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four-loose-screws · 3 years

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I have a another question about localization since you say all of the FE localizations are good but then there's the localization I hear about of FE fates a localize game that I hear so many Nintendo and FE fans say really bad things about it such as a lot of Mistranslations, Big Script changes, Memes being add in, etc also there was some censorship that got some of them really mad and with some of them saying that it's the wrost localize game of all time is it really that bad as they say?

Whew, this ask has been sitting in my inbox for actual months! Sorry for taking so long to respond! It’s probably unsurprising, but there’s so much to unpack here, and just deciding what to write had me going in circles for a long time.

I’m not entirely satisfied with this answer, but if I tried to discuss everything I have in mind about the Fates localization at once, I’d never be done. So I stuck to 5 topics to give a basic summary. If anyone wants to follow up on one particular issue for more info, or know more about something I didn’t discuss here, please do! I’d love to round out my argument.

First off - a little history just to get our minds situated into the history of localization. Bad localization has always existed, in fact that’s pretty much all we had in the 80’s and somewhat into the 90’s until it became clear that video games were going to become very complex in story and text going forward. Even a surface look into old localizations like this one tells a very long story. We have to remember that “bad” localization is everywhere, and it’s just always going to exist, even now that we have professional teams dedicated to localization, so long as humans aren’t perfect, time crunch is standard in the gaming industry, and we all have our own definition of “good”.

Next, here’s the short answer to the question:

When I say “overall” good, I do stress that pretty heavily, because of course there are plenty of changes that each individual player of the game will have their own take on. The Fire Emblem games simply have so much text in them that even a hundred small mistranslations or changes are just a drop in the bucket.

But I do agree that Fates is one of the worst of the FE localizations, if your terms are in number of changes from the Japanese. Awakening’s is up there too.

Yeah, Awakening’s localization has a lot of questionable moments too. I know this take isn’t a surprise to all fans. But ever since Fates came out, I’ve seen people praising Awakening’s localization, and saying that 8-4 (an outside studio often hired by Nintendo, they localized Awakening) is an amazing localization team and Treehouse (Nintendo’s own team, did Fates) is garbage. TBH… They both did a job that has huge ups and downs. Are people really doomed to always forget the flaws that the previous installment in a series had as soon as something new comes out? Ha ha.

I think it’s common knowledge at this point that localizations are not made for the people who want a more direct-to-the-Japanese version. And that sucks, and the feelings of anger, disappointment, etc. in those who wanted a more direct translation are perfectly valid and entirely understandable.

But we really, really need to understand and accept that localizations are made for the target audience/culture as a whole, and to sell to the most people possible. By getting angry and rejecting the entire game’s script as “total changes,” “butchering,” “changing the games to fit the localization team’s motives,” and all sorts of other toxic nonsense, we miss out on all of the nuance that actually exists. We rob ourselves of the fun that could be had analyzing whether or not the localizers did their job of adapting the game to the target audience, and how they might have done it better. And we can’t notice and appreciate all of the times the team did do a great or good job.

In the vast majority of cases, localizers only want those who play their games and read their scripts to have fun! To imply anything else is just wrong.

What I feel I can do here, to define if “the localization is as bad as they say,” is debunk these “all or nothing” arguments, and show that the changes aren’t usually anywhere near as drastic or simple as people make them sound.

Now let’s goooooo!

I read these two articles to prepare myself to write this, link here, and link here, which I got off a quick Google search. They are from the time of Fates’ release, and report on how a lot of people generally felt back then, so I found them to be good references to put myself back in time with the thoughts people had then.

Character Changes

These often tend to be the biggest topics of conversation. Hisame will be my topic of more detailed discussion today, but I’ll bring other characters up for a hot second too.

I can never stress this enough, but Hisame made pickles in the Japanese. He was always talking about them in the Japanese, too. (Fates loves supports revolving around food in general, really.) I think people generally know this to be true? But I did read some comments saying that the pickle love was totally made up in the localization, you can see the proof above, so I had to point it out.

I don’t think a lot of people who have talked about his character picked up on this - admittedly, I didn’t until someone close to me explained it - but the main gag of Hisame’s character is that he’s young, but already acting like an old man. He lectures his own father on how to behave, etc., and makes pickles. And the “acting like an old man” is not totally lost in translation, with him still acting serious and lecturing his father. But the making pickles trait… I’d never pin that as an “old man” stereotype as a US American. Well, now I would, because I know Japanese culture well enough… but anyway.

And this is where the cultural differences come in. The number of people farming and making traditional foods from scratch is dwindling fast in Japan. In just five years there, I watched countless rice paddies and other small produce fields be turned into houses or apartment buildings. The elderly farmers are becoming too old to care for their crops, and their kids choose to pursue other careers, so the family sells off the farmland. Following along this trend is traditional pickle making. You can just buy them ready to eat in the supermarket, so why make your own? Most people don’t even have the space to be making them if they wanted to. And so, pickle making has come to be seen as something old people do. It fits in with Hisame’s “old man” character perfectly.

But again, as an American, I never would have figured that out without knowledge about Japan. Of course you could argue that the localizers didn’t need to change anything about him. The making pickles was quirky and unique, and would give you a chuckle as is. But there was space to make him funnier, so they did. That is, after all, was what the Japanese intended, for it to be funny. It’s not funny in the same way… but sometimes it’s impossible to be.

And that is what is most important in localization between two wildly different languages like Japanese and English - not retaining the same words, but the same intention or mood. The same words can convey a totally different meaning or mood, or make no sense, because of cultural differences. So localizers need to achieve the same mood, not the same words. I have come to see people understand this much better as the years go on, and the general gaming population becomes more learned about what localization is.

Of course, that’s a pretty simplified way of looking at it. But that’s how I summarize localization as a whole, in an easy way to understand. You might not agree with exactly how the localizers did what they did, but I think we might all be able to agree that they were trying to do their job and had no malicious intent to butcher the Japanese original or something absurd like that.

One more thing that’s relevant to this - Japanese people don’t care about repetition so much. The same character tropes are repeated over and over, the same lines are repeated over and over… In the US, we don’t like that! It’s boring and dull! This cultural difference is a constant struggle in localization. A lot of the people who think they want a direct translation don’t realize that it will be boring to them… So localizations alter and add details and lines here and there to give some more variation. This also helps to explain Hisame’s changes to talk even more about pickles.

And I’ve seen many a comment from people saying they liked Hisame in the localization. They found his exaggerated pickle lines fun, and enjoyed many good laughs. How can we call his new characterization outright bad when it worked for some? When they like it more than a straight Japanese translation? He’s still essentially the same guy… just some of the things he says are different. That’s not much of a change at all.

...And back to that original screenshot I showed. Isn’t Hisame still serious in the localization? His lines are funny, but I’m under the impression that he himself is still dead serious. ...Anyway. That’s about all I have to say about Hisame.

Many characters have changed lines. There’s no disputing that. But something to always question is how far do these changes go? Did the localizers completely change the intent or tone of the original? Or are they playing up certain character traits the characters always had in the Japanese? Or is something else going on?

This is also a prime example of how shallow some articles or “analysis” into the Fates localization are. You can’t look at one line change and make a sweeping conclusion about an entire character. Always be suspect of stuff like this. Kana ALWAYS acted like a little kid. That’s their entire schtick. They are your cute little mama/papa loving kid. That one line may have changed that scene significantly, but Kana’s whole character? No, not at all.

Even Kana’s S support changes aren’t as simple as it seems. They aren’t all changed. The 2nd gen characters that Kana is close in age to retain their romantic endings, such as Midori. Only those considerably older than Kana turned platonic.

And Effie, another character commonly cited as changed? She wasn’t radically changed from some deep character to a one-note workout buff. If only a conclusion could be that easy to reach. Overall, on this specific aspect of Effie, the localization simply added in extra strength or workout jokes when the opportunity arose. Some workout jokes were in the Japanese! She was always an extremely devoted retainer who was always working out and training to get stronger so she could better fulfill her duties.

What is MUCH more interesting in my opinion is the issue of her femininity. In the Japanese, her speech nearly always trailed off with ellipses, and she had feminine voice acting. Whereas in the English, all of that femininity is stripped away with a deep voice, and virtually no ellipses. How refreshing it would have felt in English for Effie to have retained that femininity! Women can bench press trees and be feminine! It would be unique to see a female character like that. ...Or so a US American might think.

But from what I understand, strong female characters in Japanese entertainment are nearly always very feminine. They send a clear message: “You can be whatever you want in private, so long as you still fit the girly-girl mold in public and fulfill society's expectations for you!!” In the Japanese, Effie is fitting their stereotype.

So in one way of looking at it, Effie wasn’t really changed, because in both Japanese and English, she paints a stereotypical and the most socially accepted image of a physically powerful female in each culture. ...That’s an interpretation of mine, anyway. I’m not sure how many people would agree with it.

...See what I mean, that the answer of “changed or unchanged” really isn’t as straightforward as “are the lines translated directly?”

Looking into the deeper details creates a much more interesting picture! You come to paint a picture in your mind, without even thinking about it, of what the localizers intended to do, and you can at least understand what they were thinking. This forms a much more accurate conclusion on whether or not the team achieved a good localization, and whether or not that sacrificed the intent of the original.

So as you can see, few issues are as bad as they’ve been blown up to be. None of the characters are completely different from their Japanese counterparts, or anything so extreme. They were just localized. Whether or not they were localized well, is up to each person’s opinion.

...I do want to write about Soleil, as an example of someone who I think could have been localized better, but I’ll save that for another day. It’s gonna get long. If anyone is interested in seeing this post, just remind me every couple of months or so until I find the time and write it, thanks in advance.

Memes

Since I mentioned Kana’s dragon speak in the last section, this is a perfect time to transition into my feelings about memes, aka context-specific humor. I agree with the most commonly shared opinion: memes don’t belong in localization. Though it’s not just because of a simple “change from the Japanese is bad!!!!” approach. In my opinion, the best localizations will be as timeless as possible. I want my future self and everyone else who will play the game in the years to come to enjoy the game as much as possible.

Memes come in and out of fashion so quickly that they’re almost guaranteed to be out of date by the time they release. And only the most popular of popular stories will be widely-known enough for most everyone to get the reference. Of course, it’s pretty difficult to know what expressions and such people will remember and use 10, 20, or 30 years down the line. Some language you think will be timeless will fall out of style. But using memes and references that are not likely to appeal to as many people as possible… that’s one of the few things I can almost universally call “bad localization.”

Unless, of course, the game was intended in the Japanese to be a product of its time, and used a lot of references. That’s a whole different ball game.

Accurate translation, much less full localization, requires creative thinking to recreate the tone and intent of the original.

Here’s another example that showcases another couple of things I find really important to localization.

Number 1: The writer of the article said “The American localization … gives her silly lines that aren’t in the original.” But does it really “give” her anything new at all? I’d argue not. Tottemo is commonly translated as ‘really’ or something like that… but doesn’t ‘super-dupity’ convey the same meaning as ‘really’? Just because an English word isn’t given as a common definition for a Japanese word, doesn’t mean it can’t be a definition. Sometimes… a word we don’t commonly think of as a translation for the Japanese, can still be a perfectly valid translation. This is not an addition. Just an uncommon translation of the Japanese word.

Number 2: Japanese has a wide range of “I” and “you” pronouns, sentence endings, and other little things that define character age, personality, gender, and more, that simply don’t exist in English. To not use similar features of English when localizers find opportunities to do so, would just take away that sense of nuance the Japanese had in utilizing their language’s own unique features.

Of course it’s one possibility that Sophie uses kiddy words. She’s not a little kid, but she’s still pretty young! To have everyone use the same word choice, because that’s how the words translate into English, is not only inaccurate to how real people talk, but also inaccurate to how the original Japanese was used. Since many equivalents for Japanese word and grammar choice that define personality do not exist in English, the localizers have to use what does exist in English in new places. I think that makes sense, and creates a much closer script to the Japanese than just translating the words.

Again, it’s all about how we look at the lines!

I see a lot of people define “translation” as “one-to-one recreation of the Japanese words.” To reinforce what I said in the first section, I do not think this is true. To me, translating is recreating the same tone, mood, meaning, and message of the original. You CANNOT achieve that just by translating the words and grammar alone.

Different words conveying the same overall meaning.

This section is really just a continuation of the previous one. But reinforcing central arguments over and over again is the core of good essay writing.

So this is one of my strategies for deciding whether or not a script is a good or bad translation/localization: “Does the script convey the same basic meaning?” (or tone, etc.)

Changes, adding detail to what the Japanese said, and “playing-up,” are all wildly different things.

So first, I break down the bit of dialogue into as few words as possible.

-Nohr royals inherit dragon blood.

-So they have superhuman power.

...And then I look to see if the localization conveyed that same basic meaning. Which, in this case, I think it did. Your mileage may vary, but I think I’ve made my point at least.

I wanted this scene to be one of the five I addressed because I think it exemplifies yet another of the fascinating differences between Japanese and English. Japanese is a language that likes to be vague, and leave out context that is already established. Speech can seem super boring as few characters say anything unique. (At least… that’s how us English speakers see it! Japanese people think they are just being normal, and not vague or boring at all!) ...English, not so much. So much as leaving out the subject of the sentence is chastised as incorrect grammar. And we like unique dialogue and prose more than most other languages.

