People are buying water right now as we speak.

Yup, I’m realizing that merit and hard work is for suckers. The pathway to success is kissing ass. Unfortunately, I’m constitutionally incapable.

I’m learning not to be honest in interviews by being rejected after interviews where I’m honest.

You’re an objectively better candidate than I am. Not only do I lack recent experience, I’m also have gaps and some very unrelated low-level jobs. I’m applying for close-to-entry level work in a field I’m actually highly critical of in ways employers definitely don’t want to hear. With all my “red flags”, it’s best to be as normal and not threatening as possible.

Which does shake my confidence, a bit, going in feeling like I have to misrepresent myself, but it’s something I need to work on as a cynical manipulation of the process.

Sorry, buddy, I didn’t get an easy lay-up of a job once because I candidly I told them I got fired for not knowing shit about that particular industry (which was separate from the job I was applying to, where I actually had a bit more knowledge). It turns out that the employer that fired me will only verify dates of employment, not cause for leaving, so it was a mistake to be honest.

In fact, it’s almost always a mistake to be honest in job interviews, unless you’re jesus christ. Your first (only?) job is to service the emotional needs of the employer, which usually means not asking any probing questions about how they do business, and certainly do not demonstrate you are a serious person by talking about real deficits and how you plan to overcome them; because there is some asshole out there who is applying for the same job who will just be lying their ass off and saying how big the employer’s dick is and the employer won’t figure out they hired some incompetent fool for another few months.

I once got some feedback from an interview for a job a didn’t get. They asked me how I felt about paperwork. I said that I didn’t love it, but it needed to be done, and I made sure to finish all my paperwork by the end of the day, or end of the week at worst. This was a person-centered job, so I thought it was an OK answer. This was not the right answer. The right answer was, “I’m PASSIONATE about doing paperwork.”

Maybe you appreciate an honest candidate, but most people don’t, and there’s no way to know who is interviewing you.

Do you want evidence? Look at LLMs, designed through multiple reviews and iterations to provide “the best” answer. Guess what? The two traits that all LLMs excel at are obsequiousness and authoritativeness. That’s the energy you need to bring to job interviews.

I ran into a problem where I’m returning to an old career, so I formatted a .doc resume organizing and foregrounding my experience in that career. I’d been applying to jobs with it, and doing terribly, but then I realized that Indeed was just analyzing the resume and making a complete hash of it to present to employers. Now I’m forced to use a chronological-order resume that buries the bulk of my experience under a bunch of retail jobs.

And plenty of places don’t even give you the option to write a cover letter, either.

She’s listed but I can’t for the life of me remember what she was doing in the movie.

But I definitely remember Lo Pan!

And what was Gollum doing?

But the movie also has Alfred!

We’re coming from different places, but I’m the one out of the loop here.

Where I’m coming from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality?wprov=sfla1

Where you’re coming from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminal_space_(aesthetic)?wprov=sfla1

The Prestige is a movie where Wolverine and Batman fight in a battle of who is the best magician. David Bowie makes a teleportation machine for Logan to teleport across the entire theater to the shock of the audience.

I thought it started off as some abstract anthropology/psychology thing.

Liminal hallway is semantically overloaded in that all hallways are liminal.

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Guillotines are famously not single-use devices.

Any companies building guillotines I could invest in?

Sure, but, if I recall, Gore was mocked for being afraid of man-bear-pig, their stand-in for Climate Change, but later man-bear-pig showed up started killing people, which is the show’s mea culpa.

Two of the hallmarks of both sides media is they never admit they were wrong and they invariably serve their power structure while pretending to be independent thinkers. Examples of this are the entire foreign policy establishment that cheerled the obviously disastrous Iraq war (while anyone against the obviously disastrous Iraq war was drummed out for not being serious), and Ezra Klein’s recent turnaround on Israel due to “new facts” from 60 years ago that he just learned (coinciding with a massive drop in Israel’s popularity and masterminding an obviously disastrous Iran war).

South Park admits they were wrong and they absolutely go up against power structures, so I throwing them in the “both sides” propaganda apparatus bucket is just wrong.

33 minutes and nobody has offered an impractical yet potentiall workable solution(?) yet… maybe it really isn’t possible.

In that interpretation; the boss just agrees with what his company’s HR is putting out, so it would really be a non-meme…

Cryptocity where the streets are paved with blockchains and the mayor is AI.

It also has some damn good music… somewhere over the rainbow and if I only had a brain are bangers, and Judy Garland was a touchstone for gay boomers…

Understanding references was part of the draw, too… if I keep seeing a reference to something, I want to watch it. The biggest problem is being unaware that something even is a reference. The Simpsons DVD commentary is eye-opening in that regard.

Huh. Do you particularly care about movies? I think I’m old enough that movie history (watching the classics) was a pretty common hobby… these days, I guess people are patient gaming and there’s a lot more anime to catch up on, on top of all the scrolling.

Yeah, but isn’t it in the pantheon of Movies Everyone’s Seen like The Wizard of Oz and The Matrix?