/
Liberals believe in moral authority; Conservatives believe in it too; those of us who do not, have no where to turn. Beware the future king.
/
On the bright side, PEOTUS now provides exemplary public examples of negging, pozzing, and gaslighting, to teachers of DATDA.
/
To seek peace at all costs is folly. #notahumanist
/
So many people I meet, are comfortable with navigating peace. But when it comes to navigating war, holyshitballs, the game is taut.
/
Conversations should be preceded by an agreement on the intended outcome; or they may proceed at cross purposes. Ok for entertainment.
/
Dreaming of a world where no one expects to be cared for. A better world than this.
/
The computer scientists' gripe about voting irregularities has nothing to do with computer science. Amirite? Not checked.
/
Regret is fueled by desire. Address desire, and there are no regrets.
/
Tiny tangled little bug, caught in veins and arrhythmic smut; now cross your heart and let it fly, spread your legs, and hope to die.
/
Consciousness: check
Vitals: 55%
Privilege: check
Status: brain wakes me up after three hours to let me know I have energy to worry again
/
Not healing fast enough.
/
You hate being subtweeted. And your inner ENFP is showing.
/
I got 99 problem and quite a few are bitchy af
/
Consciousness, check. Vitals, check. Privilege, check. 50 notifications, unchecked. Time for a shower, then to figure out what I can make the world do for me today.
/
Passed the point where we seem to have enough demand for internships... such that we can drop the price to near zero... I hope this keeps up.
/
It's a bit disheartening to hear staff talk about potential hires as being hired on account of their sexual attractiveness... when the candidate's pitch is: free/cheap labour, competent communication, quantitative literacy, and an inherent motivation of gaining experience over cash remuneration.
It undermines the integrity of our workforce, and it is furthermore insulting to all the sexy people that we do not make offers to.
LOL
Addendum: actually the main concern may be that we're giving the people whom we DO hire a false sense of sexual presentability/ legitimacy/ capital. Ew. Ew. Ew...
I've been sitting here in abject disgust, staring at the screen for a full 20 minutes wondering what kind of team I'm working with.
/
Workflows jammed up. Break time. More staffhours required.
/
An empty day, with little stimulus from society, staff, or social circles. Work plods along.
/
Maybe I need to begin every day with a reminder to myself to put, front and centre, the tuple of [ current project, optimise for cash exit until 2023 ], lest I forget the only reason I have for being here at all.
/
When it gets down to thinking about why I am tired, I wonder if things would be different if I wasn't the only trusted trainer/executive for all of: accounting, finance, IT, KM, construction, visual design, copywriting, brand ownership, public relations, investor relations, advertising, coffee quality, the doneness of meat, company culture, regulatory compliance, and variance control.
This is the only poverty I have ever known: to be unable to afford enough intelligence. Now either I work harder to be able to afford more, or I wallow in disgust at every conversation. So, I must work harder.
Which is also why the #workharder meme was inserted into the company culture. If one is not motivated by disgust at the absence of work, nothing can truly motivate one to work.
/
Office hours approach. Time for the twice daily commute from the precipice of my mattress to the precipice of doom.
/
Every time I have to tell a senior staff member, "behave or get out," I remind myself that we were already damned five months ago, so it's just picking circles of hell at this point. :P
/
Time to play, "smack the whiner." Much work to do.
/
Shit. Subsecond to reflective memory transfer latency is still too high. Suspected cause: low frequency of using the former outside wage work, due to write-access getting locked down during work, and not getting unlocked quickly enough when I exit daily wage work.
/
Time to unfuck all the bad habits that we can manage.
- Juicy chicken flesh, not hard.
- Crispy bacon, not limp.
- With hot items: melting ice cream, not hard.
- As a topping: drippy espresso, not gushy.
- Chunky mushrooms, not sliced.
- Dripped sauces, not drowning.
/
staff messaging group:]
Chica: baby, take yo top off
Chica: omg. fml. Wrong group. Ignore me, i'm drunk.