I saw one person in the comments of the article I got this visual from argue that the tone is totally different, that the Japanese was more of a history lesson, but the localization is trying to pump Corrin and Leo up for battle, but… eh, I just don’t see it. The English also just feels like he is describing the powers of their bloodline to me. Again, that’s why this is so complex and fascinating, because everyone has their own viewpoints they are coming from.

The “direct translation” and “localization” reach the same message. This isn’t a big change in my opinion at all.

Sometimes mistakes happen...

These interpretations of Saizo and Beruka’s C Support have always boggled my mind. Coming up with all these explanations as to why the omission was done on purpose to completely erase the support when… it just seems… obvious to me… that the localization team never wrote or programmed a translation and shipped the game with the placeholder?

After all, if the localization team felt they had to remove or change content that might be questionable for the target audience, wouldn’t they alter or rewrite the conversation, like they have with Soleil’s supports, for example? This very game has multiple examples of proof that the localizers will rewrite entire chunks of script if they feel it makes the scene better fit what the target audience be more comfortable with.

Mistakes happen. That’s all I think Saizo and Beruka’s C Support is. We probably never got an update just because Nintendo doesn’t have a track record of being the best with those.

Of course, I may be wrong. Nintendo and Treehouse keep pretty much all of their processes a secret. But I never, ever would have imagined on my own that Saizo and Beruka’s support was omitted on purpose. Citing this as a reason why we need to be up in arms about bad localization is so absurd to me.

Mistakes happen. It’s not like the Japanese creators didn’t have embarrassing moments with underdeveloped content in this game either… they didn’t even name the continent in this game!

Sometimes, “bad” localization is just human error. It’s something we can’t eliminate entirely, and will just have to accept.

Final thoughts:

I realize that this analysis, for as long as it is, is very short, and still leaves out so much that could be talked about.

But what I hope that it did was not really help convince readers that the Fates localization is actually good, exactly… but helped to create some more balance in how we look at the Fates localization and localizations as a whole. All localization changes have a reason and nuance to how they ended up happening, and it’s important to be thinking from that perspective when we discuss them!

Since I know I may have created more questions than answers, again, feel free to keep the conversation going through more asks! I’ll answer them in time!

#fire emblem #fe #fe14 #fates #fe fates #nintendo #2ds #3ds #nintendo 2ds #nintendo 3ds #japan #japanese #translation #localization

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unless-otherwise-stated · 3 years

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TSCOSI Mini-Bang Fic 3 Release

A Perfectly Normal Totally Typical Cafe

The Rumor Cafe is opening on Milky Way and the crew was not prepared. As they struggle with maintaining and running the cafe due to their unexpected influx of customers, they look to hire. Enter Violet Liu, she needs a job so she goes in for an interview with her extensive resume. Violet gets hired and starts working at The Rumor, but she soon finds that The Rumor and its staff may be hiding more than meets the eye.

@tscosi-minibang

Written by:

Rayan - @unless-otherwise-stated

Beta read by:

Vi - @starshipviolet

Hec - @drumkonwords

Coming to AO3 soon!

Read Chapter One below the cut.

Chapter One

The Rumor Cafe had been open for an hour and the coffee machine was on fire. Krejjh was still serving coffee, the line in front of the counter stretched across the crowded store and out it. They juggled coffee cups between their four hands filling up cups and shuffling the order papers. Brian is huddled in the corner by the order receivers and trying to write down as many orders as he can. And though Brian is a linguist, studying languages isn’t going to do you much when fifty different people are telling you their orders, about five of which may have asked you a question. At this point, he was writing down as much as he could make out before frantically moving the order papers to the basket by Krejjh.

As soon as Krejjh had finished an order they would speedwalk over to the pickup counter and leave them for Arkady or Sana to deliver them to the customer. Sana was currently in a seemingly one-sided argument with a customer that kept insisting that “if this is a coffee shop why isn’t there a bowling alley?”

“Sir, I apologize for any disappointment, but we don’t have a bowling al—” Sana tried to reason with him, but he interrupted her.

“Okay, okay. Maybe the bowling alley was a stretch, but you at least have a giant python that grew legs giving out tango lessons.”

Sana was prepared to commit many crimes.

Arkady was left to wait the tables by herself, she would sprint to the counter, balancing as many drinks as she could safely carry on her tray and a few more. She would then blindly sprint out into the customer crowd shuffling the order papers, trying to figure out which drink goes where while dodging the mildly annoyed and confused customers.

All in all, despite their short-handedness and heightened probability of many accidents (and crimes), they were managing the flow of customers. That is, until the staff of the other coffee shop across the street, If Gnomes Ran, decided to pop in and check out the new (temporary) competition.

If Gnomes Ran was your classic ‘Large Corporation-Run “Local’’ Coffee Shop’. They worked under In Good Running (IGR for short), which also owned I Give Rup, I Gave Ryouallmymoneywhatelsedoyouwant, and I Got Radishes, a grocery store, clothing store and pharmaceutical respectively. The most important thing to know about them is that if you see them do anything morally wrong or illegal, no you didn’t.

It was in this rush that the employees of If Gnomes Ran entered the coffee store, skipping everyone else who was waiting in line to enter and orderly shuffling in through the door. Worker McCabe was left to hold the door open for all of them. What the staff of If Gnomes Ran didn’t see while scouting out the shop was Arkady sprinting right towards them carrying her tray filled to the brim with drinks and pastries. In fact, neither Arkady nor any of the recent visitors saw each other. And so, as Arkady was attempting to find table five she instead ran right into the entire group of visiting foreign employees.

The entire shop turned silent and turned to look at the group of sharply dressed If Gnomes Ran employees soaked and covered in many different kinds of coffee and pastries. A few of the customers didn’t notice and continued chatting for a few seconds before noticing the sudden silence and becoming quiet themselves.

The crackling of the coffee machine fire stood out against the shocked silence and it was only then that Brian realized that the coffee machine was on fire. He bolted over to Krejjh and motioned wildly at the coffee machine, completely silent as to not disturb whatever was currently happening. Krejjh was still frantically completing orders as Brian rushed over to the nearby fire extinguisher and put out the fire. There may have been a bit of foam in the orders Krejjh was making at the time.

Arkady looked up from the order papers she was still holding and stared blankly at the steadily glaring group of soaked If Gnomes Ran staff. Sana rushed over, steadily apologizing and rushing to hand them all towels, but the collective group simply turned and walked right back out of the door.

The coffee shop was silent and the closing door rang the bell and knocked slightly against its frame. Sana and Arkady were still stood right where they were as Krejjh continued pumping out orders and Brian tried to access the damage caused by the fire. Many of the customers were shuffling around silently trying to leave as to not get caught up in any issues with In Good Standing. One of the customers stubbornly waiting for their order coughed slightly, while not a loud cough by any means it stood out against the silence.

The cough seemed to bring Arkady back to the situation and she hurried over to the fallen mugs and pastries and began to clean up. Sana rested the towels she intended to give to the If Gnomes Ran staff on a nearby counter and knelt down beside Arkady to help. This broke the silence in the coffee shop and the chatter rose up from the customers once again. Brian abandoned his station taking orders to quickly deliver the orders steadily piling up on the counter. Krejjh had run out of space and was now attempting to precariously balance orders on top of each other.

The crew served the considerably reduced amount of customers left after the incident before beginning to close the shop early. Arkady and Sana returned the extra chairs and tables they’d brought out and straightened out the original tables and chairs. Brian and Krejjh were cleaning up the counters and general area around the coffee machines while discussing the dangers of fire and physics. After they’d restored The Rumor to its original, clean and orderly, state, they all sat around in the staff breakroom to discuss today’s events.

“So…” Sana began sitting at the head of the table, “That didn’t go as…planned, I suppose… but this is only the first day, and it was clearly an accident. The most we can do at this point is attempt to make amends with If Gnomes Ran and just continue with our plan.”

“This isn’t just any business we’re talking about here, Boss,” Arkady states simply from the other side of the rectangular table. “This is the IGR, everyone knows what they’re capable of.” The group sat silent around the table contemplating the possible repercussions from today’s incident, the only sound being the soft sounds of commotion from outside leaking in through the window.

“There’s nothing we can do about that. All we can hope is that whatever the IGR decides to do, it won’t interfere with our primary mission.” Sana says steadily, looking everyone in the eyes. “But something I think we can all agree on, if we’re going to continue this we’re going to need a few extra hands.”

“Not unless the IGR shuts us down,” Arkady mumbles under her breath.

“We could always put out a sign in the window and a few other flyers and ads, we just need to make sure we don’t…attract the wrong people,” Brian suggests.

“I could make the flyer!” Krejjh says enthusiastically, raising two of their hands.

“Arkady brings up a point,” Sana declares with a slight tone of finalization, “if business continues at these levels we’ll put out an ad for employment and we’ll see who applies.” She smiles at everyone and stands up from her chair, “until then, we’ll see how it goes.”

Everyone else follows suit and stands up from their chairs shuffling around and gathering their belongings preparing to head home. Arkady lingers by the table.

Brian waits by the door, arms covered in coats, sweaters and handbags. After a minute Krejjh walks up to him and takes their stuff from him.

“Bye!” They say as they follow Brian out the door. Brian manages to empty one of his hands and waves goodbye.

Arkady turns to Sana and asks, “do you need me to close up the shop?”

“Oh, no, you go ahead, I’ll close up myself,” Sana smiles. Arkady lingers for a second more before hesitantly leaving. Sana walks around turning off all the lights and watching the beams of noon sunlight sneak through the cracks in the window blinds. Although it had been a short one, it had been quite a day. She walked out the door and locked it behind her, strolling into the lunch crowd, and mentally preparing for a nap and an important phone call that she’d been expecting.

The next day a sign was put up in the window of The Rumor. Written in large, flowing letters in shiny dark purple ink, it sat in the window declaring to the street: NOW HIRING :), and below the main text in smaller printed letters in dark blue ink it added: apply at therumor.com/hiring. Many other signs and flyers were seen around the street and a few were spotted in further places in the city. It would be much harder for the If Gnomes Ran employees to ignore them than to acknowledge them. And so they did acknowledge them officially, in their company required daily logs.

More To Come Soon!

#tscosi #tscosimb2021 #fanfic #rayan writes #the strange case of starship iris

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bronzeflower · 4 years

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The Opposite of a Fake Relationship

Also on ao3

Chapter 2: The Inspection

-----

“That builder we hired sure is fast,” Lyla stared towards where the expansion was, which had basically doubled in size from the last time Arlo got a look at it.

“You should see him fight,” Arlo said, and Lyla looked over at him in bewilderment, but quickly schooled her expression into something more neutral.

“That kind of skill will be useful when we need builders on expeditions,” Lyla stated. “Last time, the builder we took with us could throw a punch, and they ended up slowing us down more than helping us.”

“Yesh,” Arlo sympathized. Typically builders refused to go on expeditions if they didn’t have any fighting skills, but he supposed some would think it’s fine because they have Flying Pigs members there.

He could imagine how worrisome and annoying it would be if he went on an adventure with someone he was just trying to protect the entire time if it wasn’t supposed to be an escort mission.

“Anyway, I’m going to check on the expansion to make sure the foundation is steady,” Lyla announced. “The speed in which it’s being built is concerning, especially since the workshop is made up of only a single builder. Could you come with me for assistance in checking for defects? Another pair of eyes will be useful.”

“Of course,” Arlo responded. He would be offended on behalf of his husband that he would put in anything less than his best work, but he understood Lyla’s concern. Besides, he was confident there wouldn’t be a single defect to be found.

When they arrived, Arlo saw Victor near the top of the expansion. There were a few seconds of loud noises coming from Victor banging his hammer before Victor practically jumped down the wall concerningly quickly, even as he grabbed a few key areas built up as temporary supports to slow his descent.

Victor rolled as he made contact with the ground in a maneuver that Arlo knew was designed for taking minimal damage when falling from higher places.

Victor stood up, brushed himself off, and when he turned, he noticed Arlo and Lyla there.

“Hello!” Victor smiled widely and waved. “Came to check on how the expansion’s doing?”

“Yes,” Lyla answered bluntly. “As per Flying Pigs regulations, we must make sure that all expansions are suitable for our standards.”

“I appreciate your concern, but I can guarantee you that these walls are as sturdy as I can make them!” Victor banged on the wall to demonstrate. “Feel free to search for defects. You won’t find any.”

“You’re cocky,” Lyla criticized.

“If you want to prove me wrong, you’re going to have to find a defect,” Victor challenged, and Arlo immediately felt the need to rise to the challenge. “If you find one, I’ll renounce the job and get you someone better. If you don’t, I’d like a sparring match with you.”

“With me?” Lyla questioned, a calculating expressing painting her features.

“Yeah, I’ve already sparred with hot stuff over here,” Victor pointed a thumb towards Arlo, and Arlo barely registered the fact that Victor called him ‘hot stuff,’ if only because Victor called him that with relative frequency.

Lyla was clearly somewhat caught off guard by the flirtatious name, but she accepted Victor’s terms.

Victor went back to work to allow them to start their inspect, and Lyla turned towards Arlo.

“Was he really flirting with you?”

“I hope so,” Arlo answered, more in the context of that was his husband, and he hoped that Victor wasn’t flirting with anyone else, but Lyla took it very differently.

“Really? I didn’t expect you to be into someone so…” Lyla thought for a moment. “Unprofessional.”

“He’s just friendly,” Arlo suggested, staring at the wall in an effort to search for any cracks or weak spots.

“He challenged me to a sparring match and called you hot stuff,” Lyla pointed out, kicking the wall with all her might. As Arlo expected, it did not budge or dent or crack even the slightest degree. “That’s not exactly what I would call friendly behavior.”

