Someone posted this: 



And I had this epiphany about it. Thought I'd share it here: 

Literally - if our society collapsed today - the tales of modern medicine would eventually sound like magic and witchcraft to the survivors after several post-advanced society story-telling. 

after several post-advanced scientific society generations of story-telling. 

If you imagine ALL of human history that we know of as the remnants of a forgotten, pre-cataclysmic, advanced scientific society... 

And then you think about the survivors sitting around camp fires, huddled under the dark night skies, telling stories of the marvels of that society... 


Those stories become the myths and legends and superstitions of the society that eventually recovers and rebuilds itself to the same place. 


"And the evil wizards and alchemists of the east worked in their labs, their towers and fortresses, summoning evil spirits, invisible evil airs that passed through all of society, flowing through cities like invisible dark clouds. In their wake they left death and destruction. They were able to selectively determine who the evil spirts would attack. Covid smiled as it worked its evil across the land. The good wizards made potions - but Covid was able to change form and make the potions impotent. The people huddled and coward in their homes, unable to fight this enemy they could not see, breath or hear - that came in the night to rob you of your breath. But Covid could not be controlled. The evil wizards thought they had enslaved Covid's will, that their magic circles and protections guarded them from the wrath of this evil that they had summoned. But Covid was stronger than even their magic, and escaped, and attacked their society too. Soon the entire world was crumbling under the assault by this dark force that they had summoned from the depths of hell, and eventually so many had perished, and no magic could long last as a defense against the demon, and all of humanity was laid to waste. Industry stopped, trade stopped, Governments collapsed, and Covid sat back and laughed as humanity was returned to savagery. Starving, man ate man, cities burned, and all the great towers that mankind had built were torn down and turned to dust." 


 

Continuity from Facebook: 

• Here is the summary:

  If you imagine ALL of human history that we know of as the remnants of a forgotten, pre-cataclysmic, advanced scientific society...

  And then you think about the survivors sitting around camp fires, huddled under the dark night skies, telling stories of the marvels of that society...

  Those stories become the myths and legends and superstitions of the society that eventually recovers and rebuilds itself to the same place.

  "And the evil wizards and alchemists of the east worked in their labs, their towers and fortresses, summoning evil spirits, invisible evil airs that passed through all of society, flowing through cities like invisible dark clouds. In their wake they left death and destruction. They were able to selectively determine who the evil spirts would attack. Covid smiled as it worked its evil across the land. The good wizards made potions - but Covid was able to change form and make the potions impotent. The people huddled and coward in their homes, unable to fight this enemy they could not see, breath or hear - that came in the night to rob you of your breath. But Covid could not be controlled. The evil wizards thought they had enslaved Covid's will, that their magic circles and protections guarded them from the wrath of this evil that they had summoned. But Covid was stronger than even their magic, and escaped, and attacked their society too. Soon the entire world was crumbling under the assault by this dark force that they had summoned from the depths of hell, and eventually so many had perished, and no magic could long last as a defense against the demon, and all of humanity was laid to waste. Industry stopped, trade stopped, Governments collapsed, and Covid sat back and laughed as humanity was returned to savagery. Starving, man ate man, cities burned, and all the great towers that mankind had built were torn down and turned to dust."

   

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  Donovan Colbert

  This is how the second age of man ended - by its own hand, with none of its monuments left standing to attest to its greatness.

   

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  Donovan Colbert

  I print this out, put it in a tube somewhere out in the driest part of the Sonoran desert, 10,000 years from now, someone digs it up, it becomes an ancient scriptural text.

You know Gary Cygax is on record as saying that AD&D is actually not the Middle Ages - it is a post-apocalyptic world that takes place AFTER Star Frontiers *and* Gamma World. 

There is a continuity and timeline to these games. Advanced insterstellar society, apocalyptic collapse, thousands of years pass, and a world that resembles a fantasy world arises from the ashes. Vampires and Ankhegs and Orcs aren't supernatural monsters. They're mutations. The "magic" isn't supernatural - it is remnants of advanced science - and wizards are the acolytes who attempt to preserve the knowledge of that collapsed society. 