Dude: i volunteer as tribute
CEO: KEEP THOSE ON
Baws: y'all do a Magic Mike skit, i can put it on corp iG...
/
It would be nice to go home to physics one day.
/
Consciousness: check;
Vitals: check; may need to raise ambient temperature - wasting too much energy staying warm;
Privilege: check;
Cctv: check;
Sales: check;
Cash flow: can't do much about it, so delegating;
-
Pause for general reflection. Of course, as I have for nearly two decades, I can wax poetic about having a dream where I live among clever and reasonable people. But I almost never kid myself that it is possible. So, I must remain focused on improving the circumstances within my immediate control.
/
You can tell who's sensitive to what domain of activity by what they consider to be a problem. Difficult ingredients, difficult people, difficult game theoretic landscapes, these are all trivial problems - but whom chooses to engage in conversations on what, that tells you about the speaker.
/
Adapted from a friend's post.)
To pass more Turing tests, a synthete must have: model of human body. Software equivalent of endocrinal reactions, emotion, and other subconscious activity. Information structures equivalent to memory hierarchy in human mind. Limited but non-zero metaprogramming capability (consciousness).
Consciousness is not a state. It is a state machine. Probably of the infinite variety.
/
16 hours down.
Up to...
Kick kitchen projects.
Kick accounts.
Play security guard.
...
/
10pm
- Check doneness of meat.
- Check fermentation of coffee.
- Calibrate ad-spend.
- Standby during abnormal shift handovers.
- Pump toilet. (fail)
- Snake toilet. (fail)
- Close all toilets.
- Shower.
2am
- Tabao lunch for folks.
- Write recipes.
- Register assets in accounting system.
- erm... well, let's see if we're on target with this by 6am...
10am
- Didn't get to accounting.
- But did get bank errands done.
- And found yellow mustard powder.
- Sent diagram and plumbing RFQ to contractor.
/
Hmm. Facebook is most of the social life I have this year. But if I keep talking only about politics, I may have no friends left. LOL
/
It takes a stupid amount of memory for a non-foodie to write recipes. -_- It's a good thing I can still build recipes from memories of food already consumed... I guess it's a bit like playing music by ear (which I have far less ability to do).
/
Oh bother.
Yet another way to run out of cash.
/
Dreaming of a world where no one expects to be cared for. A better world than this.
/
Consciousness: check
Vitals: 50%
Appointments: till 9pm
/
FIRE
/
Revolving doors in the company at the bottom of the pyramid:
- Interview: customer (A) joins as cook; immediately recommends another (B) cook;
- Interview: customer (C) joins as front of house agent; his friend applies for a generalist position (D);
- Financial Management Intern: quits (E)
- D gets thrown into the FMP program
All in six hours.
SIGH
- E proposes to stay on.
- B is hired to replace A in a month.
All in 24 hours.
LOL
/
I appear to have 120 minute event on my calendar to taste five salad sauces. This is both strange, and likely to be disappointing.
/
Consciousness: check
Vitals: 40%
Privilege: check
Anticipated schedule: salad dressings, miscellaneous trainings, sleep.
Anticipated error: high
/
Very disoriented.
Very comfortable.
Probably not a good thing.
/
All individuals are temporary.
We are functions in a stream.
/
Accountant #8
/
I wish I had ambitions. Absent of those, I do have a job. Let's focus on that instead.
/
Deploy. Click click click. Training for five hours. May crash.
/
Hulk look at accounts. Hulk see mess. Hulk smash mess.
/
Sentience: check
Vitals: 65%
Privilege: check
Concierge: online
Kitchen: new asset activation - first 36 hours are promising;
Corp: new asset activation - first 8 hours are promising, but much volatility anticipated over the next 14 days of handover from asset#7 to asset#8;
Weather: wet. Very, very, wet.
/
Summary gamble: this project is more profitable in the long run than love and life in a developed nation. Yet to be disproved, but nearly always there. Hehe.
