The Man of MATA

pt2

The brothers are bickering.

"If you don't stop whining, I swear to whatever god is left alive-"

"Boys!"

The brothers arrive to Libton, a trading outpost. Many critters run about.

One brother goes to a food stall - Warm Worms, the other two go to Mercury's Tech Junk.

Mercury: "Three corpboys straight out of pre-war propaganda. Did you rob a tomb?"

"Excuse me, bird, we're actually CEOs of MATA!"

Mercury, laughing: "Yeah, and I'm a majority shareholder. You're excused, human.

The brother sits down at the food stall. It's very small and he struggles.

He orders warm worms. A penguin child asks him to pass a napkin. The brother notices the napkin dispenser is a dead CRT.

Mercury: "Cactus pot? Necklace? Whatever this is?"

"Do you have anything that powers up?"

Mercury: "I mean... yeah. But why?"

Brother pulls out a memory stick: "A miracle."

The brothers are using a computer, browsing MATA_database.

"THERE! STOP! What is that?"

An unrealized prototype... MATA AI powered MilTek exoskeleton."

"Mercury, do you have any miltek prosthetics?"

Mercury: "I guess.."

Mercury digs up his stash of back scratchers.

The brothers and critters of Libton assemble the first MATA_BOT.

Girl: "One please!"

Mata_bot ice-cream vendor: "Coming up!" It's an ice cream with worms.

Girl, Fish and Penguin look at a statue in the center of Libton. It's surrounded by tall skyscrappers.

Girl: "What is that?"

Fish:" The three brothers memorial. It was here they built the first MATA_BOT."

Penguin: "Very post modern."

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The Warehouse in Dallas has been around since 2012 but became an official nonprofit in 2024 to expand the organization’s mission of educating the public with scholarly curatorial programming and publications. Natural Mystics, part of The Warehouse Dallas Art Foundation’s second season, opens Saturday, September 27 and organizes works from the Rachofsky Collection and the Hartland & Mackie/Labora Collection into a conversation about metaphysical artistic strategies to push back against a society ruled by a stale and cynical strain of reason, often in the service of capitalist ideologies. 

The modifier “Natural” from the show’s title is ultimately a gooey distinction, though not meaningless. Generally used to designate all the terrestrial forces that gestated our species before we began tinkering with them, we tend to mobilize the concept against looming threats of our own making. The binaries of natural/artificial, nature/culture, natura/techne,… having been debated since before Plato, are as dynamic as ever in the over 70 artworks that wind through the Warehouse’s series of galleries. They are loosely organized by geography, medium, and subject matter under themes such as Solitary Bodies, Unruly Bodies, A Precarious World, and Technological Visions. The groupings allow for unexpected dialogues that in some instances spark profound connections between otherwise unrelated artists’ practices.

A key work of the show is Italian artist Mario Merz’s 8,5,3 — a trio of igloo forms that dominate one of the largest rooms. Merz’s “igloos” were conceived alongside other countercultural architectural forms of the 1960s that seemed to look back in history to vernacular building methods, as well as to futuristic utopian visions. Sized according to numbers in the Fibonacci sequence, the structures are made from bundled stacks of twigs, tarpaper, and thick glass panels propped against steel armatures. The smallest is nested inside the largest, both pierced through by three long fluorescent tubes. The work hints at the existence of worlds bubbling up sui generis across planes of subjective and objective reality.

Another room is filled by a newly commissioned Alex Da Corte installation. Da Corte is known for building out monumental set pieces that revisit and revise our childhood pantheon of storybook characters. The Guiding Light is a full-scale recreation of a well known nursery rhyme wall, upon whom sits a Humpty-Dumpty-type holding aloft a cartoony candle. No longer an object of ridicule, he is recast as bearer of light between simulated worlds. 

Urs Fischer’s simulated worlds are more elusive. Horse/Fraud comprises two pairs of matching pedestal-sized mirrored boxes. Screenprinted images of an average sized office chair and an enormous crumpled cigarette carton are transferred onto the corresponding faces of each box, leaving any negative space around the image a perfect mirror reflection. Though we are presented with each side of the object, its objecthood is destabilized by the illusion of disconnection.