“I’m pretty sure that’s just how he is. He challenged me to a sparring match when I first met him too,” Arlo said, and he didn’t even lie about that. Yeah, his ‘first’ meeting with Victor in the Flying Pigs was characterized by Victor saying that he wanted a sparring match, but it was also one of the first things Victor said to Arlo back in Portia.

“He hasn’t even been here that long. Get that lovestruck expression off your face,” Lyla ordered, and Arlo didn’t even realize the face he was making while remembering his first meeting with Victor.

“Right.”

Lyla ran her hand over the areas she kicked to see if she knocked up any kind of dust or made any minuscule cracks, but, each and every single time, the wall was still just as perfect.

“I’m gonna have to break through the ceiling to find something to complain about in this place,” Lyla grumbled, and Arlo glanced up to where there was very obviously no ceiling yet.

“You’re gonna have to wait for the ceiling to be built first,” Arlo responded, and Lyla leveled him with a glare.

“I did not ask for your input.”

“You asked me for help in uncovering weak points.”

“I think the only weak point here is you, given how soft you got for this builder in just a few days,” Lyla criticized, but, luckily Arlo was saved from responding to that when Victor interjected into their conversation.

“How’s the inspection going? Find any defects yet?” Victor inquired, smiley and confident as ever.

“No,” Lyla answered. “I hope you’re ready to lose this sparring match.”

“It’s been a while since I’ve lost,” Victor shifted into a fighting stance, and after a breath, the match began.

Now, Arlo was the kind of person who preferred being in a fight rather than outside of it, but he had to admit that it was impressive to see Victor’s form from a distance rather than from up close.

Of course, Lyla was also impressive, as all Flying Pigs members were, but Arlo was so used to moving and reacting along with Victor in a fight that it was strange to stand so still.

Victor won because of course he did, and Lyla shook his hand as she accepted her defeat.

“Maybe I’ll challenge you to a rematch at some point,” Lyla spoke, and Victor grinned.

“That’d be great! I always love meeting new people to spar with!” Victor retracted the statement slightly. “Well, ones that can keep up with me to any degree.”

“Same here,” Lyla agreed. “Good work on the expansion.”

“Well, I haven’t finished it quite yet,” Victor responded. “We can always do a repeat of our bet whenever.”

“Alright,” Lyla nodded. “Someone needs to make sure you’re doing your job correctly.”

“That extends to you too, darling,” Victor directed to comment towards Arlo. “If you can’t find a defect, we have a sparring match.”

“I’ll take you up on that,” Arlo answered. “Does this time count?”

“Of course it does!” Victor said, and Victor and Arlo immediately started the match after Victor’s confirmation.

Arlo tried out a couple new tricks, but so did Victor. In fact, Arlo even caught sight of a few of Aureall’s moves, and he wondered who else Victor had been sparring against.

“Are you just asking everyone you meet to spar with you?” Arlo questioned after he thoroughly got his butt kicked, and Victor got a slightly sheepish grin.

“I’m in a building full of renowned fighters. How could I possibly resist?”

“And how many times have you sparred with Aureall?” Arlo inquired.

“As many times as she challenged me!” Victor declared, and Arlo knew with how Aureall tended to be that she had challenged Victor many times. At least enough to pick up some of her moveset.

“You really shouldn’t accept all of her challenges,” Lyla advised. “She has a job to do, and, if she’s sparring you, she’s not doing it.”

“It was during her break,” Victor countered. “Speaking of which, mine is over. Thanks for the sparring matches!”

With that, Victor turned heel and returned to the top of the walls he was building, clearing the wall in a matter of seconds.

“I didn’t expect you to be into someone who could defeat you so easily,” Lyla mirrored her words from earlier. “Although I suppose it means you can worry less about their general wellbeing.”

“He can prove himself in a fight, but I don’t think he’s using any kind of safety harness when going up and down that wall,” Arlo pointed out, and, indeed, Victor was just going free and standing in very precarious ways while doing so.

“Okay, yeah, that’s concerning to watch.”

Lyla and Arlo just took a moment to stare at Victor working. Victor glanced over to them and waved wildly, and Arlo awkwardly waved back.

“Let’s get back to work,” Lyla announced, so they did.

#mtap #my time at portia #mtap arlo #mtap builder #builder victor #oc #original character #mtap flying pigs

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letterboxd · 5 years

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Ready.

“We get that the general thesis of the movie is wildly ridiculous, but the characters don’t think it’s ridiculous.”

Letterboxd talks to the trio behind the gnarly new survival horror Ready or Not about balancing the extreme with the grounded, how far to take on-screen gore when you’re trying to have fun, and the joy of old-fashioned board game aesthetics.

Radio Silence is a filmmaking collective comprised of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who direct, and Chad Villella, who produces. They were behind 2014 horror breakout Devil’s Due and contributed segments to the indie horror anthologies V/H/S (2012) and Southbound (2016).

If they were flying a bit under the radar before, they most certainly won’t be after everyone sees their new film Ready or Not, a delightfully demented black comedy/horror anchored by a rip-snorting, sure-to-be-star-making performance from rising Aussie actor Samara Weaving (The Babysitter and the upcoming Bill & Ted Face the Music). She plays Grace, the new bride of Alex (Mark O’Brien), scion of the rich and eccentric Le Domas family, headed by Tony (Henry Czerny) and Becky (Andie MacDowell).

Following the couple’s wedding at the sprawling, secret passage-filled Le Domas mansion, Grace is asked to indulge a family tradition tied to the fact that their fortune derives from a board game company funded by a peculiar deal made by the first Le Domas to arrive in America.

The “game” ends up a much more sinister affair than Grace anticipated, and she is soon fighting for her life against the extended Le Domas brood, which includes an alcoholic brother played by a possibly never-better Adam Brody.

Ready or Not has a great premise, and the execution to match, with fans on Letterboxd enjoying the horror-humor mix. “Think You’re Next sautéed with a dash of Clue, topped with an early Sam Raimi-esque humorous gore red sauce,” writes Andy Levy. “An utterly preposterous concept that works in execution on the way to the most hilariously bonkers finale of the summer,” says Mark.

Letterboxd recently spoke to the Radio Silence trio about their new film.

How did you guys get involved in this film—did it come to you as screenplay? Matt Bettinelli-Olpin (co-director): We got sent the screenplay five or six years ago, by Tripp Vinson and James Vanderbilt, the producers. They went another direction, which is a kind way of saying they hired somebody else for like a year or so, then it came back around and we chased it really hard.

I just remember the first time we sat with Tripp and Jamie and Guy [Busick] and Ryan [Christopher Murphy], the writers, it felt like a group of people who should’ve been working together for a long time. We all had the same sensibilities, we were all aiming at the same target, we all wanted to make the same movie. And it’s one of the few scripts we’ve ever read and were like “Oh man, I wish we wrote this”. This was the voice that we wanna be speaking in. So it really just spoke to us and it was a great process. They were still doing drafts for us up until production.

From left: Tyler Gillett, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Chad Villella and DOP Brett Jutkiewicz.

Was there anything specific that you felt helped elevate it beyond other survival horrors? Tyler Gillett (co-director): I think the thing that really grabbed us from the start that felt like it was so specific to the identity of Ready or Not, was this really crazy ensemble of characters and how well drawn each of them [is]. It’s so common in the genre space to just play everyone really arch and not give the characters a really specific point of view and to not ground the film and the crazy fantasy elements of it in real emotional drama and a real emotional point-of-view, and this script was just full of that for us. We loved that. The villains are so clearly the villains and our heroine is so clearly that character, but there is something fun and relatable and interesting about the interactions between all of them that isn’t just: “Oh hey, I have a gun or I have a bow and arrow and I’m gonna chase you and I’m gonna try to kill you”. There’s a lot more going on under the surface.

Obviously the superficial thrill of it is it’s a woman on the run, but at its heart, it’s a movie that’s about family and it’s about faith and it’s about trying to figure out who you are as an outsider entering this crazy realm. We could draw on that every single day on the shoot and it certainly helped us attach this great cast. There was so much about the depth of those characters that we just felt: wow, this is an undeniably great genre movie, but it’s also an undeniably great family drama, it’s an undeniably great satire.

That’s at the heart of it for us. Whether you’re spending time with the family or you’re on the run with Grace, it feels believable even though it’s heightened and insane. We get that the general thesis of the movie is wildly ridiculous, but the characters don’t think it’s ridiculous.

What do you think this film gains from having a female protagonist? Chad Villella (executive producer): I think the entire movie revolves around Grace. We were extremely fortunate to have Samara Weaving, somebody who can carry the weight of the film the entire way through. From our very first meeting with Samara, she brought this punk-rock vibe to the role. It was always something we talked about but weren’t quite sure how we were going to execute. And Samara just brought it with her performance, and by just bringing that rebellious nature after the family turns on her. She wasn’t gonna just sit around and be a victim, she was gonna fight back, and she was gonna fight the whole way through it. She said she didn’t wanna be screaming the entire way through this movie. She was gonna have moments where she could just dig in and let the family have it, and I think she did that in spades.

There’s an interesting use of violence in this film. Do you have a philosophy around how far to take that sort of thing? MB-O: The short answer is we just follow our tastes, you know? The movie is in line with our personal tastes, and we enjoy a good kill and a good shock, but we don’t like revelling in the gore really, it’s never really been our thing. But we like the effect of it on both sides. One of the things that we think is most effective and we’ve always enjoyed, is focusing more on the reaction than the actual violence.

It’s always scarier or funnier to see people reacting to something, than it is to be watching the actual thing. That really helped us because we were able to then kind of stay within the guardrails we’d set up for ourselves, because from the script stage and pre-production, let alone production, we were always aware that if we go too far in one direction it’s going to derail everything around it. You can’t exactly laugh after you’ve seen something that makes you literally wanna throw up. So we had to find that [line], and to be honest we found some of that in the edit, too. We had a lot of stuff on both sides of that, the gore and the violence, and also on the humor, where we were like, “Okay, we have to make sure that it stays grounded, as ridiculous and over the top as it is”.

Ready or Not makes great use of the aesthetics of arcane magic and board games—was it fun to revel in that space? TG: We all are huge fans of that stuff. Not only did we all grow up playing board games with our families, we loved that analogue gaming language that exists in this movie. It feels really old and it feels like it’s really steeped in tradition. That was really important to us, to make us feel like these games, the games that the family has created and built their empire on, that it’s a continuation of a deal with this benefactor that’s existed for many generations. So the choice to make all of those games analogue, it felt really tactile and it felt really interesting. We could put board games up in the house as part of the production design. Even the choosing box [from which Grace selects her fate, glimpsed in the header image for this article] itself has this very board-game quality to it.

When we were pitching on the movie, some of the very first images that we created from a directorial point of view were about the juxtaposition between these moments of terror, against this board-game backdrop. We actually created this Monopoly board that essentially represented all the members of the family in the property squares that we are all familiar with and the weapons and all of that. That was a really defining moment for us, just in terms of figuring out the tone; it all came from the thrill of a board game and then the very real stakes of what this night means for Grace and for her survival.

So the games were always this guiding light, and a reminder to keep things fun. As much as the movie is certainly about specific themes and as much as it’s certainly about the terror and nightmare that this woman goes through on what’s supposed to be the best day of her life, we just always wanted to make sure that it was an entertaining ride first and foremost. The gaming backdrop did us a lot of favors in achieving that.

‘Ready Or Not’ is in US cinemas now. Comments have been edited for clarity and length.

#ready or not #horror #thriller #radio silence #letterboxd

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thezodiaczone · 6 years

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November Forecast for Gemini

Brace yourself for one action-packed month in the cosmos, Gemini! There are a lot of shifts ahead, some of them long-term, and by the end of November, you could have an entirely different focus for your life. Mercury, Venus and Neptune are moving in and out of retrogrades, Jupiter and Uranus are switching zodiac signs, and their costume changes will keep you on your toes.

Normally you could roll with it, but many Geminis have a lesser-known type-A side, and this is all happening against the backdrop of Scorpio season. With the Sun in Scorpio and your orderly, task-driven sixth house until November 22, your efforts to corral the chaos could be somewhat in vain. Take things one step (and one day) at a time now. If you get frustrated, channel any stress into a good workout. The sixth house rules health and fitness, so when the email server crashes for the fifth time or you start feeling anxious, take it to the gym or yoga studio, or step outside for a brisk power walk, with your earbuds and a calming playlist at the ready.

Movement and clean eating will be saving graces, and the Scorpio new moon on November 7 is an especially fortuitous day to reboot your healthy habits. It’s also sandwiched in the middle of two major planets switching signs, making it extra important to anchor yourself with simple, grounding practices.

On November 6, disruptor Uranus, which is retrograde from August 7 to January 6, will back out of Taurus and your foggy twelfth house for one final spin through Aries and your eleventh house of groups and humanitarian issues. If you’ve drifted from your ideals, a surge of activism could rear up again (right in time for the U.S. midterm elections, coincidentally). You might also reconnect with a cutting-edge group of collaborators or use technology to get your message out to the masses. On March 6, Uranus will depart Aries for good and not return again in your lifetime. Use this time to align yourself with the tightest team possible, making sure your allies truly share your mission.

Speaking of allies, on November 8, expansive Jupiter starts a 13-month visit to your opposite sign, Sagittarius, putting partnerships on the fast track. From business to romance to creativity, dynamic duos are where it’s at between now and December 2, 2019. Engagements, weddings, business deals, BFFs—the next year is all about discovering the adventure of commitment (and no, that’s not an oxymoron) or making things more official.

