[syndicated profile] ideas4sustainability_feed

Posted by Joern

By Molly Parker, on Baumann et al. 2025, Design principles for social-ecological research at the landscape scale applied to western Rwanda, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0330704. (full citation at the bottom of this post). How can a study be designed to take into account both social and ecological systems while encouraging researchers from different fields to work together? The recent paper … Continue reading

Nominations Clarifications - 1/?

Sep. 22nd, 2025 10:35 pm
[personal profile] sassysnowperson posting in [community profile] swrarepairs
Hello Everyone!

We are well on our way through nominations cleanups, and we've discovered some tags that could use clarification. Please read the following and respond if you see your tag (Anon is on for comments). You are also welcome to respond if it is not your tag, but you think you have input that may help the mods in figuring it out - please clarify that you are not the nominator in that case.


Clarifications



Ordo and Fi


To the mods’ knowledge, there are two characters named Fi, and ‘Ordo’ could refer to different people or even a planet. We suspect there's a decent fandom consensus for these names, and will approve as-is unless Legends fans or the nominator indicate a clarification that would be helpful.

  • Fi/Ordo (Legends)

  • Fi/Ordo/Maze (Legends)

  • Fi/Sev (Legends)

  • Fi/Sev/Scorch (Legends)

  • Ordo/Maze/Arligan Zey (Legends)

  • Ordo/Maze (Legends)



Vague Tags - Canon vs Original


There are a number of nominations that could hypothetically be filled by either a canonical character or an original one. If we don't hear back from you, we will approve as-is. If it's approved them as-is, then your creator can either choose an appropriate character from canon or create an original one that otherwise fulfills the tag. Please comment below if you would like these tags changed to be clear (ex: Any Canonical Female Jedi or Original Female Jedi)

  • Bo-Katan Kryze (Disney)/Any Female Jedi (TCW)

  • Leia Organa (OT)/Any Female Jedi (TCW)

  • Original Female Republic Navy Member/Any Female Jedi (TCW)

  • Arla Fett/Any Female Jedi (Any)

  • Jedi Master of Choice/Jedi Padawan of Choice (Any)

  • Mand'alor of Choice/Mandalorian of Choice (Any)

  • Sith Lord of Choice/Sith Apprentice of Choice (Any)

  • Any Male New Republic Senator (Any)/Luke Skywalker (Mando)

  • Original Female Republic Navy Member/Any Female Jedi (TCW)

  • Bil Valen| Sixth Brother/Unidentified Black Sun Agent (Any) (Note - for this one we would suggest Bil Valen| Sixth Brother (Any)/ Canonical Unidentified Black Sun Agent (Ahsoka) if you want the specific Black Sun Agent that appears in the Ahsoka show)

  • Rakatan Predor of Choice/Force Hound(s) of Choice




Selfcest


We have rejected the following self-cest pairings, due to the fact that they could hypothetically be fulfilled by a fic about masturbation, and this is outside of the spirit of the exchange. Note - if you want to replace this tag by something that clearly can not be fulfilled by a solo-fun-times fic (ex: Hunter/Time Travelling Older Hunter (TBB)) , please comment your preferred tags below.

  • Hunter/Hunter

  • Crosshair/Crosshair



Matt the Radar Technician is not Star Wars


Nominator, we get it, but Matt the Radar technician is not, technically, a star wars character. This nomination will appear rejected in your noms, but it can be found in Crossovers (Non-Star Wars) as "Matt the Radar Technician(SNL)/Rick the Door Technician (Any)". P.S. - your nom made me laugh, thank you.

General Information


You may also see some rejections coming in. These generally happen for one of two reasons - the nomination was in the wrong fandom (ex: including Disney Canon characters in Legends fandom nominations) or the nomination is no longer rare (Congrats and I'm Sorry). If you have any questions about rejections/nominations in general, feel free to reach out to the mods on discord, via email, or comment below, anon is on.

What's next?


We've reviewed somewhere around 400-500 tags today, but there's still some more to go! We may need to issue a further clarifications post, but once the tags are all reviewed and the tagset is cleaned up, sign ups will open!
[syndicated profile] pivot_to_ai_feed

Posted by David Gerard

The Tony Blair Institute is the brains trust for Keir Starmer’s Labour government in the UK. The TBI is the driving force behind the UK government plan to go full AI — it has a pile of tech donors, who just happen to be the companies the government’s giving all the AI contracts to. And TBI has been pushing hard for AI in government since before Labour was re-elected in July last year.