The show isn’t all sculpture though; there’s an abundance of introspective figurative painting, abstraction, photography, and a video installation by Melik Ohanian that deals with protest and censorship, and feels more uncomfortably prescient every single minute.

Surrealist approaches are represented across decades and continents, especially by figurative paintings and sculptures that disrupt the body, fracture it, and twist or violate it mechanically. There are stills from Mathew Barney’s CREMASTER 3 series and some disembodied forearms by Robert Gober. 

A gallery designated as Japanese Surrealism and the Body contains small mischievous paintings by Hiroshi Nakamura that pit the violence of “rational” machines — trains, warplanes, the video camera — against the “unruly bodies” of uniform-clad school children. And nearby a handful of collage works by Kukiji Yamashita from the early 1970s are less illustrative yet just as uneasy in their pairing of vague figures and acrid environments.

The question of nature runs through a couple of the galleries. Painting’s long history of landscape is picked up by Cynthia Daignault whose Elegy (Yosemite Valley) captures, in expressive brushwork, a luscious mountainscape completely devoid of color. An unexpected feeling of loss haunts the picture like a death portrait. Sean Landers’ painting of a sperm whale skeleton sunk into a desolate shoreline pictures a scene of something in between living and nonliving. And Nate Lowman’s Maria shows how difficult it is to neatly distinguish natural and technological phenomena. A large, painted doppler radar still of a hurricane renders not so much a natural body as a mechanically made image.

I’m particularly unsettled by Emma Webster’s digitally generated, classically painted tableau Era of Eternity, in which geese fly through majestic sun-kissed canyons under a beautifully angry sky. Cloud forms spin out from an apocalyptic vortex, melting into twisted figures and seeming to bend space-time. There is an uncanny coherence formed by the artist’s use of sculptural models and 3D modeling software to create her hyperreal compositions, which defy classical distinctions of natural and artificial. 

Other riffs on natural vs. artificial include Brazilian artist Tunga’s Untitled (Steel Pod Series) in which a conch hangs ensnared by twisted steel cables that seem to be growing out of the shell’s glossy pink mouth. It speaks of the accidental cyborgs created when we absorb and become coupled with environmental hazards cast onto us. And Pierre Huyghe uses actual living systems in his Cambrian Explosion 18, an aquarium with ancient sea creatures crawling around under a large floating lava rock. The serene, living sculpture exists in an artificial envelope sustained by chemical and mechanical interventions.

The subtext to the framing of Natural Mystics is the increasingly invisible presence and prevalence of technologies. Park Hyunki’s weighing of a stone against a picture of a stone is actually weighing the idea of an image against its material substrate, in this case a bulky vintage TV set. Matter is accounted for by his rudimentary scale, leaving the mind to bear the balance of the weightless image. Matt Johnson’s Broken iMac with a Rock more surreptitiously sides with matter in his trompe l’oeil sculpture of a large rock smashing an overturned computer screen, all of which is carved from wood and painted to hide that fact.

Two works by Cory Arcangel meditate on immaterial aspects of vision as amended by screens. In Jeans/Lakes, a pixelly pair of stone-washed jeans hovers in a bright void over its own rippling reflection created by a software program that in 2025 feels quaint. The image is hypothetically eternal, like a digital zoo for extinct aesthetics. His other piece is a C-print of a Photoshop palette with hues in a sublime radial spectrum. It’s a field of theoretical color, practically divorced from physical space, and concentrating into a central point where, like at the center of a black hole, all theories fail.

Lucas Samaras’ experimental Polaroids are more mystical than most. Samaras was a regular participant in many of Allan Kaprow’s “happenings,” and his magically mundane “photo-transformations” taken of himself in his home seem to be completely unbound by conventional knowledge. Also surprising is Yuji Agematsu’s vitrine of dazzling tiny still lifes in cellophane cigarette carton bottoms. They’re assembled from detritus collected along the sidewalk on the artist’s nightly strolls and arranged into delicate bouquets of lint, chewing gum, hair, grime, and other scuzz. They’re somehow rendered beautiful, cleansed by their arrangement and presentation behind glass and packaging.

Stuart Middleton strangely repackages items into a “kebab” of random personal effects. A wicker basket, chicken wire, spatula, a croc, and other junk are skewered onto a 10-foot-long bolt. Privileging one dimension over the other two, this tidy form reorders the volume of its stuff as on a spit or a lathe.