I think this theme is so reoccurring in fantasy and fiction (ala The Sword of Shannara, also a post apocalyptic High Fantasy world...) because it resonates with us as the obvious explanation for the anomalies we can't explain away with our own understanding of our own history. 

Totally all of the above. The biggest behavioral difference between men and women is an interest in males for Things and an interest for women in People. Inanimate objects and abstractions have always been and are today championed by men. What degrees are women getting, who now outnumber men 59.5%:40/5% in universities? Psychology, nursing, sociology, humanities. What are men doing? Getting degrees that 1) have to do with the non-human, i.e. engineering and abstractions (math, logic, etc.). And what do the most liberated women on the planet do in the Nordic countries with their freedom? They're even MORE likely to split. The human-vs-STEM divide is even stronger there.

And yes, the way of looking at things is dramatically different. And part of that is willful blindness. Have you seen a plesiosaurus skeleton? It's a sea dragon. Obviously. Literally anyone who's not desperate to tell you there's no such thing as a dragon knows that. But people desperate to tell you there's no such thing as a dragon took over after Francis Bacon. Now we have a worldview where OBVIOUSLY someone is possessed by demons and people are desperate to tell there's no such thing as demons. My friend Marquel suffers from sleep paralysis and as almost all sufferers can tell you a demon comes and stands by her bed forcing her to stay there. That's a thing that "happens" as predictably as the outcomes of any scientific experiment. So what do we call something that is the reliable result of a duplicable experiment? A fact. Unless of course it's heresy.

I prayed that God would teach me what I would learn if I took mushrooms. I know a lot of people who've taken mushrooms and are no better or worse off than before. The striking difference among people who've taken them is that their Trait Openness shoots up permanently by 6-15 points. But I'm already at 98% Openness. So what's that going to do for me? Well, a lot already. I'm getting digestible revelation about the nature of human existence that's on par with my learnings from Heidegger. What's coming into my view is that humans don't live in the physical world. It's not what you're navigating and making decisions on. We live in something I'm calling an ontograph (which means a drawing or map of existence). You don't see things as matter; you see them in terms of their utility to your agency in obtaining perceived value.

The ontograph is necessarily anchored to certain features of being human. We have mothers who are almost certainly around by the time we're weaned. We have fathers who are less likely around by that time. We need food. We need fun. We need a certain amount of company, varying widely by person. We crave sex like any sexually reproducing species. But what's crazy is that people will brush off the EXPERIENCE of those anchors/instincts as non-scientific. I know of a fellow who says there's no such thing as the power of love. He calls it an oxytocin bond. That's stupid. Of course it's love. The experience of something is what's happening in our ontograph, regardless of what's happening in the physical world.

Case in point: people who are allergic to flowers often react allergically to convincing silk imitations.

Our point of view changes from era to era, but what has never changed is that humans interact with their world in the envelope of an ontograph. We feel things whether they make sense or not. We idealize and vilify, and rate things on imaginary scales. We interpret our feelings in all sorts of different ways. Some of this is genetic; some of this is memetic; and some of it is idiosyncratic. What's socially "correct" changes but the ontographic processes that generate those conclusions do not. We have a status quo we're quite used to at the moment, but... Pederasty was moral. The Jews were parasites. There is no such thing as a dragon all of a sudden. Atheists are worried about a global flood so they're going to leave this planet and start another world where they'll give 1000-year life spans to their children who will squander the gift and drop back down to 72 again.

The hilarious gender-blindness in defense of the progressive orthodoxy is hilarious and I'm keeping my kids as far from it as I can. My daughters are learning dance and cooking and whatever else they want to learn. My oldest son is learning metalworking and coding. The girls will embody human aesthetic philosophy and the boys will embody abstract and inanimate aesthetic philosophy.

"and attacked their society too."

"Society" the way we use it nowadays is actually a distributed god. No, ladies, Society didn't tell you to value men for their resources. That's genetic in all primates. No, gentlemen, Society doesn't deserve your fealty. It's an abstraction of emergent properties of a network of humans.

