Cowboy Who?

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P2p group has released the newest build of “Symantec Ghost Boot CD” for windows. Enjoy

Description: Symantec Ghost Boot CD – creates and restores backup images of the entire disk, partition, or individual folders, and allows you to recover the system even when everything seems compromised.

Feature :
Norton Ghost operations happen “hot”, which means that you can continue to use Windows and its applications during rescue operations. There are also no options for scheduling these actions at predefined intervals or when certain events occur. The copy can be uploaded to a partition of your system, on a CD / DVD, on Blu-ray or on a USB removable media.

Norton Ghost leaves nothing to chance, and also assumes that you no longer have access to Windows, for example because some boot files are corrupt. In these cases, if you have previously created the Norton Ghost Recovery Disk, you can perform a system boot with this CD and start a recovery procedure using an already saved image.
Release Names: Symantec Ghost Boot CD 12.0.0.11379 (x64)-P2P
Size: 252 MB
Links: Homepage – NFO – NTi 

Download: NITROFLARE – RAPIDGATOR

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Old, the latest mind-bender from mad genius M. Night Shyamalan, is here – and it’s going to be polarizing. Like so many other Shyamalan movies, Old is loaded with twists, turns, and big weird secrets. If you’ve seen the trailers, you know the basic gist of the movie: vacationers get stuck on a beach and find themselves rapidly aging.

So what’s the deal? Does Old actually give us answers as to all the strange stuff going on here? Yes, it does! And I’m not entirely sure if that’s a good thing – there’s a part of me that thinks Shyamalan would’ve had a more successful movie if he had left some things more ambiguous. But that’s not what happened here. With that in mind, let’s take a dive into the Old ending and try to explain just what the deal is.

Major spoilers for Old follow. 

The Perfect Getaway

Old introduces us to a group of characters on a tropical vacation at the exclusive Anamika Resort. Side-note: Anamkia is also the name of a 1973 Hindi film about a man who finds a woman lying passed out in the road; when she regains consciousness, she claims she’s his wife – this has nothing to do with the movie itself, but it’s just a fun bit of trivia from me, to you.

There’s married couple Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps) and their kids Trent (initially played by Nolan River) and Maddox (initially played by Alexa Swinton). Then there’s doctor Charles (Rufus Sewell), his younger wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee), and their child Kara (initially played by Kyle Bailey). Along with them is Charles’ mother Agnes (Kathleen Chalfant). Finally, there’s married couple Jarin (Ken Leung) and Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird).

After arriving at Anamkia, the characters relax and take in some sun. Trent befriends another kid, the consistently nervous Idlib (Kailen Jude), nephew of the resort’s manager (Gustaf Hammarsten). The manager tells Guy and Prisca about a private beach, and the couple and their children set out for it. They assume they’re going to be the only people there – but they’re not. Charles, Chrystal, Kara, Agnes, Jarin, and Patricia all come along as well. Before they leave, though, Idlib hands Trent a folded-up note – which Trent doesn’t bother to read. Hmm, I wonder if that’ll come up at some point later in the film!

The beach, which is said to be by a nature preserve, is truly secluded – tucked away behind some rocky cliffs. You wouldn’t even know it was there unless you were specifically looking for it. Once on the beach, the characters notice someone else – a famous rapper named Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre). Mr. Mid-Sized is sitting alone by himself with a bloody nose, and in true creepy movie fashion, he doesn’t acknowledge anyone.

All is going seemingly well – at first. Guy also points out a coral reef just off the shore, and like that note Idlib gave Trent, you would probably remember that for later. Things go from good to bad when Trent discovers a woman’s dead body floating in a cove. In a prologue, we saw the dead woman come to the beach with Mid-Sized Sedan, and Charles immediately assumes that the rapper must’ve murdered her. During these accusations, it starts to become clear that Charles is a tad unhinged.

When the characters attempt to leave the beach to get some help they make a shocking discovery: they can’t escape. Any attempt to leave causes people to first have massive headaches and then blackout. When they wake up again they’re right back on the beach. All of this is pretty distressing on its own, but then the real spooky shit starts to happen. The children all suddenly begin to age rapidly. Six-year-old Trent is suddenly about 11 (and now played by Luca Faustino Rodriguez); 11-year-old Maddox is now 16 (played by Thomasin McKenzie); and Kara, who, like Trent, was six when we first met her, is also now 11 (and played by Mikaya Fisher).

The Clock is Ticking

With these bizarre developments, the adults are understandably freaked out (the kids seem oddly okay with all of this). Things quickly get worse. The elderly Agnes suddenly dies, and the dead body of Mid-Sized Sedan’s lady friend rapidly decomposes. In all the ensuing panic it comes to light that a lot of the people on the beach have certain medical conditions: Prisca has a stomach tumor; Patricia is an epileptic; Mid-Sized Sedan is a hemophiliac; Chrystal has hypocalcemia; and Charles suffers from schizophrenia.

Despite Charles’ unstable state, he’s drafted into performing an operation on Prisca when her tumor suddenly swells and grows. Charles obliges and removes the tumor – and the incision he made on Prisca’s stomach heals almost immediately. Meanwhile, Trent and Kara have gotten even older, aging into teenagers (now played by Alex Wolff and Eliza Scanlen). This triggers some horny hormones in the rapid-agers, and Trent and Kara end up having sex in a tent. Afterward, Kara almost instantly becomes pregnant, with the baby growing rapidly inside her. The baby grows so much, in fact, that Kara ends up delivering it – only to have the baby die in childbirth.