Now, with AI Britain in full swing, TBI has surveyed the British public — and the public doesn’t like AI so much. [TBI]

The survey’s a mess and it mixes up machine learning that works — where the problem is when it’s abused — with generative AI that glaringly doesn’t work. But the answers are clear either way — people do not trust the robot.

  • 39% view AI as a risk to the economy. Only 20% see AI as an opportunity.
  • 72% want more laws and regulations on AI — and that number’s gone up from 62% in 2023. The public wants the government not to give the AI vendors free rein to break regulations.
  • 88% want the government to “stop the use of an AI product if it poses a risk of serious harm.”

These numbers roughly correspond to other surveys of the public. The Guardian ran a survey in mid-September with the same sort of numbers, and the Trades Union Congress — the union of unions in the UK — ran a survey in August. About half the UK just do not trust AI. [Guardian; TUC]

There’s one gap in this report — it repeatedly insists AI is fantastic, and dodges very hard the minor detail that the most heavily promoted generative “AI” frequently just doesn’t work. But they did ask what the barriers to adoption were. The biggest, at 38%, was “lack of trust in AI content”. It turns out the lying chatbot is not trustworthy.

What does the Tony Blair Institute recommend the New New Labour government do? Regulate better? Stop pushing AI that doesn’t work? Ahaha, no:

Just like hype can be dangerous, so low trust in AI can lead to significant opportunity cost by slowing the rollout of well-functioning, socially beneficial use cases.

They’re worrying here about numbers that aren’t even majorities. 39% against AI in a survey is enough doubt to put the entire UK government AI scheme at risk. Good work, haters!

So what’s the Tony Blair Institute plan?

Understanding and improving public attitudes towards AI is thus an urgent task.

It’s not our lovely AI. You plebs are the problem. Your bad attitude The government’s job is to manage the public — that’s you! — correctly.

TBI recommends use cases that matter to people! Human-centred benchmarks, not just technical ones. And stronger regulations.

That all sounds actually useful. But TBI also recommends “digital upskilling” — that is, more training in using the chatbot. And “outreach activities to increase awareness”, which you may have already had a gutful of.

So we should expect the government to push the chatbot twice as hard, spend a lot of time and money telling you how great the chatbot is, and gloss over the bit where the chatbot doesn’t work for any real job where the details matter. Business as usual, then.

[syndicated profile] askamanager_feed

Posted by Ask a Manager

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. My office is infested with wasps

I work in a field where telework for any reason has been prohibited by our CEO. We can telework and did throughout the lockdown portion of the pandemic, but he’s aggressively against it now. Some offices and some supervisors are more lax about allowing it, but mine are not.

Separately, our building has been harboring a reoccurring wasp infestation. Every summer, the building fills up with wasps. I guess my employer has complained about this to our landlord, and in response the landlord has used canned, commercially available wasp sprays a couple of times, administered by our building’s maintenance team. At no point in the five or so years of this occurring has anyone involved a professional pest control company. My employer acts as though this is not their problem and not something they can fix, and that their only recourse is to ask the landlord to address it.

I don’t feel like this is adequate. Some employees have been issued those electric flyswatters to attack the wasps. One was left on my desk as though to make the wasps my problem.

Here’s the thing: it’s not that I’m scared of wasps, although I am. I can work despite being afraid. The problem is this: I am allergic to wasps. It is in my medical record that I am allergic to wasps. I carry epi-pens, which I have to pay for out of my own pocket, because I am allergic to wasps.

In the past, I had permission to go home and telework when the wasps were out. It wasn’t always practical to do. That permission has been revoked. Work isn’t even sharing information about the wasps or addressing any of this widely — I only know about the wasps being back because others warned me, and I had to beg my supervisor to even tell me if anything is going on.

I don’t know what to do, other than tell my coworkers how to use an epi-pen and where to find mine. Should my supervisors be doing more? Should my employer? I feel like I’m losing my mind.

What on earth?! They’re just accepting having a wasp-filled building year after year and not insisting that a professional exterminator be called? Or just calling one themselves?

This is so absurd that I wrote back to this letter-writer and asked if wasps were a stand-in for something else to help keep them anonymous but nope, it’s wasps.

