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Comments
Was it a painful lesson?
I'm wondering why I've never seen one installed properly until now.
What I thought: If employees become aware of their managers tracking their computer activity, they may lose morale after finding out their privacy has been invaded, and they may lose trust in their manager(s).
What the holy text of business says: If employees become aware of their managers tracking their computer activity, those that might not have been working to their full capacity may be motivated to work harder as they know they're being monitored.
I've heard elsewhere (though obviously it wasn't really backed up or anything) that if you don't have at least 30m total (not at all once) of just not doing anything and letting your mind wander around what's happened/happening/etc in your day, it all catches up to you as soon as you try to get to sleep.
I have pretty good log-off habits, but I do basically turn on my phone as soon as I'm awake enough and it's basically been like that since maybe 2008? I need to find a spot for my phone that's not in my room.
I don't really get why everybody needs wearables suddenly. Heart rate monitors and etc. It's all just a bit weird to me.
These past months the region has been... eventful.
Yeah it tends to turn out that as long as there's even a slight barrier people can start running two parallel understandings of practically anything.
I am actually sort of curious as to what the differences are though.
Oh by the way I actually finished my second story ever on FictionPress. Well, more like I finished it last year and then failed to finish editing it until early this month.
I actually have one more story that I just need to edit (the last third needs a lot of editing) but to be honest (and this should be obvious) I haven't written anything past the halfway point since late August.
edit: gonna read that story.
Lately I've liked the Christmas season more than I used to, possibly entirely because there are physical toy catalogues everywhere.
When I was a kid, a friend of mine (a diplomat's son) gave me this ridiculous catalogue from the UK (it was like, 400 pages long) and it had like a 40 page toy section and I looked through it so much I still remember some of the pages by heart.
* The assumption that our conflicts are a left vs. right thing, where both these terms imply whatever political positions they imply in their respective countries.
* The idea that our conflicts aren't ours, but brought about by external forces (almost always the US govt., but I've seen others too) and that we can't get angry or mess things up on our own.
* The idea that race relations are super important and most of our conflicts have to do with race* in some way analogous to their respective countries.
* The assumption that things just work, that if there's a law that says there's X then there's X, that if an institution is supposed to be independent then it actually is, ignoring corruption unless it's "institutional" (lobbying, loopholes) rather than things like bribery, favouritism or favour exchanges.
There's more that maybe I should've written down. So yeah, pet peeves. Well, of course my opinion won't be as well-based as that of a Bolivian, but I'll try.
Dude had it coming. That doesn't mean that what's going to happen is a good thing tho.
It's a shame, really. By most accounts Evo's govt. was genuinely good at managing the economy and greatly improved aboriginal rights, but there's a limit to how authoritarian you can get before people start seeing your permanence in power as a threat.
Also the current interin prez is kind of a religious nut.
This is certain to cause lots of instability, so best of luck!
.* AFAIK this is actually kind of true in Bolivia, but I disgress.
You can't, obviously! If that were the case, how could we blame everything on straight white men!
To be fair, I find my father tends to approach issues from this point even when we discuss politics here (though I notice it mainly because at this point I'm past "hope" in local political contexts).
Yeah, that's what I thought.
But;
I did not see this coming.
It's funny how Karl Marx seems to always be exempt from that principle, isn't it?
Oh my. That rarely ends well.
----
Also, today I've learned that I'm not more than half an hour of travel, conditions be favourable, from Pope's Warhead Service.
I did not expect the Holy Text of Business to be so versed in the language of fashion. Then again, give Business even the slightest whiff of money and he will come.
I've been struggling with an urge to express my opinion countered by a contradictory urge to keep lurking. I almost wrote a private message to a stranger who came up with the Idris Elba idea, to avoid going public, but calling random people isn't really an improvement, so I'm talking about this to you as a sort of safe place to vent.
