Each year on January 1, Glasstire acknowledges Public Domain Day, when copyright terms expire and works of literature, film, music, and visual art are released into the public realm. Celebrated works of fiction, iconic movies, and influential sound recordings are “free for all to copy, share, and build upon,” as the Duke University Center for the Study of the Public Domain states. This year, the list includes literary, film, and artworks from 1930, and sound recordings from 1925.

Last year, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury entered the public domain. This year, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, set in the author’s fictional setting of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi — and the basis of a 2013 movie adaptation by auteur and actor James Franco — is now accessible. Other popular literary works entering the public domain are The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett T. S. Eliot’s poem “Ash Wednesday,” and the first four mysteries of the Nancy Drew series by Carolyn Keene. Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents is also accessible, though only in the original German version Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, as is Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest of Happiness.

In lighter fare, the Betty Boop comics character is now in the public domain through her first appearance in the Dizzy Dishes cartoon by Fleischer Studios, as are Chic Young’s Blondie and Dagwood Bumstead comic strips. Mickey Mouse, perhaps the most famous American comic figure, entered the public domain two years ago through the original 1928 Steamboat Willie cartoon, followed by a dozen more cartoons last year. This year, Mickey’s public domain appearances are in 10 Silly Symphony cartoons from Disney studios, the first week of the Mickey Mouse daily comic strip, and nine more cartoons, including The Barnyard Concert, in which Horace Horsecollar and Clarabelle Cow also appear.

In the realm of film, among works entering the public domain is 1930 Academy Award winner All Quiet on the Western Front, based on the World War I tragedy by German novelist Erich Maria Remarque. Two iconic comedy troupes make this year’s list, with Animal Crackers starring the Marx Brothers, and Soup to Nuts featuring The Three Stooges. Silver screen goddesses Marlene Deitrich and Jean Harlow enter the public domain through the former’s The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel), directed by Josef von Sternberg, and the latter’s Hell’s Angels, directed by Howard Hughes.

Ira and George Gershwin top the list of musical works released into the public domain in 2026, with four songs firmly lodged in American popular memory: “I Got Rhythm,” “I’ve Got a Crush on You,” “But Not for Me,” and “Embraceable You.” Equally memorable are “Georgia on My Mind” by Hoagy Carmichael and Stuart Gorrell, “On the Sunny Side of the Street” by Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh, and the first English translation  of the German hit song “Just a Gigolo.” Notable sound recordings entering the public domain are “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby,” recorded by Gene Austin, and “Sweet Georgia Brown,” recorded by Ben Bernie and His Hotel Roosevelt Orchestra.

The status of visual artworks is murkier, given that they are released into the public domain if they were published in 1930, and as stated by Duke University, “‘published’ is a legal term of art that was not well-defined” in copyright law of the time, and could include exhibition, publication in a catalog or magazine, being exhibited, or being “offered for sale to the public.” That stipulation applies to U.S. copyright law, which differs from European law, which focuses on the year the creator of the work died, rather than publication date. 

This year’s list includes one of Modernism’s most enduring paintings, Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow by Piet Mondrian, a lesser known Paul Klee watercolor Tierfreundschaft (Animal Friendship), and an Edward Steichen gelatin silver print Fashion for Vogue, October 27, 1930, in the Whitney Museum of American Art collection. 

Visit the Duke University website for a fuller list of works entering the public domain, along with detailed explanations on copyright law and use of accessible materials.

The post Highlights from Public Domain Day 2026 appeared first on Glasstire.

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It's a beautiful-ass concept.

What is the state of television in the year 3026?
No TV!
#CowboyWho

You may fire when ready, Mr. Christian.

Happy new year! After a seven-month break, Solver returns on Monday for what I hope will be a full year of adventures. My first job is to complete and publish volume 2, with the Wobbly Head saga making up the first portion, and three single-issue (but connected) adventures rounding it out. The first one, LITTLE DAYS, starts on Monday.

The whole issue will be downloadable in PDF format for my Patreon subscribers on Sunday. And as a new year begins, I’d like to thank all those subscribers. Your support keeps this comic running; without you, I am not sure it would be. I am immensely grateful.

