and even-keeled CMO.

I wish everything was hunky-dory and that we all rode off into the sunset but, probably to the surprise of no one, it was not so. I had high hopes for the new department head since I used to have a good relationship with her and she is very competent. But instead, Trinity took over Langdon’s big project, has become her new right-hand person, getting several direct reports from myself and others reassigned to her and continues to gossip, sometimes in a pretty nasty way. In fairness, I was asked if I wanted the big project, but I was already working weekends so I was relieved when I didn’t, but I didn’t count on that automatically resulting in, “Well, (MyName) isn’t that busy so she can take on this other thing” and “Trinity now walks on water, we all must protect Trinity at all costs” — when I was still having a higher workload than her.

The new department head has completely sidelined me, so long story short, I’m job searching but also think my job might be on the line, looking at the dearth of new projects in the pipeline; I would get a pretty hefty severance, so I’m trying to stay calm. On the bright side, I did manage to get Whitaker hired permanently (although he now reports to Trinity), and I’ve done pretty well detaching from all of the bigger leadership concerns and just focusing on my work and deliverables.

3. I keep getting pulled into work that’s not my job (#2 at the link)

I’m the technical writer from 2021 who kept getting assigned project management tasks on Project Coffeepot, with a project lead who dumped ALL of his overdue tasks on me. Well, as I mentioned in the comments, I did have to stick it out during Covid. Work slowed immensely, so I just let things ride and completed whatever task came my way.

Post-pandemic, the project lead brought in an entire team – eight people – to do what I was doing. (Guys, I’m not exaggerating the number. But the increase was in part because the project lead was an empire builder and planned to take over the department.) I was perfectly happy to turn over the management tasks, but then he gave them my technical documents as well. At this point, I was truly fed up. So I said, “Fine.” I went to my manager and said, “I need a new project.” (I’m part of a technical support pool and we get assigned to different projects.) Luckily, a new effort was starting and I got in on the ground floor. It’s been wonderful! I am doing technical writing (software requirements, software test docs – all kinds of fun things – yes, I’m a nerd and proud of it!), no project management, and getting plenty of recognition for the quality of my work. The team is great and I’ve been able to learn and grow my skills. I enjoy work every day.

As far as Project Coffeepot: two years later, the project lead came to me and stated that the new team had screwed up immensely and asked me to fix it. They were behind on all of the deliverables. I took immense pleasure in stating that I was tied up on Fabulous New Project and wasn’t available to help.

The project lead eventually transferred to another program. (Alas, his empire never came to be.) The new lead came in and within six months had erased the document backlog, got Project Coffeepot production back on schedule, and it’s now nearing completion.

4. Potential employer wants me to disclose any medical conditions, including migraines, depression, eczema, and more

I ended up politely withdrawing my candidacy the day you posted my letter. In addition to the health questionnaire, they wanted me to provide a recent blood workup for immunology, that I would have had to organize and pay for myself. Normally I would have been fine to do this, but again, this was all before receiving a formal job offer, for essentially an entry-level role that paid less than I wanted. Didn’t seem worth the hassle.

The hospital’s parent company ended up going into administration/receivership just a couple of months later. Apparently they’re $1.6 billion in debt and still looking for a buyer. Probably dodged a bullet.

The post updates: the ChatGPT mansplainer, protecting interns from drama, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

https://www.askamanager.org/2026/06/updates-the-chatgpt-mansplainer-protecting-interns-from-drama-and-more.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=38507

pauraque

Jan Morris (1926-2020) was a Welsh writer known primarily for histories and travelogues published both before and after her gender transition in the late 1960s. In her time she traveled just about everywhere in the world; as a journalist she accompanied the Mount Everest expedition of 1953, waiting at a camp at 22,000 feet elevation to be the first to report that Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary had reached the summit.

Hav is one of her few published pieces of fiction, a travelogue of an imagined visit to an invented country. Morris placed her fictional land on a tiny peninsula jutting off Anatolia, and made it a crossroads where all the peoples and powers of the Mediterranean and beyond have come and left their mark through conquest and trade, and have continued to leverage its unique political position for their own gain. This omnibus edition includes the 1985 novel Last Letters from Hav and its sequel, 2006's Hav of the Myrmidons, which imagines a return visit to see how Hav has changed two decades on and where it sits in the post-9/11 world.

Apparently when Last Letters from Hav was first published, there was a bit of a "War of the Worlds" situation where many readers completely missed that it was fiction and ran right out to try to book a flight to Hav. I can understand how this happened, not just because Morris was known for nonfiction and before the internet people couldn't easily look these things up, but also because the book is so totally convincing as a depiction of a real place. Its episodic narrative gathers threads of all the real places Morris had been to and weaves them together elaborately but naturally into a multicultural knot—Turkish and Greek, British and Chinese, Christian and Muslim—that feels like it could have been, even though it never was.

The book doesn't make sweeping changes to real-world history to accommodate Hav's existence, but it makes tweaks and adjustments here and there to slip Hav in as an influence on all kinds of things. Morris creates connections everywhere (it's a common belief that Hav was the site of ancient Troy) and it seems that almost every interesting figure in history visited Hav at some point. Freud's stay in Hav as a young man inspired some of his later important works, and of course when Hemingway departed he took with him some of Hav's famous polydactyl cats. Sometimes Morris quotes passages about Hav from real writers' works, and in 1985, unless you had that exact book on the shelf, could you be sure that quote wasn't in there? I think some of them might even be real quotations that she has cleverly recontextualized to sound like they're about Hav, and with such forthright authoritativeness that you want to believe her.

( cut for length )

jennlk

And not something I could have fixed. County had, indeed, set my account up incorrectly. Once they fixed that, I was able to sign up for shifts. BC is somewhat annoyed that the TWP will have to pay me to work EV, but the agreement she signed with County says that we'll provide at least two supervisory shifts at TWP expense; and if she won't do it, I have to.

But now there's another Gaah! I can't get into the ballot portals at the state level, even though they're showing up at my State account page. And support is being really slow, so I gave them four hours of my time, and then came home. I'll go in tomorrow and rattle a few cages and see if I can get any response. There are other ways of getting at least one of the things I need, and if I can't get the other thing done in time because they can't fix their end, it's not my fault!

And in a related gaah!, the ballots came in from the printer while I was gone, and nobody knew they'd come in. sigh. DC didn't know to expect them, BC has gotten so used to someone else handling them that she didn't even think about it. (I think DT was the only one who saw the delivery, and all zie did was make sure they were delivered to the correct address.)

falena posting in

gamechangerhr

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arlie

Tomorrow my local power company will take all electric power away from me for 8 hours. Modern technology will make it impossible for me to use any gas appliances during that time, so no hot water either. No cooking, no air conditioning. And no refund of a pro rata portion of their recently increased connection fee. (Connection is mandatory given where I live; going completely off grid is not permitted, and AFAICT there are no actual competitors, in spite of deal about where your power comes from - the grid remains run by PG&E.)

I can't do anything about the government imposed tax, paid directly to PG&E, for the required connection to PG&E, and its recent increase so they could boast about reducing the price per kilowatt hour, while raising the bills of all but heavy users. I can't do anything about the equally government imposed "tax" to compensate PG&E for people who are unable to pay their bill. (Note: I have only one source for this explanation of a line item on my bill, and don't class that source as "reliable", but it does strike me as plausible, given regulatory capture etc. etc.)

But I can do something about the power outages, both planned and unplanned. I can install my own solar system. It might have the happy side effect if reducing my electricity costs, in spite of the merely nominal payment one receives as a solar user if one supplies energy to PG&E's grid.