Distraught, Kara attempts an escape by climbing the rocks that surround the beach. She almost makes it to the top but passes out, at which point she falls to the ground – and to her death. Charles’ schizophrenic state worsens, and in a fit of rage, he murders Mid-Sized Sedan. Jarin decides to try to swim for help, but – as you might have guessed – he doesn’t make it and his dead body eventually washes back up on shore. Patricia has a massive epileptic fit that kills her. And Chrystal ends up breaking a bunch of bones, only to have them heal at wrong angles. She eventually dies, too.

By nightfall, Guy and Prisca have aged into elderly people. Charles, completely out of his damn mind now, attacks them. Prisca ends up slashing him with a rusty knife which causes an infection that spreads rapidly within Charles, killing him.

Get Well Soon

By the next morning, Guy and Prisca are both dead and Trent and Maddox are even older, with Trent now played by Emun Elliott (who looks so much like Alex Wolff that I thought it was just Wolff with make-up on at first) and Maddox played by Embeth Davidtz. The siblings assume they’re doomed, but they don’t want to give up trying to escape just yet. Trent and Maddox also realize they’re being watched by a resort employee up on the top of the cliffs (that someone is actually played by M. Night Shyamalan himself, who never misses an opportunity for an extended cameo).

It’s at this point that the note Idlib gave Trent comes back, Chekhov’s gun-style. The note says that Idlib’s uncle, the resort manager, “hates” the coral reef that you probably already forgot about. The siblings reason that there’s some means of escape through the coral, and set out to swim through it. However, once underwater, Maddox’s shirt gets caught on a bit of coral. Trent tries to rescue her to no avail, and it looks like the brother and sister are about to drown.

Here, Old cuts back to the resort where we find out what’s been going on. The folks at Anamika are actually conducting experiments with drugs and pharmaceuticals. At some point (this is all very vague) someone discovered the beach and its rapid aging properties on humans and proceeded to turn it into a kind of giant laboratory. The resort then lures people with various illnesses and sets up them to be unwitting trial subjects. The rapid aging enables the researchers at Anamkia to complete a lifetime of drug trials in a single day. I just want to use this opportunity to point out that this is stupid as hell, and I really wish Shyamalan had left well enough alone. Oh well!

In true Scooby-Doo fashion, the shady researchers at Anamkia would’ve gotten away with it all if it weren’t for those meddling (former) kids! Because as it turns out, Trent and Maddox are alive – and they managed to escape the beach through the coral. They proceed to approach a vacationing cop at the resort and spill the beans. Instead of immediately assuming these two people are out of their fucking minds for telling such a wild story, the cop checks into things, and soon enough, the Anamkia manager and all his staff are being arrested while Maddox and Trent reveal to the world what happened to them and the others on the beach. All’s well that ends well. Except most of the characters are dead and Trent and Maddox are children trapped in the bodies of much older people.

The post ‘Old’ Ending Explained: Making Sense of the Latest M. Night Shyamalan Twists appeared first on /Film.

While it hasn’t exactly been chilly this summer, at least July has been running a couple degrees below average for Houston. We’re now set to, in the words of Emeril Lagasse, “kick it up a notch” this weekend. Let’s rock and roll.

Today

High pressure is going to begin to exert its will on southeast Texas today. The amount of moisture in the atmosphere is going to drop precipitously, allowing for a reduction in rain chances this afternoon. The faucet isn’t going to shut off completely, but it’s likely going to scale back to a slow drip. Call it maybe 20 percent coverage of rain this afternoon. And that may even be generous.

More importantly, the heat is going to ramp up. We topped out at 93° at both Bush & Hobby Airports yesterday. Look for about 95-96° today officially, with a few places hotter and coastal areas a little less hot but quite humid.

With the humidity, it’s likely to feel like 105 to 110° at times, which is right about when Heat Advisories should be issued by the National Weather Service. So, don’t be shocked to see at least a couple of those in the days ahead. It may turn a bit hazy as the day goes on and a cloud of Saharan dust arrives from the Gulf, but that will be more noticeable tomorrow I think. High summer’s here folks.

Weekend

This weekend should feature similar weather on both Saturday and Sunday. I’d expect highs to be 96 to 98° officially, with a few places possibly coming in near 100° and coastal locales in the lower 90s. Lows will likely be in the 70s to low 80s. Heat index values each afternoon will again likely exceed 105° in many spots. Rain chances are about as close to zero as it gets for this time of year.

You will notice a good bit of Saharan dust in the air this weekend from that dust cloud overhead. I think Saturday may look more acrid than Sunday. Either way, those of you with respiratory sensitivity to dust events should be ready for some discomfort this weekend. Sunrises and sunsets may be a bit more alluring than usual at least.

Next week

Yesterday, Eric wondered if I might be able to provide some clarity on next week’s rain chances. I can’t tell you too much new, but based on what I see in the weather models, I suspect we’ll see another hot, mostly dry day Monday, followed by a slightly less hot, slightly less dry Tuesday. On Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, the center of the ridge shifts back into Colorado, which should be enough to open the Gulf back up for daytime, sea breeze-driven thunderstorms.