Perhaps strangest of all is Alice Channer’s Synthetics, an emotionally cool floor piece of wavy ceramic slabs, mirrored steel, bunched lamé fabric, and a 3D-printed leg bone. The materials simply lay side by side reflecting each other in curved form and in the polished steel, which doubles the distortion of the elongated femur, either correcting the original distortion or further removing it from its referent. 

It is this strangeness that can snap us into new ways of understanding. And nature versus its many opposites are best understood as separated, not by their forms, but by their intentions. Aristotle’s use of the term techne included the concept of human reason concerned with production. The artists of his day were mostly craftspeople and builders. But today’s artists have the weighty job of reinventing our relationship to reason and production, merging them with the countervailing intent of illumination, insight, self-reflection. Done right, the artist as mystic holds a funhouse mirror up to themself and society and straightens out all the distortions we’ve come to think of as natural.

 

Natural Mystics is on view from September 27, 2025 through January 31, 2026, at the Warehouse in Dallas.

The post “Natural Mystics” at The Warehouse, Dallas appeared first on Glasstire.

The city of San Antonio has donated the controversial Confederate memorial statue to SS American Memorial Foundation, based in Seguin.

The New York Times:

President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday that would help clear the way for a coalition of investors to run an American version of TikTok, one that is separate from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, so that it can keep operating in the United States.

The administration has been working for months to find non-Chinese investors for a U.S. TikTok company, which Vice President JD Vance said would be valued at $14 billion. [...]

The White House hasn’t said exactly who would own the U.S. version of TikTok, but the list of potential investors includes several powerful allies of Mr. Trump. The software giant Oracle, whose co-founder is the billionaire Larry Ellison, will take a stake in U.S. TikTok. Mr. Trump has also said that the media mogul Rupert Murdoch is involved. A person familiar with the talks said the Murdoch investments would come through Fox Corporation.

$14 billion is a ridiculous valuation. The whole thing is ridiculous, of course, but a fair valuation on the open market would surely be at least 10× that value. They’re not even pretending this is on the up-and-up. And it doesn’t answer the core problem at the heart of the PAFACA Act:

Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who is focused on U.S.-China relations, said the White House’s executive order would stoke those questions only because it says “the divestiture includes intense monitoring of software updates, algorithms and data flows.”

“If you control it, why would you need intense monitoring to know what’s happening with it?” Mr. Sobolik said. “Monitoring the algorithm is not the same as controlling it. That’s the head fake the administration appears to be trying to pull here.”

WASHINGTON—Suddenly appearing at the lectern after emerging from a hole in the floor, a limbless, slippery Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced at a White House press conference Friday that “becoming an eel is a sign of good health.” “Big Pharma may have brainwashed people to think otherwise, but a healthy human body should be one long, even tube with a fin running down its back,” said the health and human services secretary, who warned that the average American child is now so full of chemicals and preservatives that they no longer secrete enough protective mucus to cover their skin. “Humans have been getting sicker and sicker ever since modern medicine convinced us we need arms and legs. In fact, if we were eating a proper diet of insects, mollusks, and sea urchins instead of this agricultural garbage, we wouldn’t need all these vaccines. You look at the ocean, and there is no autism in there. It’s not conspiratorial thinking to put two and two together. I mean, people are so big these days they can barely slither into a crevasse or burrow in the sand to hide from predators. You might think this yellow-green, slimy skin is a bad sign, but I’ve never felt better—and I’ve never performed better in the bedroom either.” Kennedy added that he would be rescinding all government approval for glasses and contacts, saying healthy people should be able to navigate waterways using their sense of smell.

The post Limbless, Slippery RFK Jr.: ‘Becoming An Eel Is A Sign Of Good Health’ appeared first on The Onion.

LAS VEGAS—Speaking enthusiastically about what he called “a beautiful sport,” President Donald Trump attended a match Monday for the Ultimate Dogfighting Championship. “That’s it, bite his throat! Bite his throat!” said Trump, who sat next to podcaster Joe Rogan in the front row, greeting celebrities such as Mark Wahlberg, Guy Fieri, and Shaquille O’Neal and watching with uncontained glee as a lineup of abused pit bulls and other breeds fought to the death behind a chain-link enclosure. “It’s incredible what these bull terriers can do,” the president added. “The unbridled aggre-ssion on display is truly something to behold. These dogs are out for blood, and I respect their savage lust for violence. More Americans should be like these brutal beasts.” After the match, Trump reportedly invited the winner of the night’s main event, Turbo, to visit him at the White House for a tour of the Oval Office. 