The guy's premise was (in my simplification) that actor skill is the primary consideration, and fitting a face to a character is arbitrary anyway. He claimed the Idris Elba idea started as a joke to troll the righties (he's a leftie blogger), but in time, he came to see it as fully legitimate idea. For a while I quite agreed with him, then I began to wonder.
I took Aang as the other example for two reasons. First, he is purely a fantasy character, like Geralt. Neither is a real person, or really belongs to any race. Sure, the Avatarworld is heavily based on the Far East, but so the Witcherworld is heavily based on medieval Europe (because, let's face it, with all the anachronisms and generic-fantasy-isms it still rather is). The second reason is that Aang was already "mis-raced" in live action, if I may say so.
So, getting back to the point, I came to believe that, in name of what I see as intellectual honesty, being angry with a white Aang is no different in principle to being angry with a black Geralt.
Also, I feel one of you may disagree with me, which may be more intellectually stimulating than if you all just said I'm right.
(I might add something more when I come up with it.)
Well, um, yeah? I think Avatar was kind of the start to one spiral, whilst the main issue here we're discussing is another.
Just to be clear, here I'm only talking about Avatar:
With characters like Aang, Zuko and Zuko's sister who surely had a name, I'm not really into the idea that we should make a big deal about them being cast as white because for goodness sakes they look white. I guess you could make a case for their grandfather being clearly Asian, but it wouldn't concern me if they were cast an Asian actor for him and not the rest because it's just a danged movie.
The problem, I think, was casting Katara and Sokka as white, because whilst it was primarily a decision based on what they thought would sell and focus groups, it came off as taking the only time you could put two Inuit (or Inuit-seeming) kids in a movie and not doing it. It was dumb and daft, and quite the severe mistake, but It Was Not An Indication of Racism. A lack of faith in the audience to accept something is in no way racist. It's a cop-out, sure.
But this isn't the world of Avatar The Shyamalaning anymore. We've moved on. Which brings me to:
There's an article about this somewhere, about how cultural trends have shifted in a... less than desirable direction when it comes to things like this, but I very much doubt I'll find it in my ridiculously full article history.
Basically, color-blind casting is great, if the actor in the role is convincing. However, this is rarely the case nowadays when it comes to big Hollywood blockbusters.
Take The Little Mermaid. I mean, they weren't going to cast a Great actress as Ariel anyways, so skill didn't factor into it much. What did factor into it was "Is there a Disney girl in the pipeline we can push with this movie".
Just as Naomi Scott was a Disney starlet in Lemonade Mouth, Hailee Bailey stars in Disney owned Freeform's grown-ish and has a brilliant singing voice. Unfortunately, overall, she'll probably forever be seen as a diversity hire, because she was (literally nobody on grown-ish can act). I have no doubt that played a big part in why she got the role. It's a business decision, not a moral one.
I mean, it's painted as one in the media, thus the ninety soulless articles about how we're all supposed to be "here for it". But the truth is the entertainment media is just as pandering as it always was, just in a new direction (one that proves to be dangerous re:piggybacking on moral standing without understanding the implications).
I mean, Cinderella is replacing an old white lady with a black gay man as the fairy godmother. There's no reason for that aside from fulfilling diversity quotas.
It's kind of funny because whilst I know redheads are rare, it's kind of impossible to think that the only natural redhead in Hollywood I can think of is Madeleine Petsch (of Riverdale fame). So this was an opportunity to introduce a new redheaded actress onto the scene, to use the logic of the "Why Avatar should have cast Inuit actors" example.
What I believe is that Hollywood is not your friend; it's nobody's friend (except maybe China's). When it was believed white actors brought people into the theater, it cast white actors. Now that there's a backlash towards this idea (possibly built entirely on a base of ShyamalAvatar, Gods of Egypt*, and Hashtag Oscars So White), and a belief that a diverse cast by itself is a selling point, it's pumping those sort of movies out like there's no tomorrow.
Anyways, Idris Elba can phone it in too, which is the impression I get from reviews I read of his DJing Netflix series which is a thing that actually exists, and of his role in The Dark Tower.
