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Will do.  This is a book on management fallacies.  It's going to be a good time.

By the way, do you have any way to reach Junkenstein?

Bump so I can find this for the new book.

The admins.  We haven't bothered in a while, because why mess with perfection?

I miss when the internet was fun.
The hot an popular people keep taking over, so us weird nerds are losing territory.

But in all seriousness, fuck the trend of making everything enslaved to some bullshit algorithm. Fuck the corporate friendly piss-garbage.
If I hear the word "unalive" one more fucking time I might have a heart attack. Keep that bullshit on TikTok or whatever.
And also, fuck off with TikTok. I'm tired of it being synonymous with Gen Z.
And now every other website also has to be TikTok, so every other website also gets worse. Thanks, TikTok. Burn in Hell. 

I am sorry people are not living up to your expectations. 

I can't imagine how this happened. 

I'm in Tucson.  ALL WE HAVE ARE CRYPTIDS.

Like the tarantula hawk.  Don't google that.

Or naegleria fowleri.  Absolutely do not google that.  Nothing but horror there.

And that's the stuff that you have to go looking for.  There's plenty of other shit that comes looking for you.

I'm sorry to hear that, Altered.

Things aren't going well out this direction, either, but for very different reasons.  I was deeply unhappy.  Now I don't feel much at all.  I am once again in that glass hallway, and everything is QUIET.

So, moving into the new job, I needed a piss test AND a hair test.  The hair on my head is 1/2" long, and they need an inch and a half.  Those who have known me from PD know where I have hair that long.

I'd like to apologize to the entire field of nursing.

Dear Roger,

You've been gone a while.  Maybe sulking, maybe dead, hard to say.  Either way, I'm better off without you.  You were, in medical terms, a schmuck.  You were always so damned eager to make friends, and you never were invited.  To anything.  People just didn't care if you were around, and that bugged you worse than if they outright hated you. You were a cypher.  Ranting your guts up is fun, but it's not a personality.

Me, I can take people or leave them.  You should try that, assuming of course that you're not pushing up daisies.  I mean, everyone left you.  Not in a cloud of anger or hatred (for the most part), just disinterest.  It's been that way since you were a kid.  Always picked last for sports, that sort of thing. 

You always had this idea that you could help people.  Like you were some kind of "savior," though you couldn't even help yourself.  The only time you were worth a shit was at that chaotic Goddamn chemical plant, and only because you knew how to make things work with minimal craters.  But when you left, you weren't really missed, were you?

No, you weren't.  And the reason you weren't is the same reason you crashed and burned here.  It was your huge Goddamn validation addiction.  You got online and suddenly you got to be the center of attention...At least until people met you in the real world.  Then you sort of faded into the background, just like you always have.  A ghost.  Someone people used to know.  Just a face in the crowd. Another Tucson loser, who loses not because of failures, but just because you weren't meant to win..  "Not invited" is in your DNA, stupid old man.

Here on the other side of the looking glass, things are doing nicely.  I've been really indulging myself doing great things for bad people.  Things that might actually negatively affect our species survival.  Fuck those humans you value so much (your rants not withstanding).  They are almost universally balls of shit, and the ones that aren't are just collateral damage.

You never learned, did you?  You never understood that if you can't be a hero - and you can't - then be a villain.  It occurs to me that your aborted series Life During Wartime had a profound affect on me.  So there's that.

In closing, you miserable little fragment of a person, let me just say that I hope someone remembered to put a stake through your heart before they buried you in whatever landfill was available.

Love,
Doktor Howl

The interesting thing is that we are feeling the effects of a recession, but there's nothing wrong with the economy.  At least nothing that's new...We of course still have billionaires being liquidity traps.

What is happening instead is a societal failure.  It is 45 years of bad decision-making catching up with us.  That's why there's no easy fix.  The entire system is rotten, from our banks to our culture.  In the USA, this started with the Carter/Reagan election. Carter said there was hard work ahead, but also prosperity.  Reagan said he'd give us all a tax break right now.  Guess who won?

Reagan also made bigotry acceptable again, with his ridiculous shit about "Welfare Queens" that even he had to later admit was a product of his imagination.  In addition, he taught America to distrust experts, and to hate the government.  We just didn't see it happening, at the time.

We see all that now, in widescreen, and we wonder how a once space-faring nation decided that vaccines aren't a thing, and that a nation with more guns than people is somehow not going to allow guns to fall into the wrong hands on the regular.

Of course, the presidents that followed - all of them - reinforced these very things, or at least some of them.

More to follow

So, The Finals are due.  The Coming Weird Times arrived.  The party has begun.

And nobody was ready.  Everyone freaked the hell out, because suddenly, it wasn't funny anymore.

We had a fat smelly orange thing in the white house.

The boat got stuck.

We had a plague.

We had an insurrection.

There are outright Nazis in the house, defending an unprovoked war in Europe.

We have nation-state piracy in the Red Sea.

This is an ugly time to be alive.  But here you are, and here it is.  And now you want someone to tell you what to do, how to be saved.  SAVED?  That was NEVER part of the bargain.  Nobody is coming to save you, and nobody every promised or even suggested that they would.  And what kind of agent of chaos hides in the basement the moment things get FUNNY?

There was never any promise, implicit or explicit, that you would die in bed of old age, surrounded by loved ones.  Remember that.  Act like it is a fact carved in stone.

Now get out there and be part of the problem.

Or kill me.

My life is really going nowhere.
Fuck me

It's not you.  It's the entire world.

Imagine my company as the Titanic.  You keep hearing groaning noises as the hull torques from the water in the front end.  Senior leadership is blowing holes in the side of the ship below the waterline to let the water out.
 
But I'm still getting a paycheck and the band is pretty good.

Personally I see Babbit as one more victim of the police, along with folks like Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, or Patrick Lyoya.  I don't agree with her politics but that doesn't excuse her murder.

Go fuck yourself.

(Conversation with Pango this evening)

You sound like the wimps on our board of directors.
"NO, YOU CAN'T DROP TUNGSTEN RODS ON NEVADA AS A TEST."
"YOU LET THOSE TWO PERVERTS FUCK IN THE MASS CENTERFUGE? THEY JUST GOT OUT OF THE HOSPITAL!"
"WHY IS THAT ON FIRE?"
They called me *mad*, Pango. I'll show them. I'll show them *all*.

Scott and Fatima are back, only now they have wedding rings.  They got married the same day they were moved out of the ICU, apparently.  That is so Tucson, I don't even know where to start.

They were in the ICU?  I am morbidly curious as to how they had the shaker table programmed, and the type of injuries incurred, but... some things are better left unknown.

Our CPO actually said, with a straight face, "we must leverage our synergies" to improve purchasing BY MAKING THE ENTIRE GLOBAL ENTITY RUN *ALL* RAW MATERIAL PURCHASES THROUGH THE HOME OFFICE.  I found myself desperately trying to choke my computer out, because you apparently can't strangle anyone through the internet (note:  save this idea for the next round of proposals).

Our management has a fetish for something called a "single source of truth."

"Single source of truth" and "single point of failure" are strictly synonyms.

How about "root cause of failure."

This usually boils down to "People demanding that there is a single source of Truth."