[syndicated profile] fail_feed

Posted by Etai Eshet

Roommate roulette has a way of revealing who learned life skills in an actual apartment and who still lives like the world is a never-ending group project at their parents' house. The current lease is a daily parade of ignored chores, a boyfriend with VIP squatter status, and uncaring food delivery logistics that leave groceries stranded in plain sight while utilities balloon like the landlord's headache. A full-time single parent manages work, split custody, and apartment basics while the supposed cohabitants treat dishes and trash as spontaneous phenomena, refusing to interact with shared space unless prompted by direct request or public shaming.

[personal profile] infinitum_noctem posting in [community profile] fan_flashworks
Title: Flames of the Heart
Fandom: Terraria
Pairings: The Mechanic/Goblin Tinkerer
Characters: Goblin Tinkerer
Rating: G
Length: 40 words
Summary: 3 sentence fic. The Goblin Tinkerer watches the Mechanic fight.

Read more... )

Next round set for May-July

Sep. 14th, 2025 04:16 pm
mossy_bench: A lone ship on a bright sunny day (ship)
[personal profile] mossy_bench posting in [community profile] launchtheship
Well, though it was quite close, based on the Tumblr poll as well as the comments on this comm, the May-July date is the winner!

There'll be more info closer to that date, so watch this space. :) Until then!
[syndicated profile] fail_feed

Posted by Elna McHilderson

Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of your actions. Sometimes rich employers think they can just get away with anything because they have money, thus, they don't take care of their employees. Unfortunately for them, Karma does not work for dollars. In the case of this rich employer, they got served in the grossest yet most satisfying way ever.

 

They had recently laid off a beloved supervisor who had worked for them for 15 years. He was a dedicated worker and never complained, yet they made sure he was unable to get unemployment. Then, the rich couple who owned the company made their Au Pair cry even though she took great care of their children. After hearing about all of their egregious entitlement, the house cleaner had had it. He decided to avenge all of these mistreated employees because they deserved to suffer some consequences. And, oh boy, did they suffer the consequences. Perhaps not financially, but they sure had a smelly situation to deal with… You'll just have to see the specifics for yourself below.  

carenejeans: (Default)
[personal profile] carenejeans
We need a host for October!


Quote of the Day:

“I wrote a book. I have the page numbers done, and now I just have to fill in the rest."

— Stephen Wright, from "67 of the Best Steven Wright Jokes on His 67th Birthday" at Cracked.com.


Today's Writing:

Free-writing to the tune of 326 words. Mostly junk, but a few sentences go with that thing I thought of that I didn't want to forget. 8-)


Tally

Days 1-22 )

Day 23: [personal profile] badly_knitted, [personal profile] brithistorian, [personal profile] callmesandyk, [personal profile] carenejeans, [personal profile] cornerofmadness, [personal profile] goddess47, [personal profile] luzula, [personal profile] sanguinity, [personal profile] sylvanwitch, [personal profile] trobadora, [personal profile] ysilme

Day 24 (over the international date line!): [personal profile] sanguinity


Let me know if I missed you, or if you wrote but didn't check in yet. And remember, you can join in at any time!
[syndicated profile] fail_feed

Posted by Remy Millisky

When your coworkers keep stealing all your good pens, you start to wonder what can be done to stop them. It's kind of a small problem — maybe too insignificant to involve HR or your boss. Plus, you may not even be able to figure out which coworker keeps stealing your pens. Maybe you have a coworker who keeps stealing all your "good" paperclips, or continually borrows your stapler until it basically lives on their desk.

These things seem small, right? But in a workplace, you're in this microcosm of the world where it's just you and your coworkers with little outside influence. All of these small actions, when done 40 hours per week, can quickly brew resentment. When your coworkers take all the good gel pens, leaving you with the inferior ballpoint pens, it's going to annoy you. But what are you going to do? Sit down and write a strongly worded Slack message or something? Send one of those passive-aggressive group messages that's like, "Just as a general note, let's not do X and Y," when really everyone knows that the message is just directed at one person? No, no. You should get creative, which is exactly what this person below did in their beautiful tale of petty revenge on the pen thief coworker. 

Next, read about what happened when a 27-year-old man got called out by a 34-year-old woman for his interesting style of texting: "Is he using ChatGPT to talk to me?" 