The post SOLVER: LITTLE DAYS starts on Monday appeared first on Bad Machinery.

Each January, millions of Americans vow to improve something about themselves, but many struggle with the commitments they make. Here are tips for sticking to your New Year’s resolutions.

Hire a hitman to shoot you in between the eyes if you even so much as look at a cigarette.

Tell your coworkers about your plan so they can inevitably mock you when you fail to live up to your resolution.

If you resolved to give up junk food for a month, petition the U.S. government to make January three days long.

Choose an attainable resolution that you’ve already completed prior to starting.

Be realistic about how many coconuts you can crack open with your head in under 10 minutes.

Remember that if you and the rebel forces don’t succeed, Selassie’s iron grip on Ethiopia may never loosen.

Convince yourself your New Year’s resolution was always to fall into the deep, dark hole of “day in the life of an age-gap couple” vlogs.

Make small, daily progress on your resolution to help ensure that you recoup the cost of Megalopolis to investors by 2026.

If you’re having trouble sticking with a goal as simple as “eat more protein,” we’re not quite sure how we can help you.

The post How To Stick To Your New Year’s Resolutions appeared first on The Onion.

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There is something though funny...
Oh yeah what's that?
The Cowboy Pat show!
And it's coming on right now! #CowboyWho

Celebrate the public domain with the Internet Archive in the following ways:

• Register for our Public Domain Day celebrations on January 21 – both virtual and in-person.
• Submit a short film to our Public Domain Film Remix contest. Deadline January 7, 2026 @11:59 PM Pacific.
• Explore the works that have entered the public domain in 2026, below.

On January 1, 2026, we celebrate published works from 1930 and published sound recordings from 1925 entering the public domain! Their arrival marks another chapter in our shared cultural heritage: the freedom to breathe new life into overlooked works, remix enduring classics, and circulate the oddities we discover in thrift stores, family attics, and forgotten corners of the internet.

For the first time since the 1970s, works from a new decade have entered the public domain after their long copyright term. This milestone builds on the momentum that began when the public domain reopened in 2019. The works of 1930 reflect a world grappling with enormous change: the early years of the Great Depression, anxieties about banks and tariffs (sound familiar?), and a cultural landscape still humming with the last heartbeats of the 1920s.

The Jazz Age and flapper style persisted through Nancy Drew’s illustrations and Betty Boop’s design; Buster Keaton’s first talkie signaled the twilight of the silent era; and the Gershwins continued to shake-up musical culture with “I Got Rhythm” and “Embraceable You”. The Interwar period left its mark, too—the first filmed adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front won Best Picture. Audiences sought escapism in the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers, in 19 new Disney cartoons, and in the gender-bending glamour of the pre-Hays Code film Morocco.

Culture was everywhere—and now, it belongs to everyone.

Musical Compositions

1930 saw the introduction of many standards into the Great American Songbook including the wistful “Dream A Little Dream of Me”, “Georgia on My Mind”, and “It Happened in Monterey”. The latter of those songs being a cultural curiosity as the spelling reflects the California city while the song is about the Mexican city. Hoagy Charmichael’s loving refrain for the state of Georgia with Georgia on My Mind would become the state’s official song in 1979. 

Even inspiration for later 20th Century works bubbled up with “Beyond the Blue Horizon” which would serve as inspiration for the original Star Trek theme. At the Internet Archive the song reminds us of the blinking blue lights that help to power the 1 Trillion webpages saved.

Check out this list of more musical compositions from the year.

• On the Sunny Side of the Street lyrics by Dorothy Fields, music by Jimmy McHugh
• Just A Gigolo (first English translation), original German lyrics by Julius Brammer, English translation by Irving Caesar, music by Leonello Casucci 
• You’re Driving Me Crazy! What Did I Do?, lyrics and music by Walter Donaldson 
• Livin’ in the Sunlight, Lovin’ in the Moonlight lyrics by Al Sherman, music by Al Lewis
• Body and Soul lyrics by Edward Heyman, Robert Sour, Frank Eyton, music by John W. Green
• I’ve Got a Crush on You; But Not for Me, lyrics by Ira Gershwin, music by George Gershwin

Literature

If we thought that detectives had a field day in 1929 then we just hadn’t seen what 1930 had to offer yet. Miss Marple, Nancy Drew, Harriet Vane, and Sam Spade all featured in iconic works of the year respectively: The Murder at the Vicarage by Agatha Christie, The Secret of the Old Clock, Strong Poison, and the published novel edition of The Maltese Falcon. Nancy Drew appeared in four different stories this year giving readers and creatives plenty of stories and mysteries to dig into. But be careful and make sure you’re reading the original editions from 1930 and not the rewrites from the late 1950s. Luckily the Archive has the 1930 editions ready for you here in our collections!

