Yep, here we are again. More lingering thoughts that I could not stretch into full-length articles. Admittedly, with these two minis, I had an internal Dragon Ball Z style beam struggle. My inner Perfect Cell said You have no reason to post these, the articles don’t go anywhere and there’s no central take-home message! Meanwhile, my inner Gohan yelled Write them anyways, After all, writer’s gon’ write!
Log Horizon, Feminists, and The Taliban
So, I have a confession to make; I have a morbid fascination with the current state of affairs in Afghanistan. Honestly, it’s like rubbernecking a car accident on the side of the highway. The Taliban have demonstrated what CGP Grey and Niccolo Machiavelli have long taught; the crowd who is able to seize power is not necessarily the crowd who can effectively govern. It’s one thing to read history books and hear stories from a bygone era regarding these concepts. It’s another matter entirely to see it unfold right in front of your eyes.
As an avid traveler to stomach-churning locales, I’ll occasionally watch travel vlogs of similar destinations on YouTube. While I’m in no rush to visit Afghanistan, I have total respect for (and secretly wish I was as brave as) the few absolutely ballsy Western tourists who choose to visit The Land of the Taliban.
The Taliban are like a mediocre college football coach. Sure, in the beginning there was a rough transition period followed by some lean seasons. After all, such turmoil is expected after an abrupt change in leadership; anyone worth a damn made a hasty exit. However, this is now year four of the new program; there’s no more holdovers from the previous administration, and thus no fingers to point.
Independent of their religious ideology, the Taliban haven’t even figured out the blocking-and-tackling of basic infrastructure. The lights only stay on for a few hours a day due to a poor electrical grid. Outside of the main drag in Kabul, there are still open sewer ducts lining most streets. The drinking water is not potable. The kicker? The Taliban is having a hard time staving off ISIS attacks. You would think that the Taliban would have a thorough understanding of guerilla warfare tactics; but hey, I’ve been wrong before…
Juxtaposed to Afghanistan is a great anime called Log Horizon. In the first season, players are transported to the world of the game. Outside of the basic mechanics of the game, there is no central government, and the Adventurers (human players) need to build a functioning civilization. The anime encompasses many key aspects of building this society; establishing a charter of human rights, establishing rule of law, building an economy, and discouraging laziness (through burgers!). Log Horizon, in later seasons, deals with foreign policy discussions, credit liquidity, and wealth inequality. Log Horizon is even labeled as educational television in Japan for how in depth the show explores these topics. Have the Taliban never heard of Crunchyroll?
And frankly, it’s important for liberals to still pay attention to Taliban era Afghanistan. Why? Simple really; our feminist and anti-police friends love to use rhetoric around deconstruction. This is usually in the context of something they dislike about society, or about society as a whole. Rarely discussed is what would happen after deconstruction is achieved. Sound familiar?
I invite my left-of-center friends to join a thought exercise. So, the apparatus you dislike is deconstructed. Alright now what? What will you replace it with? You have a plan as to what to replace it with and how you’ll implement that plan, right? You know who didn’t have a plan? The Taliban, and the results show. They may have deconstructed the republic, but the society they’ve built afterward is a manifestation of their 75-IQ foresight. If you kill all the engineers, there’ll be nobody left to run the power plant; who knew?
And now, the Taliban are complaining that virtually nobody on the international stage recognizes their government as legitimate. Truthfully, why should the international community do so? Regardless of your religious and political stances, the robed renegades can’t actually build or maintain anything. It’s a half-step above Lord of the Flies. The Taliban should rip a page out of Jordan Peterson’s playbook and clean their room before criticizing the rest of the world.
South Park taught me that it’s okay to mock the poor and stupid…
So, I Left The Village
It all started roughly two weeks ago. I was nearing the end of my Monday night shift (it was Tuesday morning at this point) when my boss’s boss asked for a meeting. I walked into the conference room and that’s when he tore off the Band-Aid; I was being laid off. I was absolutely emotionless during this meeting; my mind shifted immediately to logistics. I started mentally calculating how long my money would last before I had to touch my savings.
While I took nothing personally, the man who had to deliver the news clearly did not enjoy the task, independent of my carefree attitude. It’s not a secret that I was already planning to move on. Frankly all this did was nudge me a bit harder; though only just a bit. I did some job hunting in the first few days of my newfound freedom, I didn’t obsess over it either. In a way, I spent it a lot like the first few days of my previous unemployment.
I told some of my industry friends about the news; less for sympathy, and more of a let’s get the old band back together. With that said, I wasn’t relying on my industry buddies to open doors for me; the legwork was mine and mine alone. This unemployment was a bit different than my self-inflicted one; the economic winds weren’t at my back this time. With that said, I didn’t stress over what I know to be a literal numbers game.
Generally, I spent about 90 minutes per business day on the job search, barring any calls or interviews. My former direct reports would occasionally ask me about my own career progression; not surprising since they even noticed my grape preferences. I would tell them to not worry about my career prospects because I don’t even worry about it. Care to check my pulse?
While I’ll be intentionally vague for obvious reasons; I’ve secured a new job. The offer hit my inbox before the severance payment hit my checking account. I did this all without BlueReddit, wishy-washy recruiters, or calling in favors. I’ve even shaved down the number of contacts in my phone! It’s like I’ve fully left The Village. There is nothing that they have to offer me that I cannot get on my own faster, with less hassle, and without strings attached.
Most people are afraid to leave BlueReddit because you never know. For them, The Village represents safety. This is partly a rational and engineering-based approach to risk management, but it’s mostly just fear of the unknown. Fuck your cowardice-based hedge betting; I didn’t need The Village, even when I had to play on hard mode. Excuse me while I suck my own dick…
To quote a wise preacher from Chicago “Look at the valedictorian, scared of the future while I hop in the DeLorean.”
The Haunting: How an HR Angel Absolutely Broke Me…
T’was a nice early summer day at the start-up that I used to work for. It was Employee Appreciation Week. As such, certain remote employees were brought on-site to partake in the events. Among them was a super-cheery and deliciously fuckable HR rep who stayed on-site for the week.
She bought pizza for the second shift crew and genuinely took the time to ask pointed questions and to hear out our concerns. But more than that, she also was there to merely converse and to build relationships just for the sake of. Ask anybody who’s ever worked nights and they’ll tell you that is rarely the case.
She had developed the habit of reading my articles back in the days when I still posted on LinkedIn. She’d frequently engage with my content, offering kudos for points I made (one example is when I called out the resolution industry). The topic of discussion shifted towards my writing career. She kindly wished me well in my writing journey, in both book sales and my articles.
Tongue-in-cheek, I warned her that if I sold too many books, I’d likely quit working for the company and just write full time. She realized the slight error of her well-wishing and she flashed her immaculate pearly whites in her response.
“Oh okay, well don’t do that, stay here, and, you know, write another article.” Her response was as sweet and disarming as it was mildly self-serving.
Little did either of us realize at the time, the last three words of her sentence wound up having a lasting impact. They’ve replayed in my head countless times since that pizza-enabled interaction three years ago. The slogan has now slowed in delivery and deepened in tone inside my brain; it’s as if those three words witnessed a murder and asked for its voice to be distorted while being interviewed. A demonically-pitched version of Write Another Article gnaws at my very being if I go more than a few days without striking the keyboard or expanding upon shitposts I came up with.
Case in point, my great shame thus far in 2025 is that I went close to six weeks without posting anything between California Will Learn Nothing and An Ode to Career Leverage. I honestly wince every time I see that gap, even as I barrel towards 300 articles published. Hey Dan, you haven’t written anything in a while…
But to be clear, I’m not accusing her of any sort of malicious intent. The writing bug had already bitten me, its venom had long-overwhelmed whatever defenses I was able to muster. My brain already had fertile ground for her cheerleading to take root. In full disclosure, she said this when I had less than two dozen articles to my name, so her unknowingly parasitic message was a much-needed one.
Kanye once said “the prettiest people do the ugliest things”, even if unintentionally…
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