Honestly, no. People are pretty bad at filtering for Unicode alternative characters. It can be worked around when the site admins understand what's going on, but...have fun skimming all of the Unicode code pages for every possible lookalike character.
The headline undersells the outcome by a lot.
As part of the judgment by the US District Court of Rhode Island, Tropic Haze was issued with a permanent injunction preventing it from offering or marketing Yuzu or any of its source code in the future.
Its members are also prevented from creating any future software that circumvents Nintendo’s technical protection, and Tropic Haze must surrender all website domains and information related to its emulator.
Ownership of all related websites and domains must be turned over, and the developers are barred from further participation in "creating any future software that circumvents Nintendo's technical protection".
The wording of the actual settlement will be key here, which we are unlikely to ever see. At a minimum it puts significant controls on how the individual developers can interact with the Nintendo emulation community, if not outright prevents them from contributing code to most Nintendo based emulators. It almost certainly increases their individual liabilities if they are caught assisting such a project again, as they will be forced defend how their contributions don't violate the settlement. And that's just to avoid stiffer penalties being thrown at them.
The title of that article does not support its conclusion. Lazy pasting what I commented the last time I saw this.
Nothing has changed for LTS at all. Scroll down to the pretty graphs on https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle, and pay particular attention to how the ratio of orange to purple on the LTS graphs has changed over time. (it hasn't) The base LTS support window has always been 5 years, and the extended window has always been another 5 years.
What they did add was additional security updates for Universe packages, which are represented by the black line. Note that this black line is independent of the LTS coverage. From https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-pro-faq/34042:
Your Ubuntu LTS is still secured in exactly the same way it has always been, with five years of free security updates for the ‘main’ packages in the distribution, and best-effort security coverage for everything else. This has been the promise of Ubuntu since our first LTS in 2006, and remains exactly the same. In fact, thanks to our expanded security team, your LTS is better secured today than ever before, even without Ubuntu Pro.
Ubuntu Pro is an additional stream of security updates and packages that meet compliance requirements such as FIPS or HIPAA, on top of an Ubuntu LTS. Ubuntu Pro was launched in public beta on 5 October, 2022, and moved to general availability on 26 January, 2023. Ubuntu Pro provides an SLA for security fixes for the entire distribution (‘main and universe’ packages) for ten years, with extensions for industrial use cases.
You can also dig into this AskUbuntu answer for even more details, but the long and short of it is this has no impact on Ubuntu LTS whatsoever. Keep using it if that is your thing. Keep using something else if it is not.
This old news will become newsworthy if Canonical starts shifting packages out of the main repo and into universe, which would in fact reduce the security update coverage of LTS releases. That said, the article has not asserted any evidence of this. Nothing to see here...for now.
It is not. The headline is completely inaccurate.
Nothing has changed for LTS at all. Scroll down to the pretty graphs on https://ubuntu.com/about/release-cycle, and pay particular attention to how the ratio of orange to purple on the LTS graphs has changed over time. (it hasn't) The base LTS support window has always been 5 years, and the extended window has always been another 5 years.
What they did add was additional security updates for Universe packages, which are represented by the black line. Note that this black line is independent of the LTS coverage. From https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-pro-faq/34042:
Your Ubuntu LTS is still secured in exactly the same way it has always been, with five years of free security updates for the ‘main’ packages in the distribution, and best-effort security coverage for everything else. This has been the promise of Ubuntu since our first LTS in 2006, and remains exactly the same. In fact, thanks to our expanded security team, your LTS is better secured today than ever before, even without Ubuntu Pro.
Ubuntu Pro is an additional stream of security updates and packages that meet compliance requirements such as FIPS or HIPAA, on top of an Ubuntu LTS. Ubuntu Pro was launched in public beta on 5 October, 2022, and moved to general availability on 26 January, 2023. Ubuntu Pro provides an SLA for security fixes for the entire distribution (‘main and universe’ packages) for ten years, with extensions for industrial use cases.
You can also dig into this AskUbuntu answer for even more details, but the long and short of it is this has no impact on Ubuntu LTS whatsoever. Keep using it if that is your thing. Keep using something else if it is not.
Edit: This old news will become newsworthy if Canonical starts shifting packages out of the main repo and into universe, which would in fact reduce the security update coverage of LTS releases. That said, the article has not asserted any evidence of this. Nothing to see here...for now.