While detective fiction dominated we also got bold works from other authors including As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner which blends multiple perspectives and bold narrative experimentation to chronicle a family’s turbulent journey to honor their mother’s final request. Groundwork was also laid for another Best Picture winner with Edna Farber’s Cimarron. Children had works to entertain themselves with Dick and Jane’s introduction in Elson Basic Readers and a 1930 retelling of the folktale, The Little Engine That Could.

Dive into Archive’s literary collection to unearth more classics from 1930.

Film

A favorite film of this author is the King of Jazz, a stunning Technicolor musical revue featuring Paul Whiteman, Bing Crosby, and elaborate song and dance numbers. 

It wasn’t the only musical of the year as the Marx Brothers adapted their stage show Animal Crackers to the big screen in a film of the same name. Their comedic antics would absurdly riff on the culture of the time with Groucho directly parodying a monologue from Eugene O’Neill’s 1928 play, Strange Interlude.

While past the heyday of his filmic output, Buster Keaton was still on the scene with his first talkie, Free and Easy, entering the public domain this year. If you’ve never heard his voice before then it might surprise you! Another iconic comedy is Soup to Nuts, a vehicle for Rube Goldberg to share crazy contraptions on screen. It was also the debut of actors that would form The Three Stooges group a few years later.

In another reminder of how copyright expires on a yearly basis we’re talking about All Quiet on the Western Front for the third year in a row, but this time as the adaptation that won the 3rd Academy Award for Best Picture. The film is a sobering reminder and depiction of the horrors of war, and showcased how audiences in 1930 were still reeling from the first World War. It is also a very engaging and well rounded film that is still great cinema nearly 100 years later.

Even more icons made headway in 1930 with Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder!, John Wayne’s first leading role in The Big Trail, and Greta Garbo’s moving performance in Anna Christie.

Check out more films from the year here:

• Hell’s Angels (dir. Howard Hughes & James Whale)
• Holiday (the first adaptation of the Philip Barry play)
• Monte Carlo (An early Lubitsch)
• The Divorcee (Norma Shearer’s Academy Award winning performance)
• The Unholy Three (Lon Chaney’s final film and only talkie)

Our film remix contest is ongoing until January 7, 2026, so please upload your submissions! Read more here.

Comics and Cartoons

Only a year removed from the 1920s, culture didn’t change overnight. Debuting on September 8, 1930, the Blondie comic strip by Chic Young was steeped in flapper style. Originally named Blondie Boopadoop, she drew on the singing persona of Helen Kane—who also inspired aspects of Betty Boop. For more on Betty Boop, read Jennifer Jenkins’ write-up at Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

Mickey Mouse expanded from the screen to the page with 303 daily comic strips, sending him on western adventures, robber-chasing escapades, and more.

In 2026, we now have another 19 Disney shorts (9 Mickey, 10 Silly Symphonies) to help fill out this creative world. The Silly Symphonies rounded out their celebration of the seasons by following up 1929’s Springtime with Summer, Autumn, and Winter.

Meanwhile, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit—Mickey’s older brother—continued his prolific output even after Disney lost the rights to him in 1928. Under Walter Lantz, Oswald starred in 24 shorts this year, nearly 2.5 times Mickey’s total. Two of these, My Pal Paul and Africa, cross-promoted the film King of Jazz, proving that cinematic tie-ins have long been part of studio strategy.

Recap

The arrival of these works into the public domain is a reminder of our shared cultural heritage—of the stories, sounds, and images that shaped earlier generations and now become fair game for creative reuse. Many of these works have already been reimagined under copyright: Nancy Drew’s rewrites, the many adaptations of All Quiet on the Western Front, Mickey Mouse’s leap into comics, and more.

Now, in 2026, these works pass into a space where everyone can study them, remix them, preserve them, and carry them forward.

The public domain belongs to all of us. Let’s explore it together.

Additional resources

• Learn more about what’s moving into the public domain in 2026 from Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle of Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain.
• Public Domain Review highlights the materials moving into the public domain in 2026.
• Read the recaps from John Mark Ockerbloom’s Everybody’s Libraries of works that have joined the public domain.
• Check out the Public Domain Game Jam from Techdirt.

plus one

Thank You

Girl, Fish and Penguin pose for a photograph

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Why do I push people away?

It’s time for the passing year!

✨🌟✨Happy new year!!✨🌟✨

Wishing you the best as always, health and success for you through 2026!

Keep it up!

OTTAWA – Despite best efforts and an emotional journey through time and space, three ghosts visiting Official Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre failed to inspire him to change his ways through the spirit of Christmas.  “Normally, I would take him to the past to show he’s gone wrong,” said the Ghost of Christmas Past. “So I […]

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I'm going in here horsey, so you stay here and don't move. #CowboyWho

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The main fallout is that everyone learns geology really well and the rate of teen pregnancy is through the roof.

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past. Here are four updates from past letter-writers.

1. Interviewing in person while visibly pregnant (#2 at the link)

Thanks for your advice about addressing my pregnancy during an interview process. I had to make my decision before I saw your response, but it was reassuring that I hadn’t messed up!

I was invited to in-person second-round interviews for two positions through that recruiter in the same week, so I let him know I was pregnant and gave him permission to share that with the hiring committees. He responded with congratulations, but said he’d let me handle the conversation with employers. Weird, because he knew I didn’t have contact information for anyone I was interviewing with – all the arrangements went through the recruiter. So, both times I announced my pregnancy by walking through the door. Both interviews went pretty well, but I didn’t get offered either job, and I’ll never know whether pregnancy had anything to do with it. Also, the recruiter apparently just happened not to have any other postings I might be a good candidate for until approximately two months after my baby was born – which could absolutely be a coincidence. I typically hear from him every few months, but around the time I wrote to you, he’d sent me four or five jobs very close together, so the timing of the lull stood out.

During my pregnancy, there was only one job I applied for on my own, and for that one I had an in-person interview the day before my scheduled C-section! When I confirmed the interview, I let them know I was pregnant and planning to deliver the next day – I wanted them fully informed in case I had to cancel last-minute, and I figured my cheerfulness about interviewing that day might speak to my enthusiasm for the role. This was by far the most comfortable of the interviews for me, and I think telling them in advance contributed to that – they were warm and friendly and made small talk about their own pregnancies and kids (in a professional, non-TMI way) and I ended up with a very positive sense of the friendly culture and work-life balance at that organization. I was one of two finalists they invited back for a final interview via Zoom the following week, but they went with the other candidate. That person has a specific relevant (but not required) certification that I don’t have, but it’s also true that I passed up multiple openings to pitch myself as a person who “hits the ground running” – while that is usually me, it wouldn’t have been at that job, with how soon they wanted someone to start.

Most importantly, I now have a wonderful, healthy, mostly happy, almost four-month-old baby. Second most importantly, my old job (at a company that was going out of business) managed to keep me long enough that I qualified for our state’s paid family leave, which turned not having a new job yet into a good thing. And third most importantly, I have just accepted an offer and I get a whole five weeks before my start date to enjoy my baby without a job search hanging over my head!

2. How much exaggeration is too much on LinkedIn? (#3 at the link)

My coworker is no longer at the company, but things have taken a real turn on the LinkedIn exaggeration front. (For the commenters worried I would do something to sabotage my coworker, rest assured that this is filed firmly under “interesting topic of discussion/food for thought, but decidedly not my place to intervene in any way.”)