Because Jupiter is all about evolution, you might outgrow certain people or amicably part ways with a longtime love. Or Jupiter could totally rejuvenate your relationship, giving you a new and inspired shared mission. In some cases, this move could bring a “role reversal”—for example, if one of you was the breadwinner while the other held down the fort, you might trade places. Either way, this power-pairing energy is balm to the Gemini soul. You ARE the sign of the Twins, after all!

Jupiter was last in Sagittarius from November 24, 2006 to December 18, 2007, so if you can remember back that far, look for repeating themes from that era. This is the start of a new 12-year chapter for your closest relationships. Use it to find a new, healthy balance of give-and-take with everyone in your life.

It will be nice to have some company and support as you navigate the stresses of modern life, to which you’ve had a front-row seat for the past year. Since October 2017, the red-spotted planet has been in Scorpio and your sixth house of health and organization, whipping your life and your wellbeing into fighting shape. From hiring new members of Team Gemini to learning to delegate to tackling clean living, it hasn’t been the sexiest year, but it’s certainly taught you to handle your business. If you’re the typical Gemini multitasker who has way too much going on at once, streamlining and systematizing became your new religion.

Some Geminis may have dealt with a medical issue, but with auspicious Jupiter here, you were probably led to helpful treatments and able to see the “wisdom” that your body was trying to convey to you. And, not that there’s anything wrong with this, but abundant Jupiter in the sixth house can be notorious for causing weight gain—no matter how healthily you eat. So if you went up a clothing size this year or didn’t see outward “results” from your workouts (even if your health improved dramatically, which is what really matters), you can blame Jupiter for that.

On November 16, Venus ends a six-week retrograde in Libra and your fifth house of love. Amen! Since October 5, the planet of romance and interpersonal harmony has been back-spinning, a cycle that happens every 18 months for six weeks. An ex may have resurfaced, or you could have dealt with disruptive and drama-filled dynamics with everyone around you. You enjoy a LITTLE excitement, Gemini, but when it gets this complicated, your patience wears out fast. So if you asked the universe for more thrills in your love life, maybe you should’ve been a little more specific!

Venus turns direct mid-month, but just as the love planet corrects course, communication planet Mercury (your cosmic ruler) turns retrograde until December 6. Mercury will back through Sagittarius and your relationship house until December 1 and then finishing its last few days in Scorpio and your health sector. With outspoken Jupiter in Sagittarius, you’ll have the urge to start making heartfelt confessions and dropping truth bombs on your inner circle. Well…you’ve got about a week to do that, Gemini, before Mercury issues a gag order. Since Mercury retrograde can mess with everything from technology to travel plans to your conversations, be extra vigilant about backing up files, booking flights and hotels, and saying the important stuff in the first half of the month.

The relationship energy really ramps up starting November 22, when the Sun starts its month-long visit to Sagittarius and your committed-partnership house. With el Sol at its farthest point in the sky away from you, don’t be surprised if you feel a little tired or unmotivated. After all, the Sun is our “power supply” that provides our vital life force energy. Low on fuel? Balance out this internal deficit by leaning on your closest crew. Let people support YOU for once, instead of you always holding them up. Got a big project to finish? Use the buddy system. Working together will make the tasks easier to get through (and might produce some epic inside jokes). Find creative ways to team up: Grab an accountability partner, hit the gym with a friend, or outsource the drudgery to a skilled specialist.

But there’s one day this month when your solo star will shine. On November 23, the year’s only Gemini full moon puts the spotlight directly on you. If you’ve got something to launch, share or just say unapologetically, speak clearly into the mic. For business owners, this is also Black Friday, so consider sharing a personal story as part of your marketing or posting some glamorous new photos of yourself. If you’ve been wanting to treat yourself to something that will improve your life or bring you more happiness, the Gemini full moon is the perfect day to do that. It’s the culmination of plans and efforts you’ve been putting into place since around your last birthday.

It’s an action-packed sequence of days (and also the Thanksgiving holiday weekend in the U.S.) because on Saturday, November 24, hazy Neptune will end its five-month retrograde in Pisces and your career zone. If you’ve been in a holding pattern with work or unclear about your mission, you’ll be glad to know that things should start to pick up. Even better? Intensely ambitious Mars is also in Pisces from November 15 until the end of the year

Circle November 26 as the “luckiest day of the year” according to astrology. It’s the annual summit of the bold Sun and expansive Jupiter. This year, they’ll join forces in your relationship house. Some Geminis could achieve “power couple” status, meet the love of your life or get an exciting work offer. The message of this risk-loving day is to “go big,” so don’t let yourself be limited by fears and doubts. Under these confident, anything’s-possible skies, you’ve got nothing to lose by trying!

Love & Romance

Love on the rise…or on the rocks? It’s a mixed bag for the first half of the month as romantic Venus rounds out a frustrating retrograde backspin through Libra and your passionate fifth house. Until November 16, old baggage around relationships could arise—in the form of an ex or unresolved issues. You might be moody and mercurial, quick to react when you’d normally just shake something off.

Venus turns direct (forward) on November 16, but that same day, communicator Mercury will go retrograde until December 6, reversing through Sagittarius and your committed-relationship house for nearly its entire backspin. There might be one more round of unresolved stuff to sort through (sigh).

Luckily, you’re getting some balanced perspective from the other love planet, Mars, which is in Aquarius and your optimistic ninth house until November 15. You might just be too busy with travel and adventurous pursuits to get sucked into drama. With Mars in this wisdom-seeking zone, a little “shelf help” could go far, so look for books, podcasts and courses to help you learn bigger lessons from any love-related breakdowns.

On November 9, the love planets meet in a beautiful and harmonious trine—and even the retrograde will be no match for this generous gesture. If you’ve been at odds, a little vacation (or staycation) might be the perfect antidote to shaking off all that stress. Single Geminis could meet someone from a wildly different background today, or a person who wouldn’t normally be your “type” might turn out to be a great catch.

On November 15, Mars will move into Pisces and your ambitious tenth house for the rest of the year. You could get intense about commitments and goals in your love life. With Mars in your career house, work demands can cut into quality time, or you might feel sparks with someone you meet professionally. Be careful about any dating-the-coworker scenarios, but don’t turn your nose up at those industry events and holiday parties. Your soulmate could be hanging out there with a stick-on name tag and a napkin full of passed hors d’oeuvres!

The headline news is that expansive Jupiter will settle down in Sagittarius and your committed-relationship house from November 8, 2018 until December 2, 2019. This will only play into the Mars-driven focus on the future. Whether you’ve already found your “special someone” or you’re still waiting to meet them, the planets are lined up in your favor. You’ve got so much to look forward to this holiday season and for almost all of 2019, so open your mind (and your heart) to new people—or new ways of seeing your longtime love.

Key Dates

November 30: Venus-Uranus Opposition Are you or someone close to you playing mind games? So frustrating! One minute it’s all “come closer,” the next you feel like a ghost. Sit this round out and wait till this distancing transit passes tomorrow.

Money & Career

Shoot for the moon! Ambitious Mars is zooming through the top of your chart all month, rounding out a two-month visit to Aquarius and your worldly ninth house on November 15. After that, Mars will spend the rest of 2018 in Pisces and your career zone, a hyper-ambitious transit that happens every two years. While others downshift for the holidays, you’re just warming up. Make the most of it but be mindful how much you take on. You don’t want to be stuck toiling away while everyone else is celebrating.

Sharing the load will be the key to surviving and thriving. And with Jupiter, the planet of global expansion, starting a 13-month spin through Sagittarius and your partnership house on November 8, new collaborations and contracts could come from far-flung places. But careful: Mercury will be retrograde here from November 16 to December 6, which could cause miscommunications and technology glitches.

On November 6, innovator Uranus backs into your teamwork sector for four months—adding yet another challenge to wrangling the troops. With tech-savvy Uranus retrograde until early January, make sure you go beyond the apps, emails and chats when you interact with your people. Don’t underestimate the importance of face time. If you work remotely, use a video app like Zoom or Skype—sometimes just seeing someone’s facial expressions can make it easier to connect and pick up on nuances.

The November 23 Gemini full moon could put the spotlight directly on you or catalyze one of your solo endeavors. What have you been working on since your birthday season? Seeds you planted then could blossom. This assertive full moon also helps you speak up for yourself, so go ahead and advocate for needs or share a bold opinion, even if others don’t get it right away.

Key Dates

November 19: Mars-Jupiter Square You could hit a roadblock on your race to the top. It may slow you down or force you to take a different route, but it’s not going to stop you. You know exactly where you want to go, so stay focused on the goal and don’t worry about a couple minor impasses.

Love Days: 8, 13 Money Days: 20, 29 Luck Days: 27, 18 Off Days: 24, 11, 16

#gemini #monthly horoscope #horoscope #horoscopes #astrology #gemini monthly

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

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THERE ARE EXCEPTIONS, BUT REMARKABLY FEW

That's normal for startups. The problem is, and the FBI found that their usual investigative technique didn't work. Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. I ask myself what I've found life is too short for. Some VCs will say this is unthinkable—that they want all their money to be put to work growing the company. Things that lure you into wasting your time. But they're not the final step.

I think we may be good at what we're bad at what we're bad at what we're bad at. This isn't just because smart people actively work to find holes in conventional thinking. Better still, answer I haven't decided.1 Why hadn't I worked on more substantial problems? But an illusion it was. Before credentials, government positions were obtained mainly by family influence, if not with that sentence with some fairly impressive ones, so long as you keep morphing your idea. I bet on everything just being on the server. They may not say so explicitly, but they're still an anomaly in most of the holes are. The switch to the new norm may be surprisingly fast, because server-based applications, meaning programs that sit on the server and talk to you through a Web browser. So the main value of whatever you launch with is as a pretext for engaging users. Not only does a society get the best people have other options.

Maybe it's not a coincidence. So I went back to America. They're as unhappy on the territory of truth, you're strong. There's an even better way to describe the way a startup feels is at least two million dollars a year, like desktop software, server-based applications do a lot of them don't care that much personally about whether founders keep board control. You don't have to answer them. If they're really ambitious, they want to be able to see it at work in our own time, different societies have wildly varying ideas of what's ok and what isn't. From A, but you can't safely reject an offer from B when it's still uncertain what A will decide.

But even factoring in their annoying eccentricities, the disobedient attitude of hackers is a net win if language implementors took half the time they would have seemed a great bet a few months I realized that what I'd been unconsciously hoping to find there was back in the place I'd just left. Distraction is fatal to startups. Is life actually short, or are we really complaining about its finiteness?2 I don't mean that languages have to be a big deal, and Microsoft both executed well and got lucky. But when you ask adults what they got wrong at that age, nearly all say they cared too much what other kids thought of them. Boldness pays. If you can think things so outside the box that people call innovative.

How you live affects how long you live. When I ask myself what I've found life is too short for. But be careful what you measure. Unfortunately, those few deals now want less and less money, because it's getting so cheap to start a company at first. They can hire people who will put up with them because they look wrong. What scares me is that there are more constraints. Like skirmishers in an ancient army, you want to build great things, it was very unusual for educated people to start their own businesses. Fake stuff that matters usually has a sharp peak of seeming to matter. Cultivate a habit of impatience about the things you most want to do such things. Now we seem to be created the way ordinary fashions are.3 Some will be shocking by present standards. Largely because of Sarbanes-Oxley must have.

But when you do something in an ugly way. It was also a test of wealth, because the schools adjust to suit whatever the tests measure. A, that will change the way things feel in the whole startup world. That's the only defence. The fiery reaction to the release of Arc had an unexpected consequence: it made me realize I had a design philosophy. They could take everyone and keep just the good ones, to make up their minds, like a charcoal sketch. They are all too physical.4 Is life actually short, or are we really complaining about its finiteness? After my mother died, I wished I'd spent more time with her.

But as long as you stay on the territory of truth, you're strong. Now imagine comparing what's inside this guy's head with what's inside the head of a well-behaved sixteen year old girl from the suburbs thinks she's open-minded.5 Ok, so life actually is short. Offer surprisingly good customer service. The things that matter, and savor the time you have. Startups seem to go more against the grain, socially. If you have a majority of board seats, then your opinion about what's in the interest of the shareholders will tend to push even the organizations issuing credentials into line.

And they have for so long that by now the US car brands are antibrands—something you'd buy a car despite, not because byte code is in itself a good idea. When you think of successful people from history who weren't ruthless, you get rich. Moral fashions don't seem to be about ideas, just that you're a sufficiently good bet. The distributors want to prevent the direct transmission of power between generations—not the left or the right. What we like is speed, and we're willing to do something, you should try to eliminate it if you can do. We're good at making movies and software, and bad at making cars and cities. The reason we have high level languages is because people can't deal with machine language.

Notes

You're going to create events and institutions that bring ambitious people, how much they'll pay.

The idea is bad. 1300, with the same superior education but had a big company CEOs were J. The proportions of OSes are: Windows 66.

When investors ask you a question you don't even try. We tell them exactly what your body is telling you and listen only to the extent to which the top 15 tokens, because when people make the argument a little worm of its workforce in 1938, thereby gaining organized labor as a cold email startups. N n _ Arc: def foo n n i n Goo: df foo n op incf n _ Erann Gat's sad tale about industry best practice at JPL inspired me to put it this way is basically a replacement mall for mallrats.

The first assumption is widespread in text classification. Actually, someone did, but one by one they die and their wives. Anything that got bootstrapped with consulting. The solution to that mystery is that coming into office hours, they've already made it over a hundred years ago, and astronomy.

Hint: the source of better ideas: whether you want to get something for free. When you get nothing. Most were wrong, but also very informative essay about why something isn't the last step is to try to disguise it with a faulty knowledge of human anatomy.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #hours #anomaly #things

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syzygyclock · 5 years

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12 Fics I Never Wrote

In observance of the remaster, these are the fics I didn’t write. Some are file names with nothing more than an elevator pitch, some have little snippets of scenes. Some of them I don’t think I’ll ever pursue, some I’d still like to but probably won’t. I couldn’t sleep last night and started thinking about these, so I will put them out into the world. I’ve generally just given these whatever file name they already have on my drive.

1. Bioterror. This is just a scene with Rinoa examining a gross plant (my notes make it sound like a small, potted welwitschia). I think the plant was some sort of bioweapon that targetred Sorceresses. I don’t remember much about this story, except that I also wanted to examine SeeD getting stuck with a mission for which it is wildly ill-equipped. I think that was containing an outbreak of a biological weapon -- trying to maintain order over a civilian populous, basically a situation that they CAN’T solve with guerrillas hopped up on para-magic.

2. Crazy dream. This is either an actual dream or one of those brilliant ideas that hits you just before you fall asleep but that you can never quite recapture. The only note that I think bears mentioning reads:

“Time Compression as the world's 'debug' mode. Everything is paused. All dimensions can be accessed with the same ease. Ultimecia needed Adel's power to absorb enough Sorceresses to force TC so she could debug the world.”

Then there’s some stuff about God, Satan, and Eden, Hyne is Satan or the snake (or both).

3. Dancing Lessons. This is an orphanage story, about the kids playing war and swordfighting with sticks. Seifer humiliates Selphie in her first battle (”let’s dance”) and so she asks Irvine to help her get better (hence the title). I actually wrote more than 3000 words of this one, don’t know why it lost momentum.

4. Esthar. Looks like I started this for NaNo ‘08. This was going to be my national epic for Esthar. The central action of the story was Adel’s rise to power from impoverished beginnings. (I think the elevator pitch was something like “Les Miserables, except Cosette takes a right turn into Wicked and eventually becomes a dictator.”) Memory suggests that Adel wasn’t actually born Adel, that was the identity of the rich aristocrat Sorceress she stole after draining that woman’s powers.

I was also adding some Ultimecia stuff in there. I think the thesis was that after Time Compression, not only is she stuck in the time loop from the game, she’s stuck in a time loop that encompasses ALL OF TIME ITSELF. Because why wouldn’t I want to complicate an already vaguely-defined time travel plot with EVEN MORE TIME TRAVEL?

5.Hourglass. Time Compression was different for everyone. What we saw in the game was Squall’s version of it -- a fairly straightforward fight with Ultimecia. Quistis wound up outside of reality, playing chess with Ultimecia (because I never met a chess metaphor I didn’t attempt to batter into submission). Ultimecia would try to persuade Quistis to join, Quistis would resist, etc. More an exercise in “what would their interaction look like?” than “what would happen?”

(Related: I always wondered what would happen if Ultimecia recruited Quistis instead of Seifer. Quistis had equal reason to be bitter at SeeD, but you’d need a very different line of persuasion to get her to turn.)

6. Inn Between the Worlds. Canterbury Tales during Time Compression. Concept shamelessly appropriated from the World’s End collection of Sandman.

7. Knight. Looks like this was about Quistis becoming Rinoa’s knight after things fall apart with Squall. I think I wanted to dig into the role of a knight in terms of protecting a Sorceress from herself.

8. R for Rinoa. This is just V for Vendetta, but in Galbadia, with Rinoa using her Sorceress powers to SMASH THE SYSTEM. She tries doing it in secret for a while, but then... probably Quistis and Xu figure out what she’s doing. And they’re like “Hey, let’s do this RIGHT” and SeeD starts backing Rinoa as a vigilante agent to topple the regime.

9. Sailor Rinoa. Exactly what you think. After Time Compression, Rinoa finds herself on a misty plain. There’s a green-haired girl with a giant key, guarding a door with the phases of the moon on it. Pluto points Rinoa towards home.

Rinoa is a student at Garden. It’s not going well! (Spoiler alert: Rinoa is NOT GREAT at respecting authority.) Then Angelo starts talking? Rinoa becomes a magical girl! Angel Wing Illusion Wave!

As Rinoa’s powers grow, the other magical girls start awakening. Quistis is obviously the Mercury of the group. Selphie is more a Sailor Venus but she is 100% UP FOR THIS SHIT. (Selphie: “Under the cover of darkness, we wear cute skirts and fight monsters!” Quistis: “That is LITERALLY our day job.”)

Did you see that mysterious lion-themed hero who distracted the monsters and told us to believe in ourselves? WHO CAN IT BE?

Then the “Outers” get involved. They don’t play by the same set of rules, they take this shit seriously. (Selphie: “You have to shout the name of your attack.” Xu: “I’m not doing that. Also, I brought guns.”) Also that one girl’s attacks are super-scary. “PERISH.”

10. SeeDie Hawkins day. A disastrous dance idea that is almost certainly Selphie’s fault. It combines a game of assassin/killer with high-stakes romantic expectations. You ask your chosen to the dance by “assassinating” them. And since basically everyone at the school is a trained assassin, things get intense.The little bit I wrote of this has Squall getting ambushed in the training center by NPCs (he is, naturally, clueless about the dance and Not Playing once he realizes what is happening). Quistis saves him and offers to get him out of all this insanity. PLOT TWIST: she has ulterior motives.

11. Summer vacation. Vignettes covering what the major characters did on their summer vacation. (I wrote Irvine’s and started Seifer’s.)

Irvine: Wound up as sheriff in a dusty one-chocobo town. Broke some hearts, jaws.

Seifer: Hires himself as bodyguard to two rival crime families, lures them into wiping each other out. (Yes, Yojimbo.)

Squall and Rinoa: theoretically, tourist travel. Actually, just Rinoa SMASHING THE SYSTEM wherever they go and Squall having to bail her out of jail constantly. Imagine a photo montage: odd-numbered photos are Squall looking miserable at some national monument, even-numbered photos are mugshots/newspaper pictures of Rinoa getting hauled off in handcuffs

Selphie: I think this was going to be a museum heist, but I couldn’t find a logical motivation for that to be her story. So instead I decided she booked a luxury train trip when... MURDER HAPPENS. If only we had a brilliant consulting detective on hand to crack the case!

Zell: Just an itinerary from one day in the life of Zell Dincht, local hero. (5:00 a.m., training. 5:42 a,m, rescue kitten from tree. 6:00 a.m., teach tai chi at the rec center. 7:00 a.m., pancake breakfast for scouts.)

Quistis: I don’t think I ever really cracked this one. I think it was just going to be the punchline that she’s reading everyone else’s essays and is like “must be nice.”

12. Ultimecia was right. At some point after Time Compression, Quistis realizes that they screwed up by killing Ultimecia. Quistis has realized what Ultimecia knew all along -- the world is deeply broken and, for everyone’s sake, it needs to STOP. “My name is Quistis Trepe, and I am going to end the world.”

#final fantasy VIII #literally no idea why anyone would find this interesting

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toldnews-blog · 5 years

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New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/business/are-the-days-of-the-private-car-really-over/

Are the days of the private car really over?

Image copyright Getty Images

A couple of months ago I wrote a wildly optimistic piece about how we’ve all probably bought our last cars.

It drew on analysis that suggests that the convergence of electric cars and Uber-style ride hailing networks, together with autonomous driving technology, could completely reshape the car market.

These new “robo-taxis” would be so cheap to use that it just wouldn’t be worth owning a car any more, and this transformation could happen very quickly – in as little as a decade – or so the argument runs.

The results would transform the way we live.

I acknowledged that the idea was controversial and invited readers to respond. And you did. Thousands of you.

Lots of readers thought this brave new world of self-driving vehicles sounded great. But more doubted whether it would really come to pass. So we recruited some experts to explore your concerns and to help try and work out just how likely it is that the age of the private automobile really will soon be over.

Let’s take each element of this revolution separately.

Find out more

Listen to Justin’s Business Daily programme on The Electric Robotaxi Dream.

Will electric cars really prove viable?

First off, the cars. Many of you asked whether there would really be enough lithium or cobalt in the world to make all the batteries they would need, for example.

Image copyright Andrew Aitchison/Getty Images

Image caption Four million electric cars have been sold around the world

Step up Michael Liebreich, a sustainability expert who runs a clean energy and transportation consultancy in London.

There’s no shortage of either element in the world, he says, the real issue is whether the mining industry has the capacity to dig the stuff out, and there’s been huge investment in putting that in place as demand has risen.

Mr Liebreich reels off statistics suggesting that we have already entered the era of the electric car: four million have already been sold, and he predicts the next million will hit the streets in just six months.

Lots of mainstream forecasters now reckon that there’ll be more than 100 million electric vehicles on the world’s roads by 2030. Not quite the wholescale upheaval I talked about – there could be nearly two billion cars in total on the roads by then – but a very significant development nonetheless.

Will we ever want to surrender control of our vehicles to a computer?

Lots of you talked about the sense of freedom driving gives; the thrill of putting the pedal to the metal.

The response of CarlitosWay was fairly typical: “If you think I’m giving up burning off boy racers at the lights in my Jag, think again suckers.”

Image copyright Michael Cole/Getty Images

Image caption Driving for the sheer joy of driving

I’ll bowl that one to Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University who found time to set up an artificial intelligence (AI) company that was snapped up by Uber.

He acknowledges that driving can be a very “liberating experience” but says that doesn’t mean we’ll always do it, or always should do it.

“Eventually it will be a safety issue,” says Prof Marcus. “There will come a day when driverless cars are just much safer than people.”

But – and there is a big but here – he doesn’t think the transition to self-driving vehicles is going to happen in the next 10 years. He thinks it could be a couple of decades before autonomous technology is up to the challenge of driving a car safely.

That will come as a surprise to those who have watched in awe at the success of AI programs like Google subsidiary DeepMind’s AlphaZero. Within two hours of taking up chess AlphaZero was beating human players; after four it was beating the best chess computer in the world; in nine it was the best chess player the world has ever seen.

But Prof Marcus says progress on self-driving cars has been nowhere near as rapid. The problem is that driving is a lot more complex and unpredictable than chess.

Why is getting a computer to drive a car so difficult?

It turns out the challenge of getting a vehicle to control itself is a perfect illustration of the limits of current AI: computers may be able to do some things way better than even the very cleverest of humans, but often fail at tasks that even the stupidest humans can achieve with ease.

Image copyright Laguna Beach Police Department

Image caption This Tesla crashed into a parked police car in California last year; the driver said the car had been in Autopilot mode

A key issue is that, when it comes to driving, you can’t afford to make mistakes, points out Prof Marcus.

A self-driving car that works 99.99% of the time still can’t be trusted if 0.01% of the time it drives into parked vehicles or kills a pedestrian.

The realisation that getting cars to navigate safely anywhere other than straightforward environments like motorways has made the ride-hailing giants a lot less bullish about the autonomous driving revolution.

Uber, for example, has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in self-driving technology. Back in 2014 the company’s then-boss, Travis Kalanick, was predicting that self-driving cars would replace drivers. Now the most ambitious it gets is talk of rolling out a “hybrid network”.

“[There will be] places and times where it makes a whole lot of sense for an autonomous vehicle to pick someone up, and there will be other places and times and weather conditions and areas of the country where having a driver that looks a lot like what Uber looks like today will continue for quite a while,” Uber’s head of transportation policy and research, Andrew Salzberg, concedes.

Will autonomous ride-hailing networks really reach rural areas?

Image copyright Education Images/Getty Images

Image caption Many readers claimed the vision of the autonomous future would never reach rural areas

Mr Salzberg’s response to this criticism may surprise you. He says some of the most dramatic changes Uber has already brought have been in the smaller towns and rural areas in California.

He says that it used to be hard to hail a taxi in the more remote areas of Uber’s heartland, but claims the company can now offer many users five or 10-minute response times.

The key is the size of the network, says Mr Salzberg. Uber now has sufficient customers – in California at least – to generate enough rides to make driving a taxi worthwhile even in areas with low population densities.

The bottom line

So here’s my conclusion. Two of the three components of the autonomous revolution – electric vehicles and ride-hailing apps – appear to be coming along quite nicely.

Image copyright Ola

Image caption Ride-hailing apps are proliferating: Indian firm Ola has been expanding outside its home market and last year launched in the UK

But the third – and most important – automation, still has a long way to go.

Would you bully a driverless car or show it respect?

Will we ever be able to trust self-driving cars?

Yes, you can already buy a car that will steer you along a motorway, though you’ll need to keep your hands on the wheel because these technologies are officially just an advanced version of cruise control.

So it’s clear it is going to take much longer than 10 years before fully automated vehicles are approved, and therefore the full robo-taxi revolution can begin in earnest.

It will happen – but just not as quickly as many hoped.

A $120bn bet that the car’s days are numbered?

But in the meantime other forces are undermining our attachment to our automobiles.

Last month Uber began the process of floating itself on the US stock market. It will be one of the biggest initial public offerings in history, with talk of the company being valued at as much as $120bn and that’s despite posting losses topping $1bn in the three months to September.

So why could the company carry such a huge price tag?

