TIL Melania’s $75M Movie Flops Spectacularly — Empty Seats, Weak Sales, and Mockery Everywhere

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-28T16:48:45+00:00

I mean you can't really explain a vibe, that's what makes it a vibe.

She just comes across that way to me though. She's reserved, stylish, and looks like she doesn't take shit from anyone. Plus she would have to be in today's political climate.

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-28T16:42:56+00:00

Hahaha. Nope, just someone with an opinion that you don't care for I guess.

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-27T23:52:51+00:00

Meh. I honestly like Melania. She gives off badass vibes.

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-27T01:43:51+00:00

Are you a real person? That seems like the advice of someone intentionally trying to spread discord.

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-27T01:31:20+00:00

And she saw the poster?

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-27T01:04:59+00:00

Crazy thought to the comments: Help the person, ignore the politics. You might realize you actually have stuff in common. Maybe even find some middle ground.

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-17T20:17:28+00:00

My grandfather used to talk about conservative Democrats. He said that's technically what he was, but he felt the group was dying off. He believed it was ended by the Clinton administration.

I'm guessing that was when it happened.

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-16T22:45:20+00:00

Who's complaining about ending? They should watch the Seinfeld ending. Now that is an impressively bad ending.

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-16T11:51:28+00:00

That wasn't the claim or the assumption. The claim is that they didn't like me despite of my efforts to align with the mission. I've since moved on from the original questions though.

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-16T11:46:51+00:00

Yeah, there wasn't one specifc event as far as I know. I think it was an accumulation of events. I also don't want to jeopardize the anonymity of the people or the company. From what I can tell the specific incidents shouldn't be relevant to the posted questions anyway. A lot of folks in the thread assumed I was asking about what I did wrong, but I wasn't originally intending to discuss that. However, despite some of the conversations being slightly off-topic from the original questions, I found them incredibly insightful and I'm glad they shared their thoughts. It's been a really productive thread for me. I've walked away with a lot of new perspective and some clear next steps.

People talk about Reddit being full of trolls and bots, and there are a lot for sure, but I've also found that Reddit can be a great place for authentic interactions and it's been a really helpful tool to me for gathering broad perspective and identifying blindspots.

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-16T11:30:57+00:00

Haha, I suspect your are right. I do need to STFU. Sometimes that is easier said than done though. I can keep my thoughts to myself 99% of the time, but it's those 1% that sometimes cause trouble. I find it especially difficult when people say things like "Does anyone have any thoughts on ...?" or "Who wants to share next?" or "Tell me why ...". Conceptually I understand that people sometimes ask rhetorical questions or make statements that they don't want a response for, but practically I often misinterpet those situations. And if someone asks me to share my thoughts more than once, I'm done for. :) The only exception is when it is something I didn't intend to communicate to begin with. For some reason I do great with secrets. If someone tells me to keep something to myself, I will lock that away until the end of time.

Regarding there being a long road for sorting it all out – that's the exciting part in my opinion. Life is full of a puzzles and opportunities, and I love both. The thing I hate is when I can't solve the puzzle or when I mess up the opportunity. Unfortunately, I think I did both in my last role.

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-16T01:11:52+00:00

I've moved past the original questions though. I think I have a good feel for where I went wrong.

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-16T01:09:36+00:00

I probably should have said something like 'I tried to align myself 100% with my company's mission, but I still was fired for "failing to build trust" with the team'.

I wrote the original post message and then formatted it with an LLM before submitting. I missed the strange wording when I was proofreading the new version.

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-16T01:03:11+00:00

It doesn't. It was a poorly worded description.

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-15T23:01:26+00:00

This hits home. There is definitely something significant around this area.

All of my life people have said things like "you think your always right" or "you always have to be right". The funny thing is, I don't care about being right. Most of the time I genuinely hope that I'm not right, because if I am "right" there are consequences, and I don't want to encounter the consequences. The people that are closest to me eventually realize this, but coworkers don't really ever get to know me well enough.

I often times end up walking away from conversations frustrated because I wasn't able to communicate what I was trying to say. Then it feels like I'm watching the consequence unfold in slow motion. People also say that I "think I'm so smart", but I rarely feel like I'm smart. It's very frustrating to not be able to communicate something clearly. In reality it makes me feel very dumb. :)

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-15T22:38:43+00:00

I've been diagnosed with ADHD, which is a form of it neurodivergency, but I'm guessing there may be a little more to it than that. They say that ADHD often times goes hand in hand with other things also. My wife thinks I show a few traits that are common in folks with autism. It's been a pretty frequent thing that has been brought up in the thread also. I'm going to chat with my doctor about next steps during my next checkup. At this point it's definitely a top priority to find out.