It was a multi-prong attack. The goal was to generate uncertainty in the validity of results certified by the states, and create a justification for Mike Pence to delay certification.
Run a search on mike pence delay certification fake electors and take your pick.
"buh buh buh the government deserves to die and everyone living in the country must suffer because my feelings are hurt"
Yeah, I know you have a lot more to say than that, but the caustic and reductionist debating angle cuts in both directions. A very merry fuck you as well, sir.
Realistically, the US Government is going to continue supporting Israel no matter what happens until the US has meaningful voting reform. Israel is an entrenched interest due to the amount of money changing hands in Washington. (defense contracts, etc.) This is not helped by the social stigma of the average American not differentiating between Israel as a political entity and Jewish people as a demographic. It's one of those "broken by design" social constructs.
The logical fallacy that I largely see in play is the assumption that the Republicans would have handled this any differently. While I agree that Biden's stance is noteworthy, as a reminder that the parties are more alike than they are different on certain topics, it doesn't change the landscape of the two leading presidential candidates. One of them is in bed with Putin and appears to have a vested interest in entrenching himself as a leader who can never lose an election. (i.e. an aspiring president for life) The other candidate is still flawed, but doesn't represent an existential threat to the political institution itself.
I'd much rather have an option other than Trump or Biden, but until more states enact voting reform at a local level we're stuck with a choice of which decrepit old man is least likely to be disruptive to the entire system of government. The Republican party needs to continue its losing streak until it decides the populist authoritarian movement is a failed strategy.
Vote for useful things and voting reform at the local level.
Vote for whatever keeps the system itself functioning at the federal level. If one party's leaders are in bed with "presidents for life" or the authoritarian governments that were ratfucked to make them presidents for life, you are going to end up with a president for life.
Important to note: If enough states enact voting reform at the local level, you no longer need a constitutional amendment to have voting reform that influences the federal level. If you are looking for real change, this is where it is. It is slow and unsexy, but don't bitch about your federal vote meaning nothing if you're not doing anything with your local elections.
No one cares what either of us are, it was only relevant to my anecdote. :P Your commenting pattern appears to have become somewhat manic, so I'll leave you to it.
Nah, it's pretty evident that either you don't understand or are willfully ignorant/trolling. In the off chance that you are in fact that confident in yourself:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting#Tactical_voting
When I was younger I was one of those "enlightened centrists" who believed in things like the purity of my vote, but reality caught up with me eventually. There is no merit to such purity in first past the post systems with an entrenched plurality.
The only virtue of a wasted vote is the personal satisfaction that you get out of it, and that personal satisfaction has no real world effect on politics. The only exception is when you are voting for a visionary with overwhelmingly popular support. (i.e. you would know if one is in the race)
Supervillain is giving him too much credit. I'll grant you that he's a cartoon character, but cartoon supervillains have more complexity than him.
Kanye and Musk embody a nearly identical archetype and we'd have the exact same problem if they ran for president and succeeded. The cult of personality that follows shitty celebrities is a self-perpetuating one. It's rooted in nasty people admiring how important people can be nasty like them but without tangible social consequences. They form a mob around their cult heroes for that exact reason, strength in numbers. A safe space for the trash of humanity.
People in politics and business find Trump useful because he'll open doors for them in exchange for attention. They get cozy with leading him around by the nose with that attention until they forget that he will backstab them when they stop giving him that attention or there is more value in betraying them. Musk does the exact same shit, so again, I don't think that Trump himself is worthy of being viewed in the light you're giving him. Similarly shitty celebrities are drop in replacements for him, and worse, they might be more intelligent in their cruelty.
Irony: I clicked on this post because an unemployed friend of mine recently had their mechanical turk account suspended for no clear reason. They're still waiting on the appeal process two months later...
For anyone considering this work, you should also be prepared for your "employers" to randomly reject your submitted work and deny you pay. Good times.
Yeah, there is no need for "final solution" style accountability here. This was a project that a single developer was working on when the stars just happened to align and drive a lot of attention to it at once. A commercially oriented website in the same situation would struggle to deal with it and be forced to take out loans in order to expand staffing and infrastructure capacity.