So first and foremost: can you and your coworkers band together and push for a professional to be called? Say you feel unsafe and you’re not willing to work surrounded by wasps.

But as for you specifically, go the formal accommodations route! Talk to HR, use the words “formal request for accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act,” and explain you’re allergic to wasps and it’s not safe for you to continue working around them and you need a wasp-free spot to work in. They can decide how to achieve that, whether it’s letting you work from home, finding a wasp-free space in your current building, or calling a damn exterminator.

2. Whispering in classes vs. whispering in work meetings

This is a question about how a situation I’m dealing with in academia would transfer to the rest of the working world. In my college classes, I have a few students (underclassmen, but still adults) who consistently whisper/giggle through the lesson, sometimes when I’m not paying attention to them but sometimes when I obviously am! I’ve tried various things, like asking in the moment if they’re ready to participate, emailing after class, or warning about the impact on their grades, and this has decreased the volume but not stopped the behavior. I’m probably going to escalate to asking them to leave class or putting in a formal report with the administration (which is fairly standard practice at my school). These are short classes with 30-40 students, and I try to use a lot of interactive activities to break up the lectures (although I think I should expect them to listen even if I lectured the whole time).

What I’m wondering, as I’m trying to gauge the right response, is how this would be dealt with in a work context? I assume they’d be firmly warned about the behavior, probably in private (not easy for me to facilitate, since I only see them in class and I know some of them don’t read email), but then what? Could someone be fired for obviously whispering through large meetings or trainings every day, despite warnings? I want to take seriously my responsibility to prepare these students for the working world, and I’m also just always curious about how things work outside the strange bubble of academic life!

In a work context, they’d either be spoken to privately afterwards or directly asked mid-meeting to stop, depending on how disruptive the behavior was. In theory it’s something someone could be fired over if it continued, but in reality it’s very unlikely that it would get to that point — that’s just not something that tends to happen a lot at work; once someone has been asked to stop a few times, they tend to stop. That’s probably because the stakes feel higher at work.

I’m not an expert on teaching, but in your shoes I’d just ask them directly in middle of class to quiet down so they’re not distracting others. If they continue after that, ask them to leave so they’re not disrupting people who are trying to learn. If not being in class impacts their grades, that’s a natural consequences of the behavior — but I don’t think you need all the separate stuff about warning the whispering itself will impact their grades, reporting it to the administration (which feels like overkill, even if it’s standard practice at your school), or even teaching them a lesson about how it would go over at work.

As college students, whether or not they’re learning is up to them. But controlling your class environment so people who want to learn can learn is up to you, and you should just tell them in the moment to stop or leave.

3. A colleague’s name and mine are so similar that clients mix us up

I am one of four people at my company who do my job: think, four vets and a number of assistants and office staff. Pet owners don’t have to request a specific vet, but they often do. It’s in my best interest for people who ask for me to get to see me: it’s better customer service plus the numbers will eventually shake out into next year’s salary. The problem: my last name is extremely similar to the last name of one of the other vets. (Think Dr. Thomas vs. Dr. Thompson.) To make it even worse, we bear a slight resemblance to each other. Nobody who knew us would have trouble telling us apart, but we are the same general physical type. She is also more charismatic than me and, I’ll just say it, somewhat more popular with clients.

So, we get a steady stream of people who ask to see her, when I think they meant to ask to see me, except what if they really are asking to see her? There are a few clients who have seen us both and prefer her, and a smaller number of people who have seen both and prefer me, and some who probably don’t care but she will end up with that appointment for reasons outside of my control.

We can’t use pseudonyms like they do in customer service, because our real names have to be findable for various regulatory reasons. This has been going on for years and I’m no closer to a solution. Any ideas?

Would you be willing to use your first name — as in Dr. Jane or similar? I know it’s not traditional in medicine, but it’s also not unheard of — and it may be the easiest way to help people differentiate between you!

4. Taking sick days as a new employee

I began a new job about three months ago. It is a higher level position that requires board certification, if that matters. I currently have a mild respiratory infection. Though I have been to a doctor and tested negative for both flu and Covid, I have opted to take two days off. I simply do not feel up to performing at my full ability, and I am also trying to keep my germs to myself. Prior to taking time off, several coworkers noticed that I looked visibly ill and was losing my voice, and I have a note from my doctor. However, I am mostly worried about optics, since I am still relatively new.

