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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • Really frustrating to see online commenters speaking in favor of the acquisition (and prior MS buy ups) just because they are already locked into the Xbox ecosystem and they want games on Game Pass. Never mind that it’s objectively anti-consumer/anti-competitive and arguably bad for the industry broadly, it benefits a very specific subset of consumers so it must be good and the FTC / Sony are just haters. Complete lack of critical thinking.

    I’ve heard some industry people aren’t pleased about these kind of late cycle whole-studio acquisitions either…think for example about Starfield devs who have already done the bulk of the work on their game and then have to A) shelve whatever work was done on PS versions B) throw their work onto a subscription model instead of pure sales while C) having to immediately generate profit to justify the purchase of Bethesda/Zenimax that they didn’t have any say in. Turning more and more studios into line items in a mega corp budget sheet.

    Grim.


  • Yes, thank you! I hate these obnoxious posts that do nothing more than vaguely reference something. It’s not like memes and image macros are the greatest content at the best of times, but ones that just go “Wow, <thing> sure did happen.” are such trash. Same goes for that confused Gandalf looking around like “Huh? What’s <thing>?” Fuck off.


  • I think you’re wrong about how the movie deals with the overall system.

    First of all, in the world of the film Nimona (the character) directly addresses this idea, pointing out that believing that systems and institutions are good but individual bad actors misuse them is flawed thinking and condemning it as naiveté. She basically looks directly at the camera and says “neoliberalism is wrong, Ballister.”

    Second of all, the ending doesn’t feel like the “status quo” you make it out to be. The ending as it is A) doesn’t really explore things that in depth, as it’s pretty brief, and B) to the extent that it shows us anything, shows us some pretty major changes. The wall which represents the fascistic control over the people has a giant hole in it that clearly isn’t being fixed (remember the directors speech about how wrong even a single crack in the wall would be?), the cannons on it that represent the weaponization of their social structure are being dismantled, two of the major characters who were knights are shown just being happy together, and a third knight (one of the films biggest assholes) even demonstrates that he’s changed his perspective on Nimona and monsters (along with many others in their society). If the ending had been longer and explored more I’m fairly certain we’d see a clearer system change happening.

    Seriously though, what movie would have a character explicitly say “Changing who’s in charge of a bad system won’t make things better” and then just do that?


  • I was a teacher at a small rural school. Five people in my department. Our department head was the worst possible choice for the position - she wasn’t the most senior, wasn’t the best equipped, wasn’t the most innovative, wasn’t the best peacemaker. She bullied and belittled, her lessons were the same for years, her scores weren’t even particularly strong. We frequently went to professional development as a team which she didn’t attend. Couple this with an admin who was incompetent and constantly double talking and it was a giant pain.

    The final straw was when one of our colleagues found a better job (department head at a neighboring school) and they needed to reshuffle classes to find a replacement. Despite being more qualified and more experienced, they refused to give any honors or AP courses to me or my colleagues, instead hiring a first year teacher with only a BA and shutting the rest of the department out of the entire hiring project. We were literally in the building running summer school and planning for the following year while they did every interview with no input, promised to talk to us, then made their offers and class decisions. We were told that we’d all meet to discuss it, then they reversed course and said they didn’t want input and we’d instead have a meeting at the start of the following school year to essentially admonish us for not blindly following our department head.

    We finally decided we’d dealt with it enough. Three of the five of us left that summer, the fourth left the next year. They had to hire an entirely new department because of that one person. I’m in a better school with a better team now, one of my colleagues was poached by the same one who was originally leaving, and another sold her house and is touring the country in her RV home. The superintendent fired the admin the following year as well.