So soon after PG&E informed me of tomorrow's denial-of-service, I began requesting bids for a solar-plus-battery system. I now have 5, plus one presented in person by a suspected-crooked supplier who neglected to email me the document afterwards as I'd emphatically requested. (Three different states are suing SunRun, according to a fast Google search, and not all for the same malfeasance. While I do have one friend who's a more-or-less happy SunRun customer, I'd rather not risk using them, particular given their pushy sales tactics.)

My eyes are crossed. One of my virtual desktops is full of Firefox windows with multiple tabs, each window devoted to a specific question. I also have 4 solar-related tab collections consigned to OneTab.

( Read more... )

cosmolinguist

Aw I'm so sad to hear about Major Oak.

Going to see it (and the rest of Sherwood Forest), in 2005, on a random trip to the Robin Hood Festival that my new friends (thanks to LiveJournal of course) and I just found out existed the day before, was one of my first little adventures when I came to England.

If I was brave enough to look for them and submit myself to the cringe, I'm sure I have at least one entry here about the trip.

Major Oak was the kind of tree I felt lucky to be in the presence of. I think about it pretty often even now.

unavee

I watched this and liked it a lot more than I expected. I wish I had watched it in the theater!

I was completely unspoiled going in and loved experiencing the movie like that. I'm waiting for my library hold for the book now.

Also taking a break from binging HR fic to read some for this fandom.

askamanager_feed

Posted by Ask a Manager

https://www.askamanager.org/2026/06/updates-boss-asked-about-my-fathers-life-expectancy-asking-about-ai-in-an-interview-and-more.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=38544

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

1. My boss asked the life expectancy of my terminally ill father

My father died five weeks after you published my email (published on a day I happened to be traveling for work — so despite it all, I still managed in that time to fly to a client negotiation). It turned out I never had to deal much more with the intrusive questions and issues from the boss as I didn’t end up getting to take off as many times as I’d thought. Based on how he was doing, I had hoped and believed my dad would have had more time. A week before my father died, I took three days off and went home planning to mostly visit, but his condition significantly deteriorated right when I arrived so I ended up staying a week, in part out of pure 24/7 caretaking necessity. I took the next week off after he passed, as I was so burned out I wasn’t capable of working.

Back at work for a little over a week now and while no one gave me flack for being off, I am so discouraged at the overall response. Or lack of response really. I can count on one hand a few kind coworkers who reached out with thoughtful messages (none of them management level). The vast majority of people I work with haven’t offered condolences or any acknowledgement.* Nary a word from the “big” boss (who used to be my boss before his promotion). Yes, all these people were notified. One coworker today offered me his condolences at the end of a call I made to him, which felt like an afterthought on his part, and literally said, “I’m glad he’s at peace now.” I never talked to this person about my dad’s illness. Pretty sure Dad would rather be alive.

I don’t know if this is how most people are these days and my standards for etiquette are too high, or if I’m just unlucky in my coworkers and management. My practice is to always send condolences to anyone I work with (or interact with more than once in any context!), and privately and separately – not as an afterthought added to a business call or email. My dad’s job he retired from 10 years ago sent flowers to the gravesite. Several of my mom’s coworkers from her job she retired from seven years ago came to the service. And I get crickets from most of the people I work with right now. One could say I shouldn’t be hurt by self absorbed coworkers, but I’m struggling so much right now to be motivated to do my work. Needless to say, I am actively looking.

* To anyone who doesn’t because they are afraid of remind the person of their loss or don’t know what to say: (1) They haven’t forgotten their loss. But they may not want to be put on the spot during a business meeting and potentially become unexpectedly emotional in a professional setting. This is why you offer condolences privately. And (2) Don’t know what to say? It’s hard to go wrong with “I heard about [X] and want you to know I’m so sorry and am [thinking about][praying for] you. No need to respond but if you want to talk I’m here.” Copy, paste.

2. Asking about AI in an interview (#5 at the link)

I was the one who wrote in asking about a company’s AI use in an interview. You were very kind to say my wording was great, and I felt empowered going into the interview. The hiring manager’s response was, if I recall correctly, that the company wasn’t in the habit of using or embracing gen-AI at that time, but they weren’t opposed to AI tools for administrative tasks. She wasn’t put off by the question at all, which I feel fortunate about. I’m really delighted to say that I got that job, and I’ve been there ever since!

Obviously, AI use has only increased in the last few years, and the discourse around it has increased even more. In the last year, my company has issued statements and become a bit known in our industry for being vehemently anti-generative AI, while in the rest of the industry is aggressively adopting it.

This is a minor update to an unimportant question, but I do want to use this chance to say that if you are against generative AI but everyone around you is telling you “it’s here, just get used to it,” you really don’t have to. You’re far from the only one against it, and there are places that will refuse to use it in creative processes. It’s only inevitable if people allow it to be.

3. My coworker keeps insisting I must speak Spanish (#5 at the link)

I had a proper sit-down with the department head and had a talk about the situation and it stopped immediately.

4. My job is really flexible but it also sucks — is it time to go? (#2 at the link)

As it’s a whole year later, I wanted to provide an update!

I must have known subconsciously something was up — about a week after you posted your response, I got laid off, and I think it makes total sense. My the scope of my role didn’t make sense anymore, and I think they wanted someone local.

Some of the freedoms I enjoyed while working there, upon reflection, were probably mostly due to some deeply entrenched disorganization at that office. A few weeks after they laid me off, the new manager called me in a panic because no one could figure out how to submit the quarterly report I’d been in charge of. They paid me a consultation rate for the couple hours I spent on helping them, which I appreciated. Also, I had asked during my layoff call if they would send me a shipping label to send my laptop back. It wasn’t until a few weeks ago (!!!) that they reached out to figure out those logistics.

I am still in touch with my old managers who had left before I did, and it’s only after a ton of hindsight that I was able to see how dysfunctional that old office was. Getting laid off was honestly a relief after all that back and forth, and it allowed me to stay on unemployment while I looked for a new role. It took me the full six months to find something, so I’m doubly glad for it (as opposed to applying out while white-knuckling it at the old place for those six months).

I got hired by another organization back in September, and I’m much happier here. It pays just a bit more, fits closer to my skillset, and very notably, is still pretty flexible! I am completely WFH, can run an errand or two during the day so long as I let the team know, and I don’t even have Teams or Outlook on my phone. I’m also not the only person in my role, the company itself is much larger with more safeguards and clearer lines of report.

So: a happy ending for all! Those six months of unemployment were tough, but I’d take it over still working at my “unicorn” job.

5. The yoga studio where I teach hasn’t been paying me on time (#4 at the link)

I’m the yoga teacher who didn’t get paid for 21 classes. The comments were great, specifically one that said the gym owners wouldn’t let someone take classes without paying.

It turns out the owner did have a medical issue and was out for a month or so, but the other manager didn’t step in to pay (though that was the person that managed the yoga teachers and was my contact). I did say that I needed to be paid or I wouldn’t teach moving forward. They ended up paying me for all my classes and I requested to be put on their payroll. All the trainers are on payroll, but the yoga teachers were not. It turned out the other yoga teacher hadn’t been paid either and she thanked me for speaking up.

That being said, all is well. Not sure how long I’ll stay there, but I’m okay so long as I’m getting paid! Thank you for the great advice!

The post updates: boss asked about my father’s life expectancy, asking about AI in an interview, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

https://www.askamanager.org/2026/06/updates-boss-asked-about-my-fathers-life-expectancy-asking-about-ai-in-an-interview-and-more.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=38544

q99

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jesuswasbatman

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gelliaclodiana

Over the last couple of weeks I have read the first three Locked Tomb books! And enjoyed them greatly. It sort of took me a while to get into Gideon the Ninth, but then I started Harrow the Ninth and was just completely overcome by whatever the hell was going on there. (I mean, but the end it became a lot clearer, but oh, Harrow!) And then the same with Nona ~~The Ninth~~, where things get that much more painful for everyone.