"Vampires and Ankhegs and Orcs aren't supernatural monsters. They're mutations."

That's fantastic. And I use the term advisedly.

Yup. Great example on the plesiosaurus skeleton. There are two possibilities - we have a collective memory and we were alive when big things were still around - which is where we get stories of thunderbirds and dragon beasts from... 

OR... those things weren't all gone when we *thought* they were - in which case, we were alive when big things were still around. 

I tend to believe the latter. They survived. We didn't find skeletons because most of the world was uncharted - and they tended to survive places we didn't go. When we went, we brought back TALES of giant skeletons, but not skeletons, because it wasn't *practical* - and in a survival level society, which is what we were for most of the last 35,000 years or longer - you don't send people out to investigate giant skeletons. Most things rot and return to the earth. We got fossils from UNUSUAL circumstances over geological timespans. We think they're abundant, but compared to all the things that have ever lived, they're exceedingly rare. 

So, I suffer from sleep paralysis. It is related to lucid dreaming. The first time, a little imp dropped out of my closet, came across the room, and stuck a tiny curved blade into my open mouth. I was asleep, with my mouth open, I could see the moonlight filtering into the room through the window, I was awake, but I couldn't move. It made a little flick and cut my cheek - and when it did, I woke up, it was gone, the room looked exactly like in my dream, and I could feel a papercut like burn on the inside of my cheek. It appeared to me not unlike the creature from Stephen King's movie "Cat's Eye" - if you've ever seen that. It was dressed like an AD&D goblin. These stories are timeless... they also match the Old Hag stories, where an old hag sits on your chest and you can't breath, but you're also unable to move. They also match alien abduction descriptions. The strange thing about my *initial* experience - is that there was obviously a *tissue* sample being taken. But I was 9 or 10 - I had no idea that you took tissue swabs from the inside of your cheek. So... there was something *strange* going on there, in that I was envisioning it through my mental state of reference - I turned it into an AD&D creature - but the experience was a factual experience beyond my age or understanding... the actual physical thing that happened goes along with the idea of aliens abducting humans and taking scientific tissue samples. The desire to write this off as "oh, you had just heard about alien abductions and tissue samples - and you combined AD&D with aliens..." rings flat with me. Why would my mind mix the genres in my sleep? When I was laying there asleep, frozen, I was terrified that the thing meant to *murder* me - because that is what evil little kobolds do in AD&D... I certainly was surprised when instead it stuck the blade in my mouth and sliced the inside of my cheek. I didn't understand THAT at all. 

But lucid dreaming is really about how reality is thin and subjective. I was recently talking about this while we re-watched the Matrix trilogy - which led to discussions about Inception - and how I've had multiple-level lucid dreaming, where I kept waking from the dream into what I thought was reality, only to shortly thereafter realize I had woken into another dream. This is just as unsettling as paralysis dreams - because you *realize* each time you've woken from the previous dream that there was an even more previous dream before that - and that starts to get scary - and of course when you finally wake... you do so with some very serious doubts about the final reality you wake into. 


Your last paragraph touches on this - that people don't realize that what they all *agree* on actually changes - and that this is what makes *them* the actual Nazis. Trying to get them to comprehend this is impossible - but when a society is *all* going along with something - it is very difficult to see that thing objectively. Most people simply meld with the hive mind, without consciously realizing they're doing so. You can see so many examples of that - there was a post where a friend was defending AntiFA. I ignored it. She is totally blue-pilled on this. It does beg the question of "moral truth". Is evil still *evil* if no one in society accepts it is evil? If you grow up in a traditional Mormon polgymous church when they marry off girls as soon as they are viable - does that make you a sexual abuser? If all of society later decides this is amoral and inappropriate, and you continue to do that in spite of society - does that THEN make you amoral? 

Were slave owners actually vile, evil people when slavery was just a part of human society? I mean - we believe we're so linear - that we decide a thing and then we move forward and that thing is then cast in stone as decided - but that isn't true. These things evolve and minds change and we flip and flop back and forth over multiple generations. The status quo can be very slow to change - but it does.  