By later Thursday and into next weekend, it appears that the ridge will actually slide back southeast again toward Texas, which means we might recycle hotter, drier weather for several days late next week and into the weekend. I don’t think it will be quite like this weekend, but it may not be too far off.

Tropics

The National Hurricane Center is highlighting a disturbance that is emerging off the Southeast coast today. It has a low chance of possibly developing over the weekend, but at this time it is not expected to turn west into the Gulf.

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Today's News:

It's 12/04/1997 MCI Worldcom is formed, Machine Bolt slams a shot of Precious Keepsake's Truth Syrum, Jamiroquai tries some storytelling on Leno, Whiskey Pete is making $10,000 per corporate speaking gig, and the guys are doing their most humiliating remote to date down at the Studio City Ralph's. Segments include: News, This Day in Music History, and more! Epic!

“Norwegian women’s beach handball team [has been] fined for not playing in bikinis. While male players are allowed to play in tank tops and shorts, women are required to wear bikini bottoms ‘with a close fit and cut on an upward angle.’”
— NBC, 7/20/21

We, the European Men’s Beach Volleyball Associate Disciplinary Commission, stand by our decision to fine the Norwegian men’s beach volleyball team for refusing to play in regulation dong-hugging banana hammocks during a game in our beloved sport’s Euro 2021 tournament.

In defiance of the rules, the team wore thigh-length, hog-hiding elastic shorts during their bronze medal match on Sunday to protest against the regulation zucchini-bikini design that our sport is famous for and requires.

Therefore, it was our commission’s unanimous decision that the team be fined 3,000 euros total — 1,500 euros for “improper clothing” and an additional 1,500 euros for being “less than sexy.”

As the team from Norway knows, male players must wear bespoke gossamer ball swings, cut “with a close fit and cut on a downward angle towards the inner top of the leg-meat” and a maximum width of three inches, according to International Volleyball Federation regulations.

This is not an arbitrary decision. The International Beach Volleyball Rules of the Game Handbook clearly states:

• All players of a team must wear identical sexy Norwegian nad-buckets
• The combinations of colors and design of the dong-sarongs for the two teams must be clearly distinguishable and differently erotic from each other
• The Beach Volleyball male player’s uniform should consist of two things: a thin layer of olive oil slathered over exposed skin and a “suitably sexy” plum-smuggler made of the flimsiest (and preferably transparent) material available
• Smile more

Ever since the beach volleyball scene in Top Gun seared itself into the world’s consciousness, this august body strives to uphold this sports’ reputation as the go-to destination for sun, fun, and throbbing cut and un-cut man-root wrapped in a delicate gauze of cock-sock that leaves just enough to the imagination.

We stand firm on this matter.

Signed,
Bjørn Choadhüng
Chairperson

July 21, 2017 – I began the first work on what would become Yellowstone, with some attempts at designing a Verilog model of Apple’s IWM chip. Four years have passed since then, and I’m still working on this project! Today version 2.1 of the Yellowstone PCB is nearly ready for fabrication. V2.1 contains a pile of changes and improvements based on my tests of V2.0 over the past weeks. Some of the highlights:

• Added 2.2K series resistors on the -12V supply for J1 and J2, to safely limit current if a Macintosh 3.5 inch drive is connected. (bypassable with a solder jumper)
• Inserted 33 ohm series resistors on the data bus lines, to reduce ground bounce caused by fast-switching signals
• Replaced the DIP switch for selecting Disk II mode with a firmware-driven activation
• Removed the DIP switch for manually routing /ENABLE2 to J1 or J2, in favor of a firmware-driven solution
• Routed /ENABLE2 through two open-drain buffers to the two drive connectors, so a pull-down from one drive won’t make the other drive think it’s enabled
• Routed the RD and SENSE signals from each disk connector independently to the FPGA, so it can tell which drive is responding and handle error conditions when they both respond at the same time
• Added a “recovery” jumper that connects A11 through a resistor to the FPGA’s SPI /CS input, to support in-system programming of mis-programmed or blank FPGAs.
• Added decoupling capacitors on all four power supplies
• Added more ground fills, and lots more vias connecting top and bottom-side fills
• Rerouted and widened power supply traces, and repositioned bypass capacitors
• Fixed a spot where D5 overlapped a power supply trace. Oops!
• Fixed an enable signal that was connected directly to +5V instead of with a pull-up resistor. Oops again!
• Fixed the wrong supply voltage connected to one of the chips. Oops a third time!

It’s been a long journey, but everything is finally coming together. If all goes well I may have a beta-ready board in a few weeks.

Six of the 55 Texas Democrats who flew to DC last week in an attempt to thwart a GOP bill that would restrict voting in the state have tested positive for Covid-19 since Friday, the Dallas Morning News reports. That means that their prospects of meeting with President Biden have “dimmed substantially,” Todd J. Gillman […]

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Some time ago, I described how wildcards worked in MS-DOS, specifically how wildcards participate in pattern matching. Today, I’ll look at how wildcards participate in copying and renaming.

