The special actually marks the feature-length debut of Casper Kelly, who has shown his mastery of subversively creepy comedy with the likes of a Blair Witch Project parody starring Mystery Inc., called The Scooby-Doo Project and, most famously, the hilarious and horrifying 2014 short film, Too Many Cooks.
The filmmaker has also written for cartoons like CatDog, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Squidbillies, as well as co-created the live-action Adult Swim series Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell. One of his first contributions to more earnest horror was in the 2018 movie Mandy where he crafted the bizarre in-universe commercial for a branch of mac-and-cheese called “Cheddar Goblin.”
You can watch the Adult Swim Yule Log (aka The Fireplace) on HBO Max or here:
Being good coaches – Organize your team so that each person is working in their sweet spot (where they can use their strengths and are highly motivated to contribute) – then challenge them to perform their best by continually engaging with them to help solve their problems.
Not micromanaging – Managers need to trust their employees and not get involved in every little detail. Needing to be informed and involved in every decision is a roadmap to demoralizing a team.
Show interest in employees’ wellbeing – Gallup poles indicate employee wellbeing has six dimensions: emotional, career, social, financial, physical, and community. Leaders should be aware of how each employee feels about each of these elements of their wellbeing before they become an issue of burnout.
Listening to the team – Strong active listening skills are the foundation for good communication. Managers that have good active listening skills are able to hear problems earlier, develop trust, and win the hearts and minds of those they manage.
Help with career development – Managers who believe in their team members maintain a high view of them by showing interest in the work they do, the career aspirations, and creating learning and development opportunities for their people.
“If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you’ll end up in the Backrooms, where it’s nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.
God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby because it sure as hell has heard you”
The Backrooms is an urban legend and June 10, 2019 creepypasta which originated in a 4chan thread about unsettling images. It’s one of the first examples of liminal spaces — an aesthetic that creates unique feelings of eeriness, nostalgia, and apprehension when presented with such places outside of their designed context. They often involve pictures of familiar places that usually are busy – but are empty in the photo.
Super Eyepatch Wolf does a great little documentary on the phenomenon
The tread became hot, and in 2019 someone created a free indie game on Steam that let you wander the Backrooms. You wandered the generated space with nothing but the sound of humming lights and fighting for your sanity. Cue countless spinoffs and alternate takes – none of which were as good as the original.
Fast forward again to Jan 2022, and Kane Pixels created some amazing found-footage style re-creations that are some of the best entries since the original. Give it a watch to get that creepy feel of wandering alone in an empty mall or parking lot at night while getting the creeping feeling someone, or something, is following you…
Update 07/29/2023
Someone has created a free Steam game that lets you play this VHS style walking experience. The Complex: Found Footage
It’s all over the news that tech layoffs are everywhere. It appears that layoffs in tech are already well above the pace of the Great Recession of 2008. The treading for 2023 is looking to be even worse. Some say that the fundamentals of this tech crash are much better than the 2001 dot-com crash, but we’re clearly on a very bad, and accelerating, job loss trajectory.
Alphabet: 16-week base severance package with an additional two weeks for every year of employment at Google, Pichai said in a memo to employees. Laid-off employees will also have “at least” 16 weeks of share vesting accelerated and receive 6 months of health-care coverage.
Microsoft: Benefit-eligible U.S. employees are to receive severance, six months of health care and stock vesting, and 60 days of notice.
Amazon: Amazon is offering full pay and benefits over a 60-day period, when Amazon will keep them on the payroll but they won’t be expected to keep working. After that period, Amazon will offer laid-off employees several weeks of severance depending on their length of time with the company, a separation payment, transitional health benefits and job placement. It’s unclear if Amazon’s severance package includes any provisions that would allow employees to accelerate the vesting of stock compensation.
Salesforce: Laid-off employees would receive a minimum of “nearly” five months of pay. Benioff’s letter to employees also said that laid-off employees would receive health insurance benefits and career resources. Severance packages would include six months of health-care coverage and a “minimum of two months outplacement support.”
Meta: Zuckerberg promised “every” laid-off employee 16 weeks of severance, plus two weeks for every year of service, as well as vesting of restricted share units and health insurance coverage for a predetermined amount of time.
Twitter: Musk had previously said that laid-off employees would receive three months of severance pay. But some Twitter employees said that when they got their severance letters, they were offered only one month of severance in return for a non-disparagement agreement and a waiver of their right to sue the company.
Valefisk is a game designer that has decided that games can be a great way to troll and torture his friends and players.
In the past, he’s done a variety of game playthroughs – but severely abusing the mechanics in hilarious ways and with completely bonkers self-imposed challenges. The videos are all really good examinations of our assumptions about games and how violating those assumptions produces hilarious results. He took the low-budget peasant farming game Farmer’s Life and played it trying to stay as drunk as possible while completing challenges (he called it the Eastern European living challenge). Playing the empire building game Victoria 3 but with a traitor like Among Us. Imagine playing a CS:GO tournament but the actual player is blindfolded and a second person is trying to tell the player where to go and shoot. He creates cities in Skylines that are nothing but roads. Plays battle games with no unit caps and even playing Crusader Kings but only allowing marriage alliances that are incest.