The phrasing of Ernest's initial post suggests that there is at least one exploitable vulnerability that spammers are taking advantage of and can't be openly discussed until the gates are closed. I understand the frustration and optics problem that comes with "easy and important fixes" sliding on the schedule (i.e. the topic of the other thread), but look at it this way:
- Ernest is too slammed with work to be consciously creating more work for himself.
- He needs the spam and bot problem to go away so ASAP so that it stops taking time away from him. This includes the missing moderation tools, spam/bot campaigns that are operating at a scale that those additional tools would have difficulty addressing regardless, and the issues he can't talk about yet that were hinted at above.
- If he is waiting to push out a fix to problems that would greatly reduce his workload, there are very good reasons for it.
- If he is not able to push out fixes that reduce his workload, it stands to reason that fixes unrelated to them are also sliding.
A hypersexualized Paladin whose test of faith is to invite admiration from all who observe him or her, but they’re not actually allowed to partake. Imagine an extremely vain god or goddess who not only wants all of the sexiest people alive as their followers, but wants them to proactively blueball the rest of the world with their piety.
Or just take the easy route: a good old fashioned fertility deity who approves of their followers sewing dem oats.
The people that cancel good people are shitbags.
Relativity remains a factor. One mob's shitbag is another mob's hero. One mob's wish for freedom of thought is another mob's moral depravity.
Cancelling is just an added nuance on gossip and dogpiling, and those have been around since we've been knocking rocks together. It happens whenever a person publicly acknowledges an opinion that angers a tribe enough to single someone out. It doesn't matter whether that person is a long-time resident or a passing visitor. The more it goes against their social values, the more popular it becomes in the gossip, and the more people share it with each other as the story takes on a life of its own. Details get changed. Maybe it started with a lie or misconception to begin with and grew from there. None of that matters when people start shunning you in public or knocking on your door with torches in hand.
The only added nuance of cancelling over traditional gossip is the pervasiveness of the internet, and the distance at which people can socially band together to shun you. Most importantly, gossip has never required someone to be a good or bad person. It just needs someone to be the target of a rumor (truthful or otherwise) that pisses a lot of people off.
As others have already covered, everything we do comes with risk. Some people go through life without spending much thought on those risks, and if they're lucky they never have to deal with these things. Others let it weigh upon them heavily, and it's fairly evident that you fall into the latter camp.
You've caught on to the general theme though, which is that the more of yourself you put out there needlessly, the greater a possibility for negative things to happen as a result of that. I'm not going to ask you to wave a magic wand and become the type of person who doesn't worry about those things, so here are the best compromises:
-
Quality over quantity with your friends. Find some good people you can be yourself around, and don't stress over having fewer people that you hang out with than others. It's not a competition and it doesn't make you an inferior person.
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Minimize how much you "put yourself out there". The internet wasn't around 25 years ago, and when it was young it was common sense to use an alias on the internet wherever possible. Use different nicknames on different websites to minimize the ability of casual bad actors to link your identities between different social forums. The possibility of database leaks doxxing the e-mail address you signed up with is still there, but thwarting the low effort attempts does a lot on its own. You can go through the effort of registering with different e-mail addresses as well, but there is a point of diminishing returns here and you need to decide where to draw the line for yourself.
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Remove yourself from online discussions when it's healthy to do so. Assert your opinion, clarify your points if they need clarifying, and move on. Turn off notifications once you're past that point. Winning arguments on the internet is not realistically a thing that happens, and notifications on your mobile device from an argument will needlessly pull you back into a place of anxiety. Considering how little those mobile notifications contribute to your positive frame of mind, it's best to be rid of them completely if you ever find them having a negative impact on your day to day life.
Edit:
- Put yourself out there when you feel strongly that it is important to do so. Some causes are worth weathering the consequences, and you shouldn't let a fear of consequences completely cripple you when you feel strongly enough about something. Will your friends have your back if you stick your foot into it? Then go for it.
It means you aren't suited to run a public facing business. There's nothing wrong with that, but speaking as someone with a lot of social anxiety baggage there are things I'm equipped to do well and things that I'm not. I shouldn't let that stop me from opening a business if I really want to, but if I simply don't want to deal with the social rejection elements I have to accept that I'm better off letting someone else run that side of a business.