First, the source and destination patterns are expanded into the eleven-character FCB format by the algorithm I described in that earlier article.

Next, the directory is searched for files that match the source pattern.

Once such a match is found, the fun begins: Applying the rename pattern.

The way it works is that the rename pattern is used to produce the resulting file name, except that if a question mark is encountered in the rename pattern, then the corresponding character from the source file name is copied.

Here’s an example with renaming, although the same exercise also applies to copying:

REN ABC*.D?F GHIJ*.KL?

The source and destination patterns are

	Human-readable	Parsed pattern
Source	ABC*.D?F	A	B	C	?	?	?	?	?	D	?	F
Destination	GHIJ*.KL?	G	H	I	J	?	?	?	?	K	L	?

Suppose we have a file ABC12345.D6F that matches the source pattern. How do we transform it according to the destination pattern?

Simple: Stack the original file name and the destination pattern on top of each other. For each character of the output, take the corresponding character from the destination pattern, unless it is a question mark, in which case you take the corresponding character from the original file name.

	Human-readable	Parsed pattern
Actual	ABC12345.D6F	A	B	C	1	2	3	4	5	D	6	F
Destination	GHIJ*.KL?	G	H	I	J	?	?	?	?	K	L	?
Result	GHIJ2345.KLF	G	H	I	J	2	3	4	5	K	L	F

One way of thinking of this is that you treat the destination pattern as a stencil, with holes punched out where the question marks are. You then overlay the stencil on top of the original file name. The characters from the original file name show through the holes, and what you see is the result.

This algorithm enabled some simple rename patterns, like changing a file extension:

REN FRED*.TXT *.DOC

Suppose there is a file called FRED123.TXT. Let’s see what happens:

	Human-readable	Parsed pattern
Source	FRED*.*	F	R	E	D	?	?	?	?	?	?	?
Match	FRED123.TXT	F	R	E	D	1	2	3	·	T	X	T
Destination	*.DOC	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	D	O	C
Result	FRED123.DOC	F	R	E	D	1	2	3	·	D	O	C

Observe that we didn’t have to repeat FRED in the replacement pattern. The asterisk (which parses into question marks) just copies the existing file name, which includes the FRED.

Does this make sense? Because it does carry its own consequences.

If you’re not expecting the “copies the existing file name” behavior, and the question marks in the destination don’t match the question marks in the source, the results can be somewhat surprising:

ren FRED*.* WILMA*.*

Suppose there is a file called FRED123.TXT, and you were hoping to rename it to WILMA123.TXT. Let’s see what happens:

	Human-readable	Parsed pattern
Source	FRED*.*	F	R	E	D	?	?	?	?	?	?	?
Match	FRED123.TXT	F	R	E	D	1	2	3	·	T	X	T
Destination	WILMA*.*	W	I	L	M	A	?	?	?	?	?	?
Result	WILMA23.TXT	W	I	L	M	A	2	3	·	T	X	T

Since WILMA is one character longer than FRED, the question marks don’t line up. After copying WILMA to the result, we reach the first question mark in the destination, which lines up with the second question mark in the source, not the first. The character that is copied is the sixth character from the source, which is a 2. The 1 from the source is not copied because it was overwritten by the A in WILMA.

Wildcards are just question marks, and question marks match or copy a single corresponding character. They don’t “go looking around for their buddy question mark”. Computers weren’t that fancy back then.

We had agreed that the REN FRED*.TXT *.DOC made sense in that it didn’t rename FRED123.TXT to 123.DOC. But that rule that made sense then doesn’t seem to make sense in this more complicated case where we are doing what is more like a search/replace in the filename.

It’s important to understand the MS-DOS wildcard copy/rename algorithm because Windows remains compatible with it, so as not to break existing batch files. We’ll look at this some more next time.

The post How did copying and renaming with wildcards work in MS-DOS? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

Last time, we looked at how copying and renaming with wildcards worked in MS-DOS, and how it doesn’t work well if you are trying to perform search-and-replace operations where the strings have different lengths.

For example, if you have a list of files, say fred001.txt through fred999.txt and you want to rename them to wilma001.txt through wilma999.txt, the obvious command

ren fred*.txt wilma*.txt

will not produce the desired results because the a in wilma overwrites the first character that was matched by the wildcard in the source pattern, since fred is only four characters long.

You can still get what you want; you just won’t be able to use the wildcard algorithm to do it.

setlocal enabledelayedexpansion
for %%i in (fred*.txt) do set "_=%%i" & ren "%%i" "!_:fred=wilma!"

We write a little batch file to perform the bulk rename operation.

The main loop is driven by the FOR command, which we ask to enumerate all the files that match the pattern fred*.txt. For each such file, we set the variable _ to the file name. I like to use _ as a scratch variable name in batch files because it’s unlikely to collide with a name that means something to any particular program.¹

We then perform a non-wildcard ren command. The source file name is the file name which the FOR command gave us. The destination file name is the result of a search-replace operation with the _ variable, where we ask to search for fred and change it to wilma.

This is a two-liner instead of a one-liner because we need to enable delayed expansion so that we can delay the search-replace operation until after the _ variable is set.

