The first cigarette filters used asbestos.

Sundar Pee in your Eye

I recently read Sarah Wynn-Williams’ book about working at Facebork. Among many other revelations (like, her boss pressuring her to describe the blood coming out of her vagina from a post-birth hemorrhage - something so awful I wonder why in the hell I’m even telling this other story) she said everybody there constantly let Zuckerberg win board games. So in addition to everything else wrong with him, that pale-to-the-point-of-translucent tiny man gets to think he’s amazingly good at board games.

To her credit, Wynn-Williams kicked the shit out of him at Settlers of Cataan and then even pointed out to him where he fucked up.

I’m renovating my house which was built in 1942. Even though these houses were built as temporary worker housing during the war, the 2x4s are just insane quality. Perfectly straight and not a knot to be found in them anywhere. I repurposed some of them as stairway bannisters because they’re so great.

Unfortunately, it took me awhile to notice that they’re all 3.75" x 1.75". I knew older 2x4s were really 2" x 4" instead of the modern 3.5" x 1.5", but I never knew that there was an intermediate dimensional period like this. I kept building new walls 1/2" too high with them until I figured it out because they looked modern.

It’s like all those stories from the 1800s of clocks stopping the moment a person died. Turns out of a lot of the clocks back then would stop running if you turned them sideways, which a lot of doctors did at night to be able to read the time of death.

Jesus Christ. All I found in my house was a hat one of the workers left in the attic when it was built (1942).

One of my profs in grad school had a new house built like that, enormous with almost no yard around it separating it from the neighbors. I asked him why and he said his wife liked it like that because it made her feel more secure. I was like, OK so now your neighbors can easily come kill you and then just go home instead of having to flee from a gated community.

TBF this was in Gainesville right after the Rolling murders. Reading about somebody’s head on a turntable might make you do strange things.

No tolls only fees!

vowing to hold off on any future layoffs

He didn’t say anything about holding off past layoffs. Get ready for some retroactive shitcanning.

If you have somebody gullible enough to hand you a bag full of cash, you have to be there to receive the bag. You can scam from India or wherever, but you have to deal with gift cards and the like.

When I lived in Florida in the '90s, there was a big story in the news about a woman who was contacted by scammers claiming to be the FBI. They told her they needed her help to catch some criminal, and that they needed her to take out $5000 in cash from her savings account and give it to them in a public place. She did this, and they contacted her again and said they almost had the guy but they needed her to take out another $5000, which she did. She only got suspicious and called the cops after they tried this a third time but nobody showed up to receive the money. Apparently they assumed she was on to them and that the third time was a trap set up by the police.

Yeah, I don’t know about the legality of it. Probably worse than the removal of the bedroom was the fact that it also removed one of the two ways of getting into/out of the apartment, so I’m sure it violated fire safety regulations. The funny thing was that the downstairs was a music store with the upstairs being three apartments, and they removed my back bedroom so they could build a new addition on the back of the building. For months, I could just walk out of my kitchen and into the new addition, and had I wanted to I could have just gone downstairs and helped myself to the music store’s stock (like, guitars, amps, synthesizers etc.). The store had locks and an alarm system on all the doors and windows, but nothing securing its connection to the new addition. Oh well, Stratocasters are shit anyways.

I had no idea who he was until he got shot. I was vaguely aware of some right-wing pundit that people made fun of for having a tiny face on a big head. When I saw the assassination footage, my only thought was “damn, that really is a tiny face on a big head”.

I once rented a 2BR apartment and a couple of months in my landlord removed one of the bedrooms. It was like pulling teeth but I finally got him to lower my rent by $50.

My recliner makes a creaking noise whenever I fully recline it. The other day I was napping in it, fully reclined already, when I heard the creaking noise. Way to fucking ruin a great nap.

I literally saved my company twice. We were a small company providing contract programmers to a huge cable company (rhymes with Bombast), producing their mobile apps for them for iPhone, Android and Blackberry. When I started, we had just lost the Android gig because of the sheer ineptness of our offshore team (ironically enough, the gig was given to InfoSys who managed to do an even worse job). We were about to be shitcanned completely because we unable to produce a working TV guide-type application for Blackberry, thanks to the fact that no built-in control for Blackberry was able to handle a moving grid like a TV guide app requires. I produced probably the best mobile app I’ve ever written because I had experience with using Graphics classes for Java and was able to write an entirely owner-drawn control for this.

Unfortunately this was in 2011 as Blackberry was going through its death throes, so this really achieved nothing other than making Bombast want to keep paying us to stay around. A year later we faced getting shitcanned again because we were way behind schedule on the iOS app, thanks to an estimate that I had nothing to do with (our company very intelligently never involved actual programmers in these schedule estimates). I spent an entire week literally living in the Bombast building, coding all day and most of the night, sleeping a couple of hours a night in my George Costanza setup underneath my cubicle desk. We barely made the release schedule and Bombast kept us on again. The vulture capitalist who originally funded us had been ready to stop operations and fire everybody for some time, but this was put on hold.

Shortly after this, we were acquired by a west coast tech giant and us programmers were all laid off. The C-suite got millions in stock options, and I got … a very nice letter of reference when I applied for my school bus driver job. I’m thankful at least that I never had to deal with AI.

“You there … make that great screaming noise again when I impale this thing. Hey! Are you even listening?”

There is no I in raper.

I just read her book. Holy shit are the Facebook execs vile people. Just to pull one turd from the pile, her boss there was Joel Kaplan, the dude who worked for George W. Bush and was part of the “Brooks Brothers Riot” in Florida in 2000. Wynn-Williams had had a baby that caused an embolism; she had something like 25 blood transfusions and was continuing to bleed for months afterwards. Kaplan would conduct one-on-one online meetings with her in his underwear and pressure her to describe the blood coming out of her vagina.

And that’s just one example of the personal vileness of these people. They also manage possibly the most evil company in world history.

🪞 Skinnyfat physique