The post Trump Attends Dogfighting Match appeared first on The Onion.

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Build-a-Bear Workshop’s stock, defying the threat of tariffs on its Chinese-sourced inventory, has surged over 2,000% in the past 5 years, outpacing Wall Street darlings such as Nvidia and Palantir. What do you think?

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In brief: A lengthy stretch of quiet weather will settle into Houston. No rain is expected over the next week, and temperatures look warm for this time of year, albeit with tolerable humidity. Our next front is TBD. The tropics remain a non-concern for Texas.

We are heading into a lengthy stretch of pretty quiet weather in the Houston area. Just to give you an idea of how quiet, here’s the 7-day rainfall forecast from the NWS for our area:

So, expect a lot of sunshine the next several days!

With that will come drier conditions and certainly more autumn-like humidity levels. This will keep things hot but relatively comfortable. However, each afternoon, relative humidity levels should dip below 40 or even 30 percent.

With light winds forecast for the foreseeable future and some ample rain in many spots of late, fire danger isn’t exactly high, but if you are going to be working with open flames, particularly in more rural parts of the region, you’ll want to exercise some caution given the drier air mass in place here.

We will probably see humidity levels rebound a little next week. Temperature levels will too. We’ll go from upper-80s to around 90 degrees the next few days into the firmer low-90s later next week. Nighttime lows will only increase slowly, back to perhaps near or above 70 by later next week.

We could see temps spike to the mid-90s for a couple days later next week. Our next front is TBD, but there are hints of perhaps another weak one next weekend.

Tropics

We continue to see the Gulf shut out of tropics risks, good news for sure. But folks on the East Coast will need to monitor the 90% development area. Potential tropical cyclone advisories could be issued on this as early as later today. The track forecast is coming into focus now, with a path toward the Carolinas likely.

There are still a number of questions on 94L moving into the Bahamas. But it looks like it will be a hefty rainmaker for parts of the Carolinas, hopefully east of the footprint of Helene last year. You can follow our coverage of this system at The Eyewall.

Two Krogers, located at 9325 Katy Fwy, Houston, TX 77024, and 2300 Gessner Rd, Houston, TX 77080, closed earlier than initially expected. The closings were first announced last month and were originally slated to occur on September 30th. According to reader reports, the stores were already relatively low on merchandise by the middle of September. The Katy Freeway location closed last weekend, and the Gessner location closed shortly after. These locations are the third and ...

5-Day Uncertainty Track last updated Fri, 26 Sep 2025 11:39:36 GMT


Wind Speed Probabilities last updated Fri, 26 Sep 2025 09:22:00 GMT

The Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) has announced that it will present International Surrealism, a major exhibition in collaboration with the Tate art museum in London.

Opening November 2, 2025, and running through March 22, 2026, the show marks the centenary of the first Surrealist exhibition in 1925 — the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris — and will feature more than 100 works from Tate’s collection. Like Surrealism Beyond Borders, a collaboration between Tate Modern and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 2021, International Surrealism seeks to decentralize the Surrealism movement by presenting works from around the world.

In a press release, Sue Canterbury, the DMA’s Pauline Gill Sullivan Curator of American Art, explained, “Surrealism wasn’t just a movement or a singular artistic style, it was a way of life. This exhibition offers our viewers a glimpse into this revolution of the mind, and the evocative, fantastical, and often unsettling images that surrealism produced.”

International Surrealism will include printed ephemera and publications from the early 1900s, rooting the movement in its literary origins. Artists included in the exhibition range from the expected — René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, and Lenora Carrington — to lesser-known artists — Wifredo Lam and Malangatana Ngwenya — and artists not generally associated with the Surrealists — Alberto Giacometti, Dorothea Tanning, and Jackson Pollock.