Timing and Distribution

Sep. 24th, 2025 05:16 pm
yourlibrarian: Hawkeye Shoots multiple Arrows-lady_kingsley (AVEN-HawkeyeArrows-lady_kingsley)
[personal profile] yourlibrarian
1) Nothing like a Disney bundle price increase right on the heels of the Jimmy Kimmel fiasco. I wonder if they held off on the announcement until 24 hours after saying he'd return?

2) Having just watched the latest Death in Paradise spinoff, it struck me as curious that a successful show like Silent Witness has not done the same (though maybe it has? Anyone know?)

In a way though, it's like the show has had various spinoffs within the same show. Read more... )

I also thought about this issue given this article which argues that technology will continue to make the cost of content creation fall to where practically anyone can create marketable content, especially since consumer expectation of what counts as entertainment and information has changed due to cost and access issues as well as demographic changes. As a result, companies that invest heavily in it will expect to get paid in different ways. Read more... )

3) It's fun to see how many people over time at Board Game Arena have recognized my Merlin icon. It's a little fannish high five.

4) Sister Boniface's episode of Doctor Who struck me as a sign of changing times. Twenty years ago the fan would have been the geekiest cast member, probably the reporter, but here various cast members are fans and it's mainly the tall, matinee idol detective.

5) Interesting to see how U.S. films are getting less viewing overseas, mainly due to China's restrictions on how many can be shown there. I thought this bit was interesting as well: "The the top French films released were all English-language movies co-produced with the UK among other countries, and did more business in the UK than in the US or China." I didn't realize France even made films in English.

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[syndicated profile] eff_feed

Posted by ARRAY(0x558cac03f690)

California’s Governor should sign S.B. 7, a common-sense bill to end some of the harshest consequences of automated abuse at work. EFF is proud to join dozens of labor, digital rights, and other advocates in support of the “No Robo Bosses Act.”

Algorithmic decision-making is a growing threat to workers. Bosses are using AI to assess the body language and voice tone of job candidates. They’re using algorithms to predict when employees are organizing a union or planning to quit. They’re automating choices about who gets fired. And these employment algorithms often discriminate based on gender, race, and other protected statuses. Fortunately, many advocates are resisting.

What the Bill Does

S.B. 7 is a strong step in the right direction. It addresses “automated decision systems” (ADS) across the full landscape of employment. It applies to bosses in the private and government sectors, and it protects workers who are employees and contractors. It addresses all manner of employment decisions that involve automated decisionmaking, including hiring, wages, hours, duties, promotion, discipline, and termination. It covers bosses using ADS to assist or replace a person making a decision about another person.

Algorithmic decision-making is a growing threat to workers.

The bill requires employers to be transparent when they rely on ADS. Before using it to make a decision about a job applicant or current worker, a boss must notify them about the use of ADS. The notice must be in a stand-alone, plain language communication. The notice to a current worker must disclose the types of decisions subject to ADS, and a boss cannot use an ADS for an undisclosed purpose. Further, the notice to a current worker must disclose information about how the ADS works, including what information goes in and how it arrives at its decision (such as whether some factors are weighed more heavily than others).

The bill provides some due process to current workers who face discipline or termination based on the ADS. A boss cannot fire or punish a worker based solely on ADS. Before a boss does so based primarily on ADS, they must ensure a person reviews both the ADS output and other relevant information. A boss must also notify the affected worker of such use of ADS. A boss cannot use customer ratings as the only or primary input for such decisions. And every worker can obtain a copy of the most recent year of their own data that their boss might use as ADS input to punish or fire them.

Other provisions of the bill will further protect workers. A boss must maintain an updated list of all ADS it currently uses. A boss cannot use ADS to violate the law, to infer whether a worker is a member of a protected class, or to target a worker for exercising their labor and other rights. Further, a boss cannot retaliate against a worker who exercises their rights under this new law. Local laws are not preempted, so our cities and counties are free to enact additional protections.

Next Steps

The “No Robo Bosses Act” is a great start. And much more is needed, because many kinds of powerful institutions are using automated decision-making against us. Landlords use it to decide who gets a home. Insurance companies use it to decide who gets health care. ICE uses it to decide who must submit to location tracking by electronic monitoring.

EFF has long been fighting such practices. We believe technology should improve everyone’s lives, not subject them to abuse and discrimination. We hope you will join us.