In my last position, which I held for almost four years, I rarely took time off. That was my own choice, as I truly enjoyed being at work. However, when I left, I found myself unable to cash out all of my unused PTO due to a recently implemented policy. I am trying to set healthy boundaries for myself this time around, one of those being utilizing my available time off. My question is, in this situation of being a new-ish employee, does it reflect poorly on me to take these two days off?

You’re three months in. You’re obviously sick. You have nothing to worry about!

Frankly, even if it were your third week rather than your third month, people get sick! Your body doesn’t halt all illnesses just because you’re new to a job, and you’re not expected to come to work sick (and potentially infect others) just because you’re new. It’s not ideal to miss work when you’re new, but it happens. And you’re three months in; this is a non-issue.

Related:
Getting sick your first week at a new job

5. Job ads with a single number instead of a salary range

I’m job hunting for the first time in years and have been glad to see that many companies are including salary information in their job postings. However, a couple of times I’ve seen something that I’m not sure how to interpret: instead of listing a salary range, there’s a single figure listed. Should I take this to mean the number is firm or close to it, or go in assuming that that number is some part of what’s actually a range for the position (and if so, what point in the range is it likely to be?)? Why do companies do this?

Sometimes the number is firm (particularly in companies with policies around salary equity, where they want/need to ensure that people doing the same job at the same level aren’t compensated differently just because one person negotiated better than someone else). Sometimes it’s more indicative of the general range. You can’t really know from the outside, but in general it makes to assume that even if it’s a range, it’s a range pretty close to the number they named.

The post my office is infested with wasps, whispering in meetings, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

Balance

Sep. 22nd, 2025 11:59 pm
nineweaving: (Default)
[personal profile] nineweaving
I like that the New Year and the equinox are in balance. May this year bring peace.







Nine

Rug of a different sort and recs

Sep. 22nd, 2025 08:48 pm
donutsweeper: (Default)
[personal profile] donutsweeper
So many, many years after we probably should have we finally went out and bought a new bed to replace the 20 yr old futon (do not be me, that was *far* too long to keep that cheap thing) and when taking apart the bedframe I found an old braided rugs I'd stored between the board and the slats in an attempt to flatten it *ages* ago.

And when I say ages, I mean ages. As I vaguely remembered posting about it, I search through my livejournal and found a mention of pulling out the rug to work on (while watching an episode of due South, good taste past!me) in a post from December 2007 (2007!! who knows when I actually started it) and included a picture of the rug then:



The rug I pulled out only had two more color rounds completed so wasn't all that much further along but was left with a long section of braid unattached and needing new strips sewn on. I never quite mastered the technique of sewing on the new strips properly so that the seam didn't show and always found lacing the braid to the rug was frustrating, fiddly and hard to do for any length of time without hurting my back so it's not surprising I just gave up at some point. Tension was always a perpetual problem so I must have shoved the rug there in an attempt to flatten it. (Something that mostly, but not completely, succeeded). Deciding to just figure out some way to finish it (unfortunately, that's a part I had never really mastered either) I eventually finagled something and TADA:

35” x 20” braided rug

(Do I need another rug? No. Do I have a place for the rug? Also no. Am I also in the process of making a knotted rug that I took a break from to finish this guy off? Yes. Do I have a place for that rug? Bwhahaha, no.)

Anyway... Just a few more days left for Yuletide nominations! We get 5 slots, it's so exciting! (I really need to make an actual decision on my last slot, I've been waffling for ages about it)

And, last but not least, [community profile] recthething tumblr art recs (whoops, I've been forgetting to crosspost these here, sorry!)

Batman
- images that came to me in a vision. i just needed to see him in a nice cottage kitchen. (this vision of Batman made me laugh)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer
- buffy summers more like buffy snork mimimi <3333

Guardian
- boop the snoot (Adorable cat!da qing booping Zhao Yunlan)

Merlin
- [Dragonlord merlin - 2]: Magic returning slowly. (subtle but sweet)

MDZS/The Untamed
- His love language is being a menace (WWX has the best expression on his face when teasing LWJ)
- I have drawn many, many pictures of Jiujiu Holding A-Ling! Yet somehow, not enough. So I present to you all: Another One (adorable grumpy jin ling!)
- Emotional support hug (aww sweet)

Supernatural
- lazarus rising as a paperback (there's a whole series of these linked on the post and all are amazing)

Under the Skin
- Not sure if they should drink this… (Late night Shen Yi/Du Cheng and a very judgy but adorable cat)
- Cat Cuddles "Because everyone need a little sweetness in september I decided to make a fluffy little animation of DuCheng being adopted by the 2 cats of the house" (absolutely adorable)


Tomorrow is Rosh Hashanah, L'Shana Tova everyone! May your new year be sweet!