Oh yeah, the impression I get of a series like The Dark Tower is that they mean to cast a no-holds-barred gunman type in the role, not a polite/brooding British guy whose range basically sticks to polite/brooding. If they were going to cast a black guy no matter what, why not go with a Denzel Washington type?
Anyways I feel like this should maybe be split into it's own thread. There's a lot to go through still.
*My main question about Gods of Egypt is; everybody knows Gerard Butler is attractive and basically the thinking guy's Brad Pitt, but has nobody noticed how he's killed 90% of the movies he was in recently?
Geralt of Rivia is probably (1) too recent, (2) drawn too realistically in its most popular adaptation, and (3) too iconic in appearance, for people to be willing to see him as a concept divorced from his appearance.
Aang has somewhat of an advantage toward being seen as a concept, since he's not drawn as realistically, but he's still a very recent character and is, like Geralt, extremely iconic in appearance.
Imagine if a Pokémon movie tried to cast something that actually looks like a real-life rodent, as a pikachu. People would probably think it looks weird.
And frankly, I think it's best to simply and candidly observe that it looks weird from being different from what we're used to -- rather than trying to make it about race.
That would indeed be for the best, in a theoretical world disconnected from the dialogue that's taking place daily in this one.
What I'm saying here is, unfortunately, it's become very much about race. And it's a surprisingly recent thing as well. I mean Brandy played Cinderella in the 90s and that wasn't approached as a novelty or a nod to diversity in any way. They just wanted to make a Cinderella movie starring Brandy.
And nobody in the modern discussion about this, who would defend the position of casting somebody who looks markedly different from what we'd had before, will do so without listing how important diversity for it's own sake is. I could go through a single week of Deadline articles and find you sixty billion articles down this path. It's a very important part of the modern zeitgeist of these things.
Pokémon aren't human though. There's a new Lady & The Tramp on Disney+, and the dog species remain the same because nobody cares what species of dog they are. I bet you if we lived in a world where dog diversity was an important issue, those would have been entirely new breeds of dog.
GMH, I love you, but I'm never coming over for dinner if this is what you consider edible in Florida.
I lol'd
I've noticed that I tend to be of the school of thought that if we can't get people to decide on where to draw the line between two things let's make a third category or a new terminology that people have no prior attachments to or otherwise try to circumvent the need to draw said line.
I could call this the "legendary gerbils" solution, naming this practice after the decision of some moderators on some forum (probably GameFAQs?) settling the debate over whether the three legendary beasts in Pokémon's second-gen games are cats or dogs by declaring them to be gerbils (i.e. a neutral choice no one had even considered before) and telling everyone to shut up about it (or more specifically, stop pushing their opinions on others) thereafter.
Sometimes this works. But for things where people's prior attachments are particularly strong (e.g. political/cultural issues), this seems to risk annoying both sides, possibly with criticisms that such an approach just feels out of touch or doesn't "get it".
Legendary Gerbils sounds like it actually works to diffuse tension in specifically unserious discussions where everybody just needs to realize they're taking things too seriously.
So trying to apply it to a situation where everybody knows they're taking it seriously already (and is maybe treating it like a life or death matter even if it's not) is bound to backfire.
The Holy Text of Business: He was chosen to participate in a salary-savings program.
The number of times I have seen "salary-savings" rather than "demotion" over the past few days has been as staggering as reading pages in a textbook can be.
It's weird not having the 21x there anymore that I had for months.
I was kind of amazed to read this that I had to read it multiple times. Then again a lot of these things require a lot of reading sixty times just because they're so dense in meaning.
Basically, not only should you make products that are profitable, you should make your products objectively worse as long as they are more profitable. All you have to do is mess with customer expectations.
edit: i discounted the possibility that these are not mutually exclusive conditions
The Holy Text of Business is actually three separate highly acclaimed textbooks endorsed by official economics and corporate policy bodies in the U.S., U.K. and a bunch of other people.
Well, yeah.
But! Profit.