As for the non-business elements of your question, all you can really do is conduct yourself in a way that you don't believe you'll find yourself regretting later. If you say something in a public place, especially online, consider it part of the public record. It can and will come back to bite you later. Assume your [morally positive family member here] is always watching.
100 dollars in pennies.
> > > The Last Ringbearer (Russian: Последний кольценосец, romanized: Posledniy kol'tsenosets) is a 1999 fantasy fan-fiction book by the Russian paleontologist Kirill Eskov. It is an alternative account of, and an informal sequel to, the events of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. It has been translated into English by Yisroel Markov, but the translation has not been printed for fear of copyright action by the Tolkien Estate. > >
(snip)
> > > Eskov bases his novel on the premise that the Tolkien account is a "history written by the victors". Mordor is home to an "amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic" > >
I’m also here to expose bad excuses.
Not being able to help someone who is refusing to provide technical detail is a pretty damn good excuse in this industry.
If your goal is to expose the bad excuses of others, step one is to put in as much effort as you're expecting from others. :P
Edit for good measure: (links fixed, forgot about direct linking comments from outside of a lemmy instance)
- Your instance was not federating with lemmy.world. [1]
- You assumed that the blame had to rest on lemmy.world because you had "eliminate[d] all the possibilities [you] had at hand". [2]
- You made this post to vent about a bunch of unrelated nonsense and refused to provide technical detail that would assist the admins in troubleshooting. It's a given fact that your privacy is your choice, but it's also a given that you shouldn't be a dick about it if you choose to withhold details, even from PM. For the record, the information being requested was the bare minimum for an instance administrator to troubleshoot network interactions with a remote instance.
- A random (but cool) third party identified the issue with your instance not federating. [3]
- Instead of apologizing, you proceeded to act like you were entitled to that solution from the admins you wrongly accused. [4] You are not god's gift to the internet and they are not technical support for your instance.
There's no room for niceties here, you are either an asshole in denial or some brat who is too young to know any better. Sleep on it. Come to terms with that fact and make good on it, or don't. You aren't worth anyone's energy, and I'm only bothering with this summary for everyone else's sake. Your problem is fixed, it was never on lemmy.world's side to begin with, and somehow you are still acting like the failure of the admins to figure out what was busted with your shit is some Sherlock gotcha moment.
I am unaffiliated with lemmy.world and my toxicity does not represent the opinions of the admins. (but they're probably thinking it)
I’m asking since I can’t seem to access some kbin communities on lemmy.ml [http://lemmy.ml] but they are available from other instances. I tested this a few days ago so things might have changed. I also have the same question for fedia.io [http://fedia.io]. I can see it from other instances but not ...
Apparently one of the lemmy.ml admins was overzealous in banning all User-Agent strings that contained the word "bot". Bans were entered for all of the individual strings containing that word which were observed in their webserver logs, which impacted kbin's reported agent of "kbinBot".
The issue has been fixed, and I observed that one of my kbin posts to a lemmy.ml community was successfully pushed to the original instance.
---
Edit:
Here are all the links that I've found with the lemmy.ml admins discussing the issue:
- https://lemmy.world/comment/1082149 (appears to have been where they first noticed and fixed the issue)
- https://lemmy.ml/post/1920972 (posted a few hours later, provides additional context for what happened)
This post was originally advising kbin users that lemmy.ml has been shadowbanning all of kbin since the beginning of the month, but that was corrected earlier today (7/10).
Content from this community should begin flowing in again. As proof, you can see this post actually made it to the original instance, despite this post only being third one that is visible to kbin.social.
Why YSK:
While I'm sure that most Germans reading this post title are thinking to themselves "keine Scheiße", in other countries it is possible to go your entire life without being exposed to the unabbreviated word. "The Nazis were bad and did inhumane things, here is a list of those atrocities" tends to be the extent of what many people learn or retain during their primary education. The ideology itself and a country's descent down this path regretfully do not tend to get nearly as much time in the spotlight. This leads many people who are secure in their own morality to assure themselves that there is no way that they or their fellow countrymen would be capable of repeating the same tragedies. The irony is that the more secure you in the infallibility and moral superiority of your country's nationalists, the more your country is at risk to following in the footsteps of this regime.
