The first ten on today’s playlist:

When you like a candidate, extend the offer. Agree?

As someone points out in the comments, there was never a real job here. This was all done to get free work from the candidate. I’ve had this happen to me once. Had a company that wanted me to re-design their network as an interview task. It was obviously a ploy to get high-level work from someone with more skill and experience than anyone on their team.

I debated whether I should come up with some completely unworkable (but looked like it would function) crap and let them try to put it in place, or to just say “fuck no.” Just because designing a plausible but dysfunctional network would actually take a lot longer than creating something good, I declined and said they could pound sand. They probably did eventually find some poor, desperate sucker to do it for them for free, though.

How common is it to get rejected by women as a man?

The most common experience on the planet for men is that one. Including this fun one that happens a lot to most men:

I’ve never understood that but I guess it’s about power? It used to happen to me fairly often, be minding my own business, doing nothing at all. Then, “I have a boyfriend.” Ok, great, who cares. Then I started responding with, “Good for you.” Then after that didn’t seem like enough, I started responding with, “So do I!” to really piss ’em off.

Makes no damn sense how people act sometimes.

This is from a book released in 2008; Infected by Scott Sigler. And all I have to say is LOLOLOLOLOLOL:

SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, had been tagged by the media several times over as the next “nightmare plague.” While the disease was potentially fatal, and had racked up a significant body count in China, it wasn’t a major threat to a country with an efficient medical system like the United States. SARS was, however, a contagious, airborne disease, which explained the Racal suits and the quarantine. The bottom line on SARS? Enough of a danger to make people pay attention, but it really threatened only the elderly and Third World countries—and in America, that was never enough to create a panic.

I know I write about this all the time, but I cannot help it. It’s simply mystifying to me how many people genuinely and sincerely believe it when companies and governments tell them that they must be harmed supposedly for their own good and for “security.”

Why do y’all buy into this bullshit? Never mind, don’t answer that. Here’s what you need to do instead for your own good and for security: send me all your money. All of it. It’ll be good for you. Very good. I promise.

I’ve been too afraid to ask but fuck it. Why not a snapshot, why always a back up. What’s the big difference?

Because a snapshot is only for protecting against minor mistakes and not a catastrophic error. A snapshot and a backup are not the same thing. Not even close. A snapshot resides almost always on the same system as you are changing and depends on the existence of the element/VM/whatever you’re altering as well as the continued viability and existence of the underlying infrastructure that it all collectively lives on.

Meaning that a snapshot is only useful if you do not destroy or otherwise render the greater system you are working on effectively inoperable, or do to the same to the target system that the snapshot depends on. If you do either of those and do not have a backup, you are gonna have a bad time.

And yes, I’ve seen it happen. Not to me personally, luckily, because I am paranoid about good backups. But I have helped many other IT people recover from catastrophic errors where they thought a snapshot was good enough.

It wasn’t.

I just automatically hate anyone who likes Gödel, Escher, Bach. Such an atrocious, insanely-bad book. Just utter trash. Fake intellectualism and clownish in every aspect.

The first ten on today’s playlist:

I said Jackie Brown was my favorite Tarantino film, but I might have to change that to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It’s incredibly hard to truly make a film feel like another time — with all the requisite foreignness and the lack of assumptions we hold today. Quentin does that effortlessly in Once. I can count on one hand the other films that manage this.

Also, the entire cast is so incredibly good throughout. Margaret Qualley, though, just blazes on the screen like the tail of a close comet on a moonless night. She has more charisma than should be allowed by law.

Quentin’s magic power is getting the very most out of his cast. Very few directors seem quite able to pull that off. He takes actors who are mediocre elsewhere and just lets them (makes them?) shine.

Just such a good goddamn film.

Sadly, Margot did not show up so I guess the wedding is off.

Drat. She seemed really into me!

As a bi woman wow it is so hard to pick up girls. I feel for the men.

Indeed. When I was younger, I would’ve given anything to have the vast choice that straight women have.

Someone on Reddit said that dating for men is like trying to find a drink of water in a desert, while dating for women is like trying to find a drink of clean water in a swamp. I think that’s roughly accurate.

Getting rejected all the time and how extremely passive women seem in dating really sucks though. I don’t understanding being that passive and I guess I never will (having not been raised or socialized that way).

Around the World in Eighty Lies. How a writer fabricated a series of stories for Atlas Obscura.

God I have such a good bullshit detector. I read a number of these stories — not even realizing they were by the same author — and thought, “Reads like hogwash to me.” Because they seemed so specious, I never linked to the pieces and stopped without even finishing most of them.

Anything that at all reeks of Malcolm Gladwell just instantly throws me off. All of Mastbaum’s journalistic turds did that. Someone really should pay me for this because I can detect BS 10 miles away and upwind.

What’s a moment in your life that felt like a real turning point, but might seem insignificant to others?

When I realized at about 13 that I could just…do things. I vowed to do whatever I liked and fuck anyone who hated me or wanted to beat on me.

And so I did. Improved my life and social standing immensely. Got me some more scars too, but what can you do? (Well, bash some bully heads in, which I also did.)

I was so happy that they had an extended and pretty-accurate B-17 checklist scene in Masters of the Air. They could’ve cut that out and didn’t.

I am angry about how women treat me now.

Fully fuck how shallow people are in general. Funny, getting hotter has made me more incel-sympathetic (note: I am definitionally not an incel).