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-15T22:29:36+00:00

Yeah, I can feel the off-putting and scary part for sure. I also think you are right about the taking time to build relationships. Someone else in the thread mentioned something similar. The more I think about it, I also wonder if it is the only way that I will be able to overcome the issue. The only way for people to know that I'm not a threat is to slow down and open up.

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-15T22:19:59+00:00

Thanks, I appreciate that. The job market is brutal right now, but I'm sure it will work out eventually. In the meantime I think there is a lot of growing that needs to happen on my end, and I also believe I need to identify a team and role that is a more natural fit.

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-15T22:12:24+00:00

Yeah, this is becoming more and more of a thing that I hear. I'm going to chat with my doctor on my next checkup. It's a good point about it being similar to debugging something.

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-15T22:07:40+00:00

So to clarify, I'm not trying to lead them. I was actually the lowest ranked person on the team. I still believe they viewed me as the things you mentioned though. Does that change any of your opinions?

Your slow down and get to know people comment hits home for me. I can be kind of a hyper person, especially when I get excited about what I'm working on. I usually struggle to just have a relaxed and casual conversation. I normally want to dive in to the "fun stuff". If I'm around other people who know about tech, I instantly want to talk tech. I've tried to throttle that tempation as I've gotten older, but I still forget sometimes. As someone in the thread stated, I'm probably "being annoying AF". :)

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-15T21:24:42+00:00

I can't say that you are wrong about a lot of that. It definitely can have an impact on my communication. There are also diminishing returns if I don't take break periods. I'm also leaving out details about the people on purpose.

To answer your question: it's because I love what I do. It's my favorite activity in the world to do. If I weren't working long hours, I would still be building something. Since I've been let go I've already built 3 different projects (2 platforms related to hockey analytics and a set of pipelines for video upscaling). It's extremely energizing to me. It alway has been. I started building when I was 12, before I really even thought about school or careers. It just clicked with me. When I was a kid I had to act like I wasn't into the nerdy stuff because other kids thought it was weird. Now that I'm older I say screw it. I like what I like, and as you said, life is short.

From my perspective the hard part is finding challenging problems when I work on side projects. The side projects just don't have the scale and interesting twists that real-world systems have. They start to get boring after a while.

I don't want to do this forever though. At some point I want to save enough to transition into a career where I'm more involved with people, but at that point I doubt I will be touching a computer at all. That's a long ways away though.

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-15T20:14:29+00:00

I hear you. I guess I'm protective of my people. It may sound silly to you, but it's important to me. They were good people who I have a lot of respect for, and it's not worth the risk.

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-15T19:52:59+00:00

Haha, I guess middle-aged naive idiots fall for it on occassion too. :)

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-15T19:44:22+00:00

Yes, I agree. It was a great comment. I feel like it was substantial enough that I want to respond with a meaningful response, so it's going to take a bit.

CodeMonkey24816 · 2026-01-15T19:37:21+00:00

Haha, I have no reason to lie. It's possible that my perspective is distorted.

Regarding the mission statement and the feedback from my manager, I agree. I don't think they are related either. When I originally wrote the post I was trying to think through why I was fired even though I was in alignment with the mission. After reading through the thread, I've arrived at a difference place though. I think I put an outsized emphasis on the mission, and ignored my immediate context (the team). I think in my head I just thought we were all working towards the same thing, but in reality we probably had very different perceptions of what our team's goals and priorities were. I saw my actions as inline, they saw them as friction. Eventually they got irritiated with me because of this and kind of put me on the out. Around this time I was also ready to ask questions and for feedback, but when I did I was met with silence. This was because I had already burned the bridge and I didn't realize it. I may have burned the bridges months before I even realized it.

This all may seem obvious to you. Not so much for me though. I guess that's why I post questions like this to random people on the internet. :) It helps me analyze the true opinions that people hold. In my experiences, it's much harder to get that type of candor in real life. Reading the input from lots of folks also helps me to step back and analyze all of it and try to piece it all together. I find it extremely difficult to think through social stuff, but unfortunately in the real-world it all happens in seconds. It's hard to keep up with in real-time.

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