Thelo's tumblr

After the city took over operation of La Ronde, the amusement park section of the former Expo 67 site, it’s alleged they raided and had Belmont closed to reduce competition, but the park was aging and in 1979 one ride collapsed due to poor maintenance.

i keep seeing digital records suggesting people are working significantly past our normal hours. a comment left a 8pm. a task marked closed at 9pm. in one particularly notable case, a commit at 3am.

we are regularly told not to do that. I remember pretty early on getting a talk like 'you're not supposed to keep working past our normal hours unless something exceptional is going on'. when I talked to the 3am guy, he told me our bosses were really upset about that and told him in private that he definitely shouldn't have done it. so these are not people strategically pretending to be working late to fake dedication, because leaving records that say you're working late is not rewarded.

so you're thinking, "ah, obviously you're being given an unreasonably large workload and not enough time to do it. they say you shouldn't work late to comply with some policy somewhere, but really you are expected to, because otherwise they'd be yelling at you about all the missed deadlines."

and the problem with that theory is that i'm not working late and i'm frankly not even pushing myself that hard and taking frequent breaks and y'know posting on tumblr during work hours and i keep getting good feedback on my performance and keeping up with everything I'm supposed to be doing? I have worked late once this year and that was a meeting that ran long that I couldn't exit politely, not me failing to keep up with my workload. 'secretly i am so much more efficient than these other people that i get the same amount of work done in half the time' doesn't seem that plausible! but I don't know what is in fact going on.

Around 1610, a massive drop in atmospheric CO₂ was recorded in ice core samples. It has been attributed to the deaths of approximately 50 million indigenous North Americans due to smallpox, brought by colonizers from Europe.

I took the cargo ops class at school but my teacher explained that it doesn't give a certification and I'd only be okay for ship's crane and the school forklifts. she said I could take an online exam and get my cert. I paid 60 bucks.

I'm googling and I'm seeing a lot of resources saying that the online programs cover the classroom part of the exam but not the in person practical aspect.

29 CFR 1910.178 (l)(2)(ii)

Hi, [YOUR NAME], how are you? How is [whatever you know about them: your family/your pet/ sports team etc]? I hope everything is good! :)

I was wondering if you could help me with [thing you need from them, in the most succint way you can put it: the sales reports/ the filing system/ XYZ information etc]. Do you have a second to chat?

That's the beauty of async! It's not real-time! It doesn't matter whether it's a short or long question, you can just take the time to type it out right away, and whenever the recipient gets to read your message, they can know what you're asking immediately.

(Number of weddings, Québec, 1971-2024. Note: Same-sex weddings are included since 2004. Source: https://statistique.quebec.ca/fr/fichier/mariages-quebec-2024.pdf )

In a healthy competitive community, you spend your time 1) putting yourself in direct competition against others, and 2) immediately afterwards discuss with your opponent about how the both of you can improve from there. That's because if you want to improve as a competitor, the best way is to surround yourself with other competitors who will constantly test the boundaries of what your playstyle is capable of doing, while improving their own.

Let's say you find a specific "trick" in the game, that few people have seen. Maybe it's novel enough that most players just don't know how to deal with it, so you end up relying hard on that one trick. But what happens when an opponent actually knows how to deal with it? If you're flying solo, it might take a while before you figure it out. You don't want to pay a lot of time and effort to travel to a tournament, and have your first exposure to opponents who know how to deal with the trick live, during your tournament match.

So you go to your local meetup, you think of a way someone can get out of the trick, and you straight-up teach them. You say "hey, you know that trick I always do? It works like ABC, maybe try doing XYZ to counter it?". And then you can see how you deal with opponents who actually know about your trick, and reach the next level.

I find it really strikingly similar to the platonic ideal of a debate, where after the two sides use arguments and test each other's positions and viewpoints, both sides come out closer to the truth. The point is that yes it's a confrontation, which can feel like an attack in the moment, but it's also ultimately constructive - both parties accept temporary incomfort to reach greater heights.