/
Spending a few minutes to calibrate the mapping of my visual and auditory recognition to my sense of space.
/
You know what, "2 Rows" would be a great title for a book. Part 1: the first row would be able people's desire for social relationships, and Part 2: the second row would be about reciprocity.
Now if only I had Kierkegaard's trust fund....
/
End notes for Nov27 1pm
/
Sentience: check
Vitals: 70% (yay)
Current: numerous errands and a full training day for accountant8
/
Accounts: training day derailed by housekeeping issues;
Office housekeeping: toilets unclogged;
Residential housekeeping: toilet worm population explosion; getting a contractor to build a wall; (technically, I'm not sure if these are worms);
/
"You look unusually morose."
"Come over here, I'll tell you why."
"Ok."
"Closer."
"Right."
"Because you're over there."
"You look grumpier than usual."
"I'm not supposed to say anything."
"Why?"
"Come closer."
"Why?"
"Because I missed you."
"Aw. Ok. Bye."
And the sad truth is that she will only see me for as long as she is running from someone else. When she finds a home, there will be no abiding by the hours of visitation. No more dreams in common space. No more readings. Half drunk orders dying on a stool. She's gone before the ice melts.
And that is how you kill time. Writing parodies of sentimental episodes. And calling them thus, this is how you lose her.
/
I like the temporary chef we have. It's possible to have this kind of conversation. (Excerpts from my side only.)
[On the subject of having more, or fewer multipli-used ingredients.]
Sure. I mean, in the future having a hundred [fundamentally different] dishes is great. But remember that the illusion of choice is useful also in branding/product marketing.
Many customers for example, won't care that an arrabiata and marinara are similar. FOH's job is to explain it's toms with or without chilli (people who really know what the difference is, would be dying here).
Shampoo companies for example, will sell a "luxury", "value", "sporty", and "womens" range... all different brands, but next to each other on the shelf. And 85% of the chemical base is the same stock.
So the mutation of a few ingredients into many menu items must be deployed, in one way or another... unless we have a long term chef to lead us into the specialty foods direction ;)
We are a convenience store brand, like 7-11, or McDonalds, or Sbux for now.
[...]
For discussion's sake... well in the pleb market... unfortunately for the real super tasters... it would appear that the conversion to sales depends more on (from top to bottom):
I. Instagrammability (your 5 [apperance] )
II. Superficial value (your 4 [quantity] divided by your 3 [price])
III. Real value (your 1 [quality] divided by your 3 [price])
IV. Variety (your 2; people go to X shop to eat the 1 thing they remember or crave, e.g. Ansel's cronut... some dumbf*** salt e** croissant, etc.) :)
I think I have to place my bets on "the market is not as smart as we are". But I would welcome a snobbier direction for the shop, if we had the long-term talent to sustain it. You wanna sign on for a coupla years ?
/
The author is either playing devil's advocate, or clickbaiter. I disagree on three points at least:
1. Retail is a channel, not a division of the firm; it's only a division within the sales and marketing function of the firm.
2. Watches are not PRIMARILY a growth market; they are primarily a luxury goods segment of the lifestyle industry; the growth market is programmable fashion / cars / architecture / furniture.
3. Consumer products: Macs - raising computing power is an easy problem, raising usability is a hard problem; monitors, routers - designing semiconductors is a hard problem (the firm has gradually insourced it), designing form factors for uni-dimensional product lines with very diminished marginal returns on innovation is an easy problem (the firm has gradually outsourced this); you can probably bet that R&D is working to figure out what happens in a post-router, post-monitor, world (paradigm shifts / genre-breaking functions, what have you) - one wonders if they'll have less to show for it, than MSFT.