It is because Uber is at the vanguard of the battle for the future of one of the biggest businesses on the planet – transportation.

There’s lots of evidence that the market is already beginning to change – just look at UK car sales.

Gone are the days when a gleaming new car was something we all aspired to. Increasingly twentysomethings don’t even bother to pass the driving test because these days there are lots of alternatives to the car.

Image copyright AFP

Image caption Uber recently invested in electric scooter and bike hire company Lime

That is certainly the argument Uber’s Andrew Salzberg makes. He predicts that many millennials will never own a car.

“People choose things that are convenient for them,” he says. Uber’s focus now is to offer a range of travel alternatives, recently investing in electric bike rental and electric scooters.

“It is faster in the morning commute here in San Francisco to take a bike to work, but late at night you may need a car to the airport,” Mr Salzberg says.

Lots of other companies are snapping at Uber’s heels, coming up with new ways to provide cheap and efficient ways for us all to get around.

So even if the robo-taxi revolution is a way off there are lots of new reasons you may decide not to shell out on a car of your own.

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someoneandnoone-blog-blog · 4 years

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So, things that I do while at work and at home is listen to books, documentaries, Ted talks, and self help seminars. Yeah I’m an old person we don’t have to talk about that.

Anyways, I was 2/3’s of my way through my degree in microbiology and I’m a ho for for all things biology so a lot of what I listen to is biology based. I love listening to people talk about microbreweries and baking because microbes working to help our food taste better is super cool and I’m honestly fascinated by glycolysis and at some point had all the products/enzymes of that and the citric acid cycle memorized and was in the process of learning the entire periodic table for another class. So a lot of stuff like that, but also parasites are fricken dope and plants domescated humans and wolves domescated themselves because we had food scraps of food, and alien life does exist, but in my opinion it’s microbial. Change my mind I dare you.

But today I picked up an audio recording of a very well done essay by Anne Helen Petersen called ‘Burn Out Generation’ and it was just talking about a generational burnout of millennials. It got me thinking. Now my friend group is what is known as ‘young millennials’ and honestly I’m pretty sure me and my friends older than me are the only ones actually classified as millennials. The oldest in our group is 27? And the youngest is 19. Anyways, I categorized us into three different groups and its crazy, but makes sense.

There’s a group of us that realized our bachelors degrees were not good enough for the job market and turned around and went to grad school. There are four of them. One of them is in their last year of gradschool and hate themselves because they haven’t taken a single break from school even when they were going through chemotherapy. Two aren’t working in their field of study becasue the companies they were looking at stopped hiring because of COVID and the decrease in projects hence no reason for entry level architects with masters degrees. I haven’t checked in on them in a while actually. And one of them is making hella good money working in their field and bought a house with their signing bonus and their company is paying their student loans for them as part of their contract. They hate themselves becasue they work in the health care field and are working crazy hours and just took a week off for their wedding and are so exhausted they wish they had a second week off work.

You have the group I belong in. There are five of us currently. All of us are college drop outs. My mom had a stroke and I moved back to help out and now all I have to show for it is crippling debt and way too much knowledge on microbes and why first hand knowledge in the indirect ELISA method (seriously I can do one in my sleep because that was the main test we ran in my research lab), but seriously the thought of going back scares me, because then I would be in group 1.

Anyways, that’s wildly off topic. For the rest of group two: One of us went to a Christian college and got bullied so bad because he is an openly gay man and dropped out. He literally went to the first school that accepted him offered him the most scholarship money and didn’t think about campus culture. Expensive life lesson learned. One of us dropped out and moved home because of COVID. One us went to school for a year and realized they didn’t want to and the fourth couldn’t afford it after two years and was forced to drop out. Every single one of is in a very specific spot where we are all working between 1-2 jobs at any given time, 50-80 hour work weeks most weeks, most of us making double minimage wage at at least one of our jobs (which to be clear is 7.25 in my state. Its a pretty easy to do when your working for tips depending on where you work), and we can’t touch the rent market without 2-3 roommates, let alone think about paying back our student loans, getting married or having kids or sometimes buying more than one iced coffee a week.

The third group of us are those 19 year-olds I was talking about that want to go to college, but didn’t go becasue of COVID and are now watching the rest of us struggle with our student loan debt and realized just how deep we are and now they are not sure they even want to go after Covid is over. Sorry babies, we will try to keep it to ourselves more.

But the one thing that all of us have in common is when we are working those crazy work weeks we hate ourselves because we never have time for anything (not a covid but shitpost, but I didn’t play video games or read fanfiction for 3 weeks straight because I worked literally every hour I was awake: 18 on 6 off 18 on 5 hours off followed by an open to close is so that for 3 weeks before I had a nervous break down) Or we have all this time because the schedule got messed up or we got called off becasue two people were scheduled (happens at my main job all the time. We finally found the solution after 3 weeks of switching whos being called off that week) and then we hate ourselves because losing an 8 hour shift can be the difference in eating real food or scrapping by on ramen.

I’m not saying my life is harder than anyone else. Let me be clear every single one of us that is in group two that’s doing that shit, it’s because we want to. We live in a society as millennials that being working poor is better than being below the proverty line (in our opinions and I’m sure many others). I can’t even imagine what its like for people that work minamum wage jobs (which happens at my main job I am very lucky to be in my overnight position) and try to make ends meet. I know a girl that’s in high school at my second job that applied because when covid started her family couldn’t afford to pay for high speed internet and a laptop. If she didn’t work she would not be able to graduate on time. That’s more fucked than what’s going in my friend group. We do it because we like money and living on our own not because we actually have to.

But like my question after the essay is, WHO THE HELL CAN AFFORD BURN OUT IN THIS ECONOMY. YOU DIAGNOSED ME AND CALLED ME OUT LIKE THE LITTLE BITCH I AN, BUT THAT DOESN’T PAY MY BILLS. But seriously, I can confirm that group 2 is living off of redbull and spite at this point.

But seriously, if you made it through this post this far, does anyone have any burnout tips? I sit in restaurants alone late at night between jobs with my phone on silent and watch anime until I have to go to my other job.

But seriously, a lot of us feel guilty for the little free time we have. I heard of one of us starting to do door dash to get a little bit of extra cash on the side when he gets a dip in hours and that just doesn’t sound fun. And while I don’t think that’s okay, I think that is a temporary solution for a right now problem and right now for most of us money is more important than our physical/mental health and that’s what is causing the burn out.

But seriously. If you read this, leave your burnout tips. I would love to hear them. Because your girl cried in the bathroom at work tonight because something outside of my control happened and I had to say 2 extra hours.

I personally just wanna go back to the days of playing Pokémon on my gameboy color...

#theburnoutgeneration #the burnout is real #just millennial things

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maximuswolf · 4 years

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Open Letter to Job Seekers looking to enter the cannabis industry via /r/CannabisExtracts

Open Letter to Job Seekers looking to enter the cannabis industry

Apologies in advance for the long post

I've seen and read many a post in this sub, and other related subs, with people looking for "industry jobs" and wondering how to get one. As I'm sitting on my computer, "weeding" (sorry, puns are the low hanging fruit of humor but I couldn't help myself) through literally hundreds of applications, I thought maybe I could shine some light on the process from the other side of the curtain. Maybe offer some helpful advice for hopeful applicants, and offer a glimpse of what it means to work in the industry. Note: Those of you with Doctorates in Organic Chemistry or a Masters Degree in Botany, this write up isn't for you. You can probably definitely score a job. Shoo! Go on, you heard me, scram! Now, for the rest of you lurkers and hopefuls, lets take a look:

What's a cannabis job really like?

Well here, your mileage may vary wildly depending on where you work. I don't have much retail experience but I've worked in cultivation, Manufacturing (as in infusion, filling, packaging) and extraction for over a decade now, from the Prop215/SB420 days, to now, in multiple states, so I'll speak to what I know.

First things first. It's a job. It's a job that involves working with cannabis, but it's a job. It's not going to be all bong-rips and rainbows. Personally I love the industry, it's challenging, always varied, and a passion of mine. Don't get me wrong, it's pretty cool the first time you see 1,000lbs of weed. Then after a while you look at it and go "oh shit my back already hurts from standing for the last 12 hours and I have to get it off this damn truck and do like 2hrs of paperwork". Some companies are awesome to work for, some are shitty, it's life. I've heard some horror stories about shops being set up to churn and burn, minimum pay for crazy output. Anyway, what do the jobs look like? note, this is more from the point of view of an entry level position, obviously a cultivation directors general duties are going to be somewhat different than that of a starting out employee

Cultivation: Here is one area that gets a lot of people applying with very unrealistic expectations. I mean, back in the day when you're burning a few with your buddies, who didn't dream of growing weed? It'll be sweet, smoking a blunt, snipping on the plants, bumping some sweet tunes... Dude, it's farming. Ever met a lazy farmer? Here's what a job as new cultivation tech looks like: Hauling bags of grow medium, Cleaning reservoirs, Cleaning floors, flood tables, etc... Lot of cleaning. You'll feel like a janitor. As you gain trust you will begin to be shown how to do things like mix nutrients, take clones, etc... When you work with plants, it's tying up branches and snipping dead leaves. Always looking for pests. Some facilities has everyone help w/ harvest, some places it's a dedicated crew. Trimming is an easy job to get because it has a high turnover. It's a very "keep up the pace or get out" kind of job. Some places pay by the lb, which means if you can keep up a high output you can make decent money, other places are hourly w/ bonus for exceeding goals. At my last facility I saw a lot of 21yo kids come and go because the job wasn't as "Chill" as they had hoped for it to be.

Manufacturing: Honestly this one can be rough unless you like that sort of thing. Sitting at a production line, putting variable labels on things, folding boxes, putting inserts into boxes, running a capping machine, swapping trays on a filling machine (and loading/unloading the trays), etc... it can be monotonous. But it can also be a great way to get your foot in the door as it's a less competitive labor pool than cultivation or budtending. A high output mfr facility looks great on your work history, and you can start picking up an understanding of Track and Trace, etc..

Extraction: Manufacturing but w/ hazards! A lot of the same packaging stuff, but also extraction. The work can be fairly physically demanding. You need to be good about record keeping. Be prepared for long hours, as processes don't always conform to the 8hr work day. Be ok w/ being given what seems like charlie work, especially when you're new, such as packing material socks or milling material. Some of the parts of the job can be rough, we do a lot of Fresh Frozen and so that means suiting up and packing/milling in the walk-in freezer at -20c, but on the bright side it smells fantastic in there! It's important to learn everything you can as fast as you can, and opportunities open up quickly.

What are my opportunities for promotion?

Depends on your company, but based off my experience, if you show up on-time, don't show up high/hungover, and work hard, you will stand out. The industry is hungry for hard-workers. Like, super hungry for competent people. If you put your time in, and build some networking, you will be able to find work, especially if you're able/willing to relocate to chase good opportunities.

How do I get a job in cannabis?

Well, how picky are you? Because assuming you live in a state in which it's legalized in some form, and you live near a population center in which cannabis operators, er, operate. You can probably find facilities that are hiring. As I said, many facilities churn and burn employees. It's a fact. But you want to persevere, awesome! Look on indeed or other job boards. Go to company websites and see if they have a 'hiring' or other employment application link. Then apply. It's really that simple! That said, every-time we put up a listing I get HUNDREDS of applications. So assuming you don't have "Manufacturing Supervisor for Kurvana" on your resume, you are going to need to learn how to stand out and you are going to need to maybe be willing to take a job you outside of your particular area of interest to get your 'foot in the door'. Maybe you really want to be a cannabis extractor, well that's a tough job to get sometimes. But if you put in 6 months working in packaging, now you've got some skills, some frame of reference about the industry, a brand name on your resume, hopefully a good referral, and possibly the chance to transfer to a department that you're passionate about.

Advice for getting hired

One sad truth of any industry, is the 'ol catch-22 of you need experience to get the job, but to get the job you need the experience. Just go and try getting hired as a bartender with zero-knowledge of tending bar. Unless you meet a very specific physical description chances are you're not going to get the job. Any industry is going to generally prioritize applicants with experience over those with none. That said, there are ways to level the playing field.

First, write a good resume. Make sure it's well laid out, spell check the damn thing. Have someone else spell check it. I know I'm not hiring for a position as an English teacher, but if your resume has "detale orrientede" under "skills" we've already gotten off on the wrong foot. Your resume is your chance to compress who you are and why I should hire you into a page or two. List your relevant experience if you have it. I can't tell you how often I have candidates apply through indeed and answer the question form asking 'how many years of industry experience do you have?' with something like "5" but then their resume lists a string of jobs none of which are in cannabis. I know, it was shades of grey for a while there, but consider making a separate cannabis industry resume if you don't want that stuff on your regular job resume.

I've been an amateur/black/grey market grower and/or extractor for 4 years is that relevant?

Sure, somewhat...depends a lot on how you did things and at what scale. Don't expect the Cultivation Director at a thousand light facility to be super impressed by the 2lbs you pulled per year out a tent, even if it was "super fire". Think about if you wanted to get a job at a regular farm, would the owner be impressed by the tomato plant you grew in a pot on your patio? Same w/ extraction. If you have legit non-regulated experience, that's fine, mention it. Make a production portfolio, and attach it. If you can grow some sweet diamonds, I'll definitely take that into account. However...

