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Why 'Fight Club' Matters More Than Ever – Esquire

The movie was technically good. What Fincher movie isn’t.  But as someone who watched it at a particularly perfect time in one’s young adulthood this movie has become a monument.

 
A decade and a half later, we’re still pissed, but what are we doing about it? We’re still very much immersed in a corporate culture where our things do end up owning us, and we’re not willing to live without our Starbucks skinny lattes, our IKEA furniture, and our smartphones. What began as a means to let off some steam and to feel alive, Fight Club quickly spiraled into a lost generation of men seeking something more than nihilism. “When the fight was over, nothing was solved, but nothing mattered. We all felt saved,” The Narrator says. Durden discusses how his generation, Gen X, has no Great War but a spiritual war. “Our Great Depression is our lives.” Fight Club may be about men coming together for shared experiences, but the themes about experiencing real pain and release are universal.
via Why ‘Fight Club’ Matters More Than Ever – Esquire.

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Growing Up Sixty-Four

Kotaku has slowly turned into a haven for decent if not excellent writing  about and sometimes not primarily of games.
Case in point is this article which is closer to the writing style of someone wanting to write for The New Yorker than the sensationalist gaming press we have come to know and expect.
It’s suppose to be about the N64 except it is not, and what follows is more a meditation through remembrance of an important part of the writer’s past.
 
I hope this starts a trend on affiliated sites like io9. Keep up the good work Kotaku!!

I was recently sitting on the sofa at Action Button Entertainment Headquarters in Oakland, California, with a good autumn breeze coming in the windows. Me and Action Button Entertainment programmer Michael Kerwin were working on our game VIDEOBALL (coming QX 20XX (please buy it (I need to go to the dentist (it hurts so badly)))). The breeze was excellent. The sun was bright. I opened a YouTube tab. I put on a thirty-minute extended audio-only video of the Super Mario 64 castle music. It filled the room. Kerwin and I worked while the music played.
It took a minute for me to notice I’d put on that music. Why that track, of all tracks? It’s a nice and friendly track. It sounds like a crisp late-summer day. It also reverberates like the interior of a building. I had the windows and door wide open. We were both outside and inside at the same time.
It was sunny and breezy and cool, and a strong memory of Super Mario 64 jumped into my skull with sudden ferocity.
So I thought about the Nintendo 64 for a couple of minutes, and five anecdotes emerged which I suppose summarize how I feel about the system.
via Growing Up Sixty-Four.

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Types of Programmers

The Ninja is your team’s MVP, and no one knows it. Like the legendary assassins, you do not know that The Ninja is even in the building or working, but you discover the evidence in the morning. You fire up the source control system and see that at 4 AM, The Ninja checked in code that addresses the problem you planned to spend all week working on, and you did not even know that The Ninja was aware of the project! See, while you were in Yet Another Meeting, The Ninja was working.
Ninjas are so stealthy, you might not even know their name, but you know that every project they’re on seems to go much more smoothly. Tread carefully, though. The Ninja is a lone warrior; don’t try to force him or her to work with rank and file.
via Types of Programmers.

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Richard Branson Is Right: Time Is the New Money | Inc.com

I want to work for a company that adopts this.

 
Richard Branson just announced he would be giving Virgin employees unlimited vacation. He’s either nuts or knows something others have yet to discover: You’ll make more money if you give people their time back.
Why We Trade Time for Money
The Industrial Age taught us the only way to make money was to trade time for it. The deal was clear, and always the same: You give me eight to 10 hours of your day, and I’ll give you some money. But in the Participation Age, something new is emerging. Companies are realizing that when you give people back their time, they will make you more money. It seems counter-logical, but it’s really quite intuitive. As usual, Branson is moving on an idea that traditionalists will only discover by watching him and the other early adapters in action.
Why Would Unlimited Vacation Work?
Why give up on a vacation system that’s been in place for 170-plus years? Because it was a bad idea then, and with a work force that did not grow up in the shadow of the Industrial Age, it’s an even worse idea today. Almost no one under 40 can relate to a time-based system that makes no sense in a results-based work world.
Branson didn’t figure this out; he’s actually a late adapter, which makes a lot of the work world archaic and completely out of touch with how to make money today. Fewer than 1% of U.S. companies give unlimited vacation. In fact, America gives the second-lowest amount in the world, behind only South Korea.
The data is in: When you give people control of their time, they make you more money. W. L. Gore Inc., the pioneer in rejecting the Industrial Age, is a $3 billion company with 10,000 stakeholders. They’ve had unlimited vacation since the 1960s and continue to grow exponentially.
via Richard Branson Is Right: Time Is the New Money | Inc.com.

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TED: Hans Rosling on the HIV Epidemic

Hans Rosling’s TED talk on the HIV epidemic scared me. If the steady state of HIV infection is about 1 % of population then we are going to see about 1 million probably more because before steady state it gets worse fast and after society adjust to the HIV epidemic then we slowly stop getting worse.  People stop unprotected sex.
Watch this ted talk if you are curious

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The Same-Sex Marriage Fight Is Over – The Atlantic

Idthe fight is now over what is the next battle? Poverty I guess.
 

In the days and weeks ahead, couples will be allowed to marry in their states. In fact, Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring has announced that marriages can begin in the commonwealth as early as 1 p.m. today.
So two things have changed as of 9:30 this morning, when the orders issued. First, there will soon be thousands of same-sex couples married by order of the courts. And second, the lower-court opinions, which said the Constitution provides a right for same-sex couples to marry, are now the law.
I don’t see how today’s decision doesn’t signal that even within the Court, the fight over same-sex marriage is over.
That sounds redundant, but it’s not. As long as cert. was pending, the lower-court opinions were in limbo. Meanwhile the issue is pending in the Fifth, Sixth, Ninth, and 11th Circuits. Any panel in one of those circuits must now confront a huge weight of federal authority affirming same-sex marriage. True, other circuits’ decisions are not “binding”; true, the Supreme Court did not give any hint of its position. But that’s still a lot of contrary authority to move against. Any judge writing an opinion that bars same-sex marriage must explain why he or she is ignoring all the previous decisions.
via The Same-Sex Marriage Fight Is Over – The Atlantic.

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The Marcoses never really left home | Inquirer Opinion

I’d share the whole article if that wasn’t considered unethical blogging.
Just read the whole damn thing.

 
Convicted but never jailed
This transaction involved leasing out two train station terminals at below market rates to a private foundation that she herself put up and headed. Philippine General Hospital Foundation was supposed to raise funds for the state-owned Philippine General Hospital but its hospital director told me then in an interview that PGH never got a cent from PGH Foundation. Mrs. Marcos signed the contract with LRTA on behalf of the foundation even though she was also the LRTA chair.
In 1996, the Supreme Court found Mrs. Marcos “guilty beyond reasonable doubt,” sentenced her to 12 years in jail and fined her the equivalent of the anomalous contract. Dans was acquitted because the Court found “no conspiracy” between him and Mrs. Marcos.
Around the same time that the government of Fidel Ramos—the dictator’s second cousin—was prosecuting Mrs. Marcos in court, it was secretly negotiating a deal that only came to light in 1996 when former Solicitor General Frank Chavez asked the Supreme Court to stop it. The deal would have allowed the Marcoses to walk off with 25 percent of all their ill-gotten wealth—here and abroad. Tax-free. In addition, all pending criminal and civil cases against them would be dropped.
But that wasn’t all. Chavez presented a letter dated Jan. 24, 1995, from Mrs. Marcos’ lawyer to Presidential Commission on Good Government chair Magtanggol Gunigundo saying “it is further understood that $50 million will be taken from the top as approved by President Ramos and your
(Gunigundo’s) good self.”
“Where will the $50 million taken from the top go?” Chavez demanded to know as he asked to court to permanently bar all compromise deals with the Marcoses.
via The Marcoses never really left home | Inquirer Opinion.

