what this escaped the corporate intranet

okay, so, funny story, in the DeltaGreen TTRPG there’s a group of people called “The Dream Syndicate” with a fake website

so I follow the link, I go to the website, and I think “whoa, this is INSANE, the language feels so CULTY, I love that they went to all of this trouble to build a fake online cult to match their description in the source book”

and then I read about the Dream Syndicate in the source book and it doesn’t match at all

this is just a real website?

modern american companies are way, way down the jim jones pipeline to fuckin’ cult city

tell me your company doesn’t have a set of commandments (c.f. “values”) you’re supposed to live by and a holy mission

Need to do some BUSINESS! in the 1990s?

If you can listen to this without a little pixelated city coming to life before your very eyes, you had a very different childhood than I did.

@ArmyofOneandaHalf - 2 years ago

Ah yes, this delivers unparalleled value to the consumer

Okay, what about if you’re playing a little SNES game with prerendered graphics about a plucky little apple?

@egg_mittens - 1 year ago This album has perfect nintendo game flow.

• World 1: Large, more powerful than the player, but very easy to outsmart. A simple fellow to help you get the controls.
• World 2: The game starts showing you a bit of its edge. This boss is entirely antagonistic, but is also very charismatic and you kind of grow to love when they’re on screen. Thinks they’re very cool.
• World 3 mini-boss: duck
• World 3: Coming right around the midpoint of the game is the first proper challenge: a doppleganger boss. Propells the main story forward, genuinely a little scary. Defeating this boss feels like a huge achievement.
• World 4 mini-boss: Yeah, it’s a little silly, but also kind of a tank and you don’t fully believe it’s a mini-boss. It plays around with the environment and hits like a truck.
• World 4: We’re nearing the big bad now, so this is a huge challenge in the game’s core mechanics. The fight itself contains a puzzle aspect that is really frustrating because it’s like playing tic tac toe with lava.
• World 5: Final thing before the big bad and while they’re tough to beat, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before. They’re really there to hype you up and to get you pumped for the final boss. Making you overconfident. What’s the worst that can happen?
• World 6: Complete lovecraftian horror. A full departure from the lightharted, kind of campy aesthetic the rest of the game has had, it is now you against an unfeeling, all-powerful darkness. The threat they pose is existential, every time you die to it you feel stabbing pain and fear in your heart. This is the worst thing that can happen.

sometimes I stay up at night worrying that I’ll join a company that doesn’t have “Teamwork” and “Innovation” in its core values, and instead has “Collaboration” and “Inventiveness”

i’m not sure if I’d be able to survive the change

it turns out the lowest hanging fruit was shutting the fuck up

🌈

The reason you have a PM is to stop the Hot Drink Station Discussion from consuming your entire company

layoff notifications are always written in the exonerative tense: “X% of our employees will be leaving the company, we’re sorry for the ones affected”

as if they were hit by a fleet of buses one at a time

at some point in the past 20 years people stopped saying “meet” and started saying “sync” or “sync up”

MEETINGS ARE OVER, NOW THERE IS ONLY SYNCHRONIZATION

Following up

with the mental model

of validating solutions

aligned autonomy

while tailoring

our frameworks’ approach

to specific flows

out of these perspectives

we’ve gathered a lot

of great feedback

for planning and executing

roll-out team objectives

baking that in

to a new process

to address pain points

we’ve identified

including barriers

to ideation,

focus,

and synergies,

while preserving

our best chance to succeed

with a new team-level

product strategy documentation phase

to clearly align

the team’s strategy

to the overall company strategy

creating a big improvement

over last half

a cross discipline

planning leads team

will create a more inclusive experience

across the board

we’re really stretched

so we can go deep

utilizing impact analysis

planning cycles

detailed planning leads

across four distinct phases

utilizing context

to jump in

to high level completion

of the company strategy phase

the output of which

was the phase priorities

which we’ll walk into

with the OKR setting phase

for lightweight half-planning

strategy buffered feedback week phase

then, again,

we’ll have the monthly

company objectives

to deliver a “golden goose”

“star retention” using

the team strategy doc

which I’ll share out

after this presentation,

investment in targets

and goals

that will have value

for the business,

delineating an exciting change

😔 “We’re listening, self-reflecting, and making changes to our approach, and we understand that you feel threatened by our last interaction. We’d like to apologize to how we came off in our earlier interaction.”

😠 “You SHIT in my CHEERIOS.”

😔 “We hear you and we would like to apologize for any confusion and angst the new state of your cereal has caused you.”

😠 “Don’t POOP where FOOD is!”

😔 “We would like to assure you that we will be making changes to our policy vis-a-vis how we manage breakfast cereals going forward.”

😠 “WHAT CHANGES!?!?”

My wife’s company is trying to convince people to return to the office because one of their executives thinks its embarrassing when clients come by and the offices are empty, anyways, theatre students always need some pocket money and if someone wants to join my exciting new “potemkin village as a service” startup.

seatfillr is gonna be huge

Avenue 5 nailed this, with a deck filled with attractive, well-dressed actors pretending to work on a bunch of high-tech-looking panels for the sake of the company’s image while the actual engineers worked on a bunch of regular computers in a dingy, crowded, messy office.

as a dumpy ADHD man who wears a robe for most of the day and who has built a tremendous amount of real actual software I feel like if I had to operate in a traditional corporate environment, having a productive looking actor representing me would actually be a real career boon

He could go in, look attractive, and attend all of the meetings and report back to me and I could do all of the actual work and cyrano de bergerac for him in key moments, I think we’d be a productive team.

pretty sure we’d be VP of Engineering before long

“why are you always wearing that bluetooth headset?”

Curtis’s Actor, Handsomely: “I’m very busy with all of my job.”

as Gorthrax The Volcano Demon’s lava murders are down to only a handful a day, we’ve decided to once again slowly phase out our expensive dimensional walls in favor of a demon management strategy that focuses more on individual choice