If I need to do some sort of fancy renaming, I don’t do any of this. I’ll do a dir /b and dump the list of file names into a file. Then I’ll edit that file and use the editor’s fancy search-replace features to convert it into a list of REN commands. I’ll look over the results to verify that they are doing what I want, and possibly perform some editing to deal with special cases like “Don’t rename fred314.txt; that one stays unchanged.” Once I’m satisfied, I save the results as a batch file and run it.

If the editing is particularly complicated, I’ll write a one-off program to generate the batch file. I prefer generating a batch file to having the one-off program perform the renames directly, because that lets me preview the operation. You don’t want to mess it up.

Bonus chatter: The reimagined Windows PowerToys includes an interactive bulk renaming tool called PowerRename.

¹ Sometimes people new to batch programming will have need for a temporary variable to hold a path, and they call it PATH. This tends to result in a lot of head-scratching, since they are unwittingly modifying the executable search path.

The post How to perform more complicated search and replace-style renaming in a batch file appeared first on The Old New Thing.

What’s the point of having a New menu anyway? “Why would anybody create a new BMP file by right-clicking an empty space in a folder? You still need a BMP editor to put anything meaningful in there. The same is true for a PowerPoint presentation, and an Access database. Although, creating an empty Access database and then opening it will presumably get you the Access program. But if I want to create a new PowerPoint presentation, I will… um… open PowerPoint.”

Sure, maybe that’s what you do, but that’s not what everybody does.

Not everybody knows that the way to create a new BMP file is to open this program called Paint that is hidden in the Accessories folder of your Start menu. User research shows that for many users, the way they create a new file is to find an existing file of the same type, copy it, then open the copy and delete everything in it.¹

In fact, in the Xerox Star (the precursor to our modern GUI interfaces), creating a new document is done by copying an existing one.

For people with a document-centric view of the world, programs aren’t really things that you think about. What you really work on are documents.

It’s like making a telephone call in the United States. You don’t think about which telecommunications company serves that number. You just dial the number and let the telephone network figure out which telecommunications company is responsible for that number. You don’t really care which company gets used, as long as you get connected.

As other people noted in the comments, having a New menu is handy because it lets you create the file directly where you want it, saving you the trouble of having to navigate through the Save As dialog just to get back to where you started.

¹ And who among us can say they never created a new class or project by copying an existing one, and then deleting everything inside?

Even Unix follows this pattern for process creation! To create a new process, you clone an existing one (fork) and then delete everything inside it (exec).

The post Why does the New menu even exist for creating new empty files? appeared first on The Old New Thing.

America has seen decades of consolidation of its hospitals, raising prices for consumers. President Biden now wants to do something about it.

(Image credit: Elaine Cromie/Getty Images)

This post, I had a meltdown during an office welcome back party in my honor , was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I’m a 24-year-old woman and have worked for three years with a firm right out of college. The office is set up in different pods by team and pretty open within groups, but it’s still a maze of desks, MacBooks, and cubicles. It’s in a gutted old building in a downtown area. Everyone is around the same age and close knit, and work life has become pretty tied up with my social life. Pretty much my current close friends are the people I work with.

On top of the last year of shit, I was in a serious car accident in May 2020 and suffered a spinal injury. I am paraplegic (T12 complete) and need a wheelchair. The transition has not been easy, but work has been amazing throughout. They sent gifts, included me in remote events, and gave me an easy timeline to start back working remote when I got home (another nightmare). However, I really just want to get back to normal with life and work and not lose the closeness I had with my coworkers.

So back in March, the office opened back up for everyone to come back and pretty much my whole team did. My manager requested that I remain remote, saying that they were controlling numbers for social distancing and we would be rotated around. It was finally my turn this past week.

I showed up on Tuesday and there was an enormous banner and ribbon cutting for a new wheelchair ramp at the front of the building (there is already one in the back). I had my own parking spot (the handicap sign turned into a cartoon of me). The idea was sweet, but I was incredibly caught off-guard at the fanfare. Going inside, my desk has been moved away from my team (which is in the back of the building through a maze of cubicles but not impossible to get to) and now there’s whole pod cleared out for me next to a new family bathroom that is totally accessible (this was also new). They had balloons and cake and everything there.

I lost it. I started crying and left. My boss made me come aside, and I told her how embarrassed and hurt I felt. I did say things I regret, such as them making a performance and me being singled out and away from where the actual work is. I’ve been included in team meetings via Webex but have not really “hung out” with anyone since I left last year. I called my mom to pick me up and put in for PTO for the rest of last week.

My manager was very clearly offended, as apparently they had to spend a bunch of facility money to renovate. I get the idea and it was nice, but at no point did anyone tell me they were throwing me a f-ing cripple party and taking me away from my team. I am torn because I should be grateful but just feel embarrassed. My manager is visibly annoyed and condescendingly walking on eggshells with me. I’m back to remote at my request.

I have a new calendar invite for an HR meeting (at their request). I’m pretty nervous about the HR meeting and worried I damaged my reputation and place in our culture. I’d like to just get back to normal with everyone as it was a great place to work. What should I do?

I’m sorry you’ve been through all this!

They meant one thing and it landed a completely different way. They thought they were welcoming you back, and you felt singled out as Other. You wanted to rejoin your team, and you’ve been put in a separate pod far away from them. You’d been excited to get back to normal, and found a cartoon avatar of yourself in the parking lot. You wanted normalcy and you got hoopla and attention on exactly the stuff you’re trying not to center.