-
Locally, at Sudo, we set up with two siloes ("divisional") organised in an upstream/downstream formation, and a corporate services layer ("functional"). As such, the siloes were meant to be vertically integrated teams, but the first iteration of leadership in the siloes completely failed to cooperate with the other team, which left the central team constantly fire-fighting to bridge comms. We're still working towards completion of a second iteration, and right now we have slightly tighter integration across the company as corporate services has buffed up a bit more, and started to manhandle the other two teams. I suppose, we still need more talent. The lack of which is the main reason we fail. Blame the key person, and absence of more effective key persons. ;)
/
Forensics: there are those days when you just go "akaun in, apa lanjiao..."
/
Dreading the thought of having to line up bookkeeping trainees #9, #10, #11, etc. but the prospect of having no internal staff who can read and write accounts is even more horrifying.
If we don't fix the accounting function, I don't see us having time to train folks to fix product and marketing, and then there is no upside, and we get stuck in maintenance mode perpetually.
Or we burn out. Lol
/
Sentience: check
Privilege: check
Vitals: 68%
Current business focus: training staff in financial literacy.
/
And when we cease to be competitive, we die. Such is the homeostasis of businesses.
/
Time for a due-d expedition.
/
The term of the day is:
Potato Outbreak
/
The loyalty issue is a straw man - everyone hires people whom they have had a demonstrable ability to work with. The experience issue is also a straw man - people who value experience over theoretical expertise are typically just bad at theory.
I wouldn't go as far as to say that this post is anything more than a casual observation that eggs the subject. If I did, this would present another straw man.
/
Incredibly unproductive and unhappy year. The only thing to look forward to being the possibility of either improvement or termination. Bored witless, but that is not a reason to stop going to work. Work remains undone.
/
Hari ini Dalam Sejarah Sudo! Episod 395... dalam episod yang lepas, kuasa-kuasa FOH telah mencapai kemerdekaan daripada penceroboh puak dapur... tetapi, keamanan ini tidak tertahan. Kini, FOH telah menghantar ajen khas untuk mencari relik aiskrim dari kuil peti sejuk di perdalaman negara puak dapur, dan beginilah bermulanya pertembungan terkini antara askar-askar kedua-dua pihak ini...
/
Well good morning, first fire of the day. Third ordering screw up in seven weeks and RM70 cost of goods to be written off. And staff making fun it. Haha. I can only say "thank you for trying, you are the best we have." The absurdity for me is that it's a 15-120 minute recipe fix if I DIY, and a seven week failure if I delegate. 😂😂 I will try again. It is ultimately all my fault. (Backstory: 10Oct, previous chef was out. Prior to that, management team [excluding myself] had been assigned to focus on managing previous chef for 3 months. Result of three months, previous chef quit, and since then most of management has also made plans to move on. And we're still hiring.) Round, and around it goes...
/
Now that I'm dressed,
what's the second fire of the day?
/
Sick. But, time for a spot of work.
/
I just realised that we have better uptime than McDonalds' 24-7 outlets.
/
Team7
Consolidating
/
Assets inbound.
Gotta plan their week by Monday.
/
Sentience: check
Privilege: check
Vitals: 70%
Enforced washing, grooming, feeding, and desk work... chores, chores, chores... :) Still at that point in crisis managment where I don't know if the body will heal harder, and less sensitive to local noise, or if it cascades into long-term weakness on stress related systemic injury. In any event, the nature of the game is that we pit the backlog of work against the frailty of sum bodies in the project. Lol
/
On viewing our cafe, a chap said, "very authentic!"
-
Nothing could be farther from the truth. I wish life were really that simple. What has been built here is a tediously crafted air of originality, for the purpose of clawing up the ladder of top-of-mind in the heads of fifty thousand consumers.
As we grow the portfolio to a hundred shops, such curation must keep pace: to the effect that each item of design, in every shop *appears* to have been generated by the individualistic angst of some individual, or team, whereas it is *merely* the result of a program which exceeds the expectations for emulation of authenticity that consumers place upon producers of services such as ours. By way of discipline, we can wrest greater empathy from the masses, than all independent artists whose value propositions hinge upon their personalities: we synthesise personality from sand.
That is the only interesting way to go about consumer marketing, if you really view the human spirit as a trivial sort of thing.