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The Marcoses never really left home | Inquirer Opinion

#NeverAgain
These marcos zombies need to be identified and shamed.

Political roots intact
The 1986 People Power Revolution did chop down the Marcos political tree. But its intricate roots that spread far and wide across the state bureaucracy and Philippine society remained intact. All the Marcoses had to do was nurture the roots and wait for the tree to grow back.
In 1998, by Imee Marcos’ own reckoning, “we waited 12 years to be on the right side of the fence.” Right side meant a political alliance with then victorious President-elect Joseph Estrada, velvet seats in Congress for Imee and her mother, and a governorship for Bongbong.
An ecstatic Imee spilled the family’s secret to success: “Many professionals were appointed by my father. So you have this immense bedrock of Marcos appointees who keep moving up.”
Like secret stay-behind units, this vast army of professionals scattered in all sectors of society have defended the Marcoses and helped erase the dark legacy of their regime.
via The Marcoses never really left home | Inquirer Opinion.

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Miriam wants 24-hr security for Heidi Mendoza | ABS-CBN News

Big fan of both of these women. Upright people should not stand alone, We cannot let Comm Mendoza feel she is fighting alone.
 

Miriam wants 24-hr security for Heidi Mendoza
ABS-CBNnews.com
Posted at 10/03/2014 5:06 PM | Updated as of 10/03/2014 5:06 PM
MANILA – Sen. Miriam Defensor Santiago is asking for 24-hour police protection to Commission on Audit Commissioner (COA) Heidi Mendoza after she revealed receiving threats and harassment for testifying in the Senate investigation on the alleged overprice of the Makati City Hall building 2 and other anomalies.
In a statement, Santiago said she sent a letter to Interior and Local Government Secretary Mar Roxas to provide security for Mendoza.
She is also set to file a resolution that calls for heightened and fully-armed, 24-hour VIP police protection in favor of Mendoza, after she testified in the subcommittee hearing of the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee last October 2.
“If we let this pass, no other significant witness will be willing to testify in any congressional hearing because of fear. Let’s put our boots on the ground and stomp out fear sown by hooligans,” Santiago said.
via Miriam wants 24-hr security for Heidi Mendoza | ABS-CBN News.

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PANALO! | Group of Pinoy coders win big in international coding tourney | Infotek News: InterAksyon.com

A great victory for local tech!!
 

Math and gamesThe veritable quartet all came from Kalibrr, a local startup that helps optimize the recruitment process of outsourcing companies through their cloud-based platform.Magno, who admitted as being the least technical person of the group, came from Ateneo de Manila University and serves as Kalibrr associate product manager.Both Atienza and Ayson are company developers, while Dumol is chief software engineer. All three are members of the University of the Philippines Programming Guild.Dumol said that he started out programming after chancing upon a book in elementary about building a website.“I was in grade six and I found a book on how to make a website. It’s very fulfilling to be able to translate your ideas and thoughts into working code and make a program basically out of nothing by typing on a computer,” Dumol said.Though Ayson came to programming at a much later stage in his life, his math skills carried him through.“I did not even know the Internet until fourth year high school. I did not know that you just double click the Firefox logo to launch the Internet,” Ayson said. “But I was discovered for my math ability. I like how programming and code solves many different problems.”Atienza, a familiar name in the programming community as a hackathon master, said that his love for gaming paved the way for programming.“Before college I did not know any programming… I thought this was entirely all about games and computer. But I actually love Math and problem solving,” Atienza said.If there is one more thing the group share aside from coding, it’s gaming. The group’s name – Liadri — was actually derived from the final boss in the online game Guild Wars.
via PANALO! | Group of Pinoy coders win big in international coding tourney | Infotek News: InterAksyon.com.