If you haven't played What Remains Of Edith Finch, and you like games with an excellent narrative, treat yourself and get it. It's a short game, you can complete it in an evening, but the story it tells is beautiful.

Until recently I worked for a big telecoms company as a software engineer. We had time set aside for self development and non-work projects. Originally it was half a day a week, but we found it better to be a day every fortnight.

You could learn a new programming language or tool, build something just for fun or something you thought was useful for the team (we built a custom dashboard with notices etc., a quiz engine for weekly quizzes), or add functionality to a project that wasn't specced or requested, but you thought could add value.

After a while, a department wide code wars league was set up to challenge and learn, we had a yearly Easter egg hunt that involved solving puzzles to find prizes, people did lightning talks to teach things that they'd learnt, workshops, etc.

So much knowledge, skill and confidence was added to the team that was worth way more than what we'd do on any normal day. I'd recommend it to any technical team to try something similar.

According to his trans daughter, he was treating her like shit long before this, so he's always been an asshole.

This is why we say "the cruelty is the point" because this is where that cruelty leads.

It's because they're alpha version. They haven't gone through beta testing, been selected as a release candidate, sent to QA and finally released. They're only alpha.

I'm visiting Naples at the moment with my Italian boyfriend, and I remarked to him that Naples has a lot of places that people can just hang out without spending money, something that the UK has lost. Part of this is due to the climate, but also corporatism hasn't hit Italy as hard as other western countries. It really is a shame.

It's not. Plant estrogens have a similar structure to human estrogen, but do not work the same in the human body. You can tell this is true because otherwise trans women would be downing soy milk like there was no tomorrow.

This is such a stupid project. You could fit the same size city in 6km x 6km and it'd be bigger than what they have planned. Much cheaper and easier as well, and no reason to kill anyone... Oh wait, I see the incentive.

As a gay man, most of my list doesn't have names. Why would I remember their names? Some I didn't even ask.

I'm 4 weeks away from my voluntary redundancy. I was planning on leaving the job this year anyway, as I wanted to move, so to get a nice paycheck with it was a definite bonus.

Of the people that chose voluntary redundancy, it was mostly those without ties to the area, those that could move, young enough to re-skill, or old enough to retire. The ones that were forced into redundancy have families, mortgages, history in the area, enough baggage to cause inertia. Part of my reasoning to take the voluntary redundancy was to help save at least one person from that.

So absolutely, consent matters. It just sucks that this is happening at all.

The company's stated reasons for redundancy was to move skills to other locations in the country. This is after a year's long effort to co-locate in order to facilitate collaboration. What it really seems to be is that our location has very high staff retention, and therefore high salaries, and the company thinks it can hire younger and cheaper elsewhere. The skill and knowledge lost with this move is staggering, everyone can see that, but profit is the most important factor the company cares about, so it'll inflict its own wounds to get profit up. Capitalism is weird.

I used to work in a new age shop that sold rock salt lamps. A woman came in one time to complain about the lamp she bought.

Woman: My salt lamp was dusty and dirty.

Me: Okay...

W: So I took the rock salt off the base.

Me: Hmm?

W: And I washed it with hot soapy water.

Me: Ah.

W: And it just dissolved!

Me: Yep, it's salt.

W: I want a refund.

Me: laughs.

Years ago, I worked in the IT department at a university that brought in an MDM for accessing work email on personal devices with a policy of wiping the phone if you got your unlock code wrong 3 times. I refused to use it on my personal device and told the head of the department that it was far too risky as you could accidentally do this with the phone in your pocket. He disagreed, but less than a week later, this exact thing happened to him, got his unlock wrong 3 times, phone wiped, no backup done. He still refused to change the policy even with the inconvenience it caused him. I just laughed.