Isn't normalising fatherhood in the workplace part of this battle? Rather than hiding it and pretending that it's all fine and leaving it all to your spouse, saying, no, I am a father, it will be me sometimes that picks up my child from daycare when they are sick, I might have to leave work different hours to do the school run, etc. etc.
I remember laughing at this, my hometown was included it’s worth saying. I suspect the purchasers were largely people who lived in one of the ‘crap towns’
I’m not sure how anyone could have read it and not understood it was a joke. At the same time, I do think that he’s right that it wouldn’t get published today, not because the content wasn’t true, but people are much more quick to take offense over things like this.
I have always admired the British[1] ability to take the piss out of themselves with humour. Underlying the self-deprecation, there's always a sense of pride (misplaced?).
Perhaps things on the isles have turned to shite over time, and the pride has dwindled?
[1] maybe British is the wrong word since the Scots and Irish do similar. I'm from the ex-colonies so the correct words for UK country and peoples are confusing to me.
Facebook can be hard to get rid of if you actually have hobbies and things because so much gets organised via it. I tried to get rid but my Running club exclusively posts stuff on Facebook.
For Instagram with you needing to log in to view pages, you find that you can’t find opening times for restaurants etc because many places use it to advertise that they’re open/closed at short notice.
If you really value your running club, why not help them set something else up?
You could offer to help the people who do all that posting to get it onto an email list or some other platform away from Facebook. A small indie website somewhere, even a blog.
I know this sounds like work, and you just want to enjoy your running club, but if it gets sticky, the people who are currently posting everything on FB will eventually realise there's value elsewhere and they'll keep it ticking over.
They have a website, which is actually quite good, but it's the social aspects - lift sharing to races, posting about races that people are going to, etc. that
the social media is actually useful for. Nobody is signing up to a forum in 2025 to do this sort of thing, and WhatsApp groups which seems to be the alternative are way too noisy for my liking.
This is probably a "YMMV" kinda thing, because I thought that I would experience the same struggle, but in reality I've found out that I encounter those moments but... I don't really care. It's like being removed from all of the bullshit that comes with social media is worth the tradeoff of occasionally missing a detail like that.
I went and found forums for the hobbies I'm into, rather than social media groups. Thankfully, most of the underground music I'm into also maintain their own websites, while some of the more hush-hush groups maintain members-only email lists. If they don't do either? Well, nearly all of them sell tickets online via mainstream ticket vendors regardless of how underground they try to be, so I'll see the info eventually (and, hell - I know the event's coming up and I've put it on my calendar, I don't need to see an IG story about it every single day for two months reminding me). For backpacking, forums are fantastic compared to the oft-repeated and overrun social media groups.
For restaurants? Meh. So what if I show up and a place is closed on short notice? Worse things can happen than wasting a little bit of time. Do they only share their menu on social media but my friends swear it's amazing? Fine, I'll experience it O'Reilly-style ("We'll do it live! Fuck it!").
I don't need to know everything all the time, that's part of the adventure! And if I really do need to know something about a place that only posts on social media, I've found that I can usually find that info elsewhere if I dig hard enough.
> For restaurants? Meh. So what if I show up and a place is closed on short notice? Worse things can happen than wasting a little bit of time. Do they only share their menu on social media but my friends swear it's amazing? Fine, I'll experience it O'Reilly-style ("We'll do it live! Fuck it!").
This one is fine til it ruins your plans. My wife and I have a toddler, we went to a local Lebanese place for lunch on the one day a month we share working from home, place was closed, so we went home, no nice lunch out, found out after it was posted only on Instagram that they were closed. The other options close enough to where we live to nip out for lunch are... Mcdonalds or Burger King. I don't live in a metropolis.
But, that's life, no? We can never make plans that work out all the time. I'd say, as a father of a 5 and 3yo myself, it's a great opportunity to demonstrate/teach the kiddos how to deal with those situations.
The point of days like that, and what I highlighted to my oldest when we had a similar disappointing outing this weekend (we all wanted to grill in a park, packed everything up, but forgot it was Easter and every other family had the same idea and we were screwed), is that we still get to have a nice time with family one way or another, regardless of what we're eating.
It's definitely disappointing when time is super limited, I completely empathize! I guess I just always try and highlight the glass half full aspect of things and use that to find a way to make the best of a crummy situation.
Windows works because it just continues to work. An enterprise can buy software, and it largely just run and run and run because they are serious about backwards compatibility.
This is just not true on Mac. See: the end of 32-bit support, switch to ARM largely worked, but some software didn't if it used particular x86_64 processor instructions.
On Linux, Ubuntu is decent but people still have issues with things like graphics drivers, Wayland, etc. etc. which makes it hard to advise it for your totally non-technical user.
On top of all this, Windows has the best management options if you're running 1000s of machines in your company.
DevRel is unfortunately something that’s going the way of the dodo though now that interest rates are up. A position that doesn’t directly contribute to the bottom line of a company, so it’s easy to justify getting rid of.
I wouldn’t mind Spotify’s changes if they actually worked well. But the podcasts thing is a nightmare and doesn’t work well, and I have no interest in Audiobooks or courses as part of my subscription.
It’s not the same because with Apple Music you still have an iPod like library you can go through with artists/albums/songs.
If you like a song on Spotify it just adds it to the massive playlist. It only adds it to its library management thing if you like the Album. If you click an artist in your library it takes you to their main page rather than to your library of saved songs by them.
There's the whole 'solarpunk' genre of fiction that I'd say is more optimistic. Epitomised by stuff like Becky Chamber's books 'A Psalm for the Wild Built' and 'A Prayer for the Crown Shy' (which are both excellent by the way).
Thank you for the recommendation. I haven't read much solarpunk. Cyberpunk is too dystopian for me. Steampunk, I like the aesthetic but I don't think I've read much literature in that genre except the difference engine.
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