On their side, they probably thought they were showing you how happy they were to have you back and the work they’d done to make things comfortable and easy for you. Maybe what they did would have been welcome in a different set of circumstances or for a different person. Maybe they should have known from knowing you that this isn’t what you’d want. Who knows.

If they are as invested in you as their efforts to welcome you back make them seem, they’re going to understand that you’ve been through trauma and stress and your first day back at the office was no doubt highly emotionally loaded, and you lost it for understandable reasons.

But I do think you have to talk to your manager about what happened. Are you comfortable saying you appreciate the effort and expense they went through to welcome you back, but what you’d really been looking forward to was a return to normalcy — and all the hoopla and being moved away from your team was the opposite of that and hit you hard? And that it’s obviously been a terrible year and a hard adjustment and you just … lost it? And that you appreciate the intentions, but what you’d like most is to be part of the conversation about what accommodations you need, because you might not need or want everything they’d planned for? (Of course, if that doesn’t quite capture the way you feel, adjust as needed.)

As for the meeting with HR, you can say the same things. You can also say that what you want now is to get back to normal with everyone, and you’d appreciate their help in figuring out how to do that. There’s a very high likelihood that they’ll be relieved to hear that, because they probably set up the meeting to figure out what’s going on, not to take you to task.

I’m sorry you’ve had such a rough time! Let people know what’s going on with you and what you do want them to do (since clearly their instincts aren’t guiding them correctly) and I think you’ll be able to move forward from here.

Francine Coffey’s Celebrity Sewing Bee
Coffey
1974

Submitter: When the title says “celebrity sewing bee” they really meant a lot of Dinah Shore. The one area that was really popular during the pandemic was our crafting section. So much so, you could spot the books that needed weeding by glancing over to that section and seeing what did not go out the door. This was one of them – and with reason.

Holly: I can’t imagine why a sewing book with celebrities from 47 years ago isn’t popular anymore. <sarcasm> There are all kinds of great ideas here: put fabric on your ceiling, or Elmer’s glue some fabric to your floor! Make a diet-friendly birthday cake-shaped bag! Re-purpose bandanas into a dress (hey, if you can make a skirt out of curtains, you can make a dress out of masks! I’m sure that’s the next craft craze.)

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Hovertext:
The take-home question here is whether the fake accent is worse than the economic theory.

Today's News:

“Lucy and the Italian Neo-Realists”

While reading from James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice at the top of the Spanish Steps to Lucy, Fred, and Ethel, Ricky bumps into Hollywood acquaintance Farley Granger, in Rome for his latest picture, Senso. Lucy begs Granger for a part, but he demurs, saying that’s up to the director, Luchino Visconti, not him. Stealing away from their hotel dressed as a Dragoon, Lucy pops up at Cinecittà, where she pesters Visconti into casting her as a sentry. The whole thing ends in farce, with Lucy doping Alida Valli and dumping her in the Tiber, Granger wishing he were still in Strangers On a Train, and Visconti propositioning Ricky. Guest-starring Danny Kaye as Luchino Visconti, Alida Valli as Alida Valli, and Stewart Granger as Farley Granger.

“Lucy and the New York School Beboppers”

When Ricky’s agent gets rubbed out by the mob over unpaid gambling debts, Lucy begs Ricky to let her book the band’s club engagements, to which he agrees. Liking the sound of the Cedar Tavern, Lucy arranges a gig there with guest artist Charlie “Bird” Parker. Unfortunately, Bird ODs in their apartment and Lucy tries to pass herself off as Bird, a ruse that fools no one, especially when she tries to play “Cherokee” in 2/4 time. The whole thing ends in farce, with Lucy blubbering, Ricky swearing in Spanish, Fred and Willem de Kooning getting into a punch-up over the artist’s Big Women paintings (“You call that a big woman? You haven’t seen my wife!”), and Jackson Pollock peeing in Ricky’s conga drum. With Eddie “Rochester” Anderson as Charlie "Bird’"Parker, Mel “Bugs Bunny” Blanc as Jackson “Jack the Dripper” Pollock, Frank “EEEYeeeeeesssssss?” Nelson as Willem “The Dutchman” de Kooning and Jack “To Be or Not to Be” Benny as Clement “Slaphappy” Greenberg.

“Lucy and the Red Scare”

While sipping Shirley Temples at the Stork Club with Walter Winchell, Roy Cohn overhears Lucy telling Ethel that she’s been “red” her whole life and he duly reports her to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Hauled up before Joe McCarthy, a blubbering Lucy is given the third degree, but instead of taking the fifth she names every name she can think of, starting with her parents’ and ending with Fred and Ethel’s. A blubbering Ethel informs the Committee that what Lucy really meant was that she’s been a “redhead” her whole life, not a “red,” but not even that was true because everyone knew she dyed her hair. The whole thing ends in farce, with Ricky and Fred gagging Lucy, the Committee dismissing Fred and Ethel with a stern warning to report any suspicious characters, Roy Cohn and Bobby Kennedy getting into fisticuffs over who gets to sit next to “Tail Gunner” Joe, and Ricky being jailed for having a foreign accent. Guest-starring Jim “Mr. Magoo” Backus as Joe “I’ve Got a Little List” McCarthy, Sal “The Republic” Mineo as Roy “Angels In America” Cohn, Jimmy “Everybody Wants to Get in on the Act” Durante as “The Untouchable” Walter Winchell and “Rope-A-Dope” Farley Granger as Bobby “RFK Stadium” Kennedy.

