“Helicopter Story” was one of the best pieces of sci-fi I’ve read in a while. All the more galling that it was ripped apart in a culture war free-for-all.

I have a special amount of hate especially for those people who feel like they’re on the good side but have an understanding of literature that is too shallow to contain something like this. I blame MCU, games and Disney for letting these people believe that what happens there is what’s possible and allowed in fiction.

https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22543858/isabel-fall-attack-helicopter

“dass deutsche Behörden und bürokratische Prozesse mitverantwortlich sind am Scheitern des Start-ups.”

A kind of magical thinking that would rely on collaborating with German government institutions for your startup. The only way that is going to work is if you have a very special (paid for) in into the CDU. Also otherwise a hilarious story about the weird world of cyber.

https://www.br.de/nachrichten/netzwelt/cyberwaffen-made-in-berlin,Sbzq3WP

Foursquare is responsible for an inordinate amount of good times I’ve had, it still powers @cuppings and I’m still pleased that we got it to launch in Amsterdam as its first international city.

Bir Başkadır (Ethos) Character Network Chart

The character relations turned into a bit of a tangle so I fired up Miro and quickly charted them out. In the end it wasn’t that complicated but the worlds of Meryem and Peri are very clearly separate.

There are lots of movies where a cast of characters roams a town and occasionally intersects in a couple of dramatic moments. What comes to mind for me most immediately is Amores Perros. Of course a Netflix serial doesn’t hit the cinematic height or dramatic depth of that movie despite having more runtime to play with. What it does manage is to set a mood for the weird tangled up modern Turkey.

The most interesting and dramatic events in Bir Başkadır happen on the road (Mesude’s death under the bridge, the family dance off on the way to the village). Along with some of the commuting sequences and the continuous questions of what bus stops where and how to get somewhere in time, that is an essential part of Istanbul. The city is so vast and spread out that people are always underway, an apt metaphor for character development—interrupted or otherwise—if ever there was one.

I feel this list by Dan Na of what it means to switch to the management track and this point in particular is more or less what my days consist of (intensity, attention, feeling): “Management forces you to care more about everything.”

I am the ultimate person who has to care, who has to pay attention and who has to bring the intensity to drive things forward.

https://blog.danielna.com/choosing-the-management-track/

I think this is a leveling definition that I can live with: “Managers are paid to drive results with some support. Directors are paid to drive results with little or no supervision (‘set and forget’). VPs are paid to make the plan.”

Or if I would paraphrase this: Directors are barrels (not bullets). VPs need to create the circumstances where you are ‘certain to win’.

Career Development:  What It Really Means to be a Manager, Director, or VP