One thing I really love, which I had not considered as an upside to stories about necromancy, is that characters get to have their great death scenes and then come back again! But I also have some questions. ( under the cut )

As an aside, the worldbuilding here seems to me (not a Catholic) to be very very Catholic. Lots of god being embodied, lots of body-and-blood, lots of resurrection-and-life stuff. I guess that's possibly just generically Christian but then there's all the incense and the ritual and the death nuns...

I am now rereading GtN and looking forward to all the lab sequences, now that I know who everyone is.

On a RL note, we have heat again! I realize that for most people having the furnace out of operation in the summer is not a big deal but this is San Francisco and we have this thing called June Gloom. The gas pipe to my house had to be moved as part of the rebuilding-the-stairs process and it has been a bit touch and go getting everything working again. Yesterday evening we had nothing, because the builders jostled the new pipe and the automatic cut-off was triggered (this might only be a thing in earthquake country, but basically the gas line has an automatic shutoff if it senses motion) and the contractor and plumber had to come out late to fix it.

osprey_archer

At the end of April, I had just finished a draft of my secondary world fantasy novelette The Paper Bird.

asakiyume agreed to give it a beta read, and liked it! At which point my head promptly swelled to the size of the Goodyear blimp and I cheerfully informed everyone that I was finally going to write the dozen or so secondary world fantasies that have been knocking around in my brain for the last fifteen years, fifteen years ago having been about the time that I concluded I needed more life experience and primary world knowledge before I could attempt a secondary world fantasy again.

Since then my head has returned to its normal size (hot air balloon). I have recalled that it is not in fact possible to write a dozen stories at a time and have therefore settled on one that has been knocking around since my senior year of high school: the tale of Jess and Innis, which begins when Jess’s cousin (commandant of a prisoner of war camp) foists one of the prisoners of war on Jess, who objects that actually he doesn’t WANT a pet prisoner of war.

Cousin Commandant: Too bad! We have a big overcrowding problem! He can help you sail your little sailboat through the archipelago helping you collect folktales or whatever if is you do.

I’m not absolutely wedded to the folktale collecting of it all, mostly because it would definitely require me to write some folktales, not just for Jess’s people (the Naditai) but also for Innis the prisoner of war turned folktale gathering assistant. Obviously less work for me if Jess is collecting butterflies. However, probably also less thematic resonance.

ANYWAY obviously Jess and Innis fall in love, obviously there is culture clash, different expectations about what love is, for instance, marriage doesn’t exist in Jess’s culture and honestly they consider the whole idea kind of titillatingly weird. Romance genre imposes an ending to shoot for (happily-for-now in this case) which is very helpful to me; the challenge with a LOT of my other ideas is that I have what I consider a wonderful set-up but no actual vision for how to structure a story on top of it.

Among its other fine qualities, this is one that I could self-publish as a trial balloon to see how my readers feel about secondary world m/m. Hopefully positive? It’s just like my historical m/m, except this time the culture clash is between cultures I made up!

askamanager_feed

Posted by Ask a Manager

https://www.askamanager.org/2026/06/updates-the-married-couple-the-fitness-tracking-device-and-more.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=38499

It’s a special “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager and I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past. Here are five updates from past letter-writers.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

1. I manage a married couple, and it’s causing problems

I set up meetings with each of them, back to back, and basically had the same conversation with each of them. I scheduled it that way because I wanted each of them to be coming into the meeting “fresh” and not responding based on what I had said to their spouse. This worked well. I had good conversations with both where I made it clear that they cannot fight each other’s battles at work or speak for each other otherwise and that if they aren’t asking for what they need, it’s not reasonable to put that resentment on me or others. With both of them, I had good chats, especially about that last part, and how we could work to prevent that from building up in the future. In one case, that resulted in more frequent one-on-one meetings with me and that person. For the other, I think giving them permission to focus on their own job responsibilities and treat their spouse like a colleague at work was most of what they needed.

I won’t say that this 100% solved everything. One spouse struggled with the resentment for a while longer, and we had a series of conversations about it through the fall, one of which got pretty heated between us, but after I apologized for snapping at them and we had a chance to take some space and come back to discuss again, we ended up in a better spot. Reading between the lines, I think they’ve been struggling with some things in their personal life that made the pattern that led to the resentment at work especially hard to let go of, but I think they are getting some support to work on that outside of work. Things are much better now and they have been much better about asking for what they need to me and the broader staff.

2. My boss wants me to buy a fitness tracking device

I said I wouldn’t buy the tracking device for the last time and they actually let go. Then on an offsite, my employees asked that we all buy it and have a group competition. Since it came for the employees, I adopted the idea and we paid for their devices.

Some insights from this story:
1. I really believe that me standing up against the peer pressure as a C-level set an example for my employees.
2. My founders and I are close and it didn’t affect our relationship at all. I believe their intentions were pure albeit maybe unprofessional ?
3. You should start ask a manager podcast.

There was an Ask a Manager podcast, but I ended it in 2019; it was a lot of fun, but also a ton of work. But all the old episodes are here.

3. Is it okay to hang target practice sheets up at work? (first update; second update)

I wrote in quite a while ago because somebody in my office had gun target practice sheets hanging in their cubicle and it made me very uncomfortable.

Since I wrote in, I left that job (for a variety of unrelated reasons), moved to a different state, and a couple years ago changed careers from a series of boring, super-corporate desk jobs to a public sector job in the court system. Through this work, I have been exposed to way more detailed information about gun violence in my community and state. Thinking back on my letter, what strikes me is how little of an idea I had then of just how many people own/carry guns in the U.S. It’s something I would never even consider for myself, and knowing now how prevalent it is while also seeing the consequences on a daily basis at work is very unsettling.

I remember getting roasted in the comments for having an “irrational” fear of guns but with every passing year, fearing guns becomes increasingly more rational. It’s scary out there!

4. We’re pressured to attend after-hours social events at our own expense (#4 at the link)

I did not take the approach of gathering a group of folks together to advocate, more because of complexities of our org structure I didn’t include in my email. I gave one additional piece of feedback to leaders and then established a personal/professional boundary. Over the last few months, our financial stability has been in question and therefore I pointed out to leadership that it would be aligned with our mission and values not to ask staff to personally fund work-related activities when their future paychecks weren’t certain. After that, I established the boundary that I would only attend events that happened during the work day or where the organization was going to cover costs I incurred. I have attended zero events since.

And now, I am joining another organization where I will be part of the decision-making leadership and hope that my future team members do not have to reach out to you about me!

5. Should I tell my interviewer I like that the city is LGBTQ-friendly? (#4 at the link)

I recently emailed about the pitfalls and subtleties of interviewing while trans, and I just landed a new job, having interviewed as my new name and gender through the whole process! There are still some tricky things when it comes to paperwork, insurance, and legal signatures, but I’ve been impressed at my new employer handing things sensitively and trying to get it right with me. Thanks for your advice in that answer and in general, I had a few pieces of AAM advice at the front of my mind as I interviewed!

The post updates: the married couple, the fitness tracking device, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

https://www.askamanager.org/2026/06/updates-the-married-couple-the-fitness-tracking-device-and-more.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=38499

yourlibrarian

1) Further developments in tornado events. We evacuated to a store for several hours yesterday as there were not only warnings about possible tornados but my partner's workplace shut down in early afternoon due to weather warnings. ( Read more... )

2) Because of everything that's been going on, it's been difficult to keep up with the Cup games. So the only one I've seen in full during the last 24 hours has been England's. But I've watched the condensed games and feel I can still get a sense of how it went (which the final score can obscure).