Links: here comes the sun

Sep. 22nd, 2025 07:38 pm
sonia: Quilted wall-hanging (Default)
[personal profile] sonia
Santa Rosa cyclist on cross-country adventure rescues kitten, rides him hundreds of miles to safety — and a new home by Kerry Benefield. *teeny* *kitten*!

Mojave phone booth
a lone telephone booth in what is now the Mojave National Preserve in California. It attracted online attention in 1997 for its unusual location – it was located at the intersection of two dirt roads in a remote part of the Mojave Desert, 12 miles (19 km) from the nearest paved road (Interstate 15 to the northeast, Kelbaker Road to the southwest) and miles from any buildings.


The Future Is Coming and It's (Literally) Sunny: Notes on the Solar Revolution by Rebecca Solnit.
[I]n the western Mojave desert of California I passed in quick succession three vast renewable energy sites: the first was three solar concentrator power plants, the kind where rings of mirrors reflect sun onto a central tower, which I think is now an outdated model, but it was striking to see the literally dazzling array; the second was a big field of solar panels around the town of Mojave t hat appeared to be tipping toward the setting sun; and then a long array of wind turbines just before the desert ends as the road heads uphill into Tehachapi


Learn about ecological restoration or get out of my way by [tumblr.com profile] elbiotipo.
Now, you can go to Península Valdés and find that the whale population there is growing year after year, people can see them from their windows. In Iberá, where yaguaretés were extinct for over 70 years, there's now a population of 35 and growing, after being reintroduced just five years ago. As for rainforests?


A food designed for astronauts now fuels first responders and new moms by Madeline Taub. "Oakland resident Ryan Dowdy came up with the idea for READYBAR while working on food systems for the International Space Station." Kind of an ad, also a cool success story. No, I haven't tried them.
labingi: (Default)
[personal profile] labingi
Happy Bilbo and Frodo's Birthday! (In the great crossover 'verse in my mind, Frodo is 96 this year, I think. My math is bad, but for reasons unlikely to become apparent right now, my reference point is he's 46 years older than me, so.)

In honor of this year's birthday, I thought I'd respond Tolkienesquely to a video I recently watched, LibraryofaViking's "What Modern Fantasy Gets Wrong (and why it matters)," which is interesting and nuanced, and, its clickbaity title notwithstanding, respectful toward fantasy old and new.



Specifically, I want to respond to the video's reference to R. F. Kuang's defense of fantasy (and SF?) being ideological. I have not seen/read her speech. I'm responding to this video's reference to it; folks familiar with the whole are welcome to add context. I gather that Kuang defends ideological fantasy against the common (often rightwing) critique that it's being ruined by being too "ideological" or "political" (i.e. "woke"). As characterized by LibraryofaViking, she argues that it is artistically valid to take an ideological stand and pursue it didactically in a genre novel.

The Problem I See with (Some) Modern "Ideological" SF&F

I agree ideological didacticism is valid (i.e. it should be publishable and socially allowable, and it can have good artistic quality—Jemisin, for me, is an example; I haven't read Kuang). Likewise, I agree the rightwing critique often has a subtext that the problem is not (entirely) being ideological but being leftwing. It's not just critiquing bad writing; it's critiquing values the critic doesn't agree with and casting this disagreement as a question of "writing quality." Side note: these aren't separate issues; values and artistic quality are entangled, but they are also not the same thing.

