Orcocracy [comrade/them]

Easter Monday is part of the Easter holiday in many places.

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I wouldn’t be surprised if some places filter out applicants by using one of those (somewhat unreliable) AI-writing detectors, just as another way to cut down the pile of papers that an understaffed HR department has to read.

No it hasn’t

Yeah, if you live in an ocean port city just take a look across the harbour on any day of the week and you’ll probably see at least one Evergreen ship.

She’s using a standard beige PC monitor with the keyboard that came with the powermac G4. They used to arrest you for doing that. Steve Jobs himself would waterboard you until you agreed to buy an overpriced clear plastic Apple display that properly matched.

I don’t even think there’s a room!

It’s not people though, it’s a social structure: a set of systems and rules with no one person in charge that, once broken, is very hard to put back together again.

True, and I just checked Burnout 3, the other game OP mentioned, it’s from 2004. These are both Playstation 2 era games. These games aren’t just older than any teenager, they’re also older than the Xbox 360 the teenagers supposedly found. Who knows whatever it was they actually found, or are actually playing.

A 19 year old today would have been 8 when the 360 was replaced by the XBone, and may have kept playing on one for a few years beyond that. It wasn’t quite that long ago when that generation was still current. Perhaps these particular kids / child labourers are so young they think the “retro” cutoff line is the start of the pandemic.

All kneel before the newly crowned king of the nepo babies

Surely the French would say butter and not olive oil, right? Maybe olive oil is the Italian version. Although to suggest that Anglos would use any garlic at all seems too kind.

I’m reminded of this cliché: European writers discuss class but forget about race, North American writers discuss race but forget about class.

Bill Clinton statue in Kosovo

Right now the policies most of the NATO-aligned powers have towards boats full of people fleeing war zones to claim asylum is to ram the boats and shove the survivors in prison camps.

I think the Maoists and the Anarchists both have some very good ideas. The Maoists seem pretty serious about doing important reforms, but I think the anarchists would be more fun to have a beer with.

The US anthem can’t be sung well by the average person (especially towards the end), hence why in stadiums the crowd doesn’t even try to sing along and just cheers and whoops. The UK is about the monarch at the level of the text. But the US anthem is about the same thing in how it functions as a piece of music to create a social situation where the crowd remains passive in its adoration of a single person. There is no collective experience of doing and participatory togetherness. There is only the admiration of the celebrity pop singer as an emblem of the American aristocracy.

But yes the UK anthem is an awful dirge.

There was a GSM version of that Nokia phone from the original Matrix film sold around the world. Are GSM radio bands from the late ‘90s/early 2000s still in use? If so it would presumably still work for calls and texts in some countries.

The spring activated thing in The Matrix was only in the movie though. On the real phone you had to actually pull that plate down yourself, which made the phone seem like a complete disappointment back in the day when I once met someone who actually had one. This person could sort of fiddle it with their hand to kinda push it out one smooth motion, but it just wasn’t quite right.

I think it’s in the book “Games of Empire” where the argument is made that the worlds in fantasy games are usually just recreations of our modern capitalist world, aforementioned financial shenanigans very much included. These games often have the aesthetics of a kind of mediaeval feudalism, but in-game economies feature very modern things like decimalised currency, auction houses, arbitrage, consumerist alienation, instant payments, and so on, all of which would be very out of place in a feudal world. Fantasy RPGs show us worlds that appear radically different from our own at first glance, but upon deeper examination they are another example of the social imaginary restrained by capitalist realism.

It’s like the money in a fantasy RPG: 100 bronze or copper equals 1 silver, and 100 silver equals 1 gold.