But - that wasn't really what I felt was the gut punch of all of this. Let me refresh myself... 

Thu Sep 16 2021 00:53:21 MST from Wangiss <wangiss@wallofhate.com>

Totally all of the above. The biggest behavioral difference between men and women is an interest in males for Things and an interest for women in People. Inanimate objects and abstractions have always been and are today championed by men. What degrees are women getting, who now outnumber men 59.5%:40/5% in universities? Psychology, nursing, sociology, humanities. What are men doing? Getting degrees that 1) have to do with the non-human, i.e. engineering and abstractions (math, logic, etc.). And what do the most liberated women on the planet do in the Nordic countries with their freedom? They're even MORE likely to split. The human-vs-STEM divide is even stronger there.

And yes, the way of looking at things is dramatically different. And part of that is willful blindness. Have you seen a plesiosaurus skeleton? It's a sea dragon. Obviously. Literally anyone who's not desperate to tell you there's no such thing as a dragon knows that. But people desperate to tell you there's no such thing as a dragon took over after Francis Bacon. Now we have a worldview where OBVIOUSLY someone is possessed by demons and people are desperate to tell there's no such thing as demons. My friend Marquel suffers from sleep paralysis and as almost all sufferers can tell you a demon comes and stands by her bed forcing her to stay there. That's a thing that "happens" as predictably as the outcomes of any scientific experiment. So what do we call something that is the reliable result of a duplicable experiment? A fact. Unless of course it's heresy.

I prayed that God would teach me what I would learn if I took mushrooms. I know a lot of people who've taken mushrooms and are no better or worse off than before. The striking difference among people who've taken them is that their Trait Openness shoots up permanently by 6-15 points. But I'm already at 98% Openness. So what's that going to do for me? Well, a lot already. I'm getting digestible revelation about the nature of human existence that's on par with my learnings from Heidegger. What's coming into my view is that humans don't live in the physical world. It's not what you're navigating and making decisions on. We live in something I'm calling an ontograph (which means a drawing or map of existence). You don't see things as matter; you see them in terms of their utility to your agency in obtaining perceived value.

The ontograph is necessarily anchored to certain features of being human. We have mothers who are almost certainly around by the time we're weaned. We have fathers who are less likely around by that time. We need food. We need fun. We need a certain amount of company, varying widely by person. We crave sex like any sexually reproducing species. But what's crazy is that people will brush off the EXPERIENCE of those anchors/instincts as non-scientific. I know of a fellow who says there's no such thing as the power of love. He calls it an oxytocin bond. That's stupid. Of course it's love. The experience of something is what's happening in our ontograph, regardless of what's happening in the physical world.

Case in point: people who are allergic to flowers often react allergically to convincing silk imitations.

Our point of view changes from era to era, but what has never changed is that humans interact with their world in the envelope of an ontograph. We feel things whether they make sense or not. We idealize and vilify, and rate things on imaginary scales. We interpret our feelings in all sorts of different ways. Some of this is genetic; some of this is memetic; and some of it is idiosyncratic. What's socially "correct" changes but the ontographic processes that generate those conclusions do not. We have a status quo we're quite used to at the moment, but... Pederasty was moral. The Jews were parasites. There is no such thing as a dragon all of a sudden. Atheists are worried about a global flood so they're going to leave this planet and start another world where they'll give 1000-year life spans to their children who will squander the gift and drop back down to 72 again.

The hilarious gender-blindness in defense of the progressive orthodoxy is hilarious and I'm keeping my kids as far from it as I can. My daughters are learning dance and cooking and whatever else they want to learn. My oldest son is learning metalworking and coding. The girls will embody human aesthetic philosophy and the boys will embody abstract and inanimate aesthetic philosophy.

Oh yeah... the gut punch was how the meme actually got me to analyze the mythology of witches and wizards and that exposed that not only are the gender stereotypes accurate - but it is what we have TODAY. 