“Lucy and the Bomb Shelter”

Terrified that thermonuclear war will break out at any moment in the wake of the Suez debacle and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, Lucy decides to install a bomb shelter in the backyard of their spanking new Fairfield, Connecticut home. Armed with a riding crop in one hand and a US government issue pamphlet in the other, Lucy directs Ethel in digging a rudimentary bunker in yesterday’s Victory Garden while Ricky and Fred lounge by the pool, swilling Cuba Libres and cracking bad jokes about the world going up in flames. The whole thing ends in farce, with Lucy and Ethel accidentally sealing themselves in and unable to get out, and Ricky and Fred going on a road trip/bender together to Las Vegas where they marry floozies and lose their shirts. Guest-starring Clifton “Mr. Belvedere” Webb as Anthony “The Prime Minister” Eden, “Alphaville” Akim Tamiroff as “Meshuggener” Gamal Abdel Nasser, Bert “Waiting for Godot” Lahr as “Say It Ain’t So, Shoeless” Nikita Khrushchev, and Lana “Imitation of Life” Turner and Grace “Brickwork” Kelly as the floozies.

Harris County, which includes Houston, has more than 4.7 million people. Many of the voting rights innovations installed last year are at risk of being eliminated by the Republican-led legislature.

(Image credit: Eric Gay/AP)

The Biden administration and its allies has formally accused China of the mass-hacking of Microsoft Exchange servers earlier this year, which prompted the FBI to intervene as concerns rose that the hacks could lead to widespread destruction.

The mass-hacking campaign targeted Microsoft Exchange email servers with four previously undiscovered vulnerabilities that allowed the hackers — which Microsoft already attributed to a China-backed group of hackers called Hafnium — to steal email mailboxes and address books from tens of thousands of organizations around the United States.

Microsoft released patches to fix the vulnerabilities, but the patches did not remove any backdoor code left behind by the hackers that might be used again for easy access to a hacked server. That prompted the FBI to secure a first-of-its-kind court order to effectively hack into the remaining hundreds of U.S.-based Exchange servers to remove the backdoor code. Computer incident response teams in countries around the world responded similarly by trying to notify organizations in their countries that were also affected by the attack.

In a statement out Monday, the Biden administration said the attack, launched by hackers backed by China’s Ministry of State Security, resulted in “significant remediation costs for its mostly private sector victims.”

“We have raised our concerns about both this incident and the [People’s Republic of China’s] broader malicious cyber activity with senior PRC Government officials, making clear that the PRC’s actions threaten security, confidence, and stability in cyberspace,” the statement read.

The National Security Agency also released details of the attacks to help network defenders identify potential routes of compromise.

Several allies, including the U.K. and the members of NATO, also backed the Biden administration in its findings. In a statement, the U.K. government found Beijing responsible for a “pervasive pattern” of hacking. The Chinese government has repeatedly denied claims of state-backed or sponsored hacking.

The Biden administration also blamed China’s Ministry of State Security for contracting with criminal hackers to conduct unsanctioned operations, like ransomware attacks, “for their own personal profit.” The government said it was aware that China-backed hackers have demanded millions of dollars in ransom demands against hacked companies. Last year, the Justice Department charged two Chinese spies for their role in a global hacking campaign that saw prosecutors accuse the hackers of operating for personal gain.

Although the U.S. has publicly engaged the Kremlin to try to stop giving ransomware gangs safe harbor from operating from within Russia’s borders, the U.S. has not previously accused Beijing of launching or being involved with ransomware attacks.

“The PRC’s unwillingness to address criminal activity by contract hackers harms governments, businesses, and critical infrastructure operators through billions of dollars in lost intellectual property, proprietary information, ransom payments, and mitigation efforts,” said Monday’s statement.

The statement also said that the China-backed hackers engaged in extortion and cryptojacking, a way of forcing a computer to run code that uses its computing resources to mine cryptocurrency, for financial gain.

The Justice Department also announced fresh charges against four China-backed hackers working for the Ministry of State Security, which U.S. prosecutors said were engaged in efforts to steal intellectual property and infectious disease research into Ebola, HIV and AIDS, and MERS against victims based in the U.S., Norway, Switzerland and the United Kingdom by using a front company to hide their operations.

“The breadth and duration of China’s hacking campaigns, including these efforts targeting a dozen countries across sectors ranging from healthcare and biomedical research to aviation and defense, remind us that no country or industry is safe. Today’s international condemnation shows that the world wants fair rules, where countries invest in innovation, not theft,” said deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco.

