All Or Nothing Review
All or Nothing is a TV series on Amazon Video that follows a sports team through one season of their respective sport. It originally started as a behind the scenes documentary of the NFL, focusing on the Arizona Cardinals. However, they’ve now expanded to rugby and soccer. I’ve only watched the football seasons, but in general the show is really compelling. Elements I like: The storytelling: you get to put Read More
Read by Learning
There’s this manga series I like to read, but for whatever reason, the translation group stopped releasing English scans of the series. I can’t read Japanese, but I did find Chinese translations. However, my Chinese ability is a bit rudimentary. To get around this, I use Google Translate to interpret phrases and characters I’m unfamiliar with. Here’s my strategy: translate the whole phrase and see if it makes sense. Then, Read More
Mammon: Best Idol?
There’s a famous expression, “The love of money is the root of all evil.” Which is a damn shame, because money fucking rules. I don’t just mean in the typical sense, in that money opens up a lot of doors and also lets you buy cool ass shit – I mean in the sense of its utility and the different abstractions money can represent. For example, there’s a pretty popular Read More
Fix My Shit
I’ve been skimming my past blog posts, and it’s the damnedest thing – I noticed my editing is horrendous. Tons of typos, weird word omissions, and in one particular case, it felt like a whole paragraph was lopped off somewhere – I just stopped writing mid-sentence and moved on. I’ve got some ideas about why this happens: One, I either don’t proofread or I skim. Makes sense why these errors would Read More
On Miracle Drugs
Burn extra fat! Recover from injuries/exertion faster! Put on more muscle! You see a lot of advertisements for miracle drugs that make dubious claims – At Walgreens, they sold green tea diet pills that claimed to help burn fat faster. They had a shelf dedicated to these diet pills – I deemed it the snake oil section. What’s crazy to me is how much bullshit gets hawked as legitimate, when Read More
Remembrance of Earth’s Past [Book Review]
*** This article contains spoilers for the series. *** I’ve been working my way through the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy recently. I’m currently on the last book, Death’s End, which is pretty good, but out of the three, I found the least compelling. It’s pretty good so far, but I finished the first and second relatively quickly when I started reading. I’ve been reading the third book in bits and pieces over Read More
Goblin Slayer Review
Oops, I stopped blogging for a while. I don’t really have any excuses other than some major life changes and laziness. Actually, the major life changes should have served to increase my blogging input, because I have way more free time now that I’m not working anymore. The important thing is I’ve started up again, so here goes. ***Spoilers ahead, nothing too major but if you’d rather read this series Read More
On Culture Fit
I’ve been on a bit of a culture kick recently – how to propagate an organization’s culture, how to prevent culture takeover, and onboarding newcomers to your existing culture. It really interests me because of how general this concept is – it’s applicable to any group that grows beyond a single person. I’ve also been looking for a cheap, good value server to use as a personal virtual private network. Read More
On Crucibles
Hazing rituals at frats are falling out of fashion nowadays, but I think the core concept of the ritual is valuable to any organization. Pressure is a tried and true way of establishing rapport and building intimacy between a shared group. It’s not something that is guaranteed to build relationships, but it’s certainly conducive to it. Think of situations like army troops that survive multiple battles together. There’s no way Read More
On Human Relations
I feel like HR in a business is widely considered to be a job for soulless workers who exist in an adversarial capacity against anyone who threatens the livelihood of the business, but mostly in the form of internal threats. Largely, when I hear of HR, I hear of ways in which the business finds ways to proactively shield itself against its own employees. I understand the need for this Read More