Interim Director and Marcus-Rose Family Deputy Director Tamara Wootton Forsyth noted, “Tate holds one of the most rich and iconic collections of surrealism from around the world. It is a great privilege to bring this renowned collection from across the pond to Dallas and give our audiences a peek into the endlessly fascinating world of surrealism.”

Admission will cost $20 for the general public and will be free for DMA Members. Tickets will go on sale on Tuesday, October 7; however, members can acquire early access to exhibition tickets on Monday, October 6.

Learn more about the exhibition via the DMA’s website.

The post Dallas Museum of Art to Host “International Surrealism” Exhibition  appeared first on Glasstire.

It’s natural to associate the artistic movement of minimalism with coldness and austerity; after all, it’s called minimalism for a reason, as it’s often concerned with the elemental state of materials in time and space. But James Turrell was deeply influenced by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s sensual and ecstatic aviation chronicles and Donald Judd had a maximal interest in the world and culture around him. Behind the deceptive simplicity of minimalism is a lapidary exaltation of form and aesthetic, calling to mind the piquant line about haiku poetry in Chris Marker’s beguiling and unclassifiable travelogue Sans Soleil: “to use an adjective was akin to leaving the price tag on a gift.” 

The Larry Bell retrospective Improvisations, curated by Rachel Sadvary Zebro of the Phoenix Museum of Art and now on view at the San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA), is a grand overview of Bell’s warm, glowing work from the last half century. A member of the Light and Space movement, a more colorful West Coast counterpart to Judd’s East Coast minimalism, Bell’s revelation came with the discovery of a vacuum deposition technique in the 1960s that allowed him to coat glass panes with films of varying color and shade. The resulting works have the consistency and clarity of lucite, but the heft and prismatic potential of glass.

Bell’s glass pieces grow more impressive and refined over time. The earliest piece in the exhibition is a small glass box with a light iridescence that’s been placed in a corner. It appears charmingly homemade compared to the sleekness and complexity of Bell’s later works. Triolith and Deconstructed Cube SS C, both made in the last few years when Bell was in his 80s, are totemic, monolithic, and alien. They have a similar gravitas and aura as Judd’s aluminum boxes and Roni Horn’s copper work Things That Happen Again, attaining a pinnacle of minimalism, the alchemy of intention, where processed materials take on a mysticism through the care in which they were envisioned.

Beyond the sculptures, the exhibition includes some mixed-media collage wall pieces that complicate Bell’s practice and aesthetic. The series of collage pieces involving textiles are surprisingly delicate and earthy, pointing to Bell’s connection to the organic despite the complex industrial processes he uses. With Austin (2023), Bell coats a black cotton canvas with aluminum and silicon, creating rippling, shimmering abstract work. Like all the pieces in this exhibition, these play with perspective and space, with an emphasis on “play.” There is a lightness to Bell’s art; I am reminded of the final voice over of Hal Ashby’s Being There: “Life is a state of mind.” So is perception, and Bell’s works are tricky with an avuncular cheerfulness. 

This is most apparent in the largest work, The Dilemma of Griffin’s Cat, a stunning sculpture commissioned by SAMA for its opening in 1981. The title refers to H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man and the titular invisible man’s (Griffin) experiments with his invisibility serum on his white cat. The serum caused all of the cat to disappear except his eyes, and Bell’s sculpture caused a similar “disappearance” when his young daughter was playing in the work. This simultaneity of ambition — the piece is massive and striking — with a winking humor, is emblematic of Bell, and makes him one of the most refreshing and vital practitioners of minimalism. 

It is noteworthy that the exhibition is called Improvisations, given the processes Bell employs require careful planning. It speaks to his spirit of creativity; when I spoke with him, he mentioned that he collects 12-string guitars. He doesn’t know how to play guitar, he just likes the aesthetic, the color, the shape, and the sound they make when he plucks a string. In other words, like the pieces in this show, he lets them sing.

 

Larry Bell: Improvisations is on view at the San Antonio Museum of Art through January 4, 2026.

The post Review: “Larry Bell: Improvisations” at the San Antonio Museum of Art appeared first on Glasstire.

The Smithsonian Institution is the world’s largest museum, education and research complex. It's a public-private trust that has long operated at arm's length from the White House, but now finds itself under unprecedented scrutiny from the Trump administration. Jeffrey Brown reports for our series, Art in Action, exploring the intersection of art and democracy and our CANVAS coverage.