And the our daily chore is to corral a writhing mass of opposition in the minds of our collaborators.
Perhaps if you adjust the definition of authenticity to mean, "strategically curated design patterns, successfully marketed," then yes, we could be authentic... I suppose.
/
Sentience: check
Privilege: check
Vitals: 75%
Diet: seems to be taking after Warren Buffet, of late
Footwear: ready for roughshod running.
Must make self ready for war. Engaging. Pew pew pew.
/
I used to ask a monthly wage of RM15k, but with the MYRUSD at this stage, that's less than the nominal starting basic salary of my classmates in 2005. Lol.
Maybe I'll just stick myself here and make coffee for the next ten years, I don't know...
... I think one heuristic is to benchmark demands against the currency the bidder earns in. But I should probably double MYR demands to avoid bad jobs at this rate. Sic.
Although I tend to reboot my demands at the starting rate for fresh graduates, when I enter new fields: I rarely know what is the best gamble about these things, because at the end of the day, it's not very important to me.
Games, games, games...
/
My business plan for my 20s was executed well. The plan for my 30s has been boring AF for most of 2016. Perhaps I should start planning the 40s.
But the last time I planned to work on something which seemed like a hard problem at the onset, from 18-40, I got done in three years.
Planning doesn't always work out.
/
Sunday morning!
Fires in short-term memory: five
Fires addressed:
one (1005)
two (1022)
/
Reviewing project management tools to find the best one for a restaurant.
/
New recruit briefing:
"Omg why u sound like a robot'
"This is the standard you have to aspire to. We can't move fast until everyone works efficiently. Barely moving at 1-shop pace. How to do 100 shops? LOL"
"100? HAHAHAHAHA"
"You know I don't really care about this business if we do less than that ;)"
/
Um... I think we've mispriced something.
/
Training two new staff at once, to read and write accounts. Click click click.
/
Last Tango in Paris : This is romantic? But actually, it reminds me of a number of corny mannerisms I've come across in other people. Perhaps... they were inspired by this. Then again, much of art is a celebration of human weakness.
/
Sentience, privilege: check, check
Vitals: 77% check
Risk this week: running too broad instead of too deep, again.
/
Minimal carb day. Good. Kinethesia on point, for a good 30% of office hours. Taking a nap. Hopefully a bit more work later. Recalibrating an underdeveloped coffee.
/
Those who feel pain at the thought of death are weak. But we can, and must work together. Otherwise commerce will fail us.
/
"One makes the most of misgivings."
\"Optimistic. How unlike you."
"You just didn't notice."
\"Suuuuuure. Tell that to your status updates."
"I will. Just watch. But your tummy's had the benefit of my optimism in the past ;)"
\"I know. That should happen more often."
"I no longer have an empty kitchen."
\"And now I'm hungry."
"I don't suppose it would help if I told you to imagine yourself being fed."
\"😒"
"One makes the most of misgivings ... ;)"
|
I was reading an article on how girls decide that guys are trying too hard. Come on - my whole year's been a process of intentionally trying less hard at various things work-related, and compensating for it with hyperbolic exertions elsewhere. Case in point...
/
One definition of maturity is "ability to delay gratification." It is interesting to note, that we can infer this quality from a staff's demonstrations of empathy, or failure thereof.
/
Sentience, privilege, check, check.
Vitals, 65%.
Work is rising into second gear this week, with the addition of 2xstaff for 2xweeks.
/
1. It is a joy to clean up after gross incompetence. (Fortunately the quantity of GI is limited, and with a temporarily expanded team, we're mopping up a lot of shit in one business day.)
2. Incompetence should be the norm in an organisation... otherwise it's probably setting its standards too low...
/
One executive committed till end-June.
One executive committed till end-February.
One executive to decide on commitments in six business days.
It's good to know that we're not stalling right now, even if we may be stalled in the very near future.