Since departing the company, this person’s LinkedIn page is now wildly inaccurate and does not represent their true work history at all, especially for their time at my company. Some examples include:
– a job title that is completely different from the actual job title (think HR representative vs accountant levels of different, not teapot specialist vs teapot designer different)
– designing and creating learning programs for the whole organization (listing a specific number of people that is about five times the number of employees at the company); these programs do not exist
– creating a large number of complex work products that do not exist using software we never had access to
– meeting every single deadline they ever had (not possible with the type of work we do, and project management was one of their biggest struggles)

I don’t know if this rises to the level of bananapants, but it has been interesting to see the evolution of their personal branding. I think I now have a very clear read on how much is too much embellishment.

3. I’m sick of being the only person who can manage our old technology (#2 at the link)

I’d like to thank you for your advice, along with the many kind commenters who weighed in with their similar experiences. It seems like it’s a pretty common problem for a lot of people working in tech.

I spoke to managers about how much was on my plate and they were very understanding and were willing to support giving me as much time as was needed to keep everything running, without having to worry about other responsibilities. Unfortunately, projects to remove these legacy systems kept being delayed and there was very little interest in others picking up the work, which still left me nervous about if a problem were to come up over the evenings or weekends.

Ultimately, last year I decided to leave. While the issue I wrote about was a big factor, there was also a huge loss of staff in our department to competitors, a lack of promised career progression, and a significant change in attitude towards my team that I became increasingly frustrated with. I initially looked for similar jobs at a similar salary, but through some hard work and a massive amount of luck I was offered a role by a much larger company that offered a title promotion, massive raise, and fully remote work. I have now celebrated one year with the new company and genuinely enjoy it.

I spent my slightly ridiculous three-month notice period documenting all the tasks I had been doing and supervising other engineers as they (somewhat begrudgingly) learnt everything I had been doing. As cathartic as it may have been for the whole system to crash and burn within days of my absence it seems like they’ve kept everything ticking along, and hopefully they’ve kept up pressure for the old systems to be sent to the great e-waste recycler in the sky.

4. Can I use an offer to try to get a second offer? (#4 at the link)

Despite my confidence in getting an offer from a local city government, that didn’t happen. I did receive an email a few weeks later saying they went with someone else. So, I wasn’t able to leverage that offer to get a full time position from Company A. But the great news is that Company A decided to hire a full-time person. As a consultant, they let me skip any screeners and jump right to the first round virtual interview. Then they had me do a virtual interview with the CEO, and they told me at the end of the interview they wanted to make me an offer! So, I’ve been happily working full time at Company A since July!

The post updates: interviewing while visibly pregnant, LinkedIn exaggeration, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past. Here are four updates from past letter-writers.

1. My vegan coworker is upset about getting non-vegan gifts three years in a row (first update)

I saw some comments on the update I sent in before (about my coworker who cluelessly gave a vegan coworker three non-vegan gifts) wanted to know what Marie would get Liz for Christmas this year, haha.

Liz ended up leaving the company in October for another job, so alas, no Christmas gift story, but we did have a farewell lunch for Liz and Marie gave her a book of plant-based recipes for dogs. Liz does have a dog, I have no idea about its diet, but still, this was an improvement, especially considering no one knew Marie was going to get a going-away gift for Liz and therefore couldn’t vet it. I was really holding my breath when she pulled it out. Fortunately, Marie actually bought this book at Barnes and Noble earlier in the year when it was on display, in anticipation of giving it to Liz for Christmas. It wasn’t weird for her to give Liz a going-away gift, since turnover in our office is pretty rare, but obviously it hadn’t gone well before, so I was still surprised (but also not, because that’s just Marie — she loves to give gifts).

2. Quitting when I just hired new team members (#5 at the link)

Update: I put in my notice.

I stayed long enough to onboard my new reports, just in case having a bigger team would help me feel less burned out. Things got a little better, but I still feel called to try something else. Hopefully my team will be better off in the long term with a manager who is bought in.

I was having trouble pulling the trigger, until my boss scheduled a quick call to tell me she was quitting. That was the push I needed. Wish me luck!

3. Our laid-off coworkers are organizing a get-together — should the rest of us attend? (#4 at the link)

Several of my remaining colleagues and I ended up going to the get together with my colleagues after checking in with some of the fired folks who were organizing it. There were a few awkward spots but most people expressed sympathy for the new organizational leadership those of us who were left still had to deal with.