Orwell's inspirations for the Newspeak language can be found in The Principles of Newspeak, an appendix to the book 1984:
> > > Even in the early decades of the twentieth century, telescoped words and phrases had been one of the characteristic features of political language; and it had been noticed that the tendency to use abbreviations of this kind was most marked in totalitarian countries and totalitarian organizations. Examples were such words as Nazi, Gestapo, Comintern, Inprecorr, Agitprop. In the beginning the practice had been adopted as it were instinctively, but in Newspeak it was used with a conscious purpose. It was perceived that in thus abbreviating a name one narrowed and subtly altered its meaning, by cutting out most of the associations that would otherwise cling to it. The words Communist International, for instance, call up a composite picture of universal human brotherhood, red flags, barricades, Karl Marx, and the Paris Commune. The word Comintern, on the other hand, suggests merely a tightly-knit organization and a well-defined body of doctrine. It refers to something almost as easily recognized, and as limited in purpose, as a chair or a table. Comintern is a word that can be uttered almost without taking thought, whereas Communist International is a phrase over which one is obliged to linger at least momentarily. In the same way, the associations called up by a word like Minitrue are fewer and more controllable than those called up by Ministry of Truth. This accounted not only for the habit of abbreviating whenever possible, but also for the almost exaggerated care that was taken to make every word easily pronounceable. > >
We live in a world where it is possible to never come across the unabbreviated form of "Nazi" unless we happen to be reading a Wikipedia article describing a fictional language used in the book 1984. If you find that concerning, you might want to spend some time researching the transformation of Germany or Italy under fascist leadership. Some of my favorite anecdotes are from They Thought They Were Free, which contains recollections from ordinary German citizens during the Nazi regime. It includes their observations of how their country's transformation slowly but inevitably crept up on them. Here's an excerpt:
> > > "You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty. > > > > [...] > > > > "And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way. > >
Greetings from kbin.social! We can't see any of your existing four posts from our instance yet, so I figured I'd kick things off with a hot take to get people talking.
I've lurked in /r/lightnovels for awhile, and a common opinion that I've seen is that Disciple of the Lich is skippable because it is "another misunderstanding story with a dense and overpowered protagonist". I can definitely understand the burnout with those tropes, but I also think it's a selling the story's potential short.
To me, Disciple of the Lich is basically One Punch Man: RPG Edition. It takes the concept of an overpowered protagonist in an RPG world and plays it straight. The primary viewpoint character for this isn't the protagonist, but Pomera: the newbie half-elven shaman that he recruits early on. What is it like from a NPC's perspective to be power leveled against nightmare fuel enemies to the point where you are basically superhuman? (answer: recurring PTSD) What happens when an over-levelled healer accidentally uses her staff bonk on an average level adventurer? Exploring RPG meta jokes like these is what the series does well, and it functions at its best when it is being a genre parody like Konosuba instead of trying to tell a serious story.
Is Kanata dense? At the beginning, very. Like Pomera, he was power leveled in a small period of time. Unlike her, he wasn't born into the fantasy world and was misled by someone much more powerful than him into believing that the world is a scarier place than it actually is. The fact that his master still is more powerful than him anchors him to this mindset for two books. That's no small amount of time investment, and anyone who is already burnt out on clueless protagonists probably isn't going to have the time for that unless there is something else that grabs their attention. That goes double if they aren't a RPG fan and their ride isn't made any better by the genre jokes. Contrary to what some people have come away with, Kanata is not as oblivious to his master's crush as people seem to think he is, and I think the author recognized this sentiment enough to address it in one of the bonus stories.
Overall, I don't think Disciple of the Lich is perfect by any means, but what it does well it does very well. I just don't think it's the right series for everyone, and I say this as someone who didn't find Sword Art Online very appealing with how its main character was handled. I'm by no means a fan of protagonists who coast along through no real merit of their own, but I still like this series quite a bit. I think anyone who finds these bread crumbs I'm dropping interesting should give it a fair chance and make up their own mind. If you try it out on that basis and still think the series is meh, well, that just means I've got a strange attachment to it I guess. :)
Almost 15 years ago. Not my MC, but I worked at the same company for several years leading into it. None of the glory is mine, and I am not any of the named or fired characters in this story.