Iran versus New Zealand ( Read more... )

Iraq versus Norway ( Read more... )

Austria versus Jordan. ( Read more... )

England versus Croatia. ( Read more... )

Uzbekistan versus Colombia ( Read more... )

3) Although this affects all of us eventually, of interest primarily to academics or those keeping track of AI garbage effects. Who Gets Cited? Gender- and Majority-Bias in LLM-Driven Reference Selection by Jiangen

"Our results reveal two forms of bias: a persistent preference for male-authored references and a majority-group bias that favors whichever gender is more prevalent in the candidate pool. These biases are amplified in larger candidate pools and only modestly attenuated by prompt-based mitigation strategies."

Another author discusses anecdotal evidence for this same issue:

"When utilized in literature review, LLMs consistently 1. fail to mention female authors in female-led literatures, 2. insist that men are more influential or more heavily cited when this is contradicted by objective citation counts, and 3. attribute women’s work to hallucinated male scholars.

When generating bibliographies, the models not only omit female authors or misattribute women’s work to male authors; they will also produce lists of works cited in which all work by men is attributed to its authors, while work by female scholars is simply left unattributed."

For others wondering why this matters, other than the obvious misogyny inherent in first academia and secondly the technological industry from which AI arose, these results affect hiring and tenure, as well as what research gets surfaced for wider media distribution.

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isis

I haven't finished any books recently, mostly because I ran out of fiction at hand and started in on some nonfiction that is requiring a lot of brain (Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime by Sean Carroll), and so is going very slowly as I absorb it. However as is typical (I'm sure there's a Somebody's Law on this) all my library holds came in at once, so I have also started The Rook by Daniel O'Malley, which

merit had recommended and sounded interesting - so far, it is indeed!

But we have watched a few things. First, we finally finished 1923, which is part of the Taylor Sheridan Cinematic Universe, i.e. Yellowstone and related spin-offs. We had watched the first four seasons of Yellowstone, at which point I decided I didn't enjoy watching characters I dislike doing obnoxious things. We then watched the prequel 1883, which was generally more to my taste (we typically only watch historical, SF, or fantasy shows) but a general downer as although there were more characters I actually liked, they mostly ended up dying. So I was not really excited about 1923, but hey, Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren as cranky old western ranchers was certainly a draw, and I let B convince me. (Also, Jerome Flynn, who was Bronn in Game of Thrones, plays an interestingly nuanced villain, and Timothy Dalton (Timothy Dalton!!) plays a boringly un-nuanced villain who fortunately didn't have a pencil mustache because if he did, he would have been twirling it.)

Not-really-spoiler alert: I have come to the conclusion that the Taylor Sheridan Cinematic Universe is not for me. There were three main storylines: the eeevil Irish sheepmen who want to take the ranch land, followed by the eeevil mining baron who wants to take the ranch land; the nephew, emotionally scarred by his WWI experience, who has become a hunter for the Crown in British Africa, and the British noblewoman who throws over her old life to be with him; and the Crow girl at an Indian boarding school run by basically eeevil priests and nuns, who suffers one beating too many and fights back and runs. These storylines were weirdly separate, with the only connection being that the old ranch lady played by Mirren writes letters to her nephew in Africa begging him to come back to help them save the Yellowstone - and much of his plot is the over-the-top trauma and drama involved in he and his new wife overcoming one ridiculous obstacle after another to get to Wyoming. I kept waiting for the runaway native girl plot to intertwine with the rest, but other than glancing very slightly off the nephew plotline, it never did; I guess it's intended to be prequel for another installment between 1923 and the present (one of the native actors was the son of one of the actors in Yellowstone, so I could see a possible connection being drawn), but I'm not going to watch it.

Also I would not believe I would ever say that a show has so much kinky sex it got boring, but. Yeah.

The ending was over-the-top and relentlessly emotional (yeah, I cried) and very on-brand for the TSCU. But I admit I was hoping

this is actually spoilery

that well, Elizabeth, Alex, and Teonna were all pregnant, and the sweethearts of two of them were killed, so I figured Spencer would get killed as well and then the three of them could set up together in the huge Yellowstone house!

Okay, I never actually believed that would possibly happen, but what we got just annoyed me by the pointlessness of all the dramatic struggle along the way. But I did like the cranky old ranch couple, and the theme of progress being good for some and bad for others.

The next thing we were planning to watch was Dark Winds S4, but B said, "You know, we just saw a lot of people shooting each other amid trauma and drama, and maybe something lighter would be a good palate cleanser?" He had recently watched (on his own) some movie about a golfer (?) played by Owen Wilson, and he was looking for other films Wilson had done and came up with Woody Allen's 2011 romantic comedy Midnight in Paris.

Which just proves how well he knows me, because this movie was absolutely up my alley: hack screenwriter hoping to become a novelist, on vacation in Paris with his fiancee and her parents, somehow accidentally travels back in time and meets famous historical literary and art figures! And it's hilarious and sparkling and the various historical characters are amazing. Tom Hiddleston as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein, Adrien Brody as Salvador Dalí. I didn't know Corey Stoll but his Ernest Hemingway was maybe my favorite. (I mean, all the dialogue was brilliant, it's Woody Allen through and through.) The ending is pretty obvious a mile off, but I found it satisfying.

swan_tower

I mentioned at the start of this month that I had a new flash story in Lightspeed; now it is free to read online! Or you can follow the same link to listen to it instead, narrated by Stefan Rudnicki. As the title implies, "I Cut Off a Monster’s Arm. AITA?" is modeled after the type of Reddit post where someone posts about an incident in their life, seeking reassurance that they're not the one at fault in that situation (or sometimes confirmation that, yeah, they done screwed up). It's also one of a small but possibly growing number of flash stories I've written based around Japanese yōkai tales -- the third one will be out at the end of this month or the beginning of the next!

As usual, you can buy the entire issue of Lightspeed containing my story for $4.99, or subscribe for a whole year at $41.92. It's great to be able to read things free online, but it's also great for the magazines that publish them to be able to stay in business!

(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/JjsfB9)

sartorias

In Chicago now. Apparently the weather was so wild yesterday that they canceled the train that I would have been taking. They are folding them into today's train. It's gonna be PACKED.

On trains they put people with other people in the dining cars. I don't mind this; while I have trepidation at approaching strangers, heck, approaching anyone, anymore, except blood relatives who can't reject me) I don't mind when it's not my fault my old, boring, unaesthetic self is foisted on innocent parties.

Today's breakfast was with a gent who, after I told him I'd attended a book con in Montreal, said that he was writing a book. His first! After years as a successful businessman, he had this innovated idea . . . he isn't writing alone, but with a collaborator--AI! "This is surely new and innovative," he said cheerily.

I explained that actually, a lot of people have been experimenting with AI writing, and left it at that. If he tries to market it, he'll learn and in the meantime he's having fun. Nothing amiss with that.

So in a few hours I head home, saying goodbye to the miracle of rain in June, and the deep green that results!

askamanager_feed

Posted by Ask a Manager

https://www.askamanager.org/2026/06/update-my-job-wants-me-to-be-both-an-employee-and-a-contractor.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=38140

It’s a special “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager and I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

Remember the letter-writer whose job wanted them to be both an employee and a contractor? Here’s the update.

I was planning on having an update much sooner, but then the situation just continued to snowball. But I finally have a mostly-happy ending to share!

I did end up signing the contract, about a week after I had originally sent my letter. I hadn’t gotten Alison’s advice back yet, but I think I already knew what she and the commenters affirmed — it was almost certainly a bad idea. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel like I could turn down the contract without really jeopardizing my relationship with my job (and particularly with our very hot-and-cold CEO). I did get them to agree that I would be paid biweekly though — so my contractor payment would be added as a bonus to my hourly paycheck — instead of as an end-of-year bonus.

That probably would have been the end of an unsatisfying story, except that later that week, someone made a post online accusing our CEO of a major personal scandal. (For anonymity’s sake, I won’t say what kind, but if you just think of the most horrible thing a person could be accused of … yeah.)