/
I find it is convenient to be able to segregate time so that one can switch states of mind between:
1. reflection: creativity / blue-skying / worrying / hypothesis formation
2. tactical ops: non-reflective / completely reactionary / improvisational work
3. droll ops: non-reactionary / pre-meditated / hypothesis testing / discipline-oriented work
/
Snippets of today's conversations. Modified.
.
I: Do you want to check out the other coffee shops?
17yo staff: NO!
I: I guess your first time was horrible.
.
I: Sorry, just having another stupid conversation.
26yo staff: What's new?
I: Just trying to be polite, and not stating the facts as-is in an alienating fashion.
.
Customer: Thanks for setting this place up.
I: And what do you do for a living?
Customer: I'm a motivational speaker.
I: Jesus, Joan, and Jefferies, great job, mate!
.
Ex-staff: So people joining and leaving F&B teams... this seems to be the norm. It's holding us back too. What are we doing wrong as an industry?
I: Expecting people to stay might be the first mistake. I expected to be in perpetual-training mode.
.
Woman I have never held: You're like a mentor.
I: That's slightly embarrassing, I feel like I'm taking advantage of you.
Woman whose voice I do not recall: Speaking of advantages, I get emotional support.
I: Given the abstractness of text, I wonder if your emotions will be equally supported before and after we meet.
Woman I had barely met: Give and take.
I: Love is a fine business to be in.
/
A dreaded time has come.
Time to get up and eat.
/
2016 challenges:
* Training RM5/hour staff to deliver a full set of accounts, monthly, and forward cash flow forecasts on a daily resolution, daily.
* Making three shifts per day recalibrate specialty coffee to their taste, including temperature and pressure-profiled free variables. Logging data.
* Getting hot food service to run 24-7.
* Trying not to run out of cash.
* Trying to get enough food, sleep, and physical stimulation to maximise mental performance.
* Getting people to talk to each other reasonably without treating them all as mutts.
/
BOGH-LOGH-NIAGH
/
People with small egos are difficult to work with. They will perpetually drag others down to their shitty little bastions of inadequacy. But that's always just half the opportunity.
/
Sentience privilege check check. Vitals 70%. One executive candidate dropped out of probation. Now we are three. Much to do, much to do...
/
Concerned. But there is only one way forward... because it's been designed that way. Rinse, and repeat!
- acquire talent
- assign a task, create an opportunity for failure
- assign a routine, create a routine opportunity for failure
- look for failures, as silent failures proliferate
- identify failure, illustrate correct behaviour
- negotiate incentives for correct behaviour
- when the marginal cost of negotiating incentives exceeds the marginal benefit of correct behaviour, eject talent, unless a less immediate benefit is on the cards
/
I wonder to what degree... having the audience name our business "Sudo" has led me to brand talent management as an Ubermensch program
/
Never enough time to think through everything. Keep working, or close shop.
/
The only way to understand someone else is to become someone else.
/
Do you know hard it is to read all these ops alerts on a phone while trying to get a girl off with your other hand!? Well I don't either. :P
/
Pundits anticipate Trump's Weapons of Mass Annoyance (POTUS can text you any time)
/
Y'know... if @realDonaldTrump grows out his beard and starts to own that chin, he would be the first POTUS in a while... to look like Santa.
/
Manually triggered oxytocin rush. Haven't played that card in a while. What other meditations should I remember?
Isn't it interesting that an emotion, such as trust, can be brought into the present, from memory?
Taste is for the weak. Strength is demonstrated by the wilful. Hahah.
“Never hate your enemies, it affects your judgment.” -- Michael Corleone, Book III
2016: Trump in the White House, earthquakes errwhere. Somebody's gotta be callin the book of Revelations on this shit
/
end notes Dec 11
/
Today's fire count:
Kitchen: 2
Corp: multiple
Front of House: ongoing embers
/
"Does this look okay?"
"Make it look more pretentious."
"..."
"Business is business. Go to the back of the house, throw up, then do it."
/
Water the fires, water the fires, dum dee dum.
