Tag Archives: curation

Articles I Like: 21 HR Jobs of the Future

PolyWogg.ca
August 13 2020

Harvard Business Review’s mailing include a link to a cool article by Jeanne C. Meister about what HR people will be doing in the future, or doing “more of” in the future, given the impact of COVID-19 and the likely enduring switch to working from home. It’s based on a think piece from one of the thousands of organizations looking at the “future of work”, and there are tons of these reports coming out, as they have for the last five years. Most of them are, quite frankly, wrong. They’re pie-in-the-sky visions of “what could be”, not very practically tied to the current environment. In order for most of the predictions to come true, we would need to see a massive disruption in the workplace and workforce.

Like COVID-19 has now done, which makes some of the more recent predictions more closely tied to reality.

The report outlines 21 different job functions that HR people expect to see in the next 10 years and plots them on a 2×2 grid of how “techy” the companies are and time. It’s an interesting idea, but my take on it is that most of the 21 functions are “options” and not necessarily cooperative ones.… Read the rest

Articles I Like: How To Create A Killer Opening For Your Science Fiction Short Story

PolyWogg.ca
November 29 2018

On the rare days that I allow myself to dream that I will eventually make the time to write some more fiction, I dabble in reading interesting tidbits that resonate with me in terms of what I want to do as a writer. Not always “writing advice”, sometimes it is just about the industry, publishing, etc. Rarely do I find much in the way of real writing advice that I think, “Yes, that’s good stuff right there. I should bookmark that!”.

Way back in 2014, one of my regular feeds, The Passive Voice, shared excerpts from Gizmodo’s sub-website “i09” about science fiction writing entitled How To Create A Killer Opening For Your Science Fiction Short Story. Most of the time, I wouldn’t even bother to click on a title like that…too clickbait-y, and honestly, rarely does it live up to the premise. Often the writer will include examples of their own work, and the author isn’t usually that well-known. But the excerpt was intriguing, so why not? It was a slow day.

The article was awesome, perhaps for two reasons. First, the author, Charlie Jane Anders, put a fair amount of analytical thought into the piece. I’m an analyst by nature and profession and I recognize a good framework when I see one.… Read the rest

Articles I Like: Focus on the Fight: Writing Action Scenes That Land the Punch

PolyWogg.ca
May 1 2018

Often when I read writing tips, there is very little sense of balance. Most of them come down to a single form: “Do X, not Y”, with the small caveat that you can do Y if you do it well. The classic “Show, don’t tell” is a perfect example…except in some cases, a simple exposition deals with an info gap to get people to the next plot point. In that case, a little exposition can go a long way to avoiding stopping the action, jumping somewhere else to “show it”. Another classic used to be “Don’t use multiple points-of-view”. And then someone comes out with a fantastic book where they use multiple POV to great success. Because they did it right. Which means, often the real advice is “Do X, not Y unless you’re better than average and can actually do Y well, but know that it often doesn’t work for a lot of writers”. On the other hand, there are more advanced tomes by Lawrence Block or Stephen King that avoid that problem and give you the straight goods.

In this case, Diana Gill is an executive editor with views on how to write fight scenes (well, actually, action scenes in general).… Read the rest

Articles I Like: Astronomy Calendar for May 2018

PolyWogg.ca
April 30 2018

For those not active in astronomy circles, there is a website called Cloudy Nights for all things astro related i.e. where astronomers can go to talk about astronomy when there are “cloudy nights”. Each month, they publish the detailed Celestial Calendar (by Dave Mitsky). Here are some of the highlights for May (times converted to Ottawa time):

4/5th — The peak of the Eta Aquarid meteor shower (20 per hour for northern hemisphere observers) occurs at 03h00 (May 5); the Moon, Mars, and Pluto lie within a circle of diameter 4.81 degrees at 19h00 (May 5)

May 7: Last Quarter Moon occurs at 22h09 (7th);

May 8: Jupiter is opposition (angular size 44.8”, magnitude -2.5) at 20h00

May 15: New Moon occurs at 07:48; the Moon is 8.7 degrees south-southeast of the bright open cluster M45 (the Pleiades or Subaru) in Taurus at 18:00; Venus is at perihelion (0.7184 astronomical units from the Sun) at 19:00

May 21: First Quarter Moon occurs at 23h49;

May 29: Full Moon, known as the Milk or Planting Moon, occurs at 10h19; the Moon is 8.8 degrees north of Antares at 15h00

May 29/30: Mercury is 4.5 degrees south-southeast of M45 at 03h00 (30th)

For the planets:

During May, Venus shines prominently in the evening sky.

… Read the rest

Articles I Like: Indie Author: 6 Dialogue Traps To Avoid

PolyWogg.ca
November 12 2017

I’ve been going through some of my saved/bookmarked pages, and I came across this one from April Hamilton from back in July 2011. It’s a great summary of some problems that newbie writers (like me) have with dialogue (Indie Author: 6 Dialogue Traps To Avoid).

So it mentions that newbies often have the characters talking the same way i.e. with the same “voice”, which doesn’t happen in real life and is really boring to read. I’m not sure I like her examples of fixing it, as it starts to sound a bit cliché to have 20-somethings or ex-military people talk like caricatures, but it can give flavour to their voice. Equally, newbies often go for melodramatic scenes that are tripe for soap operas, or heavy on the exposition dump. And I like the overall premise of “when in doubt, read it out loud”. If it sounds wrong, it probably is.

However, I’m not sold on the third trap related to newbies not differentiating enough between men and women. Here’s the excerpt:

In the masculine, words are used to accomplish some goal. The goal is usually imparting necessary—and that word, “necessary”, is key here—information, but it can also be to quickly size up a person or situation, or to establish or reinforce the pecking order (e.g.,

… Read the rest