That said, as someone often annoyed by the didacticism of modern SF&F, for me, the problem is not that it's ideological; it's that it's simplistic. Read more... )
full_metal_ox: A gold Chinese Metal Ox zodiac charm. (Default)
[personal profile] full_metal_ox posting in [community profile] fancake
Fandom: Mo Dao Zu Shi, Chen Qing Ling
Pairings/Characters: Gen; Wei Wuxian, Lan Wangji, Jiang Cheng, Lan Xichen, Jiang Yanli, Jin Zixuan
Rating: General Audiences
Length: 26 photos
Creator Tags: char: jiang cheng, char: jiang yanli, char: jin zixuan, char: lan wangji, char: lan xichen, char: wei wuxian, fanwork: other
Creator Links: (AO3) [archiveofourown.org profile] Technomancer28; (DeviantArt) [deviantart.com profile] Abyss-Valkyrie; (Dreamwidth) [personal profile] abyss_valkyrie; (Tumblr) [tumblr.com profile] abyss-valkyrie

Theme: Food and Cooking, Non-Fic Recs: Crafts

Summary: So I spent all of yesterday and the night before making cupcakes and I wanted to try making some MDZS/Untamed character themed ones so these were very self indulgent and made me happy,lol.

Reccer's Notes: Exactly what it says on the tin: various characters from The Untamed, as symbolized by a photospread of fluffily ornate cupcakes; my own favorite is the Jiang Cheng one in fluorite swirls of violet and teal.

Fanwork Links: The Untamed cupcakes

:dusty-stick:

Sep. 16th, 2025 07:45 pm
marginaliana: Buddy the dog carries Bobo the toy (Default)
[personal profile] marginaliana
Various:

--Currently reading Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke, which is a silly epistolary novel told via slack messages at a PR company in which one of the characters has had his consciousness mysteriously uploaded into the company's slack channels and all his coworkers think it's a bit. Also Slackbot is having an existential crisis. Also the gentlest of satires of a PR business carries on around it all. I have actually read this before but did not retain it (as discovered when I checked out the ebook and it opened to the last page) but that just means I get to enjoy it fresh. Do recommend as very light reading.

--The makers of the game Shovel Knight wanted the characters to be body and pronoun swappable - this is a great article about their process of designing the system

--The Book of Love by Kelly Link - DNF. I don't even know any teenagers but I know this is not what teenagers are like, even if they've just come back from the dead. Contains: stereotypical teen sister drama with zero nuance, mysterious authority figure knows things but doesn't reveal any of them and speaks only in the most cryptic of ways because reasons, etc. There was one interesting/creepy bit of worldbuilding but I couldn't be bothered to see if anything came of it because I was so annoyed by everything else. It doesn't seem like it was sold as YA but god it felt desperately 2004-YA. And jagged, in that way modern pop literature uses jaggedness to mean reality. Anyway, unsurprisingly this got rave reviews and I hated it violently.

--Reread Jonathan Livingston Seagull which I believe I last encountered in my teen years and the only reaction I can manage is disdain. But why? Has western society passed out of the time of fable? Am I too close-minded for metaphor? Or is the book just fundamentally not very good? Honestly, I really don't think it's very good. I'm prepared to accept it conceptually but the different sections just don't go. It's cramming five different concepts into a seagull-shaped trenchcoat, and three of those concepts are trying to bite each other's faces off.

--Everyone should tell me their yuletide nominations just so I can be delighted about things I'm probably not going to write.

Critical Role + AO3

Sep. 22nd, 2025 09:42 pm
settiai: (AO3 -- stultiloquentia)
[personal profile] settiai
Oh, good! I was hoping that the AO3 would come up with a plan for the Critical Role tag before CR4 started next week, and it looks like they have.

I know that I didn't have to do it, but I went through and edited all 64 of my Critical Role fanworks on the AO3 to change the fandom from Critical Role (Web Series) to Critical Role: Exandria (Web Series). I also added a non-canonical fandom tag to each of them to make it very clear which campaign/miniseries they belong to, if only because it's starting to get a bit complicated.

For those curious (which is approximately no one), the non-canonical fandom tags that I added are as follows:

Critical Role: The Adventures of the Darrington Brigade (Web Series),
Critical Role: Bells Hells (Web Series)
Critical Role: Mighty Nein (Web Series)
Critical Role: The Screw Job (Web Series)
Critical Role: Vox Machina (Web Series)
Exandria Unlimited (Web Series)
Exandria Unlimited: Calamity (Web Series)

... although admittedly I was already using several of those non-canonical tags prior to me editing my fics today. It's really just the three main campaign tags that are newly added as of today.

