Useless Conversation

[HaemishM]

I don't even know where to put this...

http://liveforlivemusic.com/news/matt-stone-and-trey-parker-to-produce-reality-show-starring-dean-ween-and-les-claypool/

I... what?

[Signe]

Haemish!  You took Useless Conversation to page 666!  Now what?

[schild]

Wale and Seinfeld are making an album called The Album About Nothing. Im stoked.

[HaemishM]

Haemish!  You took Useless Conversation to page 666!  Now what?

And lo, the heavens shall reign fire and the seas will turn as blood and a mighty flock of crotchpheasants shall scour the earth, removing the unclean from existence.

[Miasma]

They recently got investors and formed their own production studio so things like this will probably keep popping up.

[Furiously]

The devil is in this thread.

[Yegolev]

I hate the unclean so much.  So much.

[Lantyssa]

Now I can say I've been to Hell and back.

[Merusk]

I feel at home now.

[Sky]

And lo, the heavens shall reign fire and the seas will turn as blood and a mighty flock of crotchpheasants shall scour the earth, removing the unclean from existence.

And here I was going make a joke about spilling the blood and summoning the crotchpheasants. I should've known they were already here.

Now I can say I've been to Hell and back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZW-3-mhnNQ

[voodoolily]

Hooray, VDL! More books to go on the very small history of food shelf I have.

Yes, congratulations!

Next book:

Colons: History of Subtitles

Congrats on your writing career! Will this be another textbook?

Thanks everyone! Chilies will be a lot lighter than Breakfast (though Bfast is written for a general-but-smart audience) - only about 150ish pages. It's part of a whole series of pop-culinary history books that are all really readable. The colons are getting a bit ridonk, but that's just the way it goes.

[Der Helm]

I think my avatar is fitting for page 666, so there you go.

[Chimpy]

Greetings page 666. I will be sad to see you go.

[Segoris]

So is this a preview of what it will be like when most are meeting in hell? If so, I'm kind of disappointed

Also, grats VDL

[Soln]

Congrats VDL!

Edit: hope Matt and Trey somehow work in John Candy Fishin Musician references.

[RhyssaFireheart]

So if this is hell... I thought it would be much warmer.  Who knew climate change would extend this far?

[murdoc]

Problem I have is that I spend a bunch of time on mine, I have a REALLY good meeting with my direct supervisor and then it's passed on to the IT Directory who is petty and obnoxious and will reduce that bonish % "just 'cause". It might only be reduced by 1-2%, but that's exactly the petty things he loves to do. What my Boss does to try to counter-act that is put me into a new category on the Mercer scale so my salary will jump instead of relying on the one time, heavily taxed bonus.

Which is ok by me.

Quoting myself yay - but I just finished disabling all the accounts of the IT Director since he got fired this morning.  Hopefully ends up being a good thing and nice to know it wasn't just me that had issues with him.

[Hammond]

Feels strange disabling a bosses account doesn't it? Although in your case it sounds like you may have enjoyed it..

[Lantyssa]

I've had to do so twice in the last nine months.  The first time felt like shit.  The second time was better (though he wasn't malicious like Murdoc's boss).

It's still a really weird feeling.

[Ironwood]

You'll never forget your first boardroom coup when you're forced to disable the leaving CEO and revoke all priviledge.

 

[murdoc]

I find it hard to take pleasure in someone else's misery - but this was totally deserved and there was a somewhat satisfying feeling to terminating his access. I was promptly booked into a meeting to discuss performance bonuses after the deed was done - so I have a feeling I wasn't the only one who got screwed over and they're re-evaluating it all.

Chances are nothing will change for this year - but hopefully this opens the door for a better environment here.

[Merusk]

Makes me wonder if he had been told, "This is the money your department gets for raises/ bonuses.  Manager salaries are included in that number, so remember when dividing it up."

Yes it's dumb to do it that way, but I've been two places that did it exactly like that.  What a surprise that the average non-management raise was in the 0-2% range every year.  No, there was no automatic cost of living adjustment.   

[Salamok]

You'll never forget your first boardroom coup when you're forced to disable the leaving CEO and revoke all priviledge.

 

You make it sound like you took a lead pipe to his knees.

[IainC]

You'll never forget your first boardroom coup when you're forced to disable the leaving CEO and revoke all priviledge.

 

You make it sound like you took a lead pipe to his knees.

You make it sound like you don't think that he did.

[Lantyssa]

The hookers were practice for the real thing.

[murdoc]

Makes me wonder if he had been told, "This is the money your department gets for raises/ bonuses.  Manager salaries are included in that number, so remember when dividing it up."