The Physician, who is *generally* male, is the one who operates *devices* to perform miracles upon you. 

The Nurse, who is *generally* female, is the one who brings you potions and remedies to ingest that perform miracles on you. 

I find this another confirmation of my "lost history/lost society/ancient alien astronaut" theory that we've been here before and do not remember it - that something so complete happened that it erased that period from our record so completely we believe it is just myth and superstition. 

It is *too* accurate. We're *projecting* our disbelief onto these old stories of wizards and witches - because our *concept* is that these things weren't possible then. 

But they exist now. And there is no better example than mental health - where a wizard would use directed energy to drive out a demon, and a witch would create a potion that would achieve the same end. Today the wizard is a physician and he would use electroshock therapy, applied by, of course, a *wand*... and a nurse would treat you with injections or oral medications - potions. 

I felt like this observation was really the "3 pointer" shot here. That if we had a complete collapse of society... as we rebuilt it - the stories of our society would eventually take on mythical proportions. The further out, the further the stories would drift from accuracy. Physicians would become wizards who fought monsters with wands and staffs and magic blades - and nurses would become witches that could concoct potions that had magical results. The whole idea of the "witchdoctor" shows how similar the roles are subconsciously in humanity. 

The wizard and the "mad doctor/mad scientist" trope are also very related. 

Also - that in our past history - wizards and witches were almost certainly autists. 

I thought everyone already understood this, but I think I'm realizing now that people are much stupider than I ever gave them credit for.  Always, ALWAYS, my view has been that I'm not actually smart, I'm just paying attention.  I have tests and experience that proves unequivocally that I'm wrong about that, because I am actually smarter than most people, but it's that damn cognitive bias that I'm normal.

I think I'm starting to actually believe I'm more capable than the average person.  It's nice that I've been able to surround myself with other smart people so I don't feel like I'm completely fucking mental.

Absolutely. In my early 20s, when I started working for corporate America at Fortune 500 sized companies - was my first hint that society is run mostly on incompetence and brute force. It is a miracle we navigated the cold war without blowing ourselves back into the stoneage. Because most of my life, most of my organizational leadership, right to the very top - have been mouth-breathers.

And when you realize this - that it isn't just that you're paying more attention, but that you've got more cognitive abilities than 98% of the people taking up space on the planet - then that bottom 98% gets real hostile toward you - because it becomes nearly impossible to hide your complete contempt for them. At this point, I see "you're just arrogant," and think, "No... you're just upset that you're smarter than a lot of people, but not smarter than me, and it offends you that you know *I* know it, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise."

I most often express this in my "80/20" rule idea. No matter where you look, 20% of the people are the actual contributors, and 80% are mostly the dead-weight. You need that 80% to do the things like flip the burgers and mop the floors and do other dead-weight things - but they're always going to produce 20% of the productivity despite being 80% of the workforce. It applies like a maxim. No matter where you look, you'll find this. And it scales with performance. If you look at F1 drivers, they're 100% in the top 20% of all drivers, but as a subgroup, there are 20% of them that make the other 80% look like they're under-performing. It is fractal. If you get Musk, Bezos, Gates, Zuckenberg, Sir Richard Branson, Warren Buffet, and a dozen other top financial achievers in a room... 20% of them will be the ACTUAL brains, and the other 80% will be going, "how come I'm not doing as good as they are?" 

Society is a clown show.

Wed Sep 22 2021 01:58:37 MST from TheDave

I thought everyone already understood this, but I think I'm realizing now that people are much stupider than I ever gave them credit for.  Always, ALWAYS, my view has been that I'm not actually smart, I'm just paying attention.  I have tests and experience that proves unequivocally that I'm wrong about that, because I am actually smarter than most people, but it's that damn cognitive bias that I'm normal.

I think I'm starting to actually believe I'm more capable than the average person.  It's nice that I've been able to surround myself with other smart people so I don't feel like I'm completely fucking mental.

