#fight the corporate power

[micahweil]

"Here's your lemon tart." The barista set it in front of the man clad in a heavily spiked jean jacket and cyberarm. "I still think you should get your ripperdoc to get that thing painted. It'd look just as nice as the sleeve you have on your meat arm."

"Th-thanks...I'll keep it in mind." The punk picked up the delicate fork that was included and sliced himself off a piece from the very tip. It was, as he always knew it to be, perfect.

"And for our latex lover..." She set the delicate coffee cup in front of the woman across from the punk, dressed in what appeared to be a very skin tight bodysuit and long coat. "Mocha latte with a hint of the real 'nilla, cinnamon on top."

"Thank you, dear." She picked the cup up and took a sip as the cheerful one bounced away to get behind the counter and help out some more.

"Chise," the punk asked. "How did we ever end up like this?"

"In a situation where we're sitting here, enjoying coffee and pastries, in spite of the fact that any other time would result in us trading slugs?" She took a second sip and leaned back, crossing one leg over the other. "I have no idea Crash."

"Sorta. I mean the fact that you and I seem to come here every week, sit down, and have a civil, even enjoyable time despite the fact your boss wants my head on a spike outside his office tower." He motioned to where the barista was now, serving two obvious mercenaries who were still singed and bleeding a little bit from their latest job. "Those two come in looking like hell, knowing damn well some of the security team will be in here in a little bit, and nothing happens. Three separate gangs who hate each other come in here and...nothing happens." He took another bite of his tart.

"Even the most bloodthirsty and hateful of rivals, who have shown they are willing to destroy entire city blocks to try to kill each other know enough to sit on other sides of the cafe and wait patiently if the other is conducting business." She sighed and rolled her shoulders. "I've got a theory."

The barista trotted up to them with a smile. "How is everything?" they asked.

"Fantastic, dear," Chise proclaimed. "Perfect brew, as usual."

"Could I get some soymoo?" Crash asked.

"Of course, sweetie! I'll be right back." They turned and headed back into the kitchen.

"And there that theory goes," Chise said, once they were out of earshot. "Surrounded by all this crime and decay, and they're the happiest, perkiest person in the world. How do they not know what this place is to so many of us?"

"Maybe we've got this all wrong." He took the presented glass of soy milk and smiled. "Maybe they've got the right idea. I can't help but feel like...this is a completely different world in here."

"I can drink to that." She sipped her latte and sighed. "My boss tells me who to kill, how to kill them, and then you show up to either defend them, or to get revenge." The cup clinked on the metal table they were at. "But here...all that barista cares about is making sure their customers are happy and full. How do the corpos keep their fingers out of it?"

He looked down at his half finished pastry. "Maybe we're working for the wrong people. I mean, there's more of us than there is people truly loyal to them, and we all know it."

This caused the conversations around them to stop, which in turn caused conversations around them to stop. In a few moments, the entire cafe was quiet. Looks bounced between rivals, professionals, and gang members, before they settled on the pair.

Chise looked at Crash, then at her coffee. "...you have a point there, friend. Maybe we need to...re-evaluate our professional relationship." She slipped an empty cred chip into her PDA and tapped on the screen. "Leaving her a big tip."

"You too, eh?" Crash had already started dialing in a cred stick to leave at the table. "Call me in a few days? See if we can find somewhere neutral to go and...talk."

"I'll bring friends."

"We will too," one of the neighboring tables responded.

A regular and oblivious person works at a coffee shop not knowing its a place of ceasefire for assassins and mercenaries.

[toontastictoons]

Asking Firestarter to be my friend...

[schrodingerscal]

The fact that 99% of the people I know call Carmen Sandiego (2019) a “baby show” is fucking INSANE.

Like, who DOESN’T love a show about a lesbian international super thief as she travels the world targeting the evil shadow-corporation that where literally her ex-“legal” guardians/a school made to gaslight young adults/older teens into being fucking criminals? Not to mention it actually teaches some pretty cool facts. Plus the ART? The PLOT? The fucking PLOT-TWISTS!? Not to mention the relationships and characters are just fucking phenomenal.

To me, Carmen Sandiego will ALWAYS be #1

[brutalmasks]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

But the transformation of the internet into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of text from the other four” has made turned technical standards-setting into a game of moneyball, overseen by conflicted refs who have few checks on their calls.

Take the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a standards body that is justly famed for its long history of making high-quality, fair web standards in a transparent and open way. As web companies gobbled each other up and browsers became the purview of two giant companies, one charitable foundation, and a handful of very small companies with nearly no market share, the W3C’s role has increasing shifted from keeping browser companies honest to servicing their most important, powerful members.

The big tech companies can pay full-time wages for “volunteers” to staff key roles in every important standards committee, and when that fails, the W3C’s process allows the director to simply override the members’ objections. That’s a great power to have when the consortium’s members need the W3C more than the W3C needs their dues — but as the sector dwindled to a handful of large companies, the ability of one person to unilaterally override the members’ popular will became a serious — catastrophic — liability.

It’s not that the W3C isn’t a good institution. When the W3C sets out to standardize a technology that the big tech companies don’t care to capture, it does an outstanding job. Look at ActivityPub, the standard behind Mastodon, which is technically brilliant.

But the tech firms didn’t care about ActivityPub, so they didn’t bother to bigfoot it at the W3C. The W3C isn’t a bad institution, but it is a comparatively weak institution.

- Weak Institutions: It's not a fair fight

[wild-at-mind]

You cannot absolve yourself from the fact of your existence in a country that has done horrible things in the past and present by failing to vote. Sorry.

Should you need to absolve your own existence? Some people talk as if you do, but personally I passionately do not think so. Guilt and actions caused by it do not create good activism. The person who convinces themselves that voting is the same as committing war crimes themselves will have a lot of difficulty with basically anything they apply that standard to. That's the problem with society- you can't opt out, not really. Not even with the hyper-anarchist existence I was trying to describe recently. Everything we do, if through enough degrees of separation, harms someone. Anything we need to survive in this world- clothes, food, electronics. We know this. We have to live with this, and not succomb to the type of thinking that most closely resembles OCD with morality fixation. When I see people behaving like this, it blows my mind, like I spent so long trying to unlearn these thought patterns and you're doing it to yourselves?!!

Society is currently set up so that we have to harm people all the time, from living in countries that sanction wars in other countries to damaging the planet. We have to live with that in the here and now, and do what we can when we can. Of course we can ask for better, but I firmly believe the only way to work towards better is to work within society and make connections to others rather than driving them away with this absolutist guilting and hostility to each other. Do not take on a burden of guilt that the person you passed on the street doesn't have. We cannot make society better if we are constantly stumbling under the burden of guilt.

Signed- an OCDer and eco activist

[rawliverandgoronspice]

This is not me defending Nintendo's shoddy writing when it comes to heavy parts of the Gerudo lore. But I do wonder if some of their really bad missteps are because of their lack of knowledge of Western racial politics. A lot of Japan is still heavily xenophobic, and racial diversity is almost zero, so they might just not actually think about the implications because they just... don't know they exist. It's not an excuse, because Nintendo IS a global company, and there should be some extra research done, since stuff like that is just really fucking iffy. I'm just trying to figure out where that stuff comes from tbh, and why it's still around, instead of being weeded out. So maybe that's a reason, in which case... maybe get some writers who can write depth into their characters.

Hey, thanks for the ask!