/
"Your mandate is to build towards 100-200% redundancy."
"We can't afford redundancy."
"We need redundancy because people here are daft, and like to walk off jobs... now we can't afford negative redundancy. Let me summarise it for you:
(1) (unit) talent here is cheap
(2) (unit) talent here is disposable
(3) ... because (unit) talent here is just not that great, so...
(4) ... we need a lot of it (units)."
-
Don't get me wrong. I'd sure like to hire a restaurant manager who can keep books, handle procurement, and train the front-of-house to (run their station AND to manage the kitchen as a supplier), but... given what the market offers we're just going to have to build this capability out of whatever walks in the door. :) Or we shutter.
/
Perhaps the only real challenge I wake up to daily, is the belief that we can turn muppets into megalodons.
/
Short-term memory data-source integration... under recalibration. I think a lot of productivity leakage may be due to having ignored this.
/
A few daily gambles:
1.
Resource allocation for the curation of mental health, to optimise for getting more work done, versus the cries of mediocre fucks telling me when to work less because they actually believe we are at an acceptable state of quality.
2.
Doing things at quality, with unit bus number, versus doing things sub-par but with investment in redundancy.
/
"They only do what the boss tells them."
"Not really. Look, you put a nobody in there who tells them she's in charge, and they jump. They're not sure if the threat is real - but they're sure that it's imminent. The moderately effective whips don't have to be good politicians, in order to be good field marshalls. In fact, now that you make me think about it... what our talent pool lacks is individuals with the propensity to play alpha male/female games... to raise their voices and order others around. Most do not. Most of those that do, overreach, and start picking fights with the actual alpha, and then get booted out. Our best talents are the ones with the capability to play alpha games, in a fully self-conscious fashion, while being diplomatic in conversation, and politically astute about their alliances."
"So much for leadership?"
"This seems to be a realistic definition of leadership."
/
I am working hard to remove the romance from lifestyle products. It may be an uphill battle, but it given that the competitive advantage I emphasise is a high quantum of work per unit of cost, then it seems internally coherent. Let us see if the hypothesis fails. That is daily work...
/
Thankful for: For random conversations to take my mind off food and menu design.
/
I guess many people would intuit that synesthesia is an arbitrary association of two completely different sensory data structures. But if you're appreciating consciousness at the lowest level of abstraction, then all higher level abstractions are deconstructable to uni-dimensional signals anyway. #oldschool
/
"Hi"
*punches to her core*
"Don't, I'm wet."
"Do you need a jacket?"
"No, I'm going to change."
*changes*
"Tada"
"Pretty."
"Don't say that."
"I'm shallow."
-
And frankly, one does and says less, as a point of safety.
/
Modes anticipated today:
- IT repair
- accounting and finance coach
- kitchen project management
- marketing communications design
- staff scheduling delegation
- water rationing plumbing execution
Not really ready. Getting ready for a lot of memory swaps on a slow disk. Executing modes. Anticipated rate of failure: dangerously high.
/
Epic boredom. But first, routine feeding, then back to menu design.
/
"French fries are a great idea."
"Yup."
"Put them on the menu."
"Do it yourself, and don't forget the rest of the supply chain from ordering, to recipe, production training, and service training."
"But french fries are great."
"Here's twenty bucks - go buy yourself some french fries, and quit bugging me about new products unless you're delivering an entire product's supply chain."
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Enforced food, sleep, not working ideally. Need to enforce more kinesthesia. Breathe control needs to be revisited. Perhaps running too.
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Standing by for deployment on Operation PPR: Payroll Potato Rescue
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"You look awkward. No, you always look awkward."
"Do you ever get bored by the people around you?"
"Uhuh."
"Is it annoying?"
"Maybe."
"Would you make a point to stay close to those boring people, studying their structures, for days, to see if they could be more interesting?"
"Err..."
"This is like the tenth year for me."
"Ok."
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On complaints that Trump is not normal: Bunch of idiots. "Normal," is not a reason (to respect anything). Lol
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"This place isn't very photogenic."