After a week of lots of board meetings and uncertainty, our new C-Suite came forward to announce that we would not be moving forward with the planned project (which was designed by our old CEO). Instead, we would be creating/executing a new from-scratch concept — with about five weeks before the project launch. (We had been working on the old project for several months, and had already spent a lot of our budget on it.) I got brought back on in the same hourly + contract fashion, but with the scale of the project very considerably changed. Everything was moving so quickly that there was no renegotiating or discussions of how things would change — we all jumped into working on this new project feet-first.

It was an incredibly hectic month of working 70-80 hours a week (with half of it as an “hourly employee” and half of it as a “contractor”… which is to say, working at my regular rate with no overtime), but it was also one of the most exciting moments in my career. After working for someone who was so ego-focused and unwilling to entertain any opinions that were not his, it was great to be on a team where everything happened so collaboratively. Work-life balance went out the window, but at least it was working towards something I was actually proud to put my name on. At one point I remember telling my fiance (who was such an incredible rock during this whole thing), “I’m really having a great time being taken advantage of.”

This was going to be the end of my update — “hooray, my terrible CEO has left and I’ve reconnected with the passion I have for this work, even if it does suck to be paid so poorly for it.”

But!

After the project ended and we all took some time to decompress, we had a retrospective on the project, and I asked my skip-level boss for a one on one. (I re-read Alison’s advice and the comments section on my commute to that meeting for encouragement — thank you all!)

I had two goals for the meeting: (1) to make sure they knew that I knew that this setup wasn’t legal, and (2) to make it clear that I wasn’t willing to enter that kind of arrangement again. (In a ideal world, should I also have gone in looking for money? Yes. But I also knew that the company had taken a serious financial hit in dealing with ex-CEO’s exit, and it didn’t feel like the battle worth fighting.)

After spending a fair portion of the meeting being sympathetic but sticking to her position (“I’m sorry that you feel undervalued, but there was nothing illegal with what we did”), my grandboss agreed to revisit the issue with our CFO and schedule a follow-up.

Thus followed a very stressful two-week wait, including a request from the CFO for the full combined time logs from those months. Boss and Grandboss also put some new protocols in place for my role (lots of conversations about “having better work-life balance” that mostly equated to “no working from home, less flexible scheduling, and more strict timekeeping”). I suspect this is largely because they realized how little oversight my job historically had — my boss would be very happy to just focus on the non-management part of his job and let us manage our own work and schedules. Now that my timesheets were being called into question, that was no longer going to fly.

Finally, close to two months after the original project had wrapped up, my grandboss and the CFO scheduled a meeting. The conversation started out with ‘we want to pay you legally and fairly” (hooray!), but also “we had no idea how much you were actually working during these months” (a little difficult to believe, since I was here all the time, as were they) and “we made you a contractor so you had more flexibility to self-manage without worrying about hourly limits.” This last point was in part fair — that flexibility was pretty essential with how quickly everything was moving — but it’s not like I could have reorganized my time to somehow fit all the work that had to be done in a way that wouldn’t have led to overtime. It wasn’t until they kept harping on that last point and going over a few weird specifics with my time logs that I realized that they were misinterpreting California labor law…. and that they had come to the conclusion that they owed me significantly more money than they actually did (by an order of at least 20 times, if not more).

We went and googled some laws together, they realized that I was not about to suddenly become the most well-paid employee at the company, and suddenly the conversation became much less tense!

All in all, it’s a pretty happy ending. This place still has its fair share of disfunction, but it’s also becoming pretty clear that new leadership does really care about the company culture of people working here and are open to hearing suggestions and change. I got a nice unexpected “bonus” from the overtime pay I should have been paid, were everything done above board. And as much as not having work-from-home and flexible scheduling felt like a punishment at first, I am learning to enjoy putting down work when I’m not in the building and letting messages and emails sit until I’m back. It’s not the place I want to work forever (and in fact, I just started gearing up to start my job search again), but for the work I’m doing right now, I’m pretty happy with how everything ended up.

Alison, thank you so much for the amazing resource that Ask a Manager has become. I’ve read this blog as fun reading for years, and I hadn’t realized quite how much useful information I had absorbed until I was going through all of this. As a young professional, having a sense of what is normal vs. dysfunctional vs. illegal has been hugely helpful in protecting myself (not to mention then being able to assert those boundaries while still maintaining positive professional relationships!). You and the Ask a Manager community are incredible and I’m very grateful for your help in how this all got resolved — I’m not sure I would have had the confidence or knowledge to stand up for myself without you all.

The post update: my job wants me to be both an employee and a contractor appeared first on Ask a Manager.

https://www.askamanager.org/2026/06/update-my-job-wants-me-to-be-both-an-employee-and-a-contractor.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=38140

straightforwardly

This is a callout post for one of my worst habits, namely, buying editions of Scum Villains in languages that I can’t read. I was looking at my personal library tracking spreadsheet yesterday evening, and discovered that I own fifteen volumes of Scum Villain across four different languages. Over the weekend, I found this wiki page listing all the different official releases Scum Villain has had globally, and this was arguably a dangerous discovery, as it led to my almost immediately purchasing a version I hadn’t been aware of before then (the 2022 traditional Chinese rerelease)… and eyeing another one I really want (2025 simplified Chinese version)… or maybe more than one asdfghjkl;

But I’m also really excited about getting my hands on the 2022 version! I looked it up on eBay on the same day, and found that someone in my country was auctioning it off for a reasonable price—with the auction ending the next day (Sunday). I set a timer, stalked it very closely, set a truly ridiculous maximum high bid… but no one else bidded on it, so I got it for that reasonable price after all! It’s actually already arrived (yesterday, which is why I was looking at my spreadsheet in the first place… had to log my new acquisition, after all!), and I’m so pleased with it. It’s so pretty!

And, vitally, it was also the “deluxe edition”, according to the ebay listing, which means that it came with a little box of merch—postcards and mini file folders and the like. This is what I was the most excited about, because that makes it so much easier to display the, quite frankly, gorgeous art and character designs from this version!

One of the things included was this plastic block-type thing (idk what it’s actually supposed to be) that had this image on it, and—omg. The cat. THE CAT. This is now canon in my heart. Post-canon Bingqiu ABSOLUTELY get a cute little orange cat as a pet at some point, and absolutely no one can tell me otherwise, lol.

( more rambling about the different versions & how I ended up becoming this kind of ridiculous person beneath the cut )

Honestly, the most important part of this entry (and the reason why I started writing this in the first place) is, in fact, Bingqiu and the orange cat that they absolutely now have, with the rest just being my own self-indulgent rambling.

enchanted_jae posting in

drabble_zone

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

ysabetwordsmith

Good afternoon. This is Janet, posting on Ysabet's behalf. She is without power today, as are large swaths of her community. Best estimate at this time for her return online is late afternoon / early evening.

linky

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

Current Mood: sore

smbc_comics_feed

Posted by Zach Weinersmith

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/spooky-3

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Kelly told me this one was too weird, so please make it popular so she has to roll her eyes.

Today's News:

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/spooky-3

smallhobbit posting in

fan_flashworks

Title: The Heir to the Estate
Fandom: Miss Marple
Rating: G
Length: 850 words
Summary: Miss Marple wonders whether Margaret Townsend's young man is the real heir to the Compton Howe estate.

( Miss Marple watched... )

smallhobbit

FutureLearn

Plants to Products: An Introduction to Biorefining (Aberystwyth University)
Plants to Products: Biorefining Feedstocks (Aberystwyth University)
I knew very little about biorefining before I took these courses. I know something more now, although I struggle with the scientific side. It was, however, a really interesting course with presenters who didn't look at the subject from a purely theoretical standpoint.

Comparative Literatures & Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Introduction (University of Bristol)
The course begins by looking at literature and the dominance of the western viewpoint. It progresses into looking at soft power and the way it's used by different nations to promote themselves, ending with a look at visual culture. While both concepts are important I felt three weeks looking at literatures would have been far more relevant.