The setup needs some backstory for the MC to fully marinate, so bear with me for a moment. Tl;dr at the end.
---
Cast of Characters:
- Mr. Wheatley: VP of Technology. The protagonist, at least in his eyes.
- Lamprey: \\Lead Developer\\ \\Career Backstabber\\ Director of IT at time of MC, and sycophant attached to Mr. Wheatley
- Bottom: \\Director of IT\\ \\Manager of Systems\\ Guy who gets demoted every time Lamprey or Wheatley's knives need sharpening. He stubbornly refuses to quit despite the messages being sent, which is why he earns this moniker despite my like for the guy.
- Chad: Originally our phone guy. Dispenser of MC who enters late into the story.
- Chadette: A floor manager. Single mom with cancer and two sons that she struggles to provide for.
I once worked IT for a callcenter selling a morally questionable study product. The scam isn't obvious when you're interviewing for the position, but once you start walking the halls long enough people start talking and you learn what's really going on. The company has changed its name and product several times for legal reasons since I left, a fact well-known to us worker bees helping our later employers verify that the shithole company listed in our work history actually existed at some point.
In addition to the questionable nature of the product, the company itself was basically a bingo card for corporate corruption. Shipping department pocketing the difference between standard and expedited shipping if the customer requested expedited and was within a certain mileage of the package carrier? Check. President knocking up his executive assistant behind his wife's back? Check. Friends of that executive assistant being given casual walks around the block while being told to keep their faceholes shut about what they know? Check, and probably because the CEO is the wife of the President. Oops?
It was in this environment that the protagonist enters the story. We shall call him "Wheatley". Wheatley is an IT enthusiast (particular emphasis on this word) and stakeholder in the company who had recently returned from setting up a chemical plant in a country known for its lax safety standards. For reasons unknown to us worker bees, Wheatley had decided that he wanted a position of leadership over the IT department. The powers that be granted his wish, inserting a "VP of Technology" above the Director of IT.
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Bottom is the Director of IT. Intelligent, but occasionally pensive and nervous when pressured. Despite these tendencies, he will usually stand up for what he feels is the decision with the most objective merit. Poor guy never stood a chance.
-
Wheatley has a doctorate. Some of you working under douchebags probably know where this is going already. Wheatley wanted everyone to know that he had this doctorate, as evidenced by his insistence in correcting any employee who did not address him as "Dr. Wheatley". He will be henceforth referred to in this post as Mr. Wheatley. Mr. Wheatley is an abusive narcissist who is convinced that he is a comedian and knows technology better than the people reporting up to him. His standard joke is to scrutinize the opinions of employees multiple rungs beneath him and joke about firing them. These "jokes" are always given a halfway serious delivery that communicates to the target that he is in fact halfway serious and could have them defenestrated if the mood suited him. He has an unhappy marriage and occasionally unleashes his scowling daughter on the mostly empty cube farm where IT resides, whereupon she crayons on those cube walls in a desperate bid for attention from the father who is too busy palling around with the executives upstairs or making a nuisance of himself in front of the worker bees who would rather be spending time on their actual jobs.
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Lamprey is the lead developer and began palling around with Mr. Wheatley during a transition between buildings. When we arrived for our first day at the new location, we learned that 1) Bottom had been demoted into "Manager of Systems" (a role created specifically for his demotion) and 2) Lamprey had been given the Director title in his place. Questionable, but okay.
So begins their reign of terror.
---
In his new role, Lamprey is a standard issue IT egoist who knows a few things and has let this get to his head. This self-assuredness is what won him a seat at the table of Mr. Wheatley. He does not like having his authority questioned, regardless of the merits involved in the opposing arguments, and will ensure that a disciplinary slip lands in your HR folder the next day if you fail to follow his direction on implementing something to the letter. (warnings? what are those?)
Chad is hired around this time. He was brought into the systems team to help wrestle with the phone system, but also dabbles with Linux in his spare time. He is not an actual Linux guy and makes sure people know this. For reasons unknown to Chad, Mr. Wheatley immediately takes a shine to him. It's probably because Chad has a good sense of humor, but also because he's not as worn down as the other worker bees and able to keep a smile on his face while laughing at Mr. Wheatley's shitty jokes, all the while hating his guts just as much as the rest of us.