On the whole, it was a good farewell, especially as several of my mentors who had been instrumental in my career success were there and it was a final opportunity to get together with them all before many of them moved out of our area.

In the following months, the changes at my organization continued, with increased hostility to the workers who were there from both those now in charge of us as well as external actors.

Some small groups were brought back while additional large scale firings at my organization continued in the months ahead, especially so during the shutdown.

I’ve tried to keep the pieces of my group’s mission alive as well as buoy the morale of my team members while making sure they have a firm understanding of our situation. With more organizational changes ahead, I’m unsure of what is next for me or my team.

I am making preparations to potentially go into the private sector and trying to make sure my team members are ready for that as well.

4. Can I leave during a project I’m leading? (#5 at the link)

The advice I received from other AAM readers really helped me shift my perspective around what we owe our jobs (and what our jobs owe us). Specifically, the idea that it is an executive’s role at the company to have contingency plans around staffing and project management–that’s ostensibly why they get paid the big bucks. The employer that had been aggressively pursuing me ended up ghosting me before the offer was final, but the support from you and the readers gave me the kick in the pants I needed to start applying and interviewing in a more intentional way. A few weeks after you published my question, I got a great offer from a local start-up and gave notice at my then employer. Tellingly, then-employer didn’t ask me why or try to bargain for me to stay. Toxic until the end, the executive I wasn’t valued by didn’t wish me luck, reference that I was leaving in any meetings during my notice period, or even say goodbye to me on my last day.

I’m a lot happier now, and I’m so glad I got the motivation to leave when I did. I only wish I’d done so sooner!

The post updates: the non-vegan gifts, the get-together of laid-off coworkers, and more appeared first on Ask a Manager.

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

Remember the letter-writer who took a job with less responsibility and her coworkers were treating her like she had no experience? Here’s the update.

It turns out the part where you asked why it mattered was the crux of the issue. At the time I wrote, we had just hired the woman who told me she had a degree in marketing and “actually knew about this stuff.” She was older than me and a little odd, but I thought she was cool and admired her amazing work ethic. She had a habit of giving me unsolicited advice, like “when you are a salaried employee you will sometimes have to work more than 40 hours a week if that’s what it takes to get the job done,” and she questioned a lot of what I told her, but I look younger than my age. At the time I didn’t realize how much she was doing it, and it often happened in meetings where other people would follow her lead, so that’s what inspired the letter. She also had other quirks, like trying to follow me into the bathroom to continue discussing work and insisting she had an innate knowledge of our local area because her father had lived here before she was born, despite the fact that she was from the South and we were a Mid-Atlantic state. This became an issue because we have many foundations and institutions named after a 19th-century robber baron, and no one could convince her they weren’t all the same organization.

Then we had a reorg and lost 75% of our staff and we became a department of two who were shoved into a basement office together. That’s when she became abusive. She started by taking any opportunity to throw my mistakes in my face. My “mistakes” were things like not covering her incidentals during a hotel stay so she had to provide her own credit card or putting the data into a spreadsheet before making it look pretty, or not ordering dry erase board cleaner while we had a spending freeze. I think she wanted me to buy it with my own money. I also stopped giving input on anything at all because she would angrily insist I knew nothing and also throw it in my face for months afterwards. We had an event and the venue gave us a list of preferred caterers. I recommended one because it fit with our mission and from then on, every time we talked about the event, she would look me dead in the face and say, “WE WILL NOT BE USING THAT CATERER.” This continued after the event, whenever catering was discussed. I had only mentioned it once.

At that point, I still thought she was just quirky (I had really liked her a lot at first), but one day I told her “no.” I refused to come in at the last minute on a day we had scheduled to work from home. She argued with me, but I stood my ground. That day she kept me on Zoom for five hours of meetings. After that she became insanely controlling. She wouldn’t let me walk around the office alone, she’d always come with me. She would be obviously unhappy if I did anything she didn’t specifically tell me to do, but she was my coworker, not my supervisor, so there wasn’t much she could do about it, and again, I wasn’t doing anything wrong, just on my own.