crowdsourcing

Sep. 23rd, 2025 09:28 am
nnozomi: (Default)
[personal profile] nnozomi
So as you may have seen I spent some of my last post grumbling about the (emotional and practical) difficulties of starting to look for a publisher for my original thing (or rather, starting the Rube Goldberg process of finding an agent who... etc.). With helpful advice from qian and others, all much appreciated, I am trying to take some more concrete steps, but right now I'm stuck on finding comparative titles for my query letter. The thing is, a) I don't have access to all the books coming out in English (there are SOME in bookstores, and if I know what I want to read I can order it, but I can't just go down to the store or library and read everything that comes out) and b) I am a very fussy reader and I just don't read that widely among new books! I don't know what there is out there lately!

so please let me know if you have any ideas about books that partake of the following:
Essential:
-- published within the last three to five years (sigh)
-- SFF
Any of the below:
-- AU early 20th-century England or Europe
-- New magical system
-- Multiple protagonists who are friends but not lovers
-- M/M romance which is plot-relevant but not the main focus
-- M/M romance involving strangers/quasi-enemies to lovers
-- Male/female friendship between colleagues
-- Colleagues from wildly different backgrounds who share a passion for their work
-- Political machinations, preferably against a monarchy
-- Get-out-of-jail subplot

...that's all I can think of at the moment. Possibilities I have right now are Freya Marske's The Last Binding series and, although it's older than they're supposed to be, Zen Cho's Sorcerer to the Crown. I want to say Emily Tesh's The Incandescent, because it chimes with my mind so well, but I can't actually think of any directly comparable points, oh dear.
(For the record, don't worry, I am not going to name a book in a query letter without having read it! I can get hold of promising possibilities if I need to, but I have to know what to look for first...).

Daily Happiness

Sep. 22nd, 2025 05:53 pm
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[personal profile] torachan
1. I decided to stay home today. Pretty much all the tasks I've been working on are now at the step of waiting for someone else to get back to me so I can do something else, so if I'd gone to work it would have been sending out reminders and poking around a bit of stuff here and there, and I just didn't feel like it. Even though taking three weeks off earlier this year knocked down my PTO balance enough that I don't need to worry about it maxing out immediately, it will max out before we take our planned trip next year, so I've got to use some days here and there to knock it down a bit more anyway.

2. Since it's not a usual day off, I didn't have any usual chores or errands on my to-do list and mostly just read and played Donky Kong Bananza (which I am still enjoying a lot). I did take a midday walk, which was much nicer in our neighborhood than at work, since we actually have a lot of shade if I stick to certain streets, which I was able to do since I was not going anywhere specific, just walking to walk.

3. I finished up another puzzle this morning, the first of those new Disney ones we got. It turns out they have rounded corners, which I wasn't expecting. Carla did the whole border, so I didn't actually have to deal with them, but since they're just a bit curved, I don't think it probably makes too much of a difference in difficulty.



4. Ollie's such a sweet guy.

scintilla10: Emily smiles elusively, looking down and to her left (Revenge - Emily)
[personal profile] scintilla10
[personal profile] letzan posted about recent "high velocity f/f fandoms":

I want to shine an occasional spotlight on fandoms that are in flux. There are two kinds of fandoms here:

  • Fandoms that are growing rapidly, which are typically not in the top 20 now, and may never get there, but might be interesting for F/F readers to check out and encourage.

  • Fandoms that are losing ground on the top 20, and seem to be "post-peak." They may well peak again in the future, but it's a good moment to look back at the impressive amount of F/F which has been written so far.


There were some real surprises (to me) in both the list of femslash fandoms that are growing over the last 3 months, and those "losing ground." [personal profile] letzan is also soliciting femslash recs for all of the fandoms listed in the post!

Take a peek for yourself.
[syndicated profile] askamanager_feed

Posted by Ask a Manager

A reader writes:

This may not be an answerable question, but I’m interested in your views on what makes company culture. I ask because my very small (fewer than 10 people), 100%-remote company recently hired a new employee, and during the interview I anticipated that the candidate might ask about company culture and I realized that I would not know what to say.

This was an unusual hire for our company, because it was only the third time in our more than 10-year history that we’ve hired someone who had no previous connection to a current employee.