Mon Sep 27 2021 10:55:14 MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

Absolutely. In my early 20s, when I started working for corporate America at Fortune 500 sized companies - was my first hint that society is run mostly on incompetence and brute force. It is a miracle we navigated the cold war without blowing ourselves back into the stoneage. Because most of my life, most of my organizational leadership, right to the very top - have been mouth-breathers.

And when you realize this - that it isn't just that you're paying more attention, but that you've got more cognitive abilities than 98% of the people taking up space on the planet - then that bottom 98% gets real hostile toward you - because it becomes nearly impossible to hide your complete contempt for them. At this point, I see "you're just arrogant," and think, "No... you're just upset that you're smarter than a lot of people, but not smarter than me, and it offends you that you know *I* know it, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise."

I most often express this in my "80/20" rule idea. No matter where you look, 20% of the people are the actual contributors, and 80% are mostly the dead-weight. You need that 80% to do the things like flip the burgers and mop the floors and do other dead-weight things - but they're always going to produce 20% of the productivity despite being 80% of the workforce. It applies like a maxim. No matter where you look, you'll find this. And it scales with performance. If you look at F1 drivers, they're 100% in the top 20% of all drivers, but as a subgroup, there are 20% of them that make the other 80% look like they're under-performing. It is fractal. If you get Musk, Bezos, Gates, Zuckenberg, Sir Richard Branson, Warren Buffet, and a dozen other top financial achievers in a room... 20% of them will be the ACTUAL brains, and the other 80% will be going, "how come I'm not doing as good as they are?" 

Society is a clown show.

Wed Sep 22 2021 01:58:37 MST from TheDave

I thought everyone already understood this, but I think I'm realizing now that people are much stupider than I ever gave them credit for.  Always, ALWAYS, my view has been that I'm not actually smart, I'm just paying attention.  I have tests and experience that proves unequivocally that I'm wrong about that, because I am actually smarter than most people, but it's that damn cognitive bias that I'm normal.

I think I'm starting to actually believe I'm more capable than the average person.  It's nice that I've been able to surround myself with other smart people so I don't feel like I'm completely fucking mental.

 

I'm very upset today because my team wants me to start assigning them tasks in Clickup and it's taking literally all my willpower to avoid making tasks that say things like "Just do your fucking job you moron" and "How many times do I need to explain what I want from you"

I do have people who get it.  I have other people who want me to do the work of breaking down their job into discrete tasks for them, and I'm over here like "I hired you so I wouldn't have to waste my mental energy on this bullshit, I thought you were competent".  Praise Allah for the ones who understand quickly.

I absolutely despise tedium and people insist on foisting it on me.

Be careful of this. I despise bosses who are not micromangers when they're assigning tasks. They become micromanagers *after* the task has been completed. 

I'm not saying you do this - but I'm more than willing to dive right in and make something happen. What I don't want is to come back to you once I've done it and have you go, "That is great, but if we did it this way, and changed that part, and also, this doesn't really work... that would be just awesome..." 

Those are the bosses that after a few assignments - they assign me something and I go, "I'm going to need a detailed breakdown of your expectations and your preferred path to the solution you would like to implement. Usually that is when we start butting heads over things like this...

"I didn't hire you to just follow bullet points I lay out for you on how to do your job!"


"I know. So how come every time I do my job, you come back with a list of bullet points laid out for me on how I should have done my job?" 

Heh. 

That usually goes over as well as responding, "because you saw me before I saw you," when a cop asks you why he pulled you over. :D 

Tue Oct 05 2021 03:29:42 MST from TheDave

 I'm very upset today because my team wants me to start assigning them tasks in Clickup and it's taking literally all my willpower to avoid making tasks that say things like "Just do your fucking job you moron" and "How many times do I need to explain what I want from you"

I do have people who get it.  I have other people who want me to do the work of breaking down their job into discrete tasks for them, and I'm over here like "I hired you so I wouldn't have to waste my mental energy on this bullshit, I thought you were competent".  Praise Allah for the ones who understand quickly.

I absolutely despise tedium and people insist on foisting it on me.

So... in D&D news... 