New Cyanide and Happiness Comic

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It's a game that encourages people to 'get a life' -- build a house, make a Sim and fulfil their dreams. So why are so many players intent on murder? From a report: The Sims has far evolved from its humble beginnings in 2000, where you created characters and tended to their needs, like a slightly more demanding Tamagotchi. As the games became more advanced, The Sims provided opportunities for the lives of your characters to more closely mirror reality: they now have lifetime goals and desires, can feel disappointment and joy, and now even do their own laundry. But whether they live a rich and fulfilling life, or an existence defined by endless suffering, the Sims' destiny is entirely in your hands. Of course many players choose not to be benevolent Gods in the Sims world -- and instead aim to kill and torture as many Sims as possible. Death has hugely evolved over 21 years of gameplay; we're no longer just sticking Sims in a swimming pool and selling a ladder to watch them drown. Instead, we're watching them explode in rocket ships, choke on pufferfish or even be eaten by the 'Cowplant' -- a mutant Venus flytrap with a cow head for a face. "The Sims see you controlling a little society, but that doesn't mean you're making it better. It reminds me of Bruce Almighty, where the role of God is handed over but that doesn't necessarily mean that's strictly a good thing. It's rather therapeutic just killing Sims, and being quite an irresponsible God," 26-year-old Dubliner RTGame (real name Daniel), who has 2.6 million subscribers on YouTube says. "I feel like a kid with a magnifying glass on the small ants. It sounds quite twisted but it's quite fun to do things like that in games like The Sims to see what happens. But yes, I do have a lot of Sims blood on my hands." He's far from alone. While many in the Sims streaming community focus their content on cutesy legacy-style playthroughs or intricate design challenges, there's an increasing interest in more boundary-pushing content. RTGame credits the popularity of his bizarre Sims series for helping him jump into streaming as a full-time career, while other YouTubers such as CallMeKevin and Plumbella count speed runs where they kill entire neighbourhoods among some of their most viewed content.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This post, update: my interviewer asked about my personal finances , was originally published by Alison Green on Ask a Manager.

Remember the letter-writer whose interviewer asked how she’d been supporting herself while she was unemployed and kept prodding for an answer? Here’s the update.

First, I’d like to thank you for answering my question. Your perspective and advice were so helpful during a weird and confusing time. You confirmed for me that this was not behavior that anyone should expect to encounter or tolerate in a normal, professional business setting. I also appreciated the support from many of the commenters during what’s been a very difficult time.

Your advice also arrived just in time for me to use it! You were 100% correct that the hiring manager was just a nosy dude. After you answered my question, I found out from someone directly involved in the hiring process that this hiring manager is inexplicably obsessed with candidates’ personal finances, especially when they’re unemployed, and has done this before despite repeated warnings not to. Apparently, he’d recently done this to a male candidate, who later declined the offer due to a “counter-offer by his current employer” (yeah, OK). This is why the hiring manager insisted on calling me without the contracting agency present, which was so out of the norm for their business relationship that it confused the agency. He knew he wasn’t supposed to, but took active steps to do it anyway. I have no way of knowing whether sexism was involved, especially since I now know that the previous candidate he’d interrogated is male.

That same source also told me that the hiring manager also believes that everyone he interviews has actually been fired but lies about it and seems to consider it his personal duty to ferret this out. That would explain the rest of that crazy phone call, which I alluded to in my original letter but didn’t fully explain. Basically, he read me lines off of my resume that we’d previously spent hours discussing and insisted that I “further explain” them, because he suddenly now “questioned the implications” I was making, even though the references he’d already talked to could have attested to them specifically. It felt strangely accusatory and was definitely not last-minute due diligence. I had no problem fluently and fluidly re-explaining these for the millionth time because I had IN NO WAY EXAGGERATED THEM, but I found it really insulting. At that point, I was sure I’d be rejected, but didn’t care because I was so angry. That’s when I emailed you, because I wanted to make absolutely sure that I wasn’t misinterpreting the finance thing.

Well, I wasn’t rejected. Not only was I offered the job right after you answered my question, but I found out that of the 8 people who’d interviewed in that round, I was the only one they’d ever seriously considered. He’d wanted to hire me the entire time, and this is how he treated me! I politely turned the job down (I was only polite because it was the contracting agency that called with the offer). I thanked them for investing their time in me, but explained that I was concerned that I’d never be able to have a productive working relationship with the hiring manager due to that phone call, or with the other interviewers due to other unrelated behavior. I have no way to know whether the hiring manager was indeed trying to lowball me on salary, because I wasn’t interested to hear out the terms of the offer.

I’ve had other (completely normal) interviews elsewhere since then. I waited this long to send an update because I was hoping to have good news to share by now. I unfortunately don’t, which sucks, but I have not for one second regretted turning down that offer. I’d rather be in this boat than on a yacht to Crazytown. Good riddance and good luck to whoever accepts it (it’s still being reposted).

Dinosaurs
The Bible, Barney, and Beyond
Phillips
1994

Phillips is an author of another book on this site, Saturday Morning Mind Control, in which the author asserts that Saturday morning cartoons are the gateway to evil. This book is more of the same. Dinosaurs, in particular Barney and Jurassic Park, are dissected for the apparent evil that lurks within these shows. He seems to have gathered that a big purple dinosaur with an annoying song about love is anti-Christian. As a mother of kids in the early 1990s, Barney wasn’t my favorite either, but I hardly would call him evil.

Based on the themes of his books, this guy is a giant killjoy. As one 7 year-old told me, “the library always needs more dinosaur books.” Amen, kid.

Mary

A

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