A quick overview of my company might provide helpful perspective: a couple of us have been here since the company’s inception; everyone else was brought in (usually without posting the open position) because one of the company leaders knew and liked them from previous jobs. Though I recognize the benefit of hiring known quantities, I’ve expressed discomfort about this trend, as my fear — borne out many times over — is that these employees would come in and just resume the relationship they had with the person they knew previously rather than get to know everyone as a new “cold” employee would need to do. The result, in my view, is that our workplace has, in place of its own culture, a bunch of separate 1:1 relationships—some of which overlap to the point of being cliques.

All of this got me wondering if there were certain essential components that go into what people think of as company culture—things like physical space or a critical mass of employees.

The new candidate never did ask about company culture, which may be a good thing, because I think my answer would have had to be, “We don’t have one.”

You have a company culture, whether you realize it or not. I bet if you asked non-leadership employees, they’d have an easy time describing how they view the culture. Of course, whether they’d be candid about it is a different question — and that’s also part of culture.

Culture is basically “how we do stuff here.” Here’s just a partial list of what it includes:

    • how most people communicate, both logistically (lots of Slack? video calls? texting? slower than other companies?) and stylistically (blunt and to the point? lots of softening expected? how deferential are people expected to be? are people more task-focused or relationship-focused, and what happens if someone is out of sync with that?)
    • how hierarchical vs. free-wheeling you are
    • how much people are expected to work within or without existing structures
    • how people provide feedback (and to who, and what it sounds like, and who gets listened to and why)
    • how fast-paced you are
    • what values you have about how you operate (for example, are you all about making life easier for your clients, no matter the inconvenience to you? do you reward or discourage speaking truth to power?)
    • how collaborative vs. siloed you are
    • how decision-making works
    • what meetings are like (do they start/end on time or drag on? do people feel they’re a good use of time or are they widely acknowledged not to be? do action items from them get captured and followed up on in a real way, or is it no big deal if they effectively disappear?)
    • what daily interactions look like
    • how much urgency people are expected to operate with and on what things
    • how much value you attach to process over outcomes
    • how information gets shared (do people generally know what’s happening and why?)
    • what the bar is for performance
    • how people are held accountable in their work
    • how appreciation is shown and experienced
    • how problems are addressed
    • how much time is set aside for reflection
    • how mistakes are viewed and handled
    • what office politics look like
    • how conflict gets handled
    • how much good will people have (and are expected to have) toward their colleagues
    • what hours people work
    • how time off is managed and perceived

… and on and on.

I once heard someone say, “Culture is what happens when the boss leaves the room,” and that’s a good description of it too.

In your case, it sounds like part of your culture might be that the team doesn’t feel cohesive — that it’s a team of individual relationships functioning independently of each other, without a lot of collaboration or trust outside of those silos. That’s a part of culture! (It’s also a part of your culture that you can work on changing if you want to. You’ll need to articulate what you’re seeing and how it affects the organization, name what you’d like to see instead, and figure out how to deliberately move toward that.)

For what it’s worth, hiring only people who you already know will bring additional problems too: you’re more likely to end up with a group of employees who are all very similar to each other (demographically and/or in world view), and you’re missing out on potentially stronger candidates just because you don’t already know them. When you’re very small, sometimes it can make sense to hire like that, but as the organization grows larger (and you’re probably at that point now), continuing to hire that way is very likely to hold you back and impact the results you get over time.

But bringing new people into a culture like you described risks being rough for those new people if you don’t first get more deliberate about what you want employees’ experience to be there.

The post I don’t think my company has a culture at all appeared first on Ask a Manager.

Bundle of Holding: Weird Wizard

Sep. 22nd, 2025 01:57 pm
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[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


The SHADOW OF THE WEIRD WIZARD corebooks, supplements, and adventures.

Bundle of Holding: Weird Wizard
[syndicated profile] askamanager_feed

Posted by Ask a Manager

A reader writes:

I just finished conducting a job interview where it was clear from the candidate’s answer to the first question that he was not going to get the job, but I felt like it would be rude to indicate that so abruptly. So I wasted 20 more minutes of his time going through the motions and by the end we both knew it was not a fit but I didn’t know what to say. Is it ever okay to cut the interview short?

I answer this question — and two others — over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.

Other questions I’m answering there today include:

  • Did my old coworker keep me from getting hired?
  • Resumes without any dates for work history

The post is it rude to cut short an interview if the candidate obviously isn’t the right fit? appeared first on Ask a Manager.

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