So... I feel many things about this, and I completely see where you're coming from, and I think you have hit the nail on the head about why Nintendo do not feel like handling this issue is necessary, or that it doesn't concern them altogether... but I have to be honest, I feel like we give Japan way too much slack on these issues in general, and it's a very common problem (thinking of the controversy on FF16 for just another recent example, or the way queerness is handled in a lot of anime and games). Regardless of, just, the artistic integrity to incorporate the rest of the world as existing alongside you which isn't... mandatory of course, but I believe is important for the sake of honesty: there are japanese people of color, there exists a queer japanese community, and a lot of immigrants living in Japan have to deal with rejection and being considered a second-rate citizen all of the time. Not to mention anything about the new generations of people who were victims of their occupation not so long ago, a subject which is still regularly repressed and ignored by their government (and by the world at large, the US had interests in quieting down some of the worst things they did due to Cold War stuff, and in the West we mostly focused on Germany and collaboration --which makes sense, it's what we knew, but anyway it's complicated and not the topic). This is not a case of mere innocence, it is a case of politically construed ignorance; which is very different, and should not be regarded as equivalent.

But even beyond their own internal socio-political issues, which I am not qualify to speak about beyond what I know from second-hand stories I heard and what I have personally researched, The Legend of Zelda is an IP that is tailored for the West (TM). It is incredibly more popular here than it ever was in Japan. It is a product designed for export. Trying to anticipate what the western market enjoys and fitting right in is part of their responsibilities as a brand if they want to succeed. So, either they did not consider this aspect, which was absolutely something they should be criticized for, as subjects of diversity are hot and trending right now (even without getting into their moral implication) and they did what I consider to be the bare, cynical minimum in this department; or they had an inkling, and considered their choices wouldn't be a dealbreaker. Which... they clearly were not.

Again, I am sorry to be a little cynical here, but while I certainly don't think Nintendo was being consciously malicious here, like making choices to actively play into harmful stereotypes and strict gender roles as some form of active ploy in some sort of culture war, Nintendo is run by conservative japanese men with capitalist interests and a responsibility towards their own government as a major player for japanese soft power. The company will *never* question its own biases, especially if the West just eats up whatever they do and build a human wall of excuses to justify their absence of accountability. This, beyond the game itself which is good and fine and also kind of soulless the more I think about it (in my opinion), is what depresses me and what makes it hard for me to move on: to give them a free pass on these subjects is a choice everyone is collectively making, because it is the Nostalgia and the Childhood and we are desperate for wonder and joy --and it ultimately makes us somewhat toothless as consumers.

And I want to add I am absolutely not immune to this, and it doesn't mean I'm condemning the practice of fandom or the possibility, or even the necessity, of holding several simultaneous truths about a piece of media at the same time and navigating them depending on what is being discussed; but Nintendo is obsessed with controlling its image as a company, curating things as acceptable or unnacceptable as they see fit, approving or disapproving of their consumers' behavior and punishing them accordingly (as well as the rest of the industry *side-eyes the thirty patents on basic gameplay actions*), and it's to say nothing of how employees may be treated beyond the perfectly curated Pikachu yellow walls. This corporate image of being non-controversial is enforced. It doesn't mean I don't admire them for a lot of things, their genuine commitment to game design innovation, their virtuosity when it comes to level design in particular, the way they foster pools of raw talent, their devotion to open up the market to new demographics of gamers, or for the risk they took with the Switch and the wonderful venues it opened for indie devs. I love their games, profoundly, and I owe the company a lot of my joy.

But again, I think it's important to consider several realities simultaneously; and this joy, this goodness, this beauty, while absolutely wonderful and worth preserving, always runs the risk of getting in the way of our discernment in what is getting sidelined.

[raffaellopalandri]

Book of the Day - Less is More

Today’s Book of the Day is Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, written by Jason Hickel in 2021 and published by Windmill Books. Jason Hickel is an economic anthropologist, author, professor, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. His research focuses on global political economy, inequality, and ecological economics. Less is More, by Jason Hickel I have chosen this book because…

[richo1915]

Free!

[boygirlctommy]

i madeeee sillay new characters and i love them

[all-made-of-stardust]

i've about had it up to here from horror stories from my friends regarding their jobs not respecting them, so i made this shitty meme.

know your fucking rights.