One day, she asked me to help another department with a task, and they wanted to have a meeting about it. When giving me the task, she said, “Don’t let this take up too much of your time.” The other department asked me to have a meeting about it, which I had on Zoom in the office with her. During the meeting, I offered to drop off some equipment for them since it was on my way. As soon as I got off the phone, she was screaming in my face that I had “broken her trust,” since she told me not to put much time into it, and demanding I tell her “what I was trying to get out of doing this,” and questioning my integrity. She then emailed the other department and told them that they had asked too much of me and that I would not help them again.

Now that I had “broken her trust,” it got really bad. Now if I was in the bathroom longer than she wanted, she’d knock on the door and ask what I was doing. On a rare day when I was at work when she wasn’t (we were both part-time), I managed to get away from her and talk to my supervisor. Remember, we had lost 75% of our staff and my supervisor was in name only. He asked if I was okay and when I asked him why he would ask that, he said, “I also work with her.” I found out that she had been lying to me about the scope of our project and that it would be ending in November despite all the plans she would talk about during our five-hour meetings.

I started looking for other jobs, but one day it was all too much. She asked me to make her a list (in a table in Word, not Excel) with one column of whose hotel rooms we would pay for and a column of whose hotel rooms we wouldn’t be paying for. For a conference with an expected attendance of hundreds of people. I explained that I wouldn’t know if someone was booking a hotel room if we weren’t paying for it. Next thing I know, she’s screaming at me that I was refusing to do a new procedure and that the (company approved) method I had been using to pay for hotel rooms was something I just made up and I was to find out if any of our conference speakers was bringing a spouse and that the spouse would have to pay for their own room (!?) and “the free ride was over.” Then she threw a barrage of insults at me until I left the room. When I returned, I told her that she couldn’t talk to me like that and I hadn’t done anything wrong. She refused to talk to me and went home.

I immediately went to HR and my supervisor and begged them to fire me. In an amazing twist, a job I had turned down a year earlier had opened again and I could move right in. During the transition, I was told to wrap up my old job and any communication I had with my coworker could go through my supervisor. But she didn’t talk to me. She did, however, have a meeting with the finance department to learn how to do my job and then emailed me to let me know that from now on I had no reason to speak to anyone else and I could take all of my direction from her. I didn’t respond, and a week after that she went to my supervisor and told him I was useless and hadn’t spoken to her in weeks and demanded I be fired. That’s how she found out I was starting my new job the next week!

My new job is amazing. I love my boss, and her boss. My days are so busy and fun that I find myself struggling to leave on time. I’m still in the learning curve stage, but I recently made a suggestion and my boss gushed over how happy she was that someone else wanted to help plan things. I am, however, in charge of the newsletter.

The post update: I took a job with less responsibility — and my coworkers treat me like I have no experience appeared first on Ask a Manager.

Hey, look, that’s my brother in that truck. What are the chances of that happening? Hi, brother!

If old women give him the creeps, maybe he shouldn’t have gone into oldwomanology.

Maybe I could just slip over there for dessert… nah, it might look bad.

North Pole, CA – After years of competition between the two Christmas lovers, Jeff Bezos has finally decided to end Santa Claus’ hold on Christmas by putting a hit out on Saint Nick after holiday season where Mr. Claus dominated headlines and trend reports. “His business model needs to be put down,” laughed Bezos. “Free […]

The post Jeff Bezos puts hit out on “socialist” Santa Claus appeared first on The Beaverton.

I ran across a promotion from a hotel.

Join us for the holidays with this promotion code.

But if you read down to the fine print, it also says

Limited number of rooms available for each date. May not be valid during holiday and blackout periods or combined with any other discount or promotional offers.

The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away.

My guess is that this was standard boilerplate they attach to all their promotions, and they didn’t realize that it conflicted with the fact that it’s a holiday promotion.

The post Reading the fine print, episode 4: Holiday promotions appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Regular readers of this blog may remember the giant traditional Swedish Yule Goat erected annually in the Swedish town of Gävle. The Gävle Goat (Gävlebocken in Swedish) is a source of fascination for me because of its unfortunate habit of being burnt down by vandals.

In 2023, the Gävle Goat was eaten by jackdaws who feasted on the unusually high seed content in that year’s straw harvest. But fortunately, in 2024, the goat survived, bringing its survival rate for the 2020’s to 3/5. It looked like it was doing fairly well, at least by Gävle Goat standards.