"It's designed to look like a hardware store, or warzone, I suppose. Don't want staff coming to work thinking it's a place to chill."
"Doesn't that make it hard to sell?"
"Yup. Forces staff to work without handicaps."
"And if you don't make it?"
"Next project. But if we get a bulletproof team, we can flip a switch and go all cookie-cutter idyllic Scandinavian Instagrammable whatnot. But the idea of allowing that sort of weakness into the organisation before the staff solidifies is just horrifying."
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Don't poke the bear. (Someone in Ankara just did that, and we were wondering what exactly the FSB is going to do next - popcorn.) If you see a Donald, however, do poke it. Poke it hard, the results are amusing! (Now I feel like a bully.)
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I think I'm out of practice at telling my mother to go away. Tsk tsk. She had been trained well. My training must be slipping - this is a stupidly busy year.
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In case anyone's still wondering why I'm spending a month on visual design work while the company teeters on the brink of ruin: it appears to be the case that I have time for aesthetic design work about once per year. Last year the setup of the company involved marque, signboard, amd furniture design, and a core visual language for interior architecture. The intention was to postpone fine tuning until operations stabilise. Operations have never been stable, and I must anticipate that they will not be stablised in the next year, either. Meanwhile, in the absence of a budget for a creative director, there has been a need for a manifesto of sensual identity: a branding bible for art (we already have one for copy). Without one, every marketing hack and artist comes along with their own sense of what can, and cannot work for the brand. So this menu puts a placeholder on the table: a unifying document which captures how Sudo Brew as a restaurant is supposed to look, taste, smell, and even sound (if you can read music, you may find clues hidden here and there). It tells the reader how drinks may be served. It tells you how loud to speak, and hiw loud to scream (only if you read colour). Let's hope this works to hold the base, in terms of the creative direction of staff for 2017. I expect to be busy in operations, meanwhile.
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Samantha Bee said it best: "I'm not a pessimist, I'm a catastrophist."
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Non-compliance rears its ugly head. Hopefully we won't have to burn more crops. LOL
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On India flights possibly being fined for having empty sewerage tanks upon landing:
Hostess1: "Hey did anyone take a shit?"
Hostess2: "Er, oh no. Mike..."
Steward1: "Ok, ok... hold up. BRB."
Hostess1: "Hurry up, they're boarding!"
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Negligence! No.
Negligee! Maybe.
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We are in the strange place of having staff who are too nice. Gansta is on-brand. I actually say "you have to go full-gangster," when I interview new FOH staff.
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How to quit a job on your first day:
1. You can quit in protest, on your first day, and it is a cleaner cut. The emotional attachments between you and them have not yet deepened. You can make it clear that "this is not what I expected, it was not told to me that these responsibilities would be part of the role, so I must withdraw interest."
1.1. If you wish to offer 1-2 weeks of work (paid or unpaid, your offer, your call) to give them more time to find a replacement, that would be nice. They may reject your offer, and you're out ASAP. They may accept, and be annoying on a day to day basis - in which case you would tell them you are stopping immediately because they made the deal worse, despite your good intentions. Or they may not even pay you in spite.
2. If you are masochistic or wish to indulge in moral fantasies, or guilt tripping, then sure, without incentive, continue as planned. :)
2.1. You may raise concerns above, with a warning that you would like to quit in the future, unless certain circumstances change by a certain time.
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"My grandfather used to run GuangDong for the KuoMinTang..."
"... so yo're Kylo Ren?"
"Sadly."
Shoutout to @emokyloren
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Not enough hours, not enough days. But still not yet dead. So I guess we'll make the most of it.
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Sentience, privilege: check, check. Breath: stuttered - many interruptive thoughts. Errands: first, feeding time, second, stock up on cheap protein supplements, third, address interruptive thoughts, fourth, maybe get some exercise.
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Sometimes I can't believe how much pop-culture I ingest in order to achieve target functionality in this industry.
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