As a cis dude who’s asexual, I’ve gotten weird questions from straight dude bros… one asked me if I “had to be super careful” to not get myself pregnant. Honest question coming from a person our country’s education system has failed.

Blake’s a good guy, but a little off-putting in person. He’s what my grandmother would call “a character.” I have no doubt he believes what he says, but I doubt the versatility of his claims on this.

The British Royal family. I’m an American, living in America, and the number of people here who follow the royals to the point of being sycophants is so freaking weird. I literally do not care about the machinations of a bunch of rich fucks who’s sole claim to fame and fortune is being sprayed out of the correct penis before then falling out of the correct vagina.

I think the most good I could do would be to go back to the mid-1700’s colonial America, probably a center of education like Philadelphia, Boston, or New York. Patient a couple of simple but yet-to-exist technologies like the addiator calculator, rifled gun barrel, etc, but especially the optical telegraph. I would try to leverage these devices/systems into myself joining the Continental Congress as a representative. The optical telegraph is 100% technology that was possible, but not in existence and one that I think could have had unforseen relevance to the founding of the United States. Imagine if long distance, nearly instantaneous communication had existed when the Constitution was being written… think about the implications of that for communication privacy protection. Might even be able to convince the founders to include such a system to be part of the constitutionally mandated post office. I think all it would take would be to point out how important communications had been in the War of Independence: “imagine Savannah has been attacked by Spain. It would take several days for a place like Boston to be alerted to that event… with the optical telegraph the whole nation would know within a matter of a few hours.” After all that, I’d probably try to help get germ theory off the ground and write rebuttals to push back on the various scientific racism theories floating about at that time.

I personally know Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who announced publicly in 2022 that he believed Google’s LaMDA large language model was becoming sentient. He doesn’t have a whole article about him, but he’s a whole section on LaMDA’s Wikipedia article.

Found out yesterday that a manager that hates me is extremely demoralized, currently job hunting, and already tried to quit.

Earlier this month, I found out that a different manager, who in the past tried to get me fired, themselves tried to resign at the beginning of the year. That manager’s contract is up in August and their department is failing on just about every metric imaginable so, they’re likely going to quit or be asked to resign at that point.

Finally, a coworker who was working with that second manager to try and get me fired was themselves fired by corporate for a multitude of reasons. These reasons include but are not limited to: credible accusations of drunk driving company vehicles, harassing and bullying others, offering cocaine to both coworkers and clients, and allegedly attempting to extort someone else out of their job… which is a felony (we’re currently encouraging their victim to go to authorities, but it involves leaked nudes and they are understandably embarrassed about the whole thing… which is their decision, no one can force them). This fired coworker once told a whole room of people “well if [TrueStoryBob] and I both walk into the GM’s office, who do you think is gonna walk out with a job.” Well, we can now definitively say it was them who would walk out of that office unemployed. They had to be forced off company property; like physically escorted onto the sidewalk by the GM and the Business Manager.

All of this has legitimately put a pep in my step. Overall, I like my job, however I was already putting my CV out there just in case. Now, I can stop the job search and not worry about potentially having to move as I also like where I live. By the way, my manager is an absolute dream who’s been watching these other two departments burn to the ground with unadulterated glee as both of these managers walk ass backwards into their own demise.

I think it means like a person is taking something that is foolish or misguided far to seriously.

Differential, différentielle, or diferencial

In English, French, and Spanish, it just sounds cool no matter what accent.

Good news then! With an algorithm fueled by human self-loathing, Instagram is the platform that hates you back!

Slither (2006) fucked me up the first time I watched it. Now I can watch it and laugh. Also, Pam from “The Office” is in it as the police dispatch/receptionist… so, I guess she just got type cast.

Mastodon, Peertube, PixelFed, and (unfortunately) Threads. [I’m forced to have a Threads account because of my job in media. I’m on Instagram and Twitter for the same reason]

I’m also super excited for Loops, but it hasn’t launched yet.

I’ve had good support from Carhartt brand stuff.

Solidarity my flat footed amigo!

We are in the future! Rack mounted touch screens are how we know we’re in the future.

You drop up black and go to commercial. Hopefully, the system is back up when the break is over.

Basically, my job is to edit video… live.

For about four hours every day, I sit in a room filled with about $2 million in equipment next to a studio with an even larger pricetag. For example: a robotic camera can cost upwards of $90k… our studio has four. Thosw robots are my children and I love them with my whole heart.

No NDA and no problem!

When I last used Overdrive, it was a fresh installation, but the system itself had been around for a few years. The UI was uncooperative, making changes required going into a script instead of just a quick fix in the on-air playlist or changing a few lines of typed coding (like with ELC and Ignite respectively). The program itself was crazy unstable… look, crashes happen with any computer program or system, but this was a daily occurrence (sometimes twice in an hour long show) which is completely unacceptable. Finally, compared to Sony and GrassValley, building new codes was a trial that often required access to the video switcher itself instead of just handling things through the code editor program.

While I haven’t worked on an Overdrive system in years, one or our competitor stations in town just got one; they’ve been having a hell of a time with it and it shows on-air. Been working in broadcasting for almost twenty years and I’ve launched all three automation systems at one time or another. With Grassvalley and Sony’s automation there’s seldom a problem at launch… Ross seems to always be a beast that needs to get wrangled. I seriously want to go to that competitor and help them (also, their studio is lit for shit and I want to fix that as well).

I’m a television technical director and Ross Overdrive is hell on wheels… it’s a video production system mostly used by local television stations to consolodate “automate” their control rooms down to one person. There’s three major companies that build systems like this: Sony, GrassValley, and Ross. In my experience GrassValley’s Ignite is pretty good, it’s stable and gets the job done. Sony’s ELC is best, going above and beyond what I need it to do (plus their customer service and tech people are just awesome). Hands down, Ross Overdrive is a pile of garbage. Their physical video switchers are really great (super intuitive and built to last), but the Overdrive automation system itself is just a clunky and uncooperative UI. I’ve had such a bad experience with their system I’ve turned down jobs when the place uses Ross Overdrive. Ross’s Xpression graphics system (or “Chyron”) is also a hot mess. I’ve heard that if you’re using all Ross stuff (video switchers, graphics system, video servers, robotics, etc) it runs smoothly and that may be true, but Christ-on-a-pogo-stick have I had nothing but trouble with their software.

I’m still on Facebook to keep up with family I don’t want having my phone number. I’m on Insta to support friends who’s business is kind of tied to it (tattooers and other artists mostly). I’m on Threads because my work requires me to be in there (and elsewhere) to promote their stuff. I don’t actually do that, but apparently once you have an account it’s there forever unless you want to nuke your Instagram account as well.

I’ve receeded from FB and Insta (along with Twitter {“X”} and Reddit) as well as being fully adverse to posting on Threads in favor of Fediverse alternatives. Been on Mastodon since the 2021 Facebook whistleblower and Lemmy since Reddit’s API BS last year. Haven’t tried BlueSky or the other Twitter alternatives. Now… getting away from using Google/Alphabet has been another struggle entirely.

Yeah. I’m not using it for like graphic design or even scribbling notes. Just clicking on things and scrolling or swiping.

Oh, and I do use the stylus from time to time… compared to high end devices (like Samsung’s Galaxy S lines) it’s not as responsive and there’s the occasional misclick, but it’s not bad. That’s the rating I’d give the experience with the phone overall: not great but certainly not terrible… 7/10 does most of what it says it’ll do.