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

1. I’m aggravated by my company’s giving-back program

My company has a giving-back program where employees are asked to volunteer time or make donations to charity and in return there is a designated one-day holiday that the entire company gets off. Terrific, right? This year, my team signed up for a charity event that was centrally located, which then moved to a much less convenient location for everybody. Most of us opted to make a donation to one of the suggested charities since twice the commute was just too much time away from work.

We then got push back to put on record how we gave back and when stated that we made a donation, were told we were supposed to attend one of the events as well. This is not how it has been presented up till now. I could note the work I do with local charities and be done with it, but I am feeling uneasy about my employer wanting to co-opt what I do of my own choice so they can tout it in their statistics. I made my donation to their chosen charity in addition to my normal designated nonprofits.

Is this just the way it is or are companies trying to get away with something here? By the way, our company does not match any of the donations employees make.

Yeah, this is crappy on multiple levels — first and foremost, telling you that you could donate or volunteer and then changing the expectations after the fact, but also the pressure to participate at all because people’s charitable support should be their own business. It’s great if the company wants to encourage volunteering and donating to charity, but it should be opt-in, not mandatory or high-pressure. And yes, if they want to tout volunteer work that you did on your own time (not during work hours), then they’re trying to co-opt your own personal volunteering as a way to laud themselves without any actual skin in the game.

Related:
my employer pressures us to volunteer for its charitable events

2. My superstar fiancé is my former professor

I’ll get the gossipy parts out of the way first. I am a woman who is engaged to a man who I met because I took a few classes he taught while in my masters degree program. You’ll have to trust me that our relationship is healthy and balanced, and, while we had chemistry for as long as we’ve known one another, our relationship didn’t turn social until after I took his classes and didn’t turn romantic until after I graduated. I received no special treatment as a student beyond what’s normal for a student with an especially good rapport with a professor. I’m not looking for advice on whether or not our relationship is appropriate. He is in his mid-forties and I am in my mid-thirties but because I am early in my career and have a young-looking face people often assume I am in my mid-twenties, which may or may not be relevant.

Here is what I’m seeking advice on. My fiancé is a superstar in the subfield I’m in. He’s a major innovator in the field, has won prominent awards, and wrote a widely used textbook. If I’m networking with someone, it is not uncommon for them to ask after finding out where I got my masters if I was able to study under him. How do I handle situations like this? It feels weird to leave out that we have a personal relationship when asked about him, but it’s uncomfortable to essentially disclose how I met my future husband when networking, especially as I know it might lead to judgment. In the past, I would just say that I took his classes and give one-word answers to any follow-up questions. (“What was it like to have him as a professor?” “Good.”) Is this approach still fine now or does it become a lie of omission?

I have no desire to keep my marriage a closely guarded secret. We are open about our relationship with plenty of close colleagues. I’m sure lots of people outside of our close network are aware. I know I can’t control the narrative. I just don’t want my first conversation with a new acquaintance at professional events to end up being about my personal life, especially when my personal life might trigger gossip.

Yeah, I think it’s going to be weird if you handle it that way and then they find out later that you’re actually engaged. It’s going to feel like a strange and significant thing to have omitted!

Instead, I’d move straight to the current relationship:

Them: Oh, were you able to study under Stewart Mongoose?
You: I actually know him very well — he’s my fiancé.

You’re skipping over the student/professor question and just moving right to your present-day relationship. That will probably be enough for a lot of people, and most probably won’t go back and say, “But did you take his classes too?” But if anyone does, you can say, “I did have some classes with him, but of course we didn’t have a social relationship until much later.”

3. How can people be required to work without pay if the government shuts down?

With (another) government shutdown looming, I am once again hearing news reports about essential government workers being required to work without pay. I have never been able to get someone to explain how that’s not highly illegal. In fact, would it not be … slavery? Can you give some insight into this?

Well, it’s not slavery because people aren’t, you know, owned by their employer and they have the right to quit.

But yeah, it’s messed up! Federal employees do get back pay once the government reopens, but it obviously can be a significant financial burden on them meanwhile; it’s not like their bills don’t need to be paid during that period.