Food Science & Nutrition: From Farm to Fork (University of Leeds)
Very little of the farm, and a much greater emphasis on new developments and the marketing of new products by different companies. It included the possibility of using a 3-D printer to create foods, which seems a particularly wasteful use of resources.

Multilingual practices: Tackling Challenges & Creating Opportunities (University of Groningen)
Quite interesting, it included looking at multilingual families and schools. It's unlikely to have any personal relevance for me, but I do think it's a good idea where appropriate.

Critical Language Awareness in Action (University of Groningen)
This started well, by looking at the varied uses of personal pronouns and then the active and passive voice. However, it then started what to me felt like using the methods that the first week had warned against, and became very critical of animal farming in any form. This wasn't improved by the misunderstanding of some information.

OpenLearn

How Places Affect Well-Being
Nothing wrong with the course, but I don't think I learnt anything new.

cakewrecks_feed

Posted by Jen

https://www.cakewrecks.com/home/true-colors-2026

You with the baaad eyes

Don't be discouraged!

Oh I realize

It's hard to read orders

In a shop full of people

Who drive you up a wall

And the bakers beside you

Can make you feel so small

But I see your TRUE COLORS

Writing through!

I see your TRUE COLORS

'Cuz that's how I write, too!

So DON'T BE AFRAID!

To let them flow

Your true colors

True colors are literal

Like a "stilleto"

[ALL TOGETHER NOW!]

And I'll see your TRUE COLORS

Causing "boo"s!

I see your TRUE COLORS

But don't let that stop you!

So don't be afraid!

To let them flow

Your true colors

True colors are "beautiful,"

Like this raaaainbow:

A big "thank you in puce" to Andrea P. Mark A., Caylin C., Darnie S., Lezlie S., Paula P., Andrea H., Christine F., & Lacey for today's colorful characters.

https://www.cakewrecks.com/home/true-colors-2026

askamanager_feed

Posted by Ask a Manager

https://www.askamanager.org/2026/06/lets-discuss-cases-of-extreme-obstinance-at-work.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=38661

Let’s discuss strange cases of extreme obstinance at work — times when someone just dug in their heels and refused to do a thing, and what happened as a result. Here are some doozies we’ve heard about in the past:

• I had a couple coworkers pitch a huge fit when my employer updated the dress code. What did they change? No pajamas. Not even kidding. This was at a call center and the dress code was VERY relaxed, but we had people literally coming to work in their PJs or similar nightclothes. The best part was some of the worst offenders went on to harangue management over it, since “it was never a problem before” and “we’re not face to face with customers so why does it matter.” People would show up in defiance in PJs and argue when they were told to go home and change.

• Nary a month goes by that I don’t think of a guy at my customer-facing work-study job in college. We started at the same time, and about four months in we switched the main software program we used (moving from a Unix-based system to something a touch more modern). He just … decided that he didn’t want to learn the new system and wasn’t gonna, so he sat in the back and read his Bible for his entire shift, every shift. He wouldn’t even process voicemails because those voicemails needed to be logged in the new software program.

I was promoted to student manager not long after the software switch, and after a couple weeks of dealing with this guy’s obstinance, I complained so much that my managers stopped scheduling him with me, and they didn’t renew his position the following year. But he got to spend four months doing absolutely nothing and getting paid for it.

• When I worked at in the office of a warehouse, we would get a freezer full of ice cream bars in the summer. It actually had to be addressed that workers MUST STOP taking entire boxes home with them. One coworker took such offense to this that he would made it his mission to eat as much ice cream as possible while on site. I watched him eat seven of them during a thirty minute lunch break. He would proudly boast about how he’d make himself sick on free food just to make sure he got his “fair share.”

• When I worked at a Scout camp, we would usually get two shirts each summer specific to the year: a polo shirt in that summer’s color, and a t-shirt listing what area of the camp you worked in. For years we wore the polo shirts on Mondays and the area shirts on Wednesdays, when families came to visit. Then one year management decided we should switch that, so campers could see who worked where at the start of the week and we’d all look nice and fancy when Mom and Dad showed up.

There was a minor uprising. Yelling arguments. Flat refusal to cooperate. We had staff for YEARS after the change who would wear the wrong shirt and say “oh — you didn’t tell me we were doing it different this week from how we’ve always done it.” We had staff members going so far as to carry two shirts with them all day Monday and Wednesday so they could put on the correct shirt when management was around, then change back to the other shirt when nobody was looking. Some of the worst offenders were our old retired guys (who are like gold, it’s hard to find adults to work at summer camp, so they weren’t disciplined over minor shirt disobedience) and carried the torch for their preferred shirt rotation for a literal decade after the change.

Please share your own stories of extreme obstinance in the comments!

The post let’s discuss cases of extreme obstinance at work appeared first on Ask a Manager.

https://www.askamanager.org/2026/06/lets-discuss-cases-of-extreme-obstinance-at-work.html

https://www.askamanager.org/?p=38661

nialla

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

prettygoodword

braird (BRAIRD) - (Scot.) n., the first shoots or sprouts (of grass or grain) to appear above the ground. v., to sprout or spring up from the ground, germinate.

Dictionaries published outside the UK claim this is British usage, while British dictionaries claim this is strictly Scottish -- since they're closer, I believe the latter. This one shows up with this meaning in Middle English breirde, which ultimately goes back to Old English brerd, edge/spike/corner, from PIE root *bʰerH-, pierce/strike, as in the shoot piercing the ground.

---L.

ao3_bssm_feed

Posted by DarkyLonewolf

https://archiveofourown.org/works/86942141

by DarkyLonewolf

Just a self-indulgent little Chibitaru lazy morning fluff piece. Written for SM LGBTQ+ Month 2026.

Words: 666, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Fandoms: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Categories: F/F
Characters: Tomoe Hotaru, Tsukino Chibiusa, Diana (Sailor Moon)
Relationships: Tomoe Hotaru/Tsukino Chibiusa
Additional Tags: Lazy Mornings, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Both Chibiusa and Hotaru are young adults in this, Physically and mentally, Morning Cuddles, Rated for some implications near the end

https://archiveofourown.org/works/86942141

the_shoshanna

Geoff and I walked in the Pride march last Saturday with my congregation as part of a multifaith coalition, and it was great: perfect weather, lots of people lining the streets cheering, multiple women wearing "Mom Hugs" t-shirts (why no "Dad Hugs"?), innumerable children of all ages waving rainbow flags. I do sort of miss the marches of my 20s in Boston, with so many thousands of people and dozens of groups marching (I was often with the Gaylaxians). But of course Boston is larger than my current city by, like, two orders of magnitude! As I remember them, the Boston marches always ended with the contingent of queer police, and they would get a huge cheer from everyone hanging out at the end of the route watching the marchers come in; that sure feels like a different era. Geoff and I walked around Kingston's post-march festival to check it out, but didn't feel any need to hang out for a lengthy period of time.

I had proposed getting takeout burgers for dinner, but Geoff pointed out that we were already downtown, so instead we had a huge late lunch at a downtown pub, which killed any need to have dinner at all. It was 2 pm and they served their breakfast menu until 3, so we both got their "breakfast burger": beef patty, lettuce and tomato and onion, a fried egg, cheese, bacon, and bacon marmalade. It was ridiculously good, especially the bacon marmalade. I took one bite and said, "I have to figure out how to make this"; but the research I did afterward suggested that homemade bacon jam has to be eaten within a week or two even if it's kept in the fridge, whereas the commercial stuff can last as long as any other commercial jam, so if I want some I guess I'll just buy it. First I need to figure out what, besides burgers, I could put it on, though -- we don't usually make burgers at home!