(no subject)

Sep. 24th, 2025 04:40 pm
phosfate: Rachel Grey in her first Phoenix costume, pissed off and on fire. (rachel grey)
[personal profile] phosfate
Found a UK ebay seller who offers downloads of 1:6 cut-fold-and-paste record jackets and vintage magazines. And yes, I am exactly the sort of person this was made for. Only some of them will get discs, because making them is a huge PITA.

Sadly it does not contain Jeff Wayne's Ware of the Worlds or the first two Alan Parsons Project albums, but does have Lexicon of Love and most of the Beatles discography.

I now have to make my dolls a crate for their LPs, and a magazine rack.

More music chat.

Sep. 24th, 2025 03:55 pm
aj: (music)
[personal profile] aj
I've been forcefully reminded lately how listening to music keeps fundamentally changing. Prior to ~120 years ago, you had to listen to live music if you listened to it at all. Then came phonographs and radio and *waves at evolution of recorded music*.

I mention this because I dabble in listening to music reviewers on YouTube. I tried keeping up with a few for a bit, but Todd in the Shadows is basically my speed when it comes to engaging with modern music. However, micthesnare on YT is someone who does what he calls a 'deep discog dive', which basically means he sits and listens to an artist or band's extant discography and talks about it. He also does the occasional experiment where he doesn't listen to anything via streaming and checks out a different/older way of engaging with music. He's done cd's only and radio only, so far, and it's pushed me to engage with the remains of my once-insane CD collection. (Luckily, I still have a CD player in my car.)

But! His most recent discography review was for Madonna. Which, full disclosure, I was a huge Madonna fan as a kid? Legitimately, I think her True Blue and Like a Prayer albums are ones that I owned on tape and played on repeat for several years.

And this is kind of what I mean about how listening to music - for me - has evolved? Because I was so limited in what I had access to - I saved my birthday and Xmas $$ to buy tapes, then CD's at the mall - I ended up spending a whole lot of time with the albums I ended up buying. I know that's similar to how my parents engaged with music too, although for them it was predominantly on vinyl.

Streaming/online music spaces really were a huge game changer for how people listen to/engage with music and I'm not going to finger wag about that. I know that there are some artists that I would never have even heard of if it hadn't been for how digital music opened things up. Artists with work that have helped me emotionally in ways that I can't really parse because their work is so fundamental to my emotional development.

That said, I'm enjoying forcing myself to slow down and engage in another way with music.

Por ejemplo, back at the end of 2014 I had the large and mildly upsetting realization that I couldn't remember the last time I'd read a published book. I'd been pretty exclusively reading fanfic at that point and I made an active choice to force myself to read published books along side my lovely fanfic. This was also when I started tracking my reading (as a tool!) to keep myself accountable. And I am very, very glad I pushed myself to prioritize reading published books. (Reading is a skill and I got a lot better at it by pushing myself out of my comfort zone.)

So, yeah! I love dumping stuff on the busted iPod (TM) and hitting shuffle, but I think it will be good for me to slow down and engage with specific albums too.

some good things

Sep. 24th, 2025 08:40 pm
kaberett: Trans symbol with Swiss Army knife tools at other positions around the central circle. (Default)
[personal profile] kaberett
  1. Today's post brought THREE of my (latest batch of) books from Oxfam, of which two were non-work-related: Index, A History of the (Dennis Duncan), which [personal profile] recessional mentioned when it was first published and which I am only just now managing to get to, and Chihuly at Kew, the exhibition book for the 2019 installation. I am having so many feelings about getting to flip through professional photography of all this art again. I'm so so pleased.
  2. I mentioned these books to [personal profile] simont, who promptly went "hold on, isn't that the one that has a good Wikipedia article?" Turns out it very much is.
  3. To my delight, despite the fact that I'd not been to the plot in something like two and a half weeks (between ten days away and the post-event collapse seguing immediately into A Cold that A brought home for us) all of the peppers various in the greenhouse were looking perfectly happy with themselves. HURRAH for Svaemskog terracotta watering bits + 2l drinks bottles. This is actually the happiest the chillis have been all year, given my... erratic... ability to leave the house; I am looking forward enthusiastically to the fruits of Expanding The System Further next year.
  4. The ancient spinach seed is coming up! In vast quantities! That I was expecting to be dead and thus sowed all of across half a bed! There is going to be SO much spinach and even I will get to turn some of it into seeds for saving purposes, probably, and much of the rest of which I will go "oh right, I have discovered I like adding fresh spinach to the sad emergency noodle pots" about.
  5. Brought home A Pannier Full Of Food, about which I am feeling very good given the Neglect. I am looking forward to turning a suitable array of tomatoes into part of the ongoing cooking project (at which point I will have some leftover puff pastry, so will also do the banana tarte tatin).