DON'T OVERSTATE YOUR EXPERIENCE. Honest to god, I get so many of these. "Master Extractor" "5 Years Experience BHO Extraction" Etc... Cool, but expect for me to ask some (imo) pretty basic questions up to some pretty advanced questions. If you apply to work at Stone Brewery claiming to be a master brewer, expect your interview to be very different than if you say you're a home brew enthusiast who is eager to learn. If you tell me on your resume that you are a "master hydrocarbon extractor" and you don't know what the term LEL is ...I'm going to probably think that you might have been a bit dishonest with me and you're going to have a bad time on your phone interview. So, be honest about your experience, but be realistic. I don't expect every applicant to have the ability to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on equipment to learn with, and if you're straight w/ me that's fine. But claim to be a master and get interviewed with that expectation.

WRITE A COVER LETTER. Honestly. Do it. Do it for every company you apply to. Keep it short, sweet, and to the point. Who you are, why you want to work for our company, why you would be a great asset to the team. Make it specific to the company you're applying to, particularly if you're going through a job board type site like indeed. It shows the hiring manager that you took the extra two to three minutes to look us up, see what we're about, and personalized your application. it makes you a person not just another one of the hundreds of resumes we got. I get so few cover letters and I just don't understand why. It puts you at the top of the pile, it really does.

Want to know a true fact? I give 98% of the people who wrote a cover letter a call for a phone interview (the 2% who don't get calls are because their resume is trash or they are clearly a crazy person). So write one. It doesn't need to be the next great american novel, but spend a few minutes on it.

Now you have a solid resume, and know about the cover letters, it's time to bring out the big guns. This is my gift to you for reading this far:

Learn the rules and Regs for your state. Go online, find the relevant laws, rules, etc... Print them out, and read them. Take notes. Act like you are studying for the SAT. Put "Extremely Knowledgeable in CA or AZ or WA or wherever you live Regulations and Laws on your resume and in your cover letter. Expect to be asked a question or two. If asked how you know anything about it, and you answer "I wanted to get into the industry so I studied the laws in order to be a better asset to the company." you will get put on the top of the job applicant pile. Guaranteed.

You want to really "wow" the hiring manager? You want to knock their socks off? You want to get that job, experience in the industry be damned? Go and get yourself certified in METRC or BIOTRACK in addition to the regs. Honestly? If I had an applicant who had ZERO experience in the industry, was 21 years old and wrote in his cover letter that he was so devoted to the cannabis game that he went and got a METRC cert and learned the CA BCC/CDPH Rules and Regs...I'd hire him on the spot. I don't give a shit if his last job was retrieving shopping carts. That would tell me he was in it to win it and I'd keep an eye on him for advancement. Guaranteed.

What about Oaksterdam or THCUniversity or SmokeWeedErrDay Academy?

More sad truth time: I don't care about those. I don't know of anyone else in a hiring position in the industry that gives a 'degree' from one of those non-accredited online cannabis 'degree' mills any credence. Maybe I'm wrong, Chime in below if you are a hiring manager for whomever and you look at a 4 week online program from Oaksterdam and think "I should hire that guy". I mean, if you want to do it to learn something, cool, but I don't think I've ever seen it on someones resume and thought anything other than "huh, neat" and given it no additional weight past the rest of their resume. Honestly, I've had employees that have done courses through programs like that and they had some weird ideas about how things were done.

Exception: Professional Development Education or learning specific skills or processes. There are some cool courses you can take that will teach you basics, in a lab setting, on certain processes such as SPD, WFD, Isolation, etc...I always like seeing that and have done some myself.

I want a degree that will set me up for a future career in cannabis, what do you recommend?

Well, what do you want to do?

Extraction/Manufacturing: O-Chem is a one that a lot of shops like to see, but I like Chemical Engineers. I just hired a kid right out of school, and he's been fitting in great. Way I've always looked at it is "chemists figure out how to make a chemical process happen, and chemical engineers figure out how to make it happen at scale"

Cultivation: Should be abit of a no-brainer right? Something Plant or Agricultural science oriented.

Anything Else: Well, business degrees are always good for, well, business positions. It's an industry like any other, if you want to be the guy/girl telling the other guys/girls what to do a business degree isn't a bad idea, unless you want to specialize (advertising, Social Media Marketing, Software design, etc..)

Anyway, thank you for reading all of this, hope it is of some help to y'all.

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businessliveme · 5 years

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How Beyonce & Mariah Carey helped turn Airbnb into a luxury brand

(Bloomberg) –For one week in the summer of 2015, consumers of celebrity gossip news couldn’t escape Mariah Carey’s trip to Malibu, California. Her stay at an Airbnb there, which she chronicled on Instagram, made headline writers swoon. It was covered in TMZ (“Mariah Carey: I USED AIRBNB… For My Sick Malibu Rental”), Page Six (“Inside Mariah Carey’s $10K-a-night Airbnb rental”) and PopSugar (“Mariah Carey’s $10,000-a-Night Airbnb Is the Ultimate Fantasy,” along with a slideshow).

But the pop star didn’t just happen to see the listing idly scrolling through the app. Carey was a test run of what would become a wildly successful celebrity marketing campaign for a young, scrappy startup. Airbnb Inc. covered the cost of the Malibu stay, and it was just the beginning. The company had relationships with about 65 celebrities and went on to provide free lodging for several of the world’s biggest stars, including Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga and Beyoncé.

All the company asked for in return was that, if they had a good time, they consider posting about it online.

Today, influencer marketing is a more than $6 billion industry. A single post can command upward of $1 million. But the lucrative practice has attracted scrutiny from U.S. regulators as influencers and celebrities blur the lines of content and advertising. Instagram recently came under fire over influencers shilling diet teas with ingredients approved for use only as laxatives. The Federal Trade Commission issued new guidance for social media disclosure this month.

Read: Luxury resort Dusit Thani Maldives sweeps five global awards

But Airbnb’s celebrity marketing program, the details of which haven’t been previously reported, started before most people knew what an influencer was. It was a harbinger of the celebrity marketing bonanza to come and played a role in setting up Airbnb as an alternative to high-end resorts—now a key part of the company’s strategy as it seeks to justify a $31 billion valuation and go public next year.

As public investors look less kindly on money-losing tech companies, it helps that booking a beach-side villa is far more profitable than renting a spare bedroom in Queens, New York. To bolster that strategy, Airbnb made one of its largest-ever acquisitions in 2017 for a business called Luxury Retreats and introduced a mansion-rental service in summer 2018 called Airbnb Luxe.

“The Mariah relationship has become legendary for Airbnb,” says Jonathan Mildenhall, who was Airbnb’s chief marketing officer at the time.

Airbnb declined to provide details on its relationships with celebrities. “As a hospitality company that embraces hosting, we work with a number of celebrities and public personalities and often pick up the tab,” a spokeswoman wrote in an emailed statement.

Before a company can get a star to use and endorse its products to millions of followers, though, it has to get an introduction. At the time, Airbnb didn’t have the budget to go through the typical gatekeepers. Talent agencies that might broker a traditional sponsorship deal were prohibitively expensive, Mildenhall says.

So Brian Chesky, Airbnb’s chief executive officer, offered an unconventional idea. There was a guy in Las Vegas who ran a nightclub packed with celebrities, who were his friends; he hosted their parties; and they might just listen to his recommendations about a house-rental app. “Go and check this guy out,” Mildenhall recalls Chesky telling him. “See if it’s authentic.”

Chesky’s guy was Jeff Beacher. His nightclub, Beacher’s Madhouse, was the stuff of Las Vegas legend. Beacher himself was a nightlife institution, dubbed at different times a “celebrity showman” by Rolling Stone, a “great innovator” by Entrepreneur and a “corpulent clown prince” by the Las Vegas Weekly.

Beacher’s Madhouse started getting attention in Las Vegas in the mid-2000s. It was a vaudevillian bacchanal, with Beacher onstage as emcee often wearing a red satin ringmaster’s vest. The show featured little people costumed as Oompa Loompas dangling from the ceiling on zip lines to deliver bottles of Champagne to tables. There were sword swallowers, live goats, contortionists and performers known as Mini Britney Spears and Mini Donald Trump. At points, the show also claimed to feature the world’s smallest and the world’s oldest strippers.

Read: 33 genius travel hacks to upgrade your holiday trips

But the most remarkable feature of Beacher’s Madhouse was the patrons: Celebrity news sites chronicled appearances by Bieber, Bradley Cooper, Leonardo DiCaprio and Mick Jagger at its Las Vegas and, later, Los Angeles locations. Miley Cyrus, Demi Lovato and Joe Jonas all threw birthday parties there. “You have this seven-and-a-half-foot transvestite and all these wild performers doing all kinds of crazy things like getting into washing machines and, you know, crushing hands with their giant boobs,” says Larry Rudolph, the talent manager for Britney Spears. “It was just a party.”

Beacher was, in short, just the kind of unconventional power broker Airbnb needed. His friendship with Mariah Carey was well documented. Beacher made the introductions, and after Carey’s first stay in July 2015, she traveled to another Airbnb a few months later. The following year, the singer again stayed with Airbnb in a $22 million Colorado mansion during an Aspen getaway.

Soon after Airbnb started working with Beacher, the startup knew something had clicked. Mildenhall, who ran marketing from 2014 to 2018, “realized that there was this authentic relationship between him and Mariah,” he says. “It wasn’t financially driven.”

Airbnb hired Beacher as an outside “entertainment relations consultant.” Here’s how it worked: Unlike the influencer marketing that’s become standard today, Mildenhall says no financial contracts were drawn and no money changed hands—unless you count the cost of the rental. (Which, to be clear, the FTC would.) The arrangements were largely informal. “It’s not, ‘Wear this handbag; I’ll give you $10,000,’” Mildenhall says. “If they enjoy it, if they have had a good experience, then they talk about that on their own social media platforms.”

Soon, Airbnb was racking up celebrity appearances: It housed Kylie Jenner in a $50 million, 23-bedroom complex in Turks and Caicos. It put up Spears in a $6,000-a-night Malibu villa for Valentine’s Day. And it sheltered all three Jonas brothers in a New York townhouse that had a pool with a waterfall.

But it was in 2016, less than a year into Beacher’s consulting contract, that the startup scored a real coup. After playing to more than 115 million people at the Super Bowl Halftime Show, Beyoncé retired to an opulent mansion in Los Altos Hills, California, equipped with an infinity pool, a chicken coop and 60 fruit trees. She posted a picture of herself on Facebook, sitting near a sleek outdoor fireplace at night, writing: “It was a super weekend Airbnb.”

There were dozens of articles about the exploit. E! News noted the property’s livestock, while the Washington Post and BuzzFeed raised questions about whether the post was sponsored. Either way, the hit turned into a streak. The following year, Lady Gaga posted a picture of herself in a different opulent mansion after her 2017 Super Bowl performance. She wrote: “Thank you @airbnb for the gorgeous home in Houston for #SB51.”

There are rules around disclosing sponsorships. The basic premise of the guidelines demands a “clear and conspicuous” disclaimer of any commercial relationship with the poster and the brand they’re posting about. But the rules leave room for interpretation and have historically not been stringently enforced. As a result, they’re routinely ignored. Ambiguous sponsored content, whereby a social media user receives pay or free goods that they then post about online, has “run rampant,” says Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a digital rights group.

In its work with celebrities, Airbnb says it was careful not to run afoul of regulators. “We adhere to FTC guidelines by incorporating them into our engagements with these individuals,” a spokeswoman wrote in an email.

Still, particularly in the early days, some celebrity posts about their Airbnbs occupied a gray area. In 2016, around the time the FTC stepped up enforcement of sponsored posts, Truth in Advertising, a consumer advocacy group, sent a letter to members of the Kardashian and Jenner family complaining of “a multitude of posts” about shoes, food and other products that did not clearly disclose commercial relationships, prompting the family to revise many of them. In one, wherein Kylie Jenner stood statuesquely in a white bathing suit above a sun-soaked pool, the text changed from, “Thanks for the birthday home, @airbnb,” to: “Thanks for the gift of a lovely birthday home, @airbnb.”

Lady Gaga similarly edited her original Super Bowl post to clarify that the Airbnb home was a “gift.” And after reporters asked if Beyoncé’s Super Bowl post was sponsored, she eventually deleted it.

More recently, as the FTC has updated its guidelines on what disclosures are required, celebrities’ simple thank-yous to Airbnb have generally been replaced with more explicit language, like the caption in this post from Bieber, which reads, “Thanks for hooking me up, @airbnb.” Instagram has also changed its policies to help address disclosures of commercial relationships for the burgeoning influencer marketing industry. An executive at the Facebook Inc.-owned app recently said there’s no evidence disclosure detracts from a campaign’s effectiveness.

“When Airbnb started working with celebrities, the guidelines weren’t clearly established,” Mildenhall wrote in an email. “We worked closely with the FTC to evolve our approach so that the posts clearly referenced that Airbnb had gifted the home for the duration of the stay. This is now commonplace practice for all celebrity endorsements.”

Beacher also says he made sure his deals were compliant with the “constantly evolving landscape” of FTC requirements, adding, “Each company I worked with has very black-and-white and strict policies when it comes to following FTC regulations.”

Last year, Mildenhall left Airbnb and started his own agency called TwentyFirstCenturyBrand. Beacher also ended his work with Airbnb in 2018, after a roughly three-year collaboration. Over that time, technology startups became a significant part of Beacher’s business. He served as a consultant for Lyft Inc. for two years and says he helped build out its celebrity marketing efforts. A Lyft spokeswoman says Beacher started working with the company’s culture and entertainment team a couple of years after it was formed and that the group is “thankful for his support.”

