My daughter loves her visiting gran, and also you usually only see her buried underneath a writhing dog with her feet poking out.

How the worst video game of all time came to be:

Warshaw drew up his pitch to Spielberg, and travelled from the Atari headquarters in Sunnyvale, California to Los Angeles. His idea was an adventure game in which the player had to help ET phone home by collecting components to make an inter-planetary telephone. The player would have to dodge government agents and scientists in order to complete the mission.

“I got down to Spielberg and I laid out the whole design,” he says. “I told him, ‘I think it’s really important that we do something innovative. ET is a breakthrough movie and I think we need a breakthrough game.’

“I talked him out of the idea of a Pac-Man knock-off. But the key was to design a game that I could deliver in five weeks.”

Oh, boy, if I haven’t returned an EMAIL that I need to field I feel like I need to tweet more carefully, and I don’t even have a boss, but this is only going to become a bigger issue as social media grows (esp. things like Twitter, where you’d have to lock your account to avoid your boss seeing it, unlike FB where you can just avoid friending people at work):

I noticed that the last two times one of my direct reports called out sick, she posted photos to Instagram during the work day hours. Basically they were “selfies” of herself looking all dolled up and ready to go. The first time this happened, I let it slide and in good faith assumed that she was just reposting a photo that was taken another day. Now that it has happened again and there is somewhat of a pattern, I want to address it with her.

Do you have any suggestions on how to approach this conversation? Or if I should approach it at all? I seem to be getting mixed opinions on this – some people say it’s not my place to comment on her social media activity. The way I see it though is that regardless of whether the photos were actually taken on the day she called out sick or not, it was poor judgment on her part because she is senior in this department and most of our junior employees (who step in to cover her work when she is out) have access to her social media activity. I was alarmed when I saw the photos and I can only imagine that the junior employee who had to stay late to cover her work on those days had a similar reaction.

I know this poses a larger issue that it is not ideal for managers and employees or mentors and mentees to be social media buddies.

ICYMI, Nikki’s fabulous interview with Alexander Chee:

I appreciate how frank you’ve been about the challenges you met while working on this novel, and what a long and sometimes maddening process it was. I feel there’s a lesson there for other writers who might be sparring with their own work, or publishers’ expectations, or the enormous pressure to not only tell brilliant stories, but move units. What would you tell aspiring novelists after the experiences of writing both your novels? 

I suppose I would tell them to learn as much as they can about how to survive themselves. I had to learn how the person I am can best live with the writer I am — the human part of me had needs for companionship, ego satisfaction, the protections of health insurance and dental insurance. Some of the best advice on being a writer I can think of is to take good care of your teeth. (The emergency funds for writers are typically inundated with emergency dental requests.)

Always here to talk about a) The Flash and b) Iris, this interview with Candice Patton is VERY spoiler-y, so make sure you’re caught up before clicking.

I have not encountered this local daycare center which has become a popular target for conspiracy theorists, but now I want to drive by it slowly while blasting the X-Files theme (or not, bc that would be creepy for the poor people trying to work there):

Visit Salt Lake City in February, in inversion season, and you’ll hardly see further than 50 yards. The rocky mountain ranges, the dozens of craft breweries, the looming Salt Laky City Temple are all shrouded in gravy-thick smog. But even through the haze, if you wound up at the intersection of 1300 South and 300 East, it’s impossible not to see the Fun Time Kidz Day Care, a DayGlo-green building with purple doors and yellow trim around windows blocked with pictures that look like they’ve been torn out of old coloring books. There’s a deserted playground out back which, if it existed in a Silent Hill game, would definitely be a place where a zombie child would lurch out at you.

Depending on who you ask, Fun Time is either a normal day care (albeit a slightly creepy one) or a cover-up for something insidious. Possibly a CIA black site, a drug front, or an organ harvesting operation. For the people who suspect something sinister, it’s become the subject of an enduring mystery: What’s going on in this building, and why has nobody seen kids come in or come out?

Robert Pickton, a truly monstrous Canadian serial killer who (like most serial killers) benefitted from society and law enforcement’s general disinterest in the safety and whereabouts of sex workers and addicts, managed to smuggle his memoir out of prison and get it up for sale on Amazon (British Columbia does not have a law that prevents criminals from profiting from their crimes, so it’s not clear what can be done at this point):

Pickton: In His Own Words was selling for around $20 on Amazon.ca, where it was ranked a #1 bestseller and a “hot new release” before it was suddenly made unavailable, with no explanation. As of Monday morning, the 144-page book was still being offered on Amazon’s U.S. site, accompanied by a rambling excerpt, but it was no longer available by the afternoon.

If you would like to read a REAL book about Pickton, On the Farm is excellent, and really gets at the remarkable failures of the RCMP and the Vancouver police, who just cocked everything up royally, allowing more women to die at his hands.

Beloved, you need DWIL. You need DWIL right now.

One of my dearest friends just had a baby, and in case you have just had a baby or are about to have one, it is really hard! It’ll get better. You are incredible. I am impressed by you.