That thing I've been saying I wanted, a turn based, rule based, open module engine that could take limitless FRP adventures? 

It exists. It exists on the strict 1st edition rules, and I own it. 

FRUA - Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures, works on the SSI overhead tile based AD&D 1st edition game engine, and allows homebrew DIY modules to be created. 


Your characters can build their way up, transfer from module to module. The modules are freely distributable - and many of them are based on original modules. They've even got some Gamma World modules. The ruleset is a little different - don't know how they accommodate for that... but basically - it seems like it is pretty hackable. 

The GOG package contains all of the original SSI games *and* the FRUA adventure creator. 

This is a collection of modules: 

http://frua.rosedragon.org/modulelist/file.php

Totally stoked. 

The problem with this - is the bosses lack of clarity on *his* vision of how *I* should do it creates *extra* work for *me*. 

Sometimes significant extra work. A lot of bosses seem to take this approach of, "I'll have them do it, it won't be what I want, and then once they have the framework, we'll reshape what they come back with into what I want..." 

And that may work excellent in a lot of industries. It is a *fucking stupid* way to approach IT engineering. Because often, you have to tear so much out to "add that little tweak," that you might as well throw the baby out with the bathwater and start again. It isn't just something you can change one part of once it is built. It is like asking for a bridge to be built, and then after it is built as a span-bridge you tell them "That is pretty good, but what we need is a suspension bridge. Can you make those changes?" 

Sure we can - if we tear down the entire fucking bridge we already built and start over from scratch. Is THAT what you want, bossman? And now you're pissed at me because you said, "build a bridge then get back to me..." and when I did, it wasn't the bridge you wanted? 

I don't think I've ever verbalized this before - though - as clearly. It caused me a lot of professional grief in my career. 

 

I'm not saying you do this - but I'm more than willing to dive right in and make something happen. What I don't want is to come back to you once I've done it and have you go, "That is great, but if we did it this way, and changed that part, and also, this doesn't really work... that would be just awesome..." 

 

Tue Oct 05 2021 12:50:20 MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>

The problem with this - is the bosses lack of clarity on *his* vision of how *I* should do it creates *extra* work for *me*. 

Sometimes significant extra work. A lot of bosses seem to take this approach of, "I'll have them do it, it won't be what I want, and then once they have the framework, we'll reshape what they come back with into what I want..." 

And that may work excellent in a lot of industries. It is a *fucking stupid* way to approach IT engineering. Because often, you have to tear so much out to "add that little tweak," that you might as well throw the baby out with the bathwater and start again. It isn't just something you can change one part of once it is built. It is like asking for a bridge to be built, and then after it is built as a span-bridge you tell them "That is pretty good, but what we need is a suspension bridge. Can you make those changes?" 

Sure we can - if we tear down the entire fucking bridge we already built and start over from scratch. Is THAT what you want, bossman? And now you're pissed at me because you said, "build a bridge then get back to me..." and when I did, it wasn't the bridge you wanted? 

I don't think I've ever verbalized this before - though - as clearly. It caused me a lot of professional grief in my career. 

 

 

I'm not saying you do this - but I'm more than willing to dive right in and make something happen. What I don't want is to come back to you once I've done it and have you go, "That is great, but if we did it this way, and changed that part, and also, this doesn't really work... that would be just awesome..." 

 

You're doing network stuff, right?  I'm having a database built that's using MongoDB because it's flexible so that we can replace things as needed with a minimum of pain.  Zac has a really good idea of what I'm going for and I'm trusting him to make it work, and so far he's a miracle worker.  Front end web stuff is designed to be replaceable on a whim.  I think I'm pretty safe here.

Found myself wondering today if the GOG support for Linux extends to ARM. It doesn't. Which is stupid. BUT... I thought to myself, their old games run on DOSbox - they've just put a wrapper around it to make it easy for end users... I wonder if I can just install DOSBox on ARM and then copy over their DOSBox games and run them on my Pi400+. 

I totally can. Witness Curse of the Azure Bonds running on my Pi 400+.