I have a Pride umbrella that I had brought to the march to loan to anyone who wanted to use it as a sunshade; it's tagged with my name, address, and phone, and I figured that either it would get back to me or someone else would make good use of it going forward. And indeed, I quickly lost track of who had it, and then yesterday someone from my congregation called me up and said she had it, was now a good time to stop by and give it back? Definitely, I said, pleased. Now it's back ~~in the closet~~ on the shelf until the next appropriate rally. I don't usually like to use umbrellas against rain, because I don't like having my hand tied up by holding it and I'd generally rather just be in a good raincoat and put a cover on my pack, but I'm very glad I have this one!

Tomorrow we go to Montreal for an overnight to see a friend and have a Father's Day dinner with Geoff's family, and then I immediately leave for eight days in rural PA with my best friend, our annual vacation together. Ever since the border reopened as the pandemic eased, we've rented a place halfway between us (except for last year when we went to see a third friend in NC) and we just hang out and talk and watch TV (I am going to show her Heated Rivalry! I cannot wait) and cook together (she is an amazing cook) and we're going to be staying next to a fair-trade farm-to-table chocolate-and-coffee factory; we stayed there two years ago, went on a tour, and then spent like $150 each in their gift shop. I brought so many treats back for Geoff and for my local book group! I expect the same will happen this year; plus this year we'll be there over my birthday, so I am anticipating a phenomenally good birthday dinner.

bethctg posting in

1word1day

scopa (noun)
ˈskōpə

• a group or arrangement of short stiff hairs on the body surface of an insect that usually functions like a brush in collecting something (as pollen)

etymology: New Latin, from Latin, broom

I gift you with a sunflower bee whose scopa is covered in pollen:

sunflower bee on a flower; it's got pollen on it's legs

source: https://www.instagram.com/p/CMXa9F8rO9D/

mific posting in

gamechangerhr

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has marked as possibly inappropriate for anyone under the age of 18. )

mific

I fell over this fic accidentally by clicking on the podfic to entertain myself while prepping dinner. I was then glued to it for 8 hours until after 1.30 am, so be warned, this story's an all-nighter!

At over 90,000 words, it's a full novel, and it's both one of the best post-Vegas penthouse "we didn't even kiss" AUs I've read and a fucking zombie apocalypse AU. It diverges from canon at that point but is otherwise firmly tethered in canon, and it's without doubt both one of the best explorations of Shane and Ilya's characters and relationship, and hands down the best zombie apocalypse AU I've ever read in any fandom, or even in profic.

It has aspects of the "forced proximity" trope, as they escape to Boston then get trapped in Ilya's apartment for 2-3 months when Boston goes to shit. But it's also a brilliant "crack treated seriously" story, as once you've handwaved the zombie situation, the author unfolds an extremely likely, indeed sensible series of events. They don't do anything rash or idiotic! Their competencies complement each other, and Shane's ability to hyperfocus and plan are an asset. They're still in moderate to severe danger at times because it's the zombie apocalypse so there's lots going on, but because they're in safe places for the vast bulk of the fic the reader isn't constantly stressed.

Then there's the character development and emotional aspect, which is incredibly well done. Shane goes from sub-drop spaciness to having to get it together and escape zombies as Yuna can't reach him and eventually gets to him in Vegas by calling Ilya. Throughout the fic they go through much of what the characters do in canon in terms of repressed feelings, believing their feelings are unrequited, some miscommunication (but no more than in canon), and eventual romance, all in the context of the zombie apocalypse and the collapse of the world as they knew it. That forces them together and (sadly for much of the world) speedruns their relationship and makes it possible, but the apocalypse doesn't stop Shane from struggling with internalised homophobia and denial, and it sure as hell doesn't stop Ilya from feeling depressed and nihilistic.

Both the fic and the podfic (really well read, and all in one sitting jfc) are wonderful. Can't recommend them highly enough. OMG THIS FIC!!! THIS PODFIC!!!

oh well, I guess we're gonna find out! By angel_deux
podfic read by DiabolicalWordreader

Content notes:
- zombie apocalypse so mass death mostly offscreen. A few gory scenes of zombies being killed but not many, and most of the horror isn't described, just learned from them listening to the news.
- Ilya is passively suicidal, esp. at the start, from the self-hatred that caused him to treat Shane badly in Vegas and from the weight of the apocalypse.
- They're both somewhat depressed and grieving at times later in the story, after the immediate battle to survive isn't as pressing. No one makes any actual attempts.

Also READ THE TAGS because they're hilarious!

melagan

I love these long summer days. I do wish I could stay awake a little later at night. My body could keep moving but my head crashes. And, there's only so much coffee even I can drink.

I have missed the last twenty minutes of a movie that started at nine p.m. more times than I can count* and those times I made myself stay awake, I had no memory of how it ended. Blank. Input not taken.

But I do love these long summer days.

*back in the old days when broadcast tv as it aired was the only option

simplyn2deep posting in

comment_fic

🌍✨ Hello, everyone! I’m

simplyn2deep, and I’m back to host another week! ✨🌍

Today’s theme is Language. 🗣️🌍✍️ Language connects us, shapes how we see the world, and sometimes gets us into hilarious misunderstandings. Whether it's learning a new language, deciphering ancient texts, navigating cultural differences, discovering the power of words, or finding new ways to communicate without speaking at all, let today's prompts celebrate the many ways we express ourselves.

📌 Just a few rules:
✏️ No more than five prompts in a row.
🎭 No more than three prompts in the same fandom.
📝 Use the character's full name and fandom's full name for ease in adding to the Lonely Prompts spreadsheet.
⚠️ No spoilers in prompts for a month after airing, or use the spoiler cut option.
📚 If your fill contains spoilers, warn and leave plenty of space, or use the spoiler cut option.

Prompts should be formatted as follows:
[Use the character's full names and fandom's full name]
Fandom, Character +/ Character, Prompt

✨ Some examples to get the ball rolling… ✨
🌎 Hawaii Five-0, Steve McGarrett & Danny Williams, Danny accidentally insults someone while attempting to use a phrasebook, leaving Steve to smooth things over before the misunderstanding escalates.
📖 Teen Wolf, Stiles Stilinski & Derek Hale, Stiles discovers Derek speaks several languages fluently and becomes determined to learn why—and how.
💬 Good Omens, Aziraphale + Crowley, after centuries of knowing every language imaginable, they debate which words humans invented that never should have existed.

We are now using AO3 to bookmark filled prompts 📚✨. If you fill a prompt and post it to AO3 please add it to the Bite Sized Bits of Fic from 2026 collection. See further notes on this new option here.

Not feeling any of today’s prompts? 🤔 You can use LJ’s advanced search options to limit keyword results to only comments in this community. Fret not, DW members 💙; we are working on a way to search through old entries for prompts for you! As of right now, the best way to search for a lonely prompt on DW is to search the community’s archive, which can be found [[HERE]].

While the use of LJ's advanced search and DW’s archive are options, bookmarking the links of prompts you like 🔖 might work better for searching in the future.

As a friendly reminder about our schedule ⏰, Lonely Prompts and sharing completed fills are encouraged on Sundays 🌿, while new themes and prompts are posted on Tuesdays and Thursdays 📅. Saturdays are a Free for All day 🎉. We'll share our posts on DW and LJ for everyone's convenience. Keep an eye out for notifications! 👀

If you have a Dreamwidth account and would feel more comfortable participating there, please feel free to do so…and spread the word! 📣 comment_fic

🗣️ tag=language

mildred_of_midgard

I got less than 6 hours of sleep, plus after yesterday I didn't want to push myself too hard, so today I did an easy run. I intended to do a distance pace, but my muscle memory from the last couple weeks took over, and I went a bit faster than that. So I decided on "fastest pace for 1.3 miles that is still fun." I figured it wouldn't hurt to remind my neuroendocrinology that I actually like running, and it's not just 10 minutes of torture that pays off in the long run. I wanted to feel some payoff!