Alas, in 2025, the goat succumbed again. But it wasn’t fire or birds that did in the goat. This time, it collapsed under the strong winds of storm Johannes, which also knocked out power to over 40,000 homes and felled trees across the country.

YouTube video of the goat’s collapse.

Local officials have not decided whether they will attempt to raise the goat back up.

The post The Gävle Goat (Gävlebocken) succumbs in 2025 to a new menace appeared first on The Old New Thing.

A little while ago, I wrote about the use of color-keyed overlays to render video smoothly. The idea is that the CPU itself produces an image with a block of solid color (green in my example), and the graphics card is instructed to replace those pixels with the pixels from an off-screen image that it generated separately. Rather than doing the image composition in the CPU, the composition happens in the video card as the image leaves the card and goes to the monitor.

In the subsequent discussion, some people remembered this technique but noted that in their recollection, the color-key was not green but some other color. What’s going on?

When you set up the color-keying with the video card, you gave it a few instructions. You told it where to find the off-screen replacement image and how big it was. You told it the size and location of the on-screen rectangle where the replacement image should go. And you told it the magic color to look for inside that rectangle.

So the CPU got to pick the color-key color.

Choosing a color-key color was a bit tricky. If another window overlapped your video playback window, and they used your color-key color, then your video would play “through” the other window at any place it used that color. Therefore, when choosing a color-key color, you wanted to pick a color that is not commonly encountered. You didn’t want white or black, for example, because those are all over the place. Common choices were either neon-bright colors such as bright green or bright magenta because they are so ugly that nobody would even use them on purpose, or very dark colors like #010000 because they are so close to black that most normal people would just pick black outright.

The neon-bright colors were also useful when debugging because it’s extremely noticeable when you messed up.

Video card support for overlays was extremely varied. Some cards didn’t support them. Others did, but with restrictions. For example, “Oh, I can do overlays, but no more than four at a time, and they cannot have overlapping destination rectangles, and furthermore, I cannot apply a scale factor smaller than 1.0 or larger than 1.3.” Navagating all of these limitations and restrictions was quite a cumbersome undertaking for programs that wanted to use the feature.

The key to all this overlay trickery is that the magic happened inside the video card, and the result went out to the monitor without ever being sent back to the CPU. Programs themselves never saw the result of the overlay. All that programs saw or knew about were the color-keyed pixels. When you took the screen shot, you got the green (or whatever) pixels. When you loaded the bitmap into Paint, it showed green pixels, (but if an overlay was active, the video card changed them to something else before sending them to the monitor). When Paint saved the bitmap, it just saved green pixels. As far as anybody on the computer could tell, those pixels were just boring green pixels.

The post Additional notes on color-keyed overlays as a way of doing smooth video rendering appeared first on The Old New Thing.

WASHINGTON—Claiming that his longstanding interest in the arts made him a perfect fit for the role, President Donald Trump announced Tuesday that he had appointed himself to the divine muses. “Many are saying these nine inspirational goddesses have become beholden to DEI and woke ideology, so I’m ascending Mount Helicon as a muse to make sure literature, science, and music continue to serve the American people,” Trump said during a press conference, adding that in his position as the 10th muse, he would embody the practices of pastoral poetry and late-night posting sprees on Truth Social. “Buskin-shod Melpomene must be doing very well, because it’s a tragedy what’s happened to the muses. Calliope is turning epic poetry into a Marxist nightmare, and Terpsichore, it’s so sad what she’s doing to chorus and dance, isn’t it, folks? And what happened to Euterpe? Good old Euterpe, we loved Euterpe. But the flutes now, they’re terrible, so we’re going in and fixing it. I actually had a great relationship with the Titaness Mnemosyne in the 1980s, and she used to say, ‘Donald, we need someone like you in the muses to keep my daughters in line.’ So it’s happening. I’m in charge, and together we’re going to make Boeotia great again.” At press time, Trump had reportedly been transformed into a magpie after boasting that the Kennedy Center could stage a production of The Phantom Of The Opera more beautifully than the nine original muses.

The post Trump Appoints Self To Divine Muses appeared first on The Onion.