(I have not today achieved my Assigned Reading, by which I mean "30 pages of The Challenge of Pain, with notes", because instead I finished reading the last five pages of yesterday's thirty pages and still need to go back and Make My Notes on, like, twenty of those pages. I am learning so much neuroanatomy good grief. But there is bread, and there is yoghurt, and there is drying laundry, and I went to the plot, and I have started digging myself back out from under my pile of PD e-mails, and there was an excellent sunset.)

[syndicated profile] fail_feed

Posted by Elna McHilderson

Parenting isn't easy. You're constantly having to swallow your pride or gather all of your courage just to provide a teachable moment. Situations where you would've simply walked away from because you don't care enough, now have value and you have to react differently. It's hard! Just take this dad: He had take something head on, even though he is non-confrontational. The situation happened while peacefully waiting to be seated at a restaurant for lunch. His wife had to go upstairs to wait with the hostess, while he and their two children (both under 6 years old) had to wait in the crowded hall downstairs. His kids were very calm, one simply chilling in a stroller and the other having a polite inside-voice conversation with him. The hallway was a squeeze for everybody, but they were trying their best to be respectful of everyone's space. 

 

However, an entitled couple came up behind them and started huffing and puffing because they couldn't see the tiny menu on the widow behind the family. They yelled to themselves about how they couldn't see the menu and acted very passive aggressively about the family in the way. The dad noticed this, and even though he would have usually he'd uttered an apology and moved on with his life, he had to take a different approach for his kids' sake. So he simply turned around and reacted with a calm tone that pointed out their disrespectful behavior. 

Thee and mee.

Sep. 25th, 2025 06:47 am
alisx: The head of a moth creature. It has dark fuzz and is grinning at you with glowing teeth teeth and eyes. (alis.mothface)
[personal profile] alisx

“public domain for thee, copyright for me”

Paddy Carver sums up “AI” companies.

Leave a comment.+

Dragon Age: The Veilguard

Sep. 24th, 2025 04:40 pm
settiai: (Veilguard -- settiai)
[personal profile] settiai
A mutual on Bluesky borrowed one of my Rooks from Dragon Age: The Veilguard for Rookanis fanart purposes! 💕

She had a specific art ref as a brain worm and needed to borrow someone else's Rook to use it on, so I got some lovely art of one of my Crow Rooks, Gianna de Riva.
[syndicated profile] fail_feed

Posted by Remy Millisky

Everyone acts awkward sometimes, but we all have that one mortifying moment that keeps us awake at night. 

I'm amazed by the people in my life who waltz through life with constant grace and poise. Their hair is always perfect, they're always a fountain of bubbling personality, they're always on time, well-dressed, and totally prepared for whatever life throws at them. How do they do it?! As someone who's perpetually clumsy, very dorky, and who often says the wrong thing, I just admire that kind of person. Like, imagine talking to your crush like a normal person, and not forgetting 98% of what you know. Life would be so grand if one could go into a meeting and not stumble through their portion of it! I mean, there are so many ways to mess up conversations, because even though you can practice in your head, you're still always doing these things in real time. Other people don't go along with the imaginary script in your head, they're free-styling it! 

These people had some absolutely laugh-out-loud stories from their own lives about the times they put their foot in their mouth during a conversation, and never recovered from the embarrassment. Check it all out below — I dare you to get through the whole thing without laughing!

Next up, read about the workers who quit their worst jobs ever, and the reasons that finally pushed them over the edge, like one person who was tired of their "power-tripping, micromanaging, unsupportive boss." 

RIP (Read In Progress) Wednesday

Sep. 24th, 2025 03:19 pm
phantomtomato: (Edmund)
[personal profile] phantomtomato posting in [community profile] booknook
What are you reading this week? Are you planning your October reading yet?

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'tis not so deep as a well

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