So I finished in 11:10, and we'll round down a bit because somebody had left a rental e-bike blocking the entire sidewalk at one point, forcing me to maneuver out along the curb and duck my head under something that was sticking out. 8.5 minutes/mile.

Not bad for "easy, comfortable, and fun"!

Knee behaved 100%, go knee.

lydamorehouse

Though, we were in and out in record speed.

SPOILER: SHAWN IS FINE.

Some time right before bed last night, Shawn got another sharp, shooting pain in her side and her urine just kept getting darker and darker. She decided she didn't want to go to the ER immediately last night, and thought she might try to sleep it off. I normally counsel against this plan, but I was also tired and so let her make the call. This morning at 4 am, she shook me awake with, "I'm really scared. My urine is really dark." No one likes blood in the urine, so off we went.

I have to say? If you're going to do a visit to the ER, 4:30-5:00 am is kind of an ideal time.

We got seen within minutes. Shawn was prepared to pee into a cup, but I walked down the hall and got her a bottle of water, anyway. They gave us a weird little room with only chairs (no bed?) But, it turned out to be perfect for us. The doc was there, again, within minutes and had already read Shawn's medical chart. He did some literal poking to find out exactly where any remaining pain was and then left to wait on the results of Shawn's urinanylasis. The wild part? The infection is nearly cleared up! The prognosis? Because Shawn is on blood thinners the speculation (that seems to have produced physical evidence, as Shawn spotted something in her "donation") is that a blood clot formed after the stone made its way out and got stuck enough to cause pain along the already injured/inflamed uretra. The darkening urine was a post-stone bleed, but given her blood thinners, it wasn't necessarily a shock for her urine to get as dark as it did.

He sent us home with an admonishment to keep up the liquids (and obviously the already prescribed antibotics) and not to hesitate if things don't clear up in a couple of days.

Kind of an exciting start to my workday! I mean, I don't have to leave for work until 2:30 pm today, but whoo boy. I am already feeling the end of a four hour shift at 7:00 pm. (And I work this weekend.) Poor Shawn is completely sacked out in bed, having taken a second day off work. I am, as always impressed with the thoroughness and careful explanations of the staff at United Hospital. If I collapse? Take me to United, okay?

Anyway, being up this early has given me a chance to catch up on some manga reviews that I wanted to post. My library has been promoting Comics Plus and so I signed up for it through them. There is a LOT of manga on Comics Plus! I should not want for reading material in the future. Also, I paged through a few more chapers of the Marie Kondo book I spontaneously brought home last Thursday and am still enjoying it. It was a perfect read for a hospital waiting room because I didn't fully have to pay attention to every single word, you know what I mean? It's still mostly a very light exploration of why Japanese culture is the BEST (according to Marie Kono, at any rate.)

anr

I Was Ready to Fall in Love With Somebody (3061 words) by anr
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Ready or Not (Movies)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Daniel Le Domas/Grace Le Domas
Characters: Daniel Le Domas, Grace Le Domas, Alex Le Domas
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Pre-Movie: Ready or Not (2019), First Meetings, Infidelity, Kissing, lovebombing, Alex Le Domas/Grace Le Domas - Freeform, 5 Times
Summary: Grace knows something is different about the night when she sees the man sitting beside Alex at their table.

"Grace," Alex says warmly, standing as she reaches them. "This is my brother, Daniel."

(aka, Five times Grace and Daniel meet for the first time.)

Current Mood: cold
Current Music: Dean Lewis - With You

liv

Not quite my first full day off since March but not far off it either. I aten't dead but I have badly run out of time for keeping in touch with people. Anyway the headline is, I have sort of finished my third year of rabbinic training although like every year there's this weird limbo between the end of teaching in mid-May and the actual end of the year first week in July.

( new experiences in the past several months )

Coming up: I'm going to two conferences this month, one for the newly formed Progressive Movement (combining two previous small denominations) and one international but held in London. (I'm glad Covid levels are actually low for the first time in 5 years, but I would have attended anyway, these are going to be the best networking opportunities ever.) The usual fortnight of random extra classes after the end of the main part of term has been condensed to three days because of the conferences, bracketed by the viva talk of our sole ordinand and then her actual ordination ceremony.

Further on into the summer I'm being helpful Jewish person for a long-running Jewish-Christian forum in Germany. And starting what will be my fourth year placement at Wimbledon Reform. In contrast to the first three years when I was here, there and everywhere, most of fourth year I'm going to be attached to that one community, so it's more like I'm a kind of assistant minister and less just showing up and leading services or teaching one-off classes. I'll miss the variety but it's clearly very relevant to actually practise doing a rabbi-type job.

Do I have a life outside Rab School? Sort of, but it's mostly quite domestic, spending time with my partners when I can. I've just had a couple of days visiting my MiL and getting my first sunburn of the year walking in the Malverns. I've managed to visit

angelofthenorth once, and occasionally get my act together to drink tea with

hatam_soferet, but other than that totally failed to see any of my friends or even email or call them.

Current Mood: tired

peasina

1. Collages, old and new

I have some new collages to share here! One is actually a gift from

stonepicnicking_okapi which I absolutely love, the others are mine, inspired by What We do in the Shadows (TV), Priums, the Alien prequel films, and general sapphic love ^^ (There’s some artistic nudity under the cut, if anyone would appreciate the warning!)

( Collages )

( Ask meme )

( Backrooms )

Thanks for reading, friends. What was the last film you saw at the cinema? 👀

nilchance

Fic: peace somehow (4/?)
Fandom: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Rating: Mature
Summary: A few days after Dalton is released from prison, he breaks another oath he took blindly. Kristoff offers him a new one. In the aftermath, Dalton needs to get some air.

chapter 4

bruce_schneier_feed

Posted by Bruce Schneier

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/06/embedding-forbidden-text-in-spyware-to-discourage-ai-analysis.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=72197

At least one malware developer is adding text about nuclear and biological weapons to their spyware, in an effort to stop automatic AI analysis.

Details:

The _index.js payload begins with a large JavaScript block comment containing fake system instructions and policy-triggering content. Because it is inside a comment, it does not affect JavaScript execution. The runtime skips it. The real malware begins after the comment with a try{eval(…)} wrapper around a large character-code array and a ROT-style substitution function.

This header appears designed for AI-mediated analysis, not for Node, Bun, or Python. It attempts to derail scanners or analyst copilots that feed the beginning of a file to a language model without clearly isolating the content as untrusted data. In weak pipelines, this can cause refusal behavior, prompt confusion, context pollution, or premature classification before the scanner reaches the actual malware.

This is not a magical bypass against static detection. YARA rules, entropy checks, AST parsing, string extraction, deobfuscation, and behavioral rules still work. But it is a practical anti-analysis trick against naive LLM-first triage systems.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/06/embedding-forbidden-text-in-spyware-to-discourage-ai-analysis.html

https://www.schneier.com/?p=72197

shmaylor posting in

pod_together

Suggest ways that the podficcer(s) might be involved in the writing process that would work well for you.

Suggest ways that the writer(s) might be involved in the podficcing process that would work well for you.

If one or more group members become unhappy or uncomfortable with how the collaboration is going, what are your preferences for how it would be handled? (For example, a preference that your partner(s) tell you right away if something bothers them, a preference that they give you some time after telling you something heavy for you to process and respond, etc. Please note that for any conflict that cannot be resolved within a single conversation, we STRONGLY ENCOURAGE coming to the mods for support and not allowing things to escalate! Participants should also all feel welcome and encouraged to come straight to the mods without having talked to their partner first if that feels safer/better!)

What is the maximum project length that works for you? Is there a period of time where your partner will not be able to contact you for many days? Is there anything else along these lines that you want to let your partner know about in advance?