A few months pass. Chad strikes up a relationship with Chadette, a single mom with cancer struggling to provide for her two sons. They are both cool people and this was a genuinely awesome thing. This was, unfortunately, one of the few high notes that year for their mutual work friends.
- One of the two guys in helpdesk who everyone knew had a baby on the way gets laid off with no notice.
- Disciplinary slips continue to fly on a whim, including to an employee who worked a night of unbilled overtime at his own discretion to try and make a solution work after Lamprey decided that he didn't want any more time being spent on it. (incidentally missing a call from a friend who committed suicide that night)
Needless to say, morale in the IT department is at an all-time low. So what does Mr. Wheatley decide to do out of nowhere? Demote Bottom again! Chad is stunned with disbelief when he (the phone guy!!) is promoted to manager over Bottom and the Linux admins, who he previously reported to. Bottom is no longer a manager at all, and his direct colleagues are people who have been with the company prior to the VP of Technology role even existing. He stubbornly refuses to quit despite this, but this is the last straw for some of his colleagues and they bail out of respect for him even if he is unwilling (or unable?) to do so for his own pride.
---
The MC
Chadette is still fighting against cancer, and some days are much worse than others. Chad had started living with her recently, and occasionally comes into work late because he is helping to get her sons to school.
For this next part, it's important to understand that most IT employees enter the building through a side entrance that is closest to the server room. It is immediately adjacent to a stairwell, and only leadership and IT have access to badge through the door. For this reason it is generally a low traffic area.
One day, Chad arrives late from dropping off Chadette's sons and finds Mr. Wheatley standing on the other side of the door waiting for him. It is very deliberate. It is at this point that he drops a quip that is stunning, even with his well-entrenched reputation for being a shiteater.
"You know, at some point, you really need to think about what is more important..."
Chad is stunned into silence with disbelief for a moment. Did he hear that correctly? He knows that Mr. Wheatley is aware of the extenuating circumstances, so is it actually possible that he just said that out loud? It takes a moment to process, but Chad was given his name for a reason in this story, and he has balls of steel.
Chad turns right back around, walks back to his car, and drives home. Message received, motherfucker.
When Chad doesn't show up to work the next day, it probably begins to sink in with Mr. Wheatley the extent to which he just fucked up. Particularly since the only person who is good at wrangling the phone system has ditched -- arguably the most important person in callcenter ops. To his credit (unless it was because something broke), he waits two weeks before he finally gives Chad a call on his cell. Wheatley plays it cool with Chad and starts with making small talk, completely ignoring the elephant in the room. Everyone is cordial. Once Mr. Wheatley has a good sense for the temperature and determines that hands are not going to emerge from his phone and repeatedly slam his face into a wall, he finally broaches his main reason for calling.
"So, when do you think you're coming back to the office?"
Chad could get justifiably quite angry here, but he's already thought this through ahead of time.
"That was my notice." click
A few months later, I'm hanging out with Chad and Chadette at their house and this story is relayed to me over showing him BlazBlue multiplayer on PS3. They were awesome people who deserved each other, and I couldn't be more proud of how he chose her over one of the biggest workplace douchebags I've ever had the displeasure of encountering.
Bottom finally quit sometime after this if I have my timeline straight. Poor Bottom. :( Eventually there was a near full turnover of everyone who had been in the IT department since before Mr. Wheatley joined the company, and he got grilled for it. Lamprey was still there because, well, he's a goddamn lamprey.
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tl;dr
IT "enthusiast" with partial ownership in company has a VP position created for himself over IT department, erects a hegemony of asskissing around himself, demotes a director twice until he is no longer a manager at all, lays off an employee expecting a baby with no notice. Douche canoe finally gets his comeuppance when the most vital ops employee quits without notice after being told to choose between work and his girlfriend with two sons and cancer. Eventually there is a full turnover of IT, minus the sycophant who got promoted for his asskissing. Get fucked, Mr. Wheatley.
Edits: Neglected to mention that there had been a full turnover of IT under Mr. Wheatley's watch, minus Lamprey. Age of Blazblue on PS3 used to better approximate when this happened. Importance of MC wielder's job function.
blightbow @kbin.social Just another Reddit migrant, not much to see here.
I subsist on a regular diet of games, light novels, and server administration.