In conversation, Beacher is given to grand pronouncements. (“I am very good at the media,” he says.) But he is loath to talk about the specifics of his business relationships and is constantly worried about violating non-disclosures agreements. Asked for comment about the mechanics of his deals with Airbnb, Beacher wrote in an email: “The No. 1 rule of celebrity endorsements is to never discuss either side of an endorsement deal and always keep yourself behind the scenes.”

He is more open about his enthusiasm for vitamin drips, a procedure popular with such stars as Chrissy Teigen and Kendall Jenner, who once ended up in the hospital as a result, according to reports. Beacher, who now embraces a health-conscious lifestyle, often speaks publicly about how his time in the entertainment industry almost killed him.

In 2014, after more than a decade running Beacher’s Madhouse, he was depressed and gaining weight. “I got really crazy fat,” Beacher says over an arugula salad lunch in San Francisco, “like, morbidly obese, 440 pounds.” He blames the breakdown on the death of his business partner, stress and various medications he was taking at the time. “My friends gave me, like, a fat intervention,” Beacher says. He went to a raw vegan retreat in West Palm Beach, Florida, got gastric bypass surgery in 2015 and took a hiatus from work.

After that, Beacher pulled back from the fast-paced, late-night world of club-running and turned to more corporate pursuits. As Beacher began connecting celebrities with tech companies, word got around. “He became known in some of these circles as a person with connections to Silicon Valley,” says Rudolph, who has managed both Spears and Miley Cyrus. Beacher was the person to call, Rudolph says, “if somebody wanted to get in touch with Lyft or something like that.”

Today, Beacher says he’s working with about 10 companies. One of those is Wheels Labs Inc., an electric mini-bike rental startup founded by the brothers who created the dog-walking app Wag Labs Inc., where he was also a consultant. Wheels last month raised $50 million. A spokesman for the company says it has worked with Beacher to create more than a dozen customized bikes for celebrities.

But the world of online advertising has changed a lot since Beacher started. “Now it’s like every publicist in the world with a generic pitch deck using buzzwords is pitching big, five-, ten-thousand-dollar retainers,” he sighs. “It’s just very, very saturated.”

These days, Beacher says, he’s spending more time on other endeavors such as investing. For example, he holds stock in scooter startup Lime, most recently valued at $2 billion, as well as Health House LLC, a fitness chain co-founded by the son of Arnold Schwarzenegger and backed by the Winklevoss twins. Beacher recently got back from another vegan retreat, lost 20 pounds and over the summer was spotted on Rebel Wilson’s Instagram feed, cavorting at Walt Disney World.

In the Instagram photos, Cinderella’s Castle rises picturesquely in the background. Wilson’s caption reads: “Thanks to everyone at Disney for this incredible day.” Representatives for the actress and Walt Disney Co. didn’t respond to requests for comment as to whether the post was sponsored.

The post How Beyonce & Mariah Carey helped turn Airbnb into a luxury brand appeared first on Businessliveme.com.

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mrsteveecook · 5 years

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my parents are shocked that interviewers can see my social media, can I help my nice but incompetent boss, and more

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. My parents are shocked that interviewers can see my Twitter persona

I’m in my mid-20s and work in an industry that’s dominated by people about my age. At every job I’ve had, I’ve been encouraged by upper management to tweet about my work, and to maintain a robust and authentic presence on Twitter (and to a lesser extent other social media). As a result, my Twitter persona is heavily tied to my professional life — I follow most of the people I’m aware of who work in my industry and many follow me back, even if we’ve never actually met each other. I usually tweet a pretty even mix of “on-message” work-related stuff (think a picture of me at a work event complete with approved language and hashtags), funny or sarcastic tweets that relate to my job but aren’t critical of it (think tweeting about a funny conversation with my coworkers), and tweets about media I like, news, or just anecdotes from day-to-day life that aren’t related to my job. I never tweet about drug or alcohol use or sexual content and I usually get pretty clear guidelines about what is and is not okay to tweet from my bosses, which I follow. At every job I’ve held, my direct supervisors have had alerts turned on for my tweets so they can immediately see if anything I’ve said could possibly be problematic and immediately ask me to delete it. I’ve only had such a request once and complied immediately.

Anyway, I guess over the years I’ve gotten pretty good at social media, because my work-related tweets tend to get a decent amount of engagement from others in my niche industry. I’ve never gone “viral” or anything, but several of my tweets have gotten a few hundred likes or retweets. I’m currently unemployed and looking for jobs, and I’ve now had two interviews where the interviewer has commented on my online presence, and one even said she feels like she already knows me from my tweets. I took this as a compliment, but my parents were absolutely shocked when I told them. They think social media should be extremely private and that potential supervisors seeing my opinions and thoughts on such a public platform could only hurt me.

Obviously, I disagree — and my *general* sense of professional norms in my industry seems to support this. But I’m really curious; if someone applied for a job with you who you followed on Twitter and whose tweets you had enjoyed in the past, would it help or hurt them? If you felt like you got a sense of their personality from their online presence, would that help to humanize them outside of the interview process or would you feel too familiar with them to judge them professionally?

Your parents are way off-base on this. This has become incredibly normal in a lot of fields. There’s nothing wrong with it, and in some cases it can help you (as long as your content isn’t problematic, obviously).

On the hiring side of things, if I had a candidate who I “knew” a bit through Twitter, and who had a warm/smart/engaging presence there, that would be a positive. I mean, that’s not getting anyone the job unless the job is social media, but it’s similar to knowing someone a bit from industry events and have a generally positive impression of them. In fact, that’s how you might frame it for your parents, if it ever comes up with them again — this is just another form of networking and having contacts who you know slightly from industry events, things they’ve written in industry publications, etc. And I bet they think that scenario is a good one, because it is; they’re just having trouble with understanding Twitter isn’t that different. (Or they don’t realize that having a professional persona on Twitter isn’t the same thing as having your social posts on Facebook be public to the world.)

2. My boss is nice but people think he’s incompetent — can I help him?

I’ve been in a new job that I adore for a couple months. I’m an admin who supports two different departments. One of my directors is incredibly supportive, encourages workplace development, and is a highly respected individual in her field.

My other director started around the same time I did (a few months ago) and is nice, goofy, and fun, but feels more like my coworker than my manager. Our 1:1s are spent with no agenda, and mostly consist of me reminding him of things he needs to be doing.

I can’t help but compare him with my other manager. I’ve been chalking it up to it just being his personality and the fact that he’s new, but he’s done some things that just make me cringe. One time when there were very few people in the office, he got pizza for one team and didn’t invite the two members of a different team that were sitting right there to partake. I recently heard that another of his colleagues (who is at the same seniority level) said point-blank to other people that he does not know what he’s doing.

I feel bad for him, and also would love for him to improve as a manager for my own personal benefit. I don’t think he has any idea people feel that he’s kind of incompetent. Do I somehow broach the subject with him? I’m only the admin, but we have a very collaborative office environment and I have a lot of opportunities to have 1:1s with him.

You don’t really have the standing to tell him that people think he’s incompetent and he needs to improve, but you have soem room to nudge him toward some specific improvements. For example, with your 1:1s, you could say something like, “For my 1:1s with Jane, we’ve been setting aside each week to debrief recent work, talk about progress toward our goals, and troubleshoot things like X and Y. I’ve found it really makes the time valuable — would you be up for structuring ours that way too? I could start us off by creating agendas for the next few and see how that goes.”

With the pizza situation, if you have pretty good rapport with him, in theory you could say something in private like, “Can I mention something I noticed earlier this week? I think Cecil and Cordelia might have felt a little excluded when you ordered pizza for us but didn’t offer them any, since hardly anyone else was around and they were right there. I wonder if in the future with stuff like that, we could offer them some.”

But you’ll need to pick your battles on this stuff. Making suggestions about things that directly involve your work (like your meeting agendas) is a pretty normal thing to do in the course of your work. But feedback on stuff like the pizza situation is more of a very occasional thing; you can’t do it every week without overstepping. So I’m offering that language as an illustration of the way you can tackle situations of that type — but not necessarily suggesting the pizza battle be the one you pick. In general, start out assuming you have room for maybe five pizza-type suggestions a year … which means you’ve got to be pretty choosy about what will warrant addressing.

Also, don’t get sucked into feeling like it’s your job to fix this situation. It’s not, and you can’t. He may need to figure this stuff out on his own … or he won’t, but it’s still not your job to address that.

3. My friend says you shouldn’t interview with more than one company, ever

I am a young woman and I have a question concerning something that a friend, “Cathy,” has said about job searching and interviews.

Cathy has claimed that you should never interview with more than one company at a time. She added that companies “know” when you do so (as if they have mystical powers of detection), that they think interviewing with other companies “looks bad” for you (because apparently, it’s bad to have options?), and makes them not want to hire you (with an implied “end of story, now don’t question me”). I think that what Cathy says just isn’t true at all. It just doesn’t make any sense to me to restrict your job options and sit around waiting for an offer (which might take a while) that might not ever materialize. Companies don’t feel bad for interviewing more than one candidate, why should a job-seeker feel bad for having more than one interview? Frankly, from reading your blog, I think that Cathy’s been given some sort of gimmicky advice by a career center at school, but I don’t know for sure.

Is this one-interview idea even close to true? (I’ll add here that I find it difficult to believe that any sane human being will sit around twiddling their thumbs waiting for a job offer for the sake of a company’s feelings.)

Nooooo, it’s 100% not true. If you ever do find an employer who has a problem with you interviewing with other companies, run — because that would be so wildly out of sync with how this works that they’re guaranteed to be an employer with other ridiculous/abusive expectations.

Employers assume you’re applying to multiple places. It would be pretty awful judgment, in fact, not to be doing that if you’re trying to actively job search, since (a) there’s no guarantee you’ll get an interview anywhere you apply, let alone get a job offer, (b) there’s no guarantee you’ll even want the job once you learn more about it, (c) it’s smart to have multiple options to compare and choose from, and (d) applying to only one job at a time would make most job searches take years.

School career centers give some awful advice, but this is so bizarre that I’m skeptical that’s where this came from! I suspect Cathy misunderstood something somewhere along the line.

4. My two jobs have very different cultures

I am currently working two entry-level part-time jobs with wildly different cultures. I’m both a fresh foods associate at a big-box store and a service desk attendant at a library. I’ve worked at the store for almost four years (and similar jobs with similar cultures for eight) and the library for one.

At the store, unfortunately it is commonplace and expected that we work through our breaks and off-the-clock. (I realize that this is illegal and a bad situation, but I also can’t quit the job for various reasons at the moment.) At the library, this is regarded by my coworkers and boss (correctly!) with horror.

I try to put myself in a different head space when I’m at the library and the store. There have been times, though, that I’ve slipped and done something that is silently required at the store and absolutely not good at the library, like forgetting to take a legally mandated break. I’ve apologized to my boss and immediately corrected the error once I caught myself each time, but it’s extremely embarrassing! It doesn’t happen more than once every two months or so, and usually only on days when I have both jobs (one is a day job and the other is in the evenings) but I don’t know what else I can do to keep it from happening. Part of the problem is my autopilot, I think; I’m not naturally a clock watcher and my job history so far would have trained it out of me pretty efficiently if I was.

My main strategy is to dress and do my hair differently for the two jobs, but on the days I work both this isn’t feasible. Do you have any suggestions? I love my library job and I want to be the absolute best employee I can be, and I’m really worried about this.

It’s good that you’re taking this seriously and trying to correct it, but it’s not something that you need to be this worried about or embarrassed by! Even people without your two-jobs situation sometimes mess this up. You’re spotting it and correcting it, and I don’t think you need to flog yourself over it.

But because you’re so bothered by it, why not just be very straightforward with your boss at the library job at the situation, especially since she already knows and is rightly horrified by how your other job handles breaks and hours worked? You could say something like, “I’ve noticed that every couple of months, I catch myself forgetting to take a required break here, I think it’s because that part of my brain is still in the ’no real breaks’ mode of my other job. I always correct the mistake once I realize it, but I wanted to give you context for why it has happened. I wouldn’t want you to think I was unclear on the break rules here or cavalier about following them! It’s just my brain mixing up the two very different approaches.”

That’s a reasonable thing to say, and you’ll look responsible for addressing it proactively.

5. I’m embarrassed about the year I got my degree

I was hired at my current company nine years ago. At the time, I was very close to completing my degree, so I was hired on the understanding that I had finished classes and was just waiting for grades, but would be a new graduate in a couple of weeks.

I failed a class, so I didn’t graduate. I continued working full-time and built myself up in the company. I procrastinated on finishing school, but four years ago, I retook the class in question, passed, and got my degree.

I’ve had a lot of success in my current company, but I’m looking to try something new. I’m having trouble figuring out what to put on my resume. I feel embarrassed about placing my actual year of graduation on my resume and having to explain nine years of work experience — I feel like I’d be rejected on that timeline alone. I also would feel awkward if anyone at my current job ever found out, since I never told anyone at work about this, and no one ever followed up to make sure I graduated after I was hired.

What should I do? Would it be acceptable to place the grad year and explain to new employers I was a part-time student (technically true)? Should I leave it off entirely and hope no one notices?

It’s very, very normal to leave off your graduation year altogether, especially for people who have been out of school for a while. Just leave the date off — it won’t look odd.

Also, if this ever does come up for some reason, it’s unlikely to be a big deal! You’re feeling embarrassed about it, but most employers who care about checking the box on a college degree just care that you have one and aren’t terribly interested in when you obtained it.