It would be illegal for any other employer not to pay people on time, but the government is fond of exempting itself from the employment laws that it passes for private employers (see also: allowing itself to pay non-exempt employees with comp time instead of cash, as well as denying whistleblower protections to legislative-branch employees).

4. Do I need to sound like I’m mourning my toxic former colleague?

A few years ago, a colleague retired from my organization. She recently was diagnosed with a fast-moving illness, was admitted to hospice, and died. Of course I feel terrible for her family and have sympathy for their loss. But this woman was not nice to me and not pleasant to work with. When I think of her, as I have during the course of being updated on her illness and passing, I think of scenes she caused in the office — berating and arguing with me, other colleagues, and at times even unsuspecting delivery men or service providers.

My boss is aware of all this behavior but continues to speak to me about how devastating and upsetting this loss is. I realize that both can be true, but I feel like my boss is looking for me to express something that my heart does not feel. How would you proceed?

You don’t need to claim to be in mourning when you’re not. But you should sound empathetic to your boss’s grief and to your colleague’s family, so you can say things like, “It’s awful for her family” or “My thoughts are with her family.” You could also say, “I didn’t know her as well as you did, but I’m so sorry for the loss to you and others who did.”

This likely won’t go on indefinitely, so the goal is just to express compassion and sympathy while your boss is processing it.

The post aggravated by my company’s giving-back program, superstar fiancé is my former professor, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

Calm down, Chicken Little. The stock market is not a bubble. Just because it’s a thin sphere of liquid that expands every second of every day doesn’t mean it’s a bubble. It could be anything.

You’re worried. You’re saying numbers can’t go up and up forever. I’m saying take a look at the stock market. It’s a light-as-air orb that is floating higher and higher. There is no way that ever stops. It’s not possible.

You really think this transparent domed enclosure is a bubble? Okay, Nostradamus. Next, you’re going to predict tonight’s winning lottery numbers, or tell me when the Red Sox will win the World Series again. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Maybe you need to get your eyes checked. Not every air-filled spherical cavity is a bubble. That happens all the time in nature for all sorts of reasons. In this particular case, it’s because the American economy is 100 percent healthy and has no underlying issues.

Don’t listen to the eggheads yapping about how companies have low profits and high valuations. Ignore the noise saying CEOs are taking on debt to buy crypto. And most of all, pay no mind to the semi-permanent inflatable structure supported by pressurized air. It’s not what it looks like.

The economy is doing great. I have a chart with an arrow, and that thing is pointed in one direction: up. I don’t see how that could change. This chart used to go back to 2007 and 2000, but my assistant cut those parts off before I could take a look. Now I can focus on the future, and on this rapidly growing hollow globe.

Tech is the future. A handful of tech stocks are propping up this whole enterprise, and that’s a good thing. Tech executives are telling us they’re on the cusp of a revolution, that they’re going to change the world. If I know tech executives, I know they would never lie to us. That’s why we should give them more money and celebrate the large, approximately spherical or ellipsoidal void that shows no sign of slowing down.

That’s enough economics for one day. Now I’m going to sit back, dip a plastic wand in a container of soapy liquid, and blow some clear, floating spheres that will last forever and ever.

Well, here we are. Although many believed that aggressive cuts to our country’s arts funding and national granting organizations by our current administration would have made it impossible to continue to mount adventurous performances of creative merit, we are overjoyed to present this piece tonight, thanks to the incredible support of institutions small and large who have stepped up to the plate to fill in the current void in arts funding.

Tonight’s performance wouldn’t be possible without the support of:

• The Doohickey Fund
• NYSPBTHA
• The MCAS Exams
• The Fjord Foundation
• Johnny Shotput’s Remote Detonation Organization
• The Mr. and Mrs. Met Institute
• The International House of Generational Trauma
• Land Acknowledgment Debate Club
• The King Richard’s Faire
• Rich Aunt Jane (love ya, Jane!)
• Disturbed Uncle Jim (there there, Jim…)
• The Heartfelt Apology Union
• MRSA
• The Itty Bitty Titty Committee
• The National Ruffle Association
• Viewers Like You
• The Clippy Home for Retired GIFS
• Haliburton
• The Where’s Waldorf School of Middle America
• Tony Romo’s Fine Arts Dojo
• The Telluride Tableside Guac Fund
• NYSHPA
• The CCR Institute for Unfortunately Gifted Sons
• Two-Factor Authentication for the Arts
• Bloin Capital
• MoviePass
• Nancy Pelosi’s Stable of Underfed Texters
• NEA: SVU
• Paulie’s Stools for Polycules on Route 9
• The Scholastic Book Fair
• MRNBC
• The Ms. Frizzle Memorial Trust
• A bank
• The National Endowment for Sick Air Bro
• The Jamie Kennedy Center
• NYFFS
• Underachievers Anonymous
• The Spleen Actors Guild
• PERVA
• The Homeopathic Raves Review
• The AFLAC Duck Cash Mattress
• Foul Language investments
• Michelle Corporation
• Chase Fraudulent Activities Missed Calls
• Quibi
• The New York Foundation for Deez Nuts

The post Trump To Travel With Own Escalator Following U.N. Embarrassment appeared first on The Onion.

Taylor Swift is promoting her forthcoming album with The Official Release Party Of A Showgirl, an 89-minute movie that features a music video, lyric videos, and commentary and that will run in theaters the weekend of Oct. 3. The Onion shares everything you need to know about the film.

Q: What inspired Swift to create this film?

A: Wedding ain’t gonna pay for itself.

Q: Is there a theme?

A: Q4 earnings.

Q: Is there going to be a signature popcorn bucket?

A: Yes, in the shape of a cash register.

Q: What should I be prepared for?

A: The sound of people singing along to The Smashing Machine in the adjacent theater. 

Q: How much time will I have to memorize the new songs?

A: Almost none, so buy some Adderall.

Q: What if I can’t make those specific nights?

A: It’s totally cool. Taylor knows how busy you are.

The post What To Know About ‘The Official Release Party Of A Showgirl’ appeared first on The Onion.

In an attempt to reduce foreign labor in the tech sector, President Trump imposed a $100,000 annual fee on new H-1B visa applications, dealing a blow to U.S. companies that rely on highly skilled immigrant workers. What do you think?

The post Trump Adds $100,000 Fee For H-1B Visa Applications appeared first on The Onion.

NEW YORK CITY – In a private meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy, US President Donald Trump stated he fully believes the embattled nation can take back all of its territory currently occupied by Russian forces, specifically if Ukraine can make supporting them “worth America’s while”. “I think that Ukraine, with possible assistance from the […]

The post Trump says Ukraine can have all its occupied territory back if it beats Putin’s offer appeared first on The Beaverton.

“You nailed it man. Way to figure it out!” Luke and the Panel (Ian MacIntyre, Megan MacKay and special guest Brandon Hackett) talk about Jimmy Kimmel’s absurd suspension, wonder how anyone could be mad at Canada recognizing the State of Palestine and are shocked (SHOCKED WE SAY) by a Liberal Minister’s admission that the Party […]

The post Liberals respond to claim their new crime bill will criminalize legitimate protest: “Yup, that’s the idea.” appeared first on The Beaverton.

Adrian aka Silent aka CookiePLMonster did a deep investigation into how a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2.

One reaction I saw to this was “Why is Windows still tinkering with critical sections? Surely there aren’t any bugs in it after all these years.”

While there may not be bugs in critical sections, there may still be performance issues. And since critical sections are so heavily used, small performance issues can add up to large ones.

We saw some time ago that many synchronization objects were made unfair to avoid lock convoys.

At around the same time, critical sections were optimized to reduce their memory footprint, particularly their cost to non-paged pool. Non-paged pool is an expensive resource since (as the name suggests) it cannot be paged out. On systems doing large-scale computing, even a small cost in non-paged pool is multiplied by a enormous number of critical sections, resulting in outsized non-paged pool pressure that creates performance and reliability problems.

More recently, changes were made to critical sections to try to detect and mitigate priority inversions, and (what is significant in 24H2) those mitigations were optimized further by moving more of the work into user mode and avoiding some cases that previously entailed kernel mode transitions.

The critical section may be an old dog, but it’s still learning new tricks in order to keep pace with a computing environment that is bigger, faster, and more concurrent that it was three decades ago.

The post Why is Windows still tinkering with critical sections? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

#Sage #RoninWarriors