This is pretty much it - each department is given a number and that number is to be divided up for raises/bonuses. Managers can make suggestions, but ultimately it was up to the Director where the cash was allocated.

[Merusk]

"Hey, here's all the money for your department. Remember if you give out too much you don't get a raise so give yourself what you think you deserve and then split the rest up."

Of course, pooling director/ department head pay into decisions made by the next level of management means that the senior executive staff actually has to make a decision somewhere along the line and interact with people outside of the board and we can't have that, now can we?!

[Morat20]

Teenagers exist solely to remind you what a flaming moron you were as a teenager.

Phrases I have heard tonight (and their literal, english translations):

 "Those grades are good enough!" (C is passing, passing is all I need).
"But my grades on my final were great! Why do you care about the last six weeks?" (I had a crap grade because I never did any homework. For two months.)
"I'm still gonna get into college, I don't have to work" (I'm fairly certain my grade inflation due to half-assing advanced classes will keep me in the top 10%, which means I'm theoretically guarunteed a place at A&M or UT, even though I won't be able to afford it).

There was also "Are you calling me stupid?" ("I don't want to be in trouble anymore. YOU can be in trouble! Yeah, feel guilty parent-bitches!")...

*eyeroll*. I finally broke down and said: "You are half-assing high school worse than either I or your mother did. We both had two freshman years and lost scholarships. Logically, you will fuck up college even worse" followed by "You may not have to try to get C's now, but college is harder than high school -- the people you will be around in college will generally be just as smart, and generally work much harder. Your C's now will be F's then. You might be good in a tiny pool, but in college you'll be bottom of the barrel with that effort. And those guys get asked to leave".

UGH. It's like a line of stupid mistakes streching from now until  his mid-thirties and I'm jumping up and down screaming "For god's sake, learn from our fucking examples! Don't fuck up exactly like we did, in exactly the way we warned you about!"

[Yegolev]

Dreadfully inspiring.

Tonight my wife let me know she thinks her period. Is.  Late.    I'm sure it's nothing but the idea is scary when you are forty.

[Morat20]

Dreadfully inspiring.

Tonight my wife let me know she thinks her period. Is.  Late.    I'm sure it's nothing but the idea is scary when you are forty.

My mother in law and my sister in law are convinced that the second our teenager leaves for college, the celebatory sex will result in pregnancy. He turns 17 this year, and that'd put us around 39 or 40.

He's a good kid. He's just....screwing up exactly like both of us did. Exactly. It's painful to watch.

[Paelos]

Dreadfully inspiring.

Tonight my wife let me know she thinks her period. Is.  Late.    I'm sure it's nothing but the idea is scary when you are forty.

Mazel Tov?

[Yegolev]

Let's wait and see, shall we?  Last time I was all pumped and psyched for a new year, it was 2009 and I spent nine months wondering if I was going to have a job in the fall.  If 2013 turns into the year I have to change diapers again, I'm going to be super-pissed.

Morat, my son appears to be almost exactly like me.  This is both encouraging and scary.  The trick will be if I can parent him better than my own parents did... actually that's not much of a trick, but he's still not going to ever listen to us even with mountains of evidence that we know what we are talking about.  Because most of the time I just don't care what evidence exists, I have to do things on my own.  Your stories are things that I can realistically expect to happen to me, if I'm right.

[Morat20]

Pratchett, in Night Watch, has the main character interacting with his younger self. At one point Older Vimes disgustedly talks about how people who say "if only I knew then what I know now" never realize that they were twerps back then. All the screwups in life back then led to you not being a twerp now.

Even when you go back, they're not going to listen to you (even though they are you!) because they're twerps. :)

But you still gotta try. It doesn't help that teenage minds are like half-hooked up and the only parts totally functioning are the bits that drop way more than the recommended dosage of hormones and various mood-changers into their brains. They're literally hard-coded to be short-term risk takers, because risk-taking attracts females (at least similarly mentally screwed females).

I keep having to remind myself that some of the more obnoxious behaviors aren't really his fault.  His brain won't be fully hooked up until his twenties. He's basically running Windows ME in there.

[Selby]

He's a good kid. He's just....screwing up exactly like both of us did. Exactly. It's painful to watch.

Let him fuck up.  Give him ample warning, he flunks out of college, he gets to live in the real world.  I'm a jerk like that though, my parents were hard as nails on me and really encouraged me to NOT fuck my life up at 17.

[Cyrrex]

We have a visitor in our office today.  Looks and sounds like and out-of-shape Niko Bellic.  Thinking of asking him if his cousin has ever been kidnapped.