(had to crop the meme so you could read the text, id under cut)

(ID: the "don't make me tap the sign" meme, but cropped so that the image mostly shows the sign portion. the sign states "I once had a coworker who was forced to work a 36 hour shift with zero time given to sleep, eat, or even pause to catch a breath. this was 100% bc the company knew that she was desperate to keep the job so they purposefully exploited her, physically/emotionally abused her, and put all the blame on her bc she "didn't get the work done in time for her to go home." do not become this woman. do not give your boss a single SECOND of your own time that wasn’t explicitly agreed upon first. do not let your boss not pay you for overtime. do not let your boss abuse you like my company abused my coworker. KNOW YOUR FUCKING RIGHTS. KNOW YOUR OWN POWER." End ID.)

[deancasforcutie]

when it's year four of the "WHAT WAS THE REASON" crowd refusing to hear out better and better evidence and explanations of The Reason

[impossible-rat-babies]

me wanting to put paladin as eyrie canon but only the specific kind of paladin I want to make up because I want to flesh out Lore

[godloveyell]

And the Right is aiding and abetting their actions by helping them to hide behind the DEI excuse. 😡

Everyone’s getting a literal crash course in the knowledge that all consumer and worker protections are written in blood. They were not given to us at the benevolence of our corporate masters; the masters were forced to do these things or else face being dragged from their houses by an angry mob.

i feel like the boeing whistleblower case should radicalize more people. a major airline company is producing planes with less and less regard for safety and it's starting to get noticeable. man takes them to court, which would reduce profit at the cost of public safety. he fucking dies the night that boeings legal team asks him to stay an extra day. if nothing happens about this, i hope it gets through to people that america would literally kill you for a few extra cents

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The problem is that as large, powerful, strong institutions fail, the battleground shifts to the weak institutions that sit beneath them. When a elections are rigged through voter suppression or gerrymandering, the real election moves to the in-party nomination process, which was never designed to be the locus of the kind of contestation that we see in a general election.

That’s how California ended up with so many terrible, corporate Democrats in state office: in many of California’s races, the winner is whomever gets the Democratic nomination, and those nomination processes lack the kinds of limitations on outside spending, dark money, or voter suppression that attends our general elections.

At the extreme end of this, you get hereditary political offices. Take Dan Lipinski. He’s an anti-Choice, anti-union, anti-LGBTQ “Democrat” from Illinois who stepped into his father’s Congressional seat without even winning the nomination, his father stepped down after winning the nomination, handing it over to his son.

Lipinski was arguably the worst Democrat in the Congressional caucus, but he’s held his seat from 2004-2021, while being showered with money by the railroad industry, and voting consistently to dismantle the already inadequate rail safety regs.

Lipinski’s congressional district was such a Democrat safe-seat that the Republicans don’t even bother to mount a serious candidate to run against him — the GOP nomination process for the district is so poorly attended that Lipinski’s opponent in the 2020 race was an avowed Holocaust-denier.

- Weak Institutions: It's not a fair fight

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Political parties are weak institutions. In contested elections, parties whose nomination process is corrupt or inadequate lose to parties with better nominations, and are spurred to clean up their act.

But when a seat is safe, the real election takes place in a smoke-filled room with little scrutiny or due process, and it doesn’t matter, because the candidate wins anyway.

Remember the 2016 Democratic primary, when the Sanders campaign sued the Democratic National Committee over last-minute rule-changes that cinched the nomination for Hillary Clinton? The DNC’s defense was that the Democratic Party was a private entity and it rules were a strictly internal matter.

They told the judge that they were within their rights to “go into a back room like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way.” They disclaimed any obligation to choose their nominee on the basis of an “impartial” or “evenhanded” basis.

This is what a weak institution looks like: opaque and inscrutable, with zero obligation to deliver a fair outcome.

- Weak Institutions: It's not a fair fight