More recently he has started purposefully making games to torture and befuddle his friends. He’s made such creations as EXTREME Monopoly, a first-person adventure game with purposefully broken mechanics and puzzles that make no sense, and a host of other troll playthroughs of games. more recently a board game that is just…hilariously evil.
He unleashes it on his friends – one of whom appears to be nursing a massive hangover.
Groundbreaking immunotherapy for repair-deficient colon cancer
The findings of a small clinical trial with 14 patients were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting in June 2022 by researchers from MSK. In six months of treatment with dostarlimab, a monoclonal antibody therapy drug, all 14 patients saw their colorectal cancer tumors vanish entirely.
In the study, all 14 patients received the immunotherapy treatment dostarlimab as the first-line treatment for mismatch repair-deficient locally advanced rectal cancer. MSK researchers administered single-agent dostarlimab, an anti-PD-1 monoclonal antibody, every three weeks for six months in patients with mismatch repair-deficient stage 2 and 3 rectal adenocarcinomas, to be followed by standard chemoradiation and surgery.
All 14 patients who initiated treatment and had at least six months of follow-up saw no evidence of a tumor through numerous tests including an MRI, PET scan, and biopsy to name a few. Because of the disappearance of the tumors, none of the patients required chemoradiation or surgery.
While mismatch repair-deficient colon cancer is not the most common type of colon cancer (only about 3-5% of colon cancers), the findings showed astounding results of what appears to be an actual cure for this type of cancer without surgery or chemotherapy. 5 years of follow-up monitoring will be required to confirm this result, so there is still a long way to go.
William Shatner became the oldest person (90 years old!) ever to go into space in 2021. He spoke about the experience immediately after the fact. It was clear that it shook him up, but we would have no idea until 2022 when he released this statement in an op-ed for The Guardian. In it, he describes his experience of a well documented phenomenon experienced by many astronauts – the Overview Effect:
While I was looking away from Earth, and turned towards the rest of the universe, I didn’t feel connection; I didn’t feel attraction. What I understood, in the clearest possible way, was that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death. I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, of adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet.
This was an immensely powerful awakening for me. It filled me with sadness. I realised that we had spent decades, if not centuries, being obsessed with looking away, with looking outside. I played my part in popularising the idea that space was the final frontier. But I had to get to space to understand that Earth is, and will remain, our only home.
This highly emotional and moving experience is a well known phenomenon. Wikipedia gives us a good description of the Overview Effect:
The overview effect is a cognitive shift reported by some astronauts while viewing the Earth from space. Researchers have characterized the effect as “a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus”. The most prominent common aspects of personally experiencing the Earth from space are appreciation and perception of beauty, unexpected and even overwhelming emotion, and an increased sense of connection to other people and the Earth as a whole.
One of the earliest experiences was by Edgar Mitchell in 1971 as part of the Apollo 14 mission and the 6th man to walk on the moon. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1970, but had this to say when looking at the Earth from his trip to the moon:
“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.”
Casino Azul makes some pretty crazy Tequila bottles: weird still contraptions, animals, funky glass constructions with flowers in them, and even ships and AR rifle bottles.
No word if their tequila is actually drinkable, but that’s usually not the point with these sorts of things.
I think everyone has heard of the scandals at some of the largest game studios. Sexism, emotional abuse, gaslighting, and toxic working conditions were just some of the stories that have come to light. Many smaller developers have been extraordinarily vocal at denouncing these studios at GDC and online.
Fast forward a year or two, and now we’re finding out that some of the most vocal Indies are turning out to be as bad, if not worse, than those they were complaining again.
This isn’t to denounce these particular people – but to point out that abuse can happen anywhere and everywhere. Anyone or any group that pretends to be superior than others are almost certainly putting themselves in a position to become hypocrites. After all, we’ve seen these issues from triple A studios to indies to Linux kernel development to world renown peace and love artists like John Lennon.
Flannery O’Connor’s is famous for saying “tenderness leads to the gas chambers”. It was borrowed by Walker Percy in his novel The Thanatos Syndrome, but what did O’Connor mean?
The plot of Percy’s book involves a group of well meaning scientists who discover a drug that makes everyone happy. It calms people down, eradicates their stress and guilt. The results are terrifying and hilarious. The local community begins to disintegrate into crimes of passion, but no one really cares because everyone is “happy.” This idea is even played out as a completely unrelated recent horror game called We Happy Few.
Both O’Connor and Percy are not opposed to well meaning tenderness per se. They are opposed to tenderness or compassion as the only virtue. It appears today that anyone that dares to make a statement that is critical of anyone else – then that person who has made the observation, stated an opinion or even simply stated facts–will be excoriated, vilified, cancelled and censored by the thought police.
When the tenderness police take these steps they do so with a terrifying self righteousness. The gas chambers are operated by people who believe they are doing something good. They are ridding the earth of the unworthy–those who dare to not be tender enough. If you think this is an exaggeration ask yourself about the attitude of those who already censor, use emotional blackmail and attempt to silence and exclude those who are deemed incorrect. Do they not go about their campaign with their heads held high–confident in the righteousness of their cause and confident also in their own superior virtue?
What happened to the old adage: live and let live, or respect different opinions, or using reasoned data based debate and arguments to decide the best ideas (instead of emotional appeals and the use of logical fallacies)? I guess that’s where the phrase “Evil preaches tolerance until it becomes dominant – then it silences good”
