1. I started my new job this week, which was pretty much just all orientation. A little irksome, but if they want to pay me to sit in a room and listen to someone talk for eight hours, I’ll take it. No idea how my actual job will work out, since I’ve not done anything related to it yet.

2. The company that bears the name of Disney continues to descend ever further into self-parody. This week I heard that they are not only making a live-action adaptation of Snow White, but that they cast a distinctly non-white actress in the role. Again, this is the sort of thing you’d joke about, but here we are.

I’m hoping that messing with Snow White will prove the “sailing in force into the West” of Disney, and result in the company being swallowed up in a great chasm, leaving only a remnant of the faithful behind (still reading Prof. Tolkien’s letters).

(Of course, it’s still not as ridiculous as the BBC race swapping Anne Boleyn).

3. Going through training at my current job (which is a very, ah, self-impressed company, though to be fair one that seems to have a good deal to be impressed about), it occurs to me that this is basically just a tribe: we have our chief, who acts as the active will of the collective and whom people talk about with reverence and respect, a hierarchy of senior nobility who have received their positions from the chief and are particularly invested in the well-being of the tribe, and so on. My training thus far has largely been an induction into the tribe and learning why I should appreciate it and be loyal to it, and the good of the tribe is presented as the great goal to which we are aiming.

I think our situation differs from that of our ancestors not in that our tribes are fundamentally different in nature from, say, feudalism or tribalism, or so on, it’s that we are less bound to them. We can easily move between tribes, and in fact most of us are obligated to do so. The company-tribe was always a looser bond than natural tribes – nation, church, etc. – but these days it’s looser than ever.

What we have here, in fact, is something like no-fault tribal divorce. Though since the ‘tribe’ is a natural human need, we overcompensate by being extremely tenacious in clinging to those tribes we actually do feel an emotional attachment to and which we don’t expect to have to divorce from. So, we obsess over fandoms, or sometime political parties, and so on; whatever we can feel relatively ‘safe’ within.

Just a vague, half-formed thought there. Maybe something there.

4. A very interesting and on-point video by David Stewart on the growing hatred for Baby Boomers: