#i have issues with companies fucking everyone over so they can have higher profits
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What I think when I see companies saying they want 1 year experience but no more than 2:
"We want someone already trained so we don't have to pay for that and we can underpay them because they lack experience."
#finding a job is a bitch#and now i'm seeing simple reception-ist type jobs requiring undergrad degrees#and let's not forget requiring a driver's license with clean abstract for a job that doesn't require driving#or requiring people be able to lift 50-90lbs without assistance just because#but lucky you! you get minimum wage and no benefits!#and the government branch that's in charge of worker's comp drags their feet and denies it unless it hits the media#and companies wonder why they have a hard time finding people#someone with an undergrad degree isn't going to be taking calls for less than $20/h for 'may turn into a permanent job!'#i'm also incredibly sus at companies that make new postings every few months#especially when their probation period/time when benefits kick in is the same length of time#but hey it's all a way to be able to say they can't find canadians who will work jobs#thus they *need* to hire temporary foreign workers at minimum wage with no benefits#and can also charge rent for a property they own and have several adults to a room#with the even worse companies taking visas or otherwise trapping people to work for them as they can't leave the country without help#i have zero issues with tfw#i have issues with companies fucking everyone over so they can have higher profits#and the government nods and tells them they're right because 'young' (read: <35) people are lazy and don't want to work
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...I know people in this day and age think any collaborative effort can fix things, often despite reality (ex. the MULTIPLE tumblr blackout protests over the last like 10 years across different owners of tumblr that didn’t change shit),
but I think going out of your way to buy things from tumblr en masse as a “well then they’ll be profitable and won’t have to change things to resemble profitable sites!” as if the CEO/higher ups are personally going to see this and not AT MOST just go “oh we made money, sick, Anyway.” is just. the most naive and frankly 5-year-old level of problem solving unrealistic idea if you think about it for more than 5 seconds. People are just so blinded by naive optimism it’s painful.
Staff isn’t going to see your purchases and go on a full redemption arc and restore porn in spite of payment systems’ massive stigma against it or Apple’s restrictions and never ever try to mimic Twitter or TikTok again, or whatever the fuck you’re expecting, they’ll keep focusing on shit tweaks that resemble other sites because those are what keep investors who think they know tech and user wants hooked and they think new people from other sites will come over for that instead of the fact these people are typically escaping those kinds of features.
Staff isn’t your friend, their vying for support like they’re your buddy who is hitting hard times and has been here holding your hand all these years is deliberate corporate marketing, they’re an arm of a corporation that spits in the face of LGBTQ+ people and especially black people for daring to post about themselves while touting themselves as The Queer Site! A diverse site! Look at this AMA we’re doing with someone about Black History Month! and you’re doing nobody a service when you’re unintentionally rewarding a service for getting worse because they will not know nor care about your motives, they just care that they got money and will continue making it worse regardless of you. They’re a corporation, not a small business ran by 10 people who are trying their best. People throwing money at Staff already encourages them, let alone when you buy into the weird parasocial shit they try with us which will continue as they see success with that method.
Like the mere idea of everyone buying the crabs to gift to make the site profitable is just unrealistic (especially in this economy with such terrible inflation and in NA there are issues with the weather and fires, on a site that mostly consists of groups of people who are typically low income or unable to work???), it feels very much like the gofundme pages people set up to raise money for celebrities who have debts who will be fine regardless and definitely don’t need your help. Corporations and CEOs are not your friends, they never will be. They do not care about you and they’re not some poor uwu victim of circumstance.
TL;DR half-assed blackouts aimed at companies that don’t care (that I have seen over and over) and “cr*b day” type efforts are incredibly dumb and will change nothing, and they will not change anything, just encourage them since they see they’re making money during their current marketing schemes, if they notice at all. You pitying them like they’re a poor innocent person is exactly what the corporation wants.
If you want to make a difference give that money to an artist or lgbtq+ people who basically get flagged as mature for Existing, or people who get their posts flagged for criticizing the site, or something, someone who gets screwed over by this site on the regular. It will do far more good than that whackadoo type pipe dream and sit down and think for a second, please.
#I normally would not care but this is like. absurd levels of Not Thinking At All#grown adults saw that post about this and went Yeah!!!!!!#how the fuck did someone go ''we should ALL buy crabs to give tumblr money!'' as a solution to shit corporate decisions and it get as big#as it did. Do you guys THINK#or does staff really have it wrapped around your parasocialized finger with humanizing them like a suffering entity who is so so poor#vena vents#not art#And that's a good faith interpretation that the person who suggested the crab thing aren't friends with a staff member or are one or some#shit#we've seen people on or know staff doing some shit to subdue criticisms (especially by trans and black people). I don't trust that#That as a thing that mysteriously gets slapped everywhere on here makes me narrow my eyes#Apparently judging by others comments about it the OP suggesting it is also a pr*lifer and a lot of the people boosting it are bigots so.#enjoy supporting a cause ran by people who want you dead ig
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I'm gonna come out and say it. Microsoft is bad, actually.
Sure for people who know what they're doing it's pretty intuitive and extremely useful but the fact that majority of its users needed some level of training to be able to use it should already tell you something about its user-friendliness and ease of use.
I've been using Google docs for a majority of my shit because it's basically Microsoft but more streamlined, super compatible and it's got the main three that most people need, docs (word), sheets (excel) and slides (PowerPoint). There are a couple of differences but the ease of use is better, the user-friendliness is higher and the storage is online so you don't have to fill your laptop or phone storage with all your documents and spreadsheets and slideshows. It just goes in your Google drive.
The main two differences though that's been my main pet peeves with Microsoft for years is one, Google docs is free to use, it comes with your free Google account, you just pay for extra storage when your Google drive gets full. Microsoft. Is. Fucking. Expensive. And their "lifetime" products that you supposedly pay for once to use forever expire after about 5 years and then you have to pay for the newest (literally the same fucking thing) Microsoft office pack. But more. I would not have had much of a problem if you just had to pay minimal amounts for software upgrades every 3-5 years, but you currently have to basically buy a full new product every 3-5 years and it costs the full damn price.
The second main issue I have, if you accidentally log out of your Gmail you just fucking log back in my dude. If you log out of your outlook however you have to phone 7 international consolates, the president of the United States personally, the astronauts on the iss, and Satan specifically on his hell landline before you can get it restored. If you need to reenter your product key for any office programs after a while for security reasons your product key suddenly doesn't exist anymore and you have no choice but to buy a new office suite.
Microsoft is super bad as a tech company and I have a passionate and fiery dislike for them and wish they would not be the mainstream product used by everyone. I'm going to need an ethical company with actual brains that don't rely on planned obsolescence to make profits to make a better fucking Microsoft and take over the market please and thank you.
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(This is just me screaming about living with a disability in our present hell and being in a constant state of precarity with everyone asking when I’m going to “get better”)
Finally received approval of my temporary disability from January... and only for January. The paperwork was delayed due to a combination of me being incredibly ill and my HR department not sending the paperwork when they told me they did, but I didn’t expect it to take this long. The approval, received on March 26th, also included a request to submit additional paperwork for approval of February’s payment. I had already called and emailed my case worker to confirm they received the February paperwork weeks ago but I guess that will be delayed until my doctor fills out a form that is simply a retread of the same information included on the original form with different wording and a bunch of information on physical labor that is completely irrelevant to my job. Temporary disability through your job is almost always determined on a month-to-month basis but it’s never taken this long for a response when I’ve had to go on it on the past due to my disabilities. I knew both the health and disability insurance policies at my job were significantly worse this year than the last based on the information we received for the New Year because the company is naturally looking to save money by cutting benefits while moving our warehouses to the south to save even more money on labor. The new owners (a holding company looking to maximize the value of this bullshit, useless company until they sell it in two years for a profit) literally sent an email at Christmas letting us know we’d receive our holiday bonuses for this year but as a matter of policy we wouldn’t be receiving them in the future. Of course I’m expected to be grateful I have any insurance coverage at all working a CS job where I’m making minimum wage but somehow I feel less gratitude than I do an overwhelming sense of dread and anxiety for the future. I haven’t been able to get several tests or doctor’s evaluations completed due to the pandemic and financial considerations (my deductible was met in late February, perfect timing) so of course my health status hasn’t changed. The hospital I go to in NYC has cancelled all non-urgent procedures and appointments on a case-by-case basis and despite my concerning blood work re: my kidney function I’m being forced to wait by the insurance company handling my disability claim with no consideration of the current crisis. I understand the need to do this for hospitals but please be cognizant of the shitty position people with chronic health issues are being thrown into during the pandemic. I can make telemed appointments with my doctors but everything is being held up by the need for tests and lab results.
There’s also something grim about the fact that the outstanding balance I owe from this year’s deductible to the hospital is almost the exact amount I received to live on for the month of January in March.
I’m exhausted and sick and completely isolated from my friends and chosen family outside of instant messaging at my dad’s house and I don’t know if my health will ever get better or if I’m going to need major surgery in the near future and if I’m going to be fired and lose my health insurance by the time I find out. My boss emails me every two weeks to ask about my health as if I’d ever give her more information on my status than she already has. My manager keeps texting me prayers at random intervals. I’m purposefully isolating myself from the people I love because I constantly feel like a burden - I hate not being able to be there for them because being this sick feels like a full time job. Apparently their awful treatment of me was because of how “needed” I was. These texts and emails keep mentioning how productive and beloved by the customers I was while I was constantly being criticized for not bringing my numbers up. I was only number 2 or 3 in the reams of useless data my boss pores over as a fucking job and the obvious reaction to that is to make me feel awful knowing about my health issues so I can raise my numbers even higher. I don’t know if I can return to this job without completely sacrificing the last shred of my sanity. Between the pain, the exhaustion, and the panic attacks induced by people berating me with the job title “happiness ambassador” I don’t think I can handle working with these assholes anymore. But then I remember that any job in CS involves this level of mental degradation and at least I had health insurance. Fucking insurance. I’ve lived my entire life under the crushing terror that I would lose my insurance. I’m just tired. I’m so fucking tired. I can’t afford the medical supplies I need to live without it and Medicaid is incredibly awful to ostomy patients in terms of providing enough supplies. But maybe that’s my fear talking, I’ve just helped a lot of people with catheters and other supplies who didn’t receive a sufficient supply through their state’s Medicaid program through support groups for my condition in the past and the problem has only gotten worse with the severe under funding and cuts to the program. I want to believe it isn’t so awful but experience has taught me time and again to expect the worst.
I’m trying to hold onto hope but everything feels too heavy right now. I’m just going to numb myself with video games until I’ve cried myself out. I’m too exhausted for another panic attack today.
#venting#personal#this is just stream of consciousness because i can barely think#getting better feels so fucking pointless if it’s even possible#most of my issues are chronic and will get progressively worse#i am lucky enough to have some family support but i am definitely the black sheep of my family and it is very lonely here#this is my version of screaming in the middle of the woods#disability#i don’t know how much longer my landlord will waive my rent because i’m not well enough to live at my apartment on my own right now#every facet of society is set up to make life that much more difficult for the unproductive#being sick suuuuuucks#long post#covid19#this is probably incoherent#i'm too mentally ill to motivate myself to get better physically at this point
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so uh, i was telling @ishibooty about my daydreams and the fact that somehow in two of these scenarios, marcus ends up joining libra, and all of a sudden it was 5am and i had 3k words of summary of marcus’ arc for one of them
there are two parts to it. this was supposed to be a side-plot. why am i like this
anyway enjoy my ramblings i guess
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Mushroom arc
Marcus and Leo meet at the hospital (Daniel came to visit/interrogate/make fun of Steven and kicked Leo out of the room) and leave a good impression on each other. (“So uh, are you also a cop ?” “Why does everyone assume that ? Is it my name ??”)
Later, Libra investigates on a drug ring. Because the drug seems to incorporate magic in its fabrication, making it as potent on humans as well as all sorts of beyondians, Leo is sent alongside Zapp to get a sample and get a closer look and maybe identify the spellcaster or something. Marcus is in the club and makes himself known, and it turns out he is part of the gang. Zapp and Leo get invited to a private room and meet some of the higher-ups (Marcus included), buy their sample, and are then asked to breathe into a container, of which they are assured it is perfectly safe, just a security measure. Since murdering clients seems like a pretty bad business plan for a drug ring, the duo does what they’re asked. They pass out and wake up in the club, with no memory of the past 30 minutes.
Later, Leo is greeted by Marcus at Diane’s Diner and they have a chat, during which Leo feels like he met Marcus recently but can’t seem to place it ? Marcus makes fun of him, asks if Leo has been hanging with Mushroom beyondians and at Leo’s confusion, mentions the amnesic effects of their spores.
Leo comes back to Libra all “MOM HOLY FUCK”, and the team decide to investigate that memory-erasing spore thing. Also one of Steven’s “contacts” discouraged him from looking deeper into the drug ring geez I wonder why that might be.
In parallel to that whole investigating, Leo goes to eat out with Nej, accidentally bumps into Marcus, and they somehow become a trio of burger pals ? (“wait what do you mean you sold Nej burgers for profit” “it’s money my dude”) Hanging out together during lunch break regularly, all that jam. At some point, following Leo and Marcus complaining about their respective workplaces and co-workers (preluded by Marcus being all like “work ? like, part-time ? aren’t you in high school ?” “… I’m 21…” (quietly) “what the fuck”), Nej mentions having an actual job but can’t seem to remember it. Cue laugh track I guess.
Plot twist it’s not funny it’s actually tragic because the place Nej works at is the spore extraction factory that serves as the center of that Mushroom traffic. Chain, Zapp, and Leo storm the place, Leo gets beaten up, Nej is traumatized, the Mushroom beyondians are evacuated, the building is burned down and so are the spores. Meanwhile, Marcus is allowed for the first time into the laboratory, meets the spellcaster, looks around the place and asks non-suspicious questions, he’s just curious and enthusiastic and kind of dumb in his cleverness but that’s just how Marcus is haha look at him, such a good and loyal guy (we hope).
Someone caught Leo and Zapp on tape while they destroyed the factory and since Marcus is friends with Leo, it’s a bit uhhhhhhh suspicious ? Marcus is all “do I look like I have control over whatever every single one of my friends does ?”, the Chief goes “okay well, would you fucking mind getting that kid over here so we can know where he learned about the spore factory ?”, and so Marcus goes to do just that.
Except he doesn’t. What he does is go see Leo at the hospital, offers to go on a walk in the hospital park, covertly gives Leo a vial of his own blood, and tells him to act like they’re fighting and then run away and bring the vial to Daniel. He then makes as if to grab Leo to take him with him.
Leo knees him in the dick and books it. The gang guy dispatched to make sure Marcus actually did his job watches and comes to the conclusion that Marcus is on their side because, like, yeah.
When he gets the news and the blood, Daniel calls the narc brigade to start the tracking, grabs Leo, gets in the car, and starts driving. The “tracking” is actually blood magic, the vial of blood Marcus gave Leo reacting to sigils he left at the lab and even on the spellcaster and forming spikes in the direction of it all. Turns out Marcus was an undercover narc looking to get his hands on the spellcaster (drug labs are rather easy to make, having a magic user able to apply their knowledge to that kind of craft is a lot less common).
Of course when magic is activated, it risks being picked up on by other magic users, so any intervention needs to be swift, and also Marcus seems to have been under some suspicion (why else would he ask Leo to serve as a middle-man) so things need to move real fast. (“wait so you’re going on a drug busting operation with a civilian in your car ? I know I said I wanted to know what the hell is going on but that’s kind of, like, uhhh” “you’re holding the vial and giving me the directions, I can’t do that while driving”)
Anyway, most of the gang is arrested, Marcus ends up in the hospital because he saw some kids crossing the road without watching and jumped in to save them, ironically saving him from being exposed as a cop to the underworld, and Leo later apologizes for kneeing him in the dick. End of arc
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Boss arc
Marcus takes advantage of his old gang being disbanded, and of him still looking like a regular crime guy, to join another, bigger group. The Boss welcomes him with open arms because 1) Marcus sells himself really well (“yo my brother’s a lieutenant of police, I got some intel”) and 2) they actually knew each other before the Collapse, and while Marcus never worked for him, the Boss has a lot of respect for him.
The burger trio still hangs out together, and sometimes Marcus also hangs out with Leo alone. It’s a nice break from work for Marcus honestly, Leo is a chill guy, and it’s great to not have to pretend to be someone else, with someone who isn’t Daniel, for once. And for Leo it’s also a nice break from the usual Libra madness. They share wacky stories, some gossip, one time Marcus arrives like “LEO HOLY FUCK” because he spotted Steven at Daniel’s flat and they both lose their shit. They also get a little more real sometimes I mean, both of them have some heavy baggage, and Marcus doesn’t have a lot of emotional support outside of his brother (who is married to his work and not great at emotions himself). In short, they’re friends.
Anyway, Leo may or may not be developing a crush – whatever the truth is, Zapp has decided to go on Big Brother mode and drag Zed along to stalk Marcus and make sure he’s an okay guy. (“are you sure this is necessary ?” “this is HL, and this is Leo, he’s like, a trouble magnet ! and if things turn out badly, guess who will have to deal with the fallout ?” “… you actually care, don’t you” “shut up !”) Of course, Marcus publicly performs as a Crime Guy, so that’s a little… well…
Zapp and Zed follow Marcus to a shady pub where Marcus has a meeting with the Boss (“wait isn’t this guy like, a crime lord” “god fucking dammit”), get spotted, but since Marcus isn’t about to out them as Libra if he can avoid it, he just ironically buys them a drink. And that’s how a hot mess and a merman end up sharing a table with a Crime Guy and a Crime Lord. Zapp, always the diplomat, asks Marcus to break up with Leo. Marcus is obviously very confused because, like, they’re not ??? A thing ??? So Zapp instead tells him to not start a thing, while Zed sits there nervously and very obviously tries to not look at the Boss.
Marcus laughs it off, but he ends up a little shaken by the encounter honestly, not because Zapp said anything particularly clever, but because it echoes doubts he’s been holding about himself for a while now. He’s been doing his job for quite a long time, has done quite a lot of shitty things to keep his cover up, and he – he isn’t quite sure he’s really helping. Sure, he’s lead to the dismantling of some drug rings, but was it worth it ? If he looks at what he did for the past years, how exactly is he different from the people he targets ?
Also there’s like, Collapse trauma, which in his case is also closely related to that whole issue. For three days, Marcus walked around with a suitcase of “merchandise” from whatever his gang was at the time, doing his best to survive and get that thing where he was supposed to get it and not lose it and not act like a servant of the people who would actually help, or try to help at least. Marcus made it out of the Collapse with his cover intact, his gang mostly dead, and a suitcase full of shit he didn’t know what to do with because the people he was supposed to bring it to died and he did it all for nothing. He let people die for nothing.
And he does feel a kinship with some of his “co-workers”. He’s friend with some of them. He slept with one of them, at a time when he had just lost whatever purpose he’d had for the three days the Collapse lasted, at a time when he couldn’t get in touch with his family and make sure they were alive and he was just so desperate for someone he knew, for some human warmth, for whatever comfort he could get. And the Boss (at the time not his boss, but someone he knew and who made business with whoever he used to work for) was kind and praised his determination and good work and just held him with no judgement.
Marcus enjoys the Boss’s company. What happened after the Collapse was a one-off thing, but they’ve been in touch ever since, drinking out sometimes, sharing some quiet comfort together. The Boss introduced Marcus to a new group in exchange for his merchandise. The Boss keeps on vouching for him, trusts him, and Marcus almost feels a little guilty.
He feels guilty a lot, he finds, whether that be when he enjoys drinking with his co-workers or when he works at home on a spell that would identify the caster in charge of their drug.
One time, Steven comes to the Boss with a deal, information for whatever price the Boss gives and Marcus sits there, at the Boss’ right, watches Steven and the apparent friendship between him and the Boss and thinks “ah”. Same fucked up hat, same dilemma, same constant walking a line you can barely see.
At Daniel’s place (Steven has been there a lot more often lately, and Marcus a lot less, but they still end up meeting at times), neither of them mention that moment of recognition. But Marcus mentions being a little tired, and Steven half-jokingly offers him a place in Libra, should he ever want a change of pace.
And Marcus thinks maybe, just maybe, this would be better. Maybe he could help, really help, the way he wants to. He just needs to finish this job. Just this one job.
It’s not that he means to isolate himself, he just really needs to figure this spell out, and anyway Zapp was exposed as Libra and that brought suspicion on Marcus because of the whole “don’t date my friend/colleague” incident and while the Boss trusts him, there’s this one guy who has some amazing instincts (and maybe holds a grudge for that time Marcus beat him up for trying to sell stuff to kids), and that means hanging out with Leo is probably a terrible idea. And he has work. And he is so, so tired. He has nightmares, too, a little more than usual. Maybe more than that.
It’s a good thing that there are spells offering protection against nightmares, really, a good thing there are spells that provide energy too. Marcus has a rule against ever consuming something he sells, but he’s been so tired lately that he gets close. But there are spells for sleep that work better than alcohol, and spells for energy that work better than cocaine, with none of the less appreciable side-effects, and it’s a shame the only magic he knows is blood magic because drawing blood to activate them is a pain, literally. But it’s a small trade-off for the ability to keep it together and finish his work.
Leo actually seeks him out once, and while the encounter is short because Marcus can’t afford to hang out with “most definitely Libra” and tells Leo that (and also mentions Zapp and Zed’s visit because he is petty), it’s also nice to have Leo be all “if it’s because you’re afraid of getting me into trouble, friendly reminder that this is HL and that I am Libra” at first and just. Miss him, apparently ? Marcus will have to treat him to lunch once he is done.
After that, after his eyes pick up on the weird magic going on over Marcus’ shoulder, Leo looks up spells by shape, and if he was worried about Marcus avoiding him before, he is now worried for an entire different set of reasons. Square-shaped spells are reinforced exponentially, and there’s no way anything stronger than a level-1 energy spell (the equivalent of an espresso) can be healthy. Also he is going to kill Zapp.
And finally, finally, Marcus gets his breakthrough. He finalizes his identification spell, drops a little blood on the powder in the middle of the circle, and gets a signature. He can track this caster. He grabs paper, a pencil, writes down the signature sigil, calls Daniel to tell him that he got it, and – and there was a defensive spell inside the drug because of course there was and Daniel needs to come here right now.
At the time, Daniel is wrapping up a case with Klaus and Gilbert nearby, and there is no question what the fastest vehicle here is. The others can manage without him. Daniel reaches Marcus’ flat in record time, Klaus on his heels, and they find Marcus unconscious on the floor, left arm injured, in a state that seems much worse than it should be.
Daniel grabs the paper Marcus is holding, Klaus compresses the injury and carries Marcus to the car, and Gilbert drives as fast as possible in these conditions. Calls are made – to the narc brigade, sending them the signature so they can do whatever it is they need to do with it and so they can prepare to start the tracking of what Marcus left for them to find, and to Steven, who is currently free and can absolutely help in the capture of the higher-ups of the gang (Leo definitely helps spot anyone who escapes).
Luciana welcomes them with the same determination she has at all times, and the slight annoyance she always expresses at seeing Daniel, and hurries Marcus inside. “What did he take ?” she asks, and Daniel could strangle her. Marcus doesn’t take anything, he is a professional, how dare she – but he is overdosing, Klaus was the only thing keeping his heart beating during the drive there, and the powder on the floor of his flat seemed weirdly crystallized, like it had solidified and broken. And there was no weapon that could explain Marcus’ injuries. And the conclusion Daniel and Luciana reach is. Bad.
He answers Luciana’s questions, asks for a small sample of Marcus’ blood, shouts at whoever he has on the phone at the time, and goes for the car. Luciana is baffled, Gilbert readies to drive, and Klaus says he will stay at the hospital and call if anything happens. It’s not a pretty arrangement, but the look on Daniel’s face was one that promised death to anything that tried to stop him, so.
I could go into length about the capture, about the way Daniel almost killed the Boss for his words, about the return to the hospital and the gruelling wait for news, about the way the Luciana on coffee break duty told Daniel off for criticizing her devotion to her work when he isn’t much better himself, about the relief Daniel felt at it being personal, a revenge of sorts, instead of something he’s heard much too often about his being heartless. He isn’t, if Marcus died it would break him, but he simply doesn’t know any other way to deal with these emotions than drowning them in work.
Later that night, after Steven has dragged him home to make him catch at least some sleep, he will tell Steven about the death of his grandfather, back when he was a kid, about Marcus crying for an hour, about himself not shedding a single tear, instead finishing the model boat the three of them had started because he needed to do something. It will be the first time they have that kind of discussion, the first time it feels like whatever they have going on is a serious relationship. But that is a story for another time.
When Marcus wakes up, a few days later, he asks Daniel to transmit his resignation letter. His recovery will take time, months even, to get back to a functioning state both physically and mentally, but that is the first step towards that. Another step will be to buy Leo and Nej lunch when he gets discharged, reconnecting with them. And another will be to ask Steven if the job offer was serious, and to accept it.
Marcus joins Libra as a blood mage with some background information on drug dealings, and he thinks, for the first time in forever, he can help.
(Also he hasn’t told Daniel anything about that last part and he is not looking forward to that conversation, at all.)
#kekkai sensen#blood blockade battlefront#marcus law#leonardo watch#yumi writes#note : blood magic and blood fighting techniques are not the same and actually dont have much in common#yes i actually made some magic theory for this. its. somewhere in my unscanned sketches#my naming conventions for most characters are. terrible. if i dont know your name ill just call you by your job#idk if read mores are still as buggy as they used to be on mobile but it they are im very sorry#body heat AU
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Second Democratic Debate Analysis, pt. 1
Like last time, I’ve (finally) read the transcripts. I read the fact-checkers’ analysis. I have ranked them.
Also like last time, due to the size of the field, I’ll be splitting my analysis into four groups. This first one will be the Please Do Not Make Me Vote For Them group:
Good news! Due to candidates dropping out, it’s a shorter list!
Biden, Williamson, Delaney, Ryan, and Bullock
Under the break, I’ll be analyzing their debate performance, how effectively they represented themselves on the issues, and how much I hate them, in reverse order of preference. Let’s begin.
17) Bullock
Governor Steve Bullock did not make an appearance in the first set of debates, and now I know why. He is the Shirley Exception made flesh. “Surely no one would actually use our laws to hurt someone. Surely if someone is really a good person they won’t face terrible abuses. Surely not…” Stevie, these are things that are currently happening. These are facts.
Those who read my analysis of the first debates should know that I do not accept any luke-warm “healthcare choice” arguments, and Steve is full of those, too.
He’s very worried about other candidates campaign promises being unrealistic, and says that it’s important to listen to “real Americans,” as if democratic socialists and the majority of Americans who support universal healthcare aren’t “real” enough for him.
As if that weren’t enough, he also argues in favor of some of the abuses of immigrants, as a deterrent to immigration.
To his credit, he supports treating gun violence as a public health issue, including research by the CDC into causes, which could inform actually useful gun control policies. He wants to see Citizens United overturned, which is also good. But not good enough.
16) Ryan
Representative Tim Ryan has the distinction of being one of the candidates I hated entirely in this debate. I agreed with none of his points, and most of my notes contain profanity. He introduced himself as New and Fresh, playing on his youth (he’s 45. The average age of the democratic candidates is 54. There are 4 people running who are younger than Tim) without offering much substance.
He opposes decriminalizing the border. On healthcare he seems to think we can’t make healthcare better for everyone because then unions won’t have anything going for them which is just…
He thinks letting businesses “buy in to medicare” is a good idea, and all I can hear is “privatize the social safety net and let companies decide whose grandma actually deserves to have proper care when she breaks her hip.”
I’m not saying Tim is evil. I’m saying he’s spineless and would let bad things happen because it’s too much work to stop them.
15) Delaney
Representative John Delaney joins Tim Ryan in the dubious category of “I hate you and everything you stand for.” The only reason he ranks slightly higher than Tim is because someone had to. Their scores were the same level of shrieking profanity.
John thinks that reminding everyone that he was the youngest CEO in the history of the New York Stock Exchange is a good thing, showing that he has absolutely no idea what democrats are looking for in a candidate. Surely, we should trust him! He sold his soul early and has abided by the contract for so long!
He is another candidate decrying “unrealistic” campaign promises. He reiterated his concern that Medicare for All would underfund the healthcare industry in America, he considers it an “extreme” policy proposal, and called it an “anti-private sector strategy.” Yes, John, because the private sector’s profit motive has been working so well, let’s all continue dying so that small groups of people can make lots of money off of the price of insulin. Fuck you.
14) Williamson
Marianne Williamson’s contributions were blessedly brief and infrequent. She supports public campaign funding, which is great, but she also spent an entire minute on “I have concerns” without once proposing a solution, referred to the American healthcare system as a “sickness care system,” which for me evokes concerns about chemtrails and chemikillz, and her opening statement evoked American Exceptionalism.
I’m so tired of Marianne Williamson.
13) Biden
Former Vice President, Former Senator Joe Biden was invited to comment on everything. As a result, I have over a page of notes just for him. The moderators’ bold strategy of checking in with Uncle Joe every time anyone said anything gave him opportunities to say a few things I agreed with, but ultimately was not enough to get him out of my lowest ranked category.
As he said in the last debate, Joe supports rejoining the Paris Climate Accord. This time, he said we need to “increase” the standard, apparently recognizing that solutions negotiated several years ago will not be sufficient now, and he wants to see an end to fossil fuel subsidies. These are good things I can agree with.
Joe is concerned by the treatment of immigrants seeking asylum, and the excessive wait times for their cases to be heard and the refugees either released or returned to their country of origin. His solution is to “flood the zone,” spend more resources to make decisions faster. This guarantees nothing except a reduction in detainees which, while generally positive, is less than half a solution.
The thing Joe said that I liked best was about the treatment of former-inmates after the completion of their prison sentences. Joe said that former-inmates should have access to public programs and benefits upon release. This would be a significant change from the current system, which continues to punish people long after their sentence is served. He also said that drug crimes should result in rehab, not prison.
Joe continued to use his association with Obama as a shield against criticism, which was worn thin before the first debate started. He evaded questions about Eric Garner, refused to answer questions about Obama-era deportations (with the added bonus of “what I said was said in confidence, you’d share it, but not me”), invoked American Exceptionalism in his opening statement, interrupted Cory Booker at one point, blamed all of our current political and social dysfunction on Trump, and thinks we should renegotiate the Trans Pacific Partnership.
The cherry on top of this shit sundae? He said the phrase “I have the only plan that (…)”
I haven’t talked about this much, because it’s a little hard to express in text, but I have a very, very negative response to any claim to being the only person who can solve a problem. It’s bad when Trump does it, it’s bad when Biden does it, it’s an abuser’s tactic. “I’m the only one who loves you, I’m the only one who can help you, I’m the only one” is always a) a lie, and b) a red flag.
Granted, I was so far behind that some of Biden’s comments formed parallels I might not have seen when he initially said them, but some of the things he said about immigration were symptomatic of the same thought process that gave us that abominable rewrite of Emma Lazarus’s New Colossus. Biden, when trying to make a point about the strength of America being in our diversity, said that “we’ve been able to cherry pick from the best of every culture,” and followed it up with “anybody that crosses the stage with a PhD, you should get a green card for seven years. We should keep them here.” Not everyone who immigrates to the U.S. is going to have an advanced degree. Not everyone who immigrates to the U.S. is going to be “the best and brightest.” And that’s a good thing. There is a limit to the number of doctors and lawyers a society needs. Some immigrants are going to be nurse’s assistants and cab drivers, and we need them here, too.
Even with all of that, the worst of what Joe had to say was about healthcare. Joe thinks that limiting co-pays to $1000 per person is part of making healthcare accessible to everyone. He thinks your health insurance premium should be no more than 8.5% of your annual income. I did some math. For minimum wage, that’s almost $2500 for insurance, out of pocket, before anyone sees any benefit. After taxes, that leaves about $10k for a minimum wage worker to live on for a year. At $15/hour, $20k to live on. These are not reasonable numbers in most of the country.
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New Post has been published on https://lovehaswonangelnumbers.org/3368-2/
Taurus at the Speed of Sound ~ May Monthly Horoscope
by Eric Francis
Dear Friend and Reader:
Earlier this week, we experienced the first of seven Sun-Uranus conjunctions in Taurus (that was Monday, April 22). News events are moving at a dizzying pace, and defy comprehension. At the time I’m writing this article on April 25, it’s been just over a week since the Notre Dame Cathedral fire, and a week since the release of the redacted version of the Special Counsel’s report. It seems more like a month.
As of this writing, there are now 20 Democratic presidential candidates, with Joe Biden’s entry into the race. Also today, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin met Kim Jong-un, the Korean leader, for a summit meeting in China. Putin is moving in on a power vacuum abandoned by Trump’s failed attempts at courting diplomacy with Kim.
Texas executed John William King for the 1998 killing of James Byrd, the first time in modern Texas history that a Caucasian man was executed for the death of an African American man. This was the infamous dragging death by a white supremacist.
Pres. Trump denied that he ordered then-White House Counsel Dan McGahn to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller III. He said that McGahn had lied to the Special Counsel about this during the investigation.
McGahn, one of the star witnesses in the Special counsel’s investigation, has been subpoenaed to testify before Congress, but Trump brought a personal lawsuit to block his testimony. The president also vowed to fight any subpoena of documents or testimony by congressional oversight committees, in effect daring the House of Representatives to impeach him.
On that note, if he is impeached, Trump said he would fight it at the U.S. Supreme Court. He is clearly referencing his impression that he would get a 5-4 win on any case he brings, but there is no such course of action provided for under the Constitution. (What actually happens during an impeachment is that the chief justice presides over the trial, with the Senate serving as the jury.)
Contents of the report of the Special Counsel, 448 pages long, are gradually percolating through the news. The report details the astonishing extent of Russian meddling in the election, which came in the form of a social media propaganda campaign dating to 2014, and hack and dump operations of email and confidential documents stolen from formal Democratic Party offices and Hillary Clinton’s personal office.
Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, this week falsely summed up the operation Wednesday as consisting of “a couple of Facebook ads.”
On the Personal Side of the Equation
We live in a restless time. I keep reading articles about the impact of lack of sleep and sleep hygiene. Part of this impact is coming from being inundated by radio waves, which are invisible light waves; these burn melatonin. So too does exposure to blue light, which is a fact of looking into screens all day.
But there is something more, a sense of agitation, nervousness and fear, as if we’re heading toward an edge that we cannot see.
Despite all the discussion about global warming and climate change, collectively our societies are doing very little about it. Economic success is still measured in growth — corporate profits and the value of the stock market. Many people are struggling — really struggling — to make ends meet as everything gets more and more expensive.
Economic woes are always an issue; we hear about them in good times and bad. But we are living in the New Gilded Age, when there are more billionaires than ever before. Money is energy, and much of it is stagnant at the moment, as companies and individuals hang onto huge cash reserves. There is fear of loss and little imagination about what to do with vast sums of wealth that exist.
As I’ve written many times, my studied impression is that the internet is what is driving consciousness: the sensation of what it feels like to be alive right now. Inundation by internet is the primary factor behind the social crisis, the anxiety epidemic, the sexless relationships, and a general state of psychic chaos.
Reader Responses: Uranus in Taurus
I recently asked my readers how they were responding to Uranus in Taurus. Here is a sample of the responses:
“It’s quite an upheaval. My trust in God has increased and at times is still quite tested. Due to a lingering concussion that hasn’t healed I haven’t worked for several weeks. I am far out on a limb in completely new territory. I have a sense that I am learning many things that I’ve needed to learn for a while. I am also in brand new territory that’s missing some of the old markers.”
lived at ages 4-6, (big stir), all the moving from home to home before I was in 5th grade… my inner sense of personal sovereignty and authority has had its challenges as I feel that speaking in honesty and truth can fucking stir lots of pots. It seems to put people I care for in uncomfortable wonder about my authenticity in relationship to them, cause I’m challenging them.”
“Quite a lot has shifted for me but the one that really stands out is as a 57 year old man who is pretty conservative in physical expression and exercise, I started going to a weekly free form dance and have progressed from slow soulful movement to full on dance machine!”
“Everything about personal awakening resonates, though that started about 3 years ago. Building on that theme now, Uranus seems to be about burning through convention to see what remains, like the alchemical calcination phase, and using what’s left to (re)build something new. This is showing up in my career, which is being guided towards creating a new, spiritually-based business model from what survives the fire.”
“On the 15th my shelf of greenware fell over and every piece broke. My shelf of essential oils came out of the wall; luckily only one bottle broke. I found myself reading about broken vessels, specifically oil bottles and the shards with drops of oil representing light and the connection to everything. But the break through this week, and I think that is what Uranus in Taurus is offering, is that these material things do not matter except for what they represent. Throwing pots is a meditation for me. It is the process that is important, not the creation of the material, but the creation of the spiritual body. Part of my path, it seems, is renunciation or detachment to the material plane. Creation of the spiritual body is most important. I also learned that you cannot have a loving connection to others without a loving connection with God/creator.”
Beltane New Moon Coming May 4
The Beltane New Moon on May 4 is an intriguing chart. I’ll have more to say about it in Monday morning’s edition, and in the upcoming Planet Waves FM (where I will continue my coverage of the Special Counsel’s report, and ignoring the presidential race). The horoscope below is based on the Beltane chart — shown in the graphic below.
With love,
Eriv
~~~~~~~~~
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The Bullshit Industry That Is Women’s Clothing
We’re gonna have a little talk, friends. We’re gonna have a talk about the state of women’s clothing and how much it sucks.
I’m talking off-the-rack clothing aimed at adult, working women. Your Ann Taylors. Your J.Crews. Your Banana Fucking Republics. The Nordstroms of the world. You know, the companies that are trying to get us to buy their most recent monstrosity of polyblended horror and the subject of plenty of thinkpieces, this one included. “Are millennials killing the clothing industry?” Yes, because you deserve to die, but also now we’re naked so can we please strike a plea bargain?
Before any of you get your panties in a twist, I’m counting stay at home moms as working women, because domestic labor is work, childcare is work, and juggling logistics is work. If you can outsource it and the person who is doing it would reasonably expect to get paid, it’s work -- so don’t tell me being a SAHM isn’t work just because nobody’s paying her to do the job of a nanny, line cook, housekeeper, administrative assistant, executive director, coach, motivational speaker, teacher, or community organizer. And also, no SAHM should have to resort to the MLM hell that is LueLaRoe in order to clothe her body. Put the valentine heart printed butter leggings down, Karen.
So, working women, clothing ourselves is hard. It has gotten worse over the past two decades. Let us break this shit down:
Declining quality. Don’t gaslight women over 30 and tell us that the decline in quality is all in our heads and that our expectations have increased as we’ve gotten older and more critical or educated. A lot of us still have our blazers from J.Crew that we bought in 2007 -- at least I do. I saved them because they’re gorgeous and sentimental, and now I save them as a physical reminder that clothing currently available to me as a retail consumer has sharply decreased in quality.
Fit issues. Between the unreasonably sloppy, inconsistent sizing (sometimes between two of the exact same garments), bizarre proportions, limitations on size ranges, and a seemingly universal refusal to cut garments for women larger than a B cup, women’s clothing fits horribly. The solution to this problem seems to be to sew everything in stretchy, cheap materials that are clingy, unflattering, and translucent, which translates to...
...Awful styles. Since the solution to lazy fit is stretch, the industry makes a lot of clothing styles that are not suitable for most women’s daily lives because they’re too cheap to use decent fabric in making clothing to account for the fact that they’re too cheap to invest in fit and quality construction. Oh, you can’t wear a cold-shoulder top and a pair of stretchy black leggings to your corporate job? Too fucking bad, that’s what’s in stock right now. If we call it “Athleisure,” it’s all good! And if you look shitty in it, it’s because you’re not athletic enough to be wearing it.
It’s funny how when women abandoned the corset, it was liberating -- until style started demanding that women become their own corsets. No lumps or bumps or bulges allowed, but unless you want to wear Spanx (read: a girdle), you better diet yourself down to a flawlessly smooth size 2 if you don’t want to look horrible in a simple tshirt.
Sure, good style is available to those who have enough social or economic capital to access it -- and by social capital, I am including people who are thin.
The state of plus-sized fashion has always been appalling, but as the country tumbles into greater income inequality, the concentration of jobs paying a living wage into traffic-jammed cities with a lack of reasonably affordable or accessibly housing, the masses are not going to be getting thinner. The workday has been getting longer, either by extending hours or by making it very clear that people who leave before 6 are slackers, or by tethering us to email in the spirit of “leaning in.” Sorry, when you spend 1-3 hours/day commuting to your soul-sucking job that doesn’t pay enough to afford help to outsource all of the shit you have to do on weekends in order to function as an adult, the “obesity epidemic” is not going to end. How about we call a spade a spade: the “obesity epidemic” is a side-effect of the confluence of income inequality and late-stage capitalism. “Calories in, calories out, it’s so simple!” say people who are able to prioritize and afford to be thin, and are rewarded in kind with clothing that at least isn’t punishingly ugly or uncomfortable.
Let’s talk about uncomfortable clothing: there’s a lot of it when you get out of the stretchy-spandex land masking the laziness of corporate clothing behemoths behind 2% spandex in an already forgiving knit. Wovens, friends, let’s snark on wovens. Wovens are the fabrics that are stiffer -- think jeans without spandex, chinos without spandex, button down shirts without spandex, your wool coat without spandex, etc.
Believe it or not, young people, most of these items didn’t stretch 10-15 years ago, or if they did it was a tiny amount -- enough so that you could comfortably drive a car while still wearing a garment that was purposefully cut and constructed so that it would lay close to the body. Instead of spandex, clothing was constructed with more ease -- more space, looser in areas where a normal human body needs space to move. And nobody looked shitty, because the clothing was made so that the structure of the garment kept it from looking like a sack of potatoes; that structure comes from quality fit, construction, and materials.
And of course, companies will retort that if they did anything the way they did 10-15 years ago, costs would skyrocket! Materials are expensive and skilled labor isn’t cheap, especially if paid a living wage in a country with labor regulations to protect workers! To which I say: bullshit. Costs won’t skyrocket unless you expect customers to pad the pockets of your shareholders and executives to make up for increased production costs that narrow the profit margin. Essentially, you want the same profit margin that was established and became the norm when you switched to shitty quality while raising prices.
The problem is really of your own doing, Mr. Mall Fashion Executive Dude; you trained your customers to expect good quality clothing for decades, rested on your laurels while increasing your profit margins by cutting production costs, got everyone on the corporate end used to booming profits based on this giant margin, and then got confused when shit went south. You went for short-term profits, banking on the reputation of your brand to carry the company through a quality control nosedive. And now we’re rubbing your face in it.
So here’s some advice to the corporate powers that be:
Make some fucking decent clothing.
Make the entire line in a wide range of sizes, 00-24+ with no differentiation between “plus” and “misses.”
Give women’s clothing the attention, quality, consistency, and detail of men’s items.
Stop putting random shit on your clothing. I want a goddamn tshirt without a sequin, weird design, picture of a bird, a saying, etc.
Don’t “bring back a classic” and mark it up 200%. Take a hint: we all still have that item from 2003, don’t think we won’t compare them and put the videos taking you down for both an outrageous markup and a comparatively mediocre product. Looking at you, Lululemon’s “full on Luon” (i.e. regular luon from a few years prior with a new name and higher price). Looking at you, J.Crew icon trench from 2003 (i.e. the old trench marked up higher than it was before but with a shittier fit and cheaper materials).
If your wovens look like shit on the average American woman, that means you need to hire people who know how to design a decent garment, use better materials, and learn about ease, drape, and tailoring.
If your pants don’t fit women with hourglass figures, the problem is your pants.
And finally: Listen to the women screaming at you on Instagram every time you roll out a crappy collaboration. What do they want? Natural fibers, better fit, a size range that is inclusive and reflects the general public without arbitrary cutoffs, good design, cohesive collections, solid basics, durability, functional pockets that can hold a fucking iphone, classic lines, and comfort.
If that is too much of an order, maybe get the fuck out of the industry that makes clothing for women, because there are actually companies that have demonstrated that it is possible to do it right: MM LaFleur (pricey, but excellent), Boden, Land’s End, etc. are all examples of companies that manage not to completely screw the pooch on selling clothing to women. Hell, I’ll even give you Eileen Fisher. Give me some linen and a functional pocket, Ms. Fisher, I’ll gladly look like a sexless therapist who moonlights at an art gallery.
But seriously, fuck right off with this cold-shoulder, poly-blend, lazy bullshit.
#Snark#fashion#style#jcrew#mmlafleur#boden#landsend#lululemon#leggings#comfort#pockets#gaslighting#plus size#clothing#open letter#cotton#wool#patriarchy#bullshit#lularoe#lulanope#lulanever#clothes#women#womensfashion#womenswear#eileenfisher#sexlesstherapistmoonlightingatanartgallery
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Hey, friends. This is important to me and my family. Please read it.
It’s SVTFOE hiatus, and you’re like “omg is Brian going to leak something about the new season” and I won’t (or will I?), but I am going to take time out of my day (during which I really need to write the music that brought you all here in the first place) to write about something very important to me. I hope over the years I have gained enough of your respect and trust that you will read this to the end. It’s about health care, but mostly about me and my family and how this bill screws us.
You probably know that the Graham-Cassidy bill is being set up for a vote sometime soon in the Senate (so that they can decide its fate before Sept 30, which is the deadline for them to only need 50 votes to pass it; after Sept 30, they will need 60, which would require bipartisan support). Let’s get it out in the open now: this is an unequivocally a bad bill. The last time the Senate brought forth a bill like this (the “skinny repeal” of the Affordable Care Act / Obamacare), that bill had 12% support from the American public, and the Graham-Cassidy bill is WORSE than the “skinny repeal” bill in many respects. I’ll let Jimmy Kimmel explain, because he’s funnier than I am:
youtube
K cool. We’re all up to speed. This bill sucks, all the major medical associations that you rely on oppose it, and the creators of the bill do not want you to know its details because they know you will hate it.
Here’s how this all affects me, personally.
A lot of you know that I had cancer in my 20s. I’ve discussed it openly here. It sucked, it was out of my control and probably written into my DNA and thus unavoidable, and while I am totally in remission now, it is something I think about every day, as I am at higher risk for certain other cancers in the future due to my treatment.
I am also a creative professional, as is my wife. We do not receive insurance from our employers. We are eligible for health insurance through our unions, but we have to log enough official union hours to qualify. THE MUSICIANS UNION DOES NOT INCLUDE COMPOSERS. I can log union hours as an orchestrator or instrumentalist, but only if a show I am working on is a “union show” and I “hire myself” to orchestrate, which is weird. I have never composed for a union show. Some of us composers never will. (There are very few union shows. That’s a whole other issue.) Basically, it is almost a certainty that I will never qualify for health insurance on my own.
My wife, on the other hand, is part of the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA), and whenever she works on a show (she’s on The Flash, Tuesdays this fall on the CW!), it is highly likely that she will qualify for insurance. Very good insurance. But, she is under the same constraints as me, in that she must earn a certain amount of money in a year to qualify. If she works on a short gig, or if she goes on maternity leave and misses a TV season, then we will not qualify for union insurance and will have to purchase it out-of-pocket.
Okay, here’s where the Graham-Cassidy bill royally screws us over. Check out this map from the The Washington Post (or go here and then come back).
See California way over there to the left? We could lose $78 BILLION in funding if this bill passes. That is almost double the state that would lose the second most (New York). This funding is used to stabilize the health insurance market. It’s very complicated to explain why, so I won’t try to do that here because I’d probably get it wrong anyway. If you’re curious, Google (and time – health insurance is super convoluted) is your friend.
What will that loss of funding do? NO ONE FUCKING KNOWS. IT’S SO MUCH. UC Berkeley kind of guessed, hypothesizing that 6.7 million people would lose their insurance. Or that essential services would be cut. And that kids, or people with disabilities, or senior citizens would suffer the brunt.
(Difficult to spot SVTFOE S3 spoiler, not located at the end of this post because I know some of you might just scroll to the end: I scored an entire episode for season 3 primarily with nylon Latin guitar, to reflect a specific character who is the focus of the episode. It doesn’t sound like any other episode to date.)
The Graham-Cassidy bill allows states to decide whether to let insurance providers charge more for people with preexisting conditions. How much more? Well take a look at this chart.
Hey look, there’s “other cancers” on the third line and there’s that absurd surcharge of $73,000. And oh look there’s fucking PREGNANCY (successful, perfectly healthy pregnancy, like my wife had), and there’s a rise in cost of $17,000. That’s an additional $90,000. Great. Would California eliminate pre-existing condition protections? I mean, probably not, we’re super progressive. BUT WHO KNOWS, WE MIGHT LOSE $78 BILLION IN FUNDING.
So what’s the better alternative? There’s enough discontent about Obamacare that, yes, the bill should be reviewed and strengthened. BUT. This should be done with MEMBERS OF BOTH PARTIES (and they’re trying right now, but the GOP is like nah, let’s pass this shitty bill instead because we hate Obama hardcore). If Graham-Cassidy fails, then the Senate will HAVE TO create a bipartisan solution, because they will need 60 votes to pass it.
Listen, I didn’t ask to get cancer. I have never smoked, I have maybe like 4 drinks a year. I exercise multiple times a week. Our home is vegetarian. I did everything right, and I still got sick. When Obamacare passed, I sighed a huge sigh of relief, because I was protected from being gutted by insurance companies (which are profit-based). Now? Now I’m pretty fucking stressed. If my wife and I aren’t working, it means we aren’t making any money, and this is exactly the situation in which the Graham-Cassidy bill would expect us to pay MORE money for health insurance. How does that make any sense?
What can you do? Call 202-224-3121. Tell them this bill sucks. ESPECIALLY CALL if you live in Arizona or Alaska or West Virginia or Maine. Your senators will most likely be the deciding votes. But everyone call. It only takes a few minutes but can protect millions of Americans like me.
Thanks for reading.
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renoku replied to your post “mood trying to watching swedish news”
What are the issues around Swedish schools? Is it similar to the politics in America (minus the violence)?
no, not at all. i think anyway. i can’t say i got a perfect overview on usa school politics really. but because the swedish school system is very different form the usa i doubt its the same debate.
the arguments are all about which type of structural approach the different parties want to have to swedish school system. it should be noted, all schools in sweden are financed via tax - money, and therefore to different degrees under direct state control (although there is a difference between kommunal skola and friskola, but that is for the advanced course of swedish school system ;P).
so ANYWAY
there is some basic differences to the approach to school politics in the different swedish parties. now the swedish parliment got 8 parties (i think... honestly, i am bad at remebering numbers, dyscalculia), so going through all of their stand points would be. too much and too long.
simplified, and with no regard to whatsoever to what some swedish politicans or another said last week about this forever over - talked subject, but on basic ideological outlook
the democratic socialists (and the enviroment party which can never make up it mind of were they stand)
socialdemokraterna (the socialist democrats)
the social democratic party typically want the same school system for the entire population. no private and/or indepent schools. but most important, everyone should go out with the same knowledge from school EVEN from secondary school (which is not obligatoric). the core value here is that all kids should be able to use the grades from their secondary school to go to uni. therefore the social democratic party is traditionally against things like secondary school which teaches one a (working class) proffesion, because the consider that too deepen class divide among the population.
the socialdemocratic ideal of the school was (historically, this is kinda oldish now) to use the school to minimaze class. that (used) to be the core of their politics. therefore private schools was actually ,with a few exception, illegal in sweden in the past. also, one were not allowed to choice which school your kids went to blahblah
(this was like 20+ years ago. it should be noted that the socialdemocratic party both build AND then later deregulated the school system. they kinda, changed their view majorly on this subject in the 1990s..... but god lets not get into THAT. so messy, so much. they were actually the ones that made the school go from state goverend, to locally goverend forexemple... also there is so much Problematic Things to discuss about the difference between the social democratic parties officals ideals about education and their actual politics historically, but i digress)
ANYWAY LETS MOVE ON
vänsterpartiet (the left party)
after deregulation of the swedish school system the schools can now be run by capitalist companies which earn profit. and because all swedish school is tax financed it means that that those indepent schools (börsnoterade friskolor) get their profit from swedish tax money. this makes, vänsterpartiet (=the left party. also democratic socialists, but more socialist than the democratic socialist.), mad. so mad.
vänsterpartiet party leader Jonas Sjöstedt thinks the entire “private capitlist companies making profit from tax money that should really be spend on the kids” thing is the worst thing that ever happened (well, second worst, after being betrayed by prime minister löfven, that backstabbing player). i do agree with this. but they have been saying this now for about 8 years, so. i am not feeling up for hearing it again, even if jonas sjöstedt got a very calming voice.
Miljöpartiet (the enivorment party)
miljöpartier (the enviroment party) which is also in the goverment (with the socialdemocrats), most likely have some kind off view, i have not looked it up. historically they used to support the existence of independ schools (friskolor), which vänsterpartiet heavily disliked (vänster historically wanting all schools to be in the same state goverend system. but i am not up to date on their current view on this).
the liberal and conservative block, the right - wing parties. (its considered the same block in sweden yes....)
more grades, more possibilites to make profit in school, even more grades, tougher school, dreams about a “golden socialdemocratic” epoch of education that never existed.
becuase of this, that they are conservative in such a way that they want to GO BACK to the past of education, they amusingly sometimes sound MORE socialist about education than the social democratic party.
fellow peoples of sweden, remember that time the liberal party wanted to make the school state run again? (the liberal party in sweden has a problem with remebering the meaning of the word liberal.....)
as swedish satirist ola söderholm said in the podcast lilla drevet: “because the swedish right - wing is competing in reconstructing a false image of 1950s sweden, they are starting to sound like classic communists. now they are suggesting to build up class rooms in such a way that there is a totally even amount of kids form different socio-economic classes in the class room. if a school has too many poor kids, just close down that school! if there goes no upper class kids in a school, just grap some of those kids and move them to a school with poor kids.
at this pace, the socialists do not need to do anything, just sit and lean back, while the liberals tries to build one of those really ineffective state - controlled detailed plans for the entire school system”.
the liberal party (folkpartiet, liberalerna)
the have a very hard time remebring what liberal means, appear to believe it means “conservative, really fucking conservative”. Jan Björklund, their party leader, is obsessed with school. OBSESSED. i hate him intensly, he was the school minister in sweden during my teenage years, and his face brings rage to my heart.
he is also into “more grades, more demands on kids, more homework, more everything”. his own merits for having all these views on school? he is a former soldier in the swedish army.............................................................
(he got no clue what he talking about)
the centre party (centerpartiet)
called the centre party, is actually the most neoliberal party in the swedish right - wing. confusing. former farmer party.... an oddball party
their view on school? i have no idea. a educated guess “making profit from school via tax money is an utopia”. thats a guess but *shrug*
the moderate party (moderaterna)
moderaterna, who are called the moderate party but are liberal - conservative, be like: “same education for EVERYONE in sweden? EVEN the working class? working class at university? what is this?”
ok, if i am being a bit less biased haha, there big thing is that one should be able to choose if one wants to go to a secondary school education which gives one acces to university or not. basically, they want to have 2 school system, one secondary school if one wants higher education afterwards and 1 secondary school if one wants to learn a trade. in their model trade secondraty school do not give acces to univeristy. in the social democratic model trade secondrary school still exist, but it ALSO gives you the same acces to university as not going to a secondrary school that teaches you a trade.
the christian democrats (kristdemokraterna)
i have no fucking idea, this party sucks and i refuse learning things about it. (also i have getting tired writing this up haha)
the neo - nazi block (who would like us to call them “nationalistic social - conservative”. pfft. they are neo - nazis)
swedens democratic party (sverigedemokraterna)
they are neo - nazis, they probably have some populistic and racist idea. who cares, fuck sverigedemokraterna and their 13% in swedens parliament.
and that is a very messy and quickly typed describtion off school politics in sweden.
oh also i forgot, the reason they are all so very obsessed with school politics? sweden is not number 1 in “the best schools in the world” ranking by blahabla whatever their name is. such things, swedish politics consider UNACCPTLE and a FAILURE, and CRISIS. seriously, we are not even close to the bottom. and way above usa in ranking forexemple. but swedish politics always want to be the literally number 1 in the world. (finland is number 1 btw, which just makes swedish politician ever more obsessed with the entire thing)
basically swedish politics won’t let any of us rest form swedish school discourse, until swedish school kids are ranked as number 1 in the world. before then, they will talk talk talk talk about it.
*me falling over from pure boredom just thinking about swedish school discourse*
@renoku
#renoku#norsesuggestions#norsereply#swedish politics#cw nazi mention#this mostly a summary of school politics in sweden during my life#that is from the 1990s to now 2018#with some guest appearence of the school system of the 1980s#the school system of imagnation of 1950s that some in the right wing dream about#was btw an whole other beast than what the modern day politicians construct in their discourse#remember all those posts about the roma civil rights movement to be allowed to go to school in sweden?#that happened in the 1960s....#and abusive school system of nomad schools for saami children?#were saami children were forced to go in a very abusive and racist school system by the swedish state?#that went on until the 1970s.....#but no surprise the current political discourse is never about that#but thats is an whole other bag of issues which would needs its own post
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Hi there! I've got a question, what is Tony's threat level according to other intelligence agencies after all the snafu of TWIFFON? Like does CBI and FBI' opinion differ from Interpol or MI6? And what about SI legal? Do they have specific lawyers on threat watch and Pepper too? At this point I'm even wondering what does Bill Gates and other competitors think of SI legal? Are they crying in opposition? What was president' reaction over SHIELD' fall and Tony? What about FoxTV and Twitter?
Disclaimer: TWiFFON was created with accidental world domination as an end goal long before I posted the first chapter, as a spitefic in response to the fandom’s reaction to Civil War, and Tony’s treatment in particular. I am a very broke student who’s doing this for fun, as stress relief between classes and whenever I have the time. I am not a political science major, or economics, or business. I have absolutely no clue as to how a corporation’s run, or international law, this is just me derping around in the MCU and keeping my fingers crossed that comic book science covers for whatever I’ve missed and hoping for the best. [So if I screwed something up on the legal side, you’ll know why.]
Okay, now that that’s taken care of: the gist of what you’re asking can be found in a post I did a while back, on power dynamics behind the scenes.
[more under the cut, because you guys know how I roll and RIP whoever’s on mobile otherwise. Because this turned into surprise SI meta.]
To sum up from that post:
Tony and Co. are pretty damn formidable, but PR’s mostly on top of things to make them seem like they’re harmless. Whether or not it works depends a lot on a myriad of factors, including economics, political leanings, and location, and as I’ve said before the US has a different view on Tony than the rest of the world does. I’m not going to delve into specifics [this was supposed to be crack, dammit!], because of the above, but given that in real life the heavy pull that corporations have, I’d like to think that in terms of suspension of disbelief I’m not doing too badly.
I mean, sure, there’s always going to be opposition, but a) Stark Industries used to be in the weapons manufacturing business, so they’re used to cutthroat politics even if they changed tracks a while back [and we’ve seen it happen, and will continue to do so in the fic], and b) I haven’t even touched on how comic book science influences things, like how Wakanda’s existence throws a wrench into International politics or Howard Stark’s infamous legacy [which is a story for another post].
I mean, in real life, the US really did a number on Latin America in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Now imagine what could’ve happened if SHIELD was also out there fucking shit up.
Or how Vietnam must’ve been like, because guess who probably got some of the contracts for supplying the military with munitions? Or just what might’ve led to a different sociopolitical landscape, because how would have Captain America’s image have influenced the Red Scare? Would Howard’s influence [via SHIELD, or otherwise] led to a different way of dealing with Iran? He was known to have participated in the Manhattan Project, so that’s already one change felt: how else did he make it into the history books?
Just…I could go on. I haven’t watched any of the tv shows, but…well. You get the idea. How influential was Howard, even before Tony was born? Bits and pieces’ll show up in TWiFFON, and some other things I write, but…well. You get the idea.
Also: I have no clue how economics work in real life [again, broke student here, statistics’re more my speed at the moment], but…if NAFTA and the TPP can exist, in real life, and royally fuck up international economies because profits, then a fictional company that’s been kicking since before World War II and is currently headed by some of the sharpest minds in their generation is, again, not too far out in terms of suspension of disbelief.
After all, Stark Industries is a family company. [Well…kinda.]
Sure, at the time it was also for weapons manufacturing, but still: Tony grew up knowing he’d inherit it someday. I cover this a bit in the PR interlude, and I think you guys might be able to see hints of it in the Legal interlude as well, but Tony grew up with Obadiah being a larger presence in his life than Howard was, and I forget if it got cut or not but in one draft the PR representative was also a known face.
So, Stark Industries’ presence has been a constant in Tony’s life. Stemming from childhood, even, and we can see its influence early on, too: remember how he was 17 when he worked with PR to keep stock prices from plunging and thus avoid layoffs?
Tony’s very possessive of what he has, when it comes to people. Add in a dash of spite and his issues, and you get a company that hasn’t changed its stance on vacation time in decades, or health insurance coverage for its employees since before the Reagan administration, and offered roughly a month of paternity leave shortly after Tony took over the company. [Daddy issues for the win.]
Sure, it cut into profits a little, but iit wasn’t like he was hurting for money. And Tony always had a patent or two ready to shut up the board whenever anyone tried to complain and the ‘hey our productivity’s way higher than the competition’ wasn’t enough of a reason to keep things as they were.
Plus, remember how I said it part of it was out of spite? Tony’s mentally flipping his father off the whole time, but he’s also very smug about it because ha, that that, Hammer and your stupid budget cuts!
And all the while, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal are all but gushing about how SI’s employee satisfaction rates are off the charts. Tony tries to make it background noise, because really, it should not be unusual to offer that much maternity leave, seriously, what is wrong with you people…and in doing, so kinda misses out on some things.
Like, for instance, just how diehard loyal Stark Industries is.
There’s a reason everyone in SI’s so rabid about corporate espionage, and maybe money can’t buy everything but overtime pay sure goes a long way sometimes and turns out that on-site daycare is a smash hit, who knew? It’s not just the pay, really; it’s the company picnics with a line-item for property damage, it’s the rivalry Legal and R&D have that has the rest of the company eating popcorn, it’s in the top-of-the-line coffeemakers in the break rooms and free entertainment whenever Hammer Industries tries to do a thing and fails epically.
Add in the way SI’s got some very strict policies on stuff like sexual harassment [because Tony may act like a playboy for the cameras but he respects women and won’t stand for it], and JARVIS’ assistance, plus Pepper being Pepper, and you’ve got a company full of highly motivated, hypercompetent people all united under the same banner and an employee satisfaction rate that makes the competition go equal parts ‘that sounds fake but okay’ and ‘just what the hell do these people even eat?!’ and that’s why, in the legal sense at least, Tony’s all but untouchable. Business-wise, SI’s feared and envied because Legal’s Seen Some Shit and PR’s handled two generations of Starks and good fucking luck getting a spy in. when JARVIS is in charge of background checks and all fellow coworkers are willing to go the extra mile if it means showing up Hammer. [And I haven’t even mentioned SWORD yet.] Again, SI used to be a weapons company. Sure, they’re doing more civilian-friendly stuff now, but that kind of legacy is really hard to erase even if you tried. You don’t get to the top by being kind, in that industry […I think; again, broke student here], and we’ll see that aspect crop up more as we go along in the fic, too.
Just…where other companies took a colder turn, went more for profits and took advantage of the tax cuts, Stark Industries didn’t change a thing. Jobs didn’t move offshore, and the international branches were chugging along well before NAFTA was put into effect. After all, unlike other sectors, they can afford to do so, because Tony takes pride in churning out top-of-the-line stuff [be it bomb, pre-Afghanistan, or the latest tablet or nanoprocessor], and, again, his genius means he can increase revenue without having to do it at the expense of SI’s employees if push ever came to shove.
Plus, I reiterate: this is meant to be self-indulgent stress relief. Suspension of disbelief’s a thing, this is the same universe where we have cryogenically-preserved supersoldiers running around and magic exists.
To sum up: okay, now what you’ve got is a company of hypercompetent employees who’re diehard loyal and who knows how many resources at their disposal. So when things snowball…well. Really, it was a tiny bit of miscommunication, could’ve happened to anyone!
It’s just. Umm. Just a tiny case of world domination.
[not going too much into specifics because guess what the fallout-from-AoU/buildup-to-CW arc’s even about, and I kinda went overboard with the meta enough as is.]
#I got an ask!#Naught replies#meta#if you're going to be evil might as well do it right meta#Stark Industries#behind the scenes#thinking aloud#Naught rambles
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A critical dissection of the latest news (excuses) from Teets Talkarico
Quoted words are his, straight from his Atari Age ego thread, of course. Comments are mine, in bold italics. This might be long.
UI video will be a live stream. We were scheduled to do it this week in the office (the official office internet & servers were just completed and installed/finalized last week)... then the California lockdown started on Monday making it against the law to assemble in our new building. We were also thinking of getting @Starpaddler and his AWARD WINNING wife to come down between now and Christmas (and to video them seeing and playing the machine for the first time, etc.). Some may cry foul and try to say I'm stalling. For those folks... get your head out of your asses and read the news.
Yeah, you’re stalling. Learn how to ship.
We've shown a working machine with controllers publicly since the beginning of 2020. We've shown an early version of our UI over a year and a half ago. Ask John Riggs, Metal Jesus, Smash JT, Michael Pachter and oh yeah... Walmart, Gamestop, Koch media, Best Buy, Amazon, Argos, Media Mrkt, Saturn, EB Games, etc. Just wondering if anyone out there thinks we didn't show the machine working over a year ago when we took our first 100,000 purchase orders without breaking a sweat. Wondering if people out there think we were able to secure a $150 MILLION manufacturing line of credit with smoke & mirrors. Please. To those folks, spare us the drama and stupidity at this point
We can’t ask them. You made them sign an NDA, remember? We say your “early UI” with the self-beheading robot thing that has chicken drumsticks for legs.
Now Tommy is up to a $150 million line of credit? And claims to be small time? hahahahaha
All that has been shown to this point are a few shovelware-ready Android freemium games and some hand models, with two controllers that don’t even match.
E3 - June, 2019 was to SHOW buyers the system behind closed doors for the first time. We knocked it out of the park and achieved every goal we set out to. We've hired at least 30+ new people since then. Funny that people would think we're going backwards over a year a half.
Yeah, you hyped the fuck out of showing it off at E3 then psyched everyone by saying it wasn't public and wouldn't be public. That probably pissed a bunch of people off to hear you hype it up for over a month then tell them to fuck off when they wanted to see.
We don't know what these "goals" are either. the goal could be "seduce suckers and get their money" for all we know.
You ARE going backwards, or if you're moving forward, it's at a snail's pace that means you're going to have to ultimately delay a year or more.
We decide when we show things based on when it's best for US.... not some angry obsessed handful of hater trolls demanding that we show certain things or else the whole thing is a scam. Besides, we already know they will all be first in line to buy Amico so they can complain about it some more.
It's easy. just shut the farkle up and don't promise things your ass can't deliver, don't tease things you don't have, and don't show things off before they're ready. Don't brag about things then get mad when people ask for proof.
I think for our family audience, you aren't in the minority at all. When we ask families which one they would most likely play... it's always mini-golf over regular golf. Those stats go down when the age demographic is raised. Especially over 60+.
The idea of people being able to affect the spin of the windmill, etc. is EXACTLY the type of unique and simple gameplay that makes us so different (especially with our controllers).
So let me just give a big...
WOULDN'T THAT BE SOMETHING?™
Yeah when I played miniature golf, your friend/sibling fucking with the course hazards are what we used to call "cheating."
And what do the controllers have to do with affecting gameplay elements? He just threw that in for no reason. Maybe don't tout product you don't have, and don't stoke the hype-fires when you don't have anything to burn in them.
Wouldn't THAT be something?
His excuse to not show off the UI is hilarious. I guess he doesn't have internet at home. If you think about it, it makes no sense.
I've been mentioning for a few months that everything would need to be finalized by the end of January at the latest, that way we could at least crank out the Founder's Editions before China shuts down for the Chinese New Year (February 12 - 26). Takes a month to ship via boat and then time at customs. Then shipping out to everyone individually. So end of January to get in Founders hands by beginning of April. Another option is to wait until the beginning of March and then airship the 2,600 Founders units to the U.S. A lot more expensive and completely eats away any profit margin we would have had (we would probably even lose money), but a decision that I'm willing to make for the Founders if possible.
He's setting up the failposts(tm) and is getting ready to kick the failball through them and admit he has to delay another 6 months after April.
Isn't he a swell guy for losing money on getting the flounders editions out? WE DID EVERYTHING WE COULD. Even if he does that it means he is delaying, because it will take another 2 months to get them to everyone else, which is June.
But it really comes down to the ability to get each and every part required. We have started ordering long lead time components (last month) and are starting to see potential backed up parts/component issues starting to crop up and our team is figuring out work arounds.
Bahaha long lead time parts were ordered last month?!?
What the blue sky is this astrosmasher smoking? He's screwed and he knows it. Long lead time parts should've been ordered literally 3 to 9 months ago. And he KNOWS THIS. Anyone that has worked in this industry knows this. The chip manufacturers tell you this. It takes a while to actually manufacture chips, and if you're buying a lot of something (10K+) generally there isn't enough stock on hand and they actually have to produce them for you which takes 2 months or so, possibly a bit longer.
Again, I gotta stress that things in manufacturing (at least for us smaller guys) are literally changing from week to week. If we are experiencing lockdowns here in the U.S. what do you think China is going through? The press/media doesn't cover that much.
This is bullshit. You set your manufacturing contracts up months in advance. You KNOW when the factory will be ready to work on your stuff, and you coordinate buying stock and handling lead times so it all lines up. Your part suppliers will know what lead times are, that's what they are for.
Typically you're planning your product production 4-6 months out, contacting suppliers with the big things (processors, memory, power chips... things that are only made by one company or maybe two) and getting pricing and lead times and even possibly getting preliminary orders in.
Also, china's back up to full production. The media don't cover it because most Americans aren’t working to get electronics mass produced in China.
But ask yourself why Sony, Microsoft & Nintendo are lacking the supply they need.
Because they are not incompetent.
The hundreds of components and parts we have in Amico are made ALL over China. Not just in one factory. The manufacturing plant (Ark) makes some, but not things like the Qualcomm Snapdragon chip. So if just one of the hundreds of components has a delay (and are unable to get it elsewhere), you can imagine the chain reaction it has on everything down the line.
The only things in his footbath that are proprietary enough to get screwed on will be the SOC, MAYBE some memory (usually there's several suppliers for this), and power chips if he's using some higher end regulators with multiple outputs or whatever. The rest is all commodity garbage and he should be able to get that stuff from a dozen vendors.
Also the plastics of course but you have 100% full control over plastics and other incidentals like metal contacts.
YOU are producing it, so you have full control.
All we can do is keep working super hard and hope things fall into place. The latest California lockdowns that started this 0week and will go to the end of the year were devastating for sure. We planned on moving the entire team into the new building in December.
Sooooo ... work from home? Tommy is just setting up another delay and blaming it on COVID-19.
That being said, we are doing the best we can considering the circumstances and as always, I'm being as transparent as I possible can considering the challenges and always changing landscape from week to week. If we need to push it out a few months, we would know that information probably by the middle or end of January.
As transparent as a funhouse mirror. This is him saying right now that he’s going to delay. He knows NOW that he’s screwed.
I'm totally okay with giving as many updates as possible as they come in. Right now we're working hard on getting everything completed over the next month via video. Not very efficient when you need to test couch co-op games as well!
Out of the 3,948,739,834 people he has hired, he doesn't have ANY testers?
And why does it take this long to make a stupid video? It takes that long to photoshop Amico controllers into every frame of the stock video, replacing the PS4 controllers?
A big article about the video game industry and Loot Boxes came out today in the Los Angeles Times (one of the biggest newspapers in the entire county) which I was quoted. Positive vibes for Intellivision!
There's him taking credit for that. Why would they ask him anything about it? he hasn't probably ever played a game that even has a loot box, or know anyone that does/has. He's just a loudmouth pushing a footbath.
It costs this much to make an Intellivision Amico game:
Depending on the project. Could be anywhere from $50,000 - $250,000. I'd say the average is around $100K - $125K.
Too bad he won’t use completed indie games! Oh, wait ...
I'm amazed Tommy even knows about loot boxes. They became a big deal after 2005, and that's where his knowledge mysteriously ends.
TO SUM UP
Tommy has shown that he never had, and still doesn't have, the first clue what the hell he thinks he's doing.
Tommy cannot, will not, and ain't gonna have product to ship in April, or most likely the first , second or third quarter of next year.
Tommy continues to be a colossal, exaggerating, self-aggrandizing ass clown who can't tell the difference between the truth and his heavily dyed haircut which is that stupid lookin' lump three feet above his ass.
Tommy's entire exercise to date has proven to be nothing but an excuse to stroke his manchild ego.
Tommy knows zilch about producing anything in china in volume, let alone anything electronics.
When all is done, Tommy is going to make the Ataribox look like a brilliantly executed rollout performed with military precision.
#scampaign#footbath#delays#excuses#blaming#whining#hi tommy#i know you read this#dead on arrival#incompetent
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A lukewarm defense of Eli Lilly and their insulin production.
So I live in Indianapolis. Specifically, I live in the Lilly bubble which is the area where basically everyone works for Lilly. I’ve lived there my whole life and believe when I say I have more than a few complaints about Lilly as a company. However, it also means I can offer this Luke warm defense of why Lilly is not the people we should be targeting about insulin prices.
People like Bernie and Warren have been going after companies like Lilly for over priced medicine for a long time now, and to an extent they’re right. Drug prices are inflated to hell and that needs to change, but it’s not necessarily the manufacturers fault. Companies like Lilly charge way less for their product than what customers are paying and it’s because the middlemen are jacking prices up. I know in an ideal world people wouldn’t have to pay at all for necessary life saving drugs like insulin, but we can’t target companies like Lilly for that. Insulin is expensive to manufacture, most generic companies won’t pick it up because it’s too expensive to manufacture, creating basically a monopoly where the only people who can and will produce it is Lilly. But Lilly is still a company with employees and they have to make at least some profit. That doesn’t mean peoples complaints have fallen on deaf ears though. Lilly has started producing a generic insulin that is half the price. Their other more expensive stuff is better but meant for diabetics with complications but for most people the generic stuff is exactly what they need. The problem is Lilly is producing, Hell their practically begging people to buy it, but insurance and pharmacies want nothing to do with it. They don’t even want to carry it, because the generic just doesn’t have the finical benefits that the more expensive stuff does. It’s got so bad Lilly has literally said if you cannot get insulin and it is life threatening they will find a way to get you insulin. Lilly is a company and a lot people think of companies as these soulless machines and don’t get me wrong having met some of the higher ups I can tell you they’re soulless corporate bastards buts as a whole there are good people there who want to help. I get it Bernie and Warren and others are trying to do some good. I support them, but I wish they would publicly shame what is actually wrong with the pharmaceutical industry not just pick a handful of companies to use as figureheads for the issue.
This isn’t to say Lilly is innocent. Believe me they have their share of skeletons, but to solely blame them for people dying without insulin is to largely ignore what is actually fundamentally fucked up in our healthcare system.
Anywhere heres some links:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/03/25/eli-lilly-discloses-pricing-data-for-its-popular-insulin-humalog.html
https://www.biospace.com/article/eli-lilly-s-humalog-generic-hits-the-streets-at-half-the-price-of-the-branded-insulin/
https://www.statnews.com/pharmalot/2019/12/16/lilly-insulin-warren-blumenthal-drug-prices/
And finally if you can’t get insulin:
https://www.lilly.com/diabetessolutioncenter
#insulin#lily#eli lilly#politics#big pharma#pharmaceutical manufacturing#diabetes#bernie#warren#liberal#health care#drug manufacturing
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The Debt He Owes : Collections (1/3)
Joey Drew Studios has fallen into deep debt, and Larry Bower is the collections agent assigned to make Mr. Drew pay up. Of course, that goes about as well as you'd imagine.
Also on Fanfiction.Net (Ava Blook) and Archive Of Our Own (AvaBlook), no links so this shows up in searches.
It was Larry Bower's first trip out on his own. After months of supervising more experienced people on the job, and then be supervised by them, he was finally out on his own. Of course, he was a newbie, so he was starting at the bottom of the pyramid, doing the work no one else wanted to.
Larry was a collections officer, and Joey Drew Studios was one client his boss doubted would ever pay up.
They'd been calling twice daily, and then half a dozen times a day, until the public phone number disconnected. They’d been sending letters for months now, enough that his boss had once joked that they’d spent more on paper than they’d ever get out of the studio. Finally, they’d decided they could spare a rookie to try and lean on the studio a little harder.
So of course, it got passed to Larry, and now he was standing outside the front door of Joey Drew Studios, trying to work up the nerve to knock.
He’d seen their cartoons, pretty much everyone had. They’d gotten a laugh out of him, for sure, even if the quality had been going downhill for the past few years. At this point, his boss was sure Joey Drew was using the studio as a front while he pocketed most of the money—there was no way an animation studio spent as much as Joey Drew Studios did on animation and had cartoons come out months after the advertised release date and with stiff, jittery animation.
No big deal, though, Larry tried to convince himself. Almost every business owner the collections officer had dealt with had been doing something shady if not downright illegal with the money they owed. Joey Drew was no different.
Larry squared his shoulders and knocked on the door.
“Ruthford Collections Agency!” he called.
He could hear scurrying behind the door, and then a frazzled-looking young man wearing a shirt stained with ink opened it for him.
“Here to see Joey?” he asked. Larry nodded, startled by the man’s appearance. He could understand getting ink on your clothes if you worked with it all day, but this man looked like he’d had a bucket of the stuff dumped on him.
Still, he let Larry inside, which was more than he’d been expecting. A narrow hallway plastered with posters for Bendy cartoons opened into a larger room, with machinery whirring on the walls and a projector showing off rough animation that a couple people were murmuring over. There was an animator frantically working at a desk haphazardly placed in one corner, as if whoever was in charge of these things had run out of room elsewhere.
“You okay waiting in the break room? I’ll have someone find Joey and send him over,” the animator asked.
“Oh, uh, sure,” Larry said. “I can wait for him.”
“Great,” the man said, taking Larry down a somewhat twisty path into the studio. He opened a door near the end of a hall and gestured down the stairs. Larry got a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach, but he wasn’t sure if it was from the fact he was being ushered into a basement or from the simply awful grinding noises coming through the thin wall to the left of the break room door.
Still, this was his job. He didn’t have much choice.
Larry began descending the stairs, and the animator headed on his way.
“Franks!” the animator screamed.
“What?” came a muffled shout from down the hall.
“Find Joey and send him to the break room!”
“That’s not my job!”
“Well it’s sure as fuck not my job either, and I’ve got a deadline!”
There were a couple other people in the breakroom, thankfully. One man slouched over in his chair, smoking a cigarette and scowling, while another stood near the wall doing some odd stretches with his arms. Both barely spared Larry a glance, keeping their eyes on the clock. Larry noticed a shiny new punchcard machine near the bottom of the stairs, with a poster encouraging employees to punch in. It seemed that Joey was quite demanding of his employees’ time, so it didn’t make much sense that the studio was in such bad shape for its budget—unless Mr. Drew was spending more on punchcard machines and similar waste than on his employees. How he ever expected to turn a profit like that, Larry didn’t know.
It took a while for Mr. Drew to show up. The stretching animator punched back in and returned to work, and the smoker started up a new cigarette and put the old one out. He started scribbling at a piece of scrap paper, nonsense gibberish Larry couldn’t quite make out. He began to wonder if that Franks fellow, or anyone else, was even looking for Joey Drew at all.
Finally, when the smoking man had finally gathered his papers and stormed out, Joey Drew showed up at the top of the stairs. He seemed confident, put together, and he wasn’t short of breath—Larry fumed a little internally that he’d been kept waiting longer than necessary—yet his suit was rumpled and the sleeves were stained with ink up to his elbows as if he’d dipped his arms partway into a vat of the stuff. Larry wasn’t quite sure what he had been expecting from the man, but this wasn’t it.
“Sorry for the delay!” Mr. Drew boomed in a deep, loud voice—a showman’s voice, for sure. “Ran into a few problems on the way, you know how it is when you’re running your own company! Well, maybe you don’t, but I’m sure you can imagine it’s incredibly busy!”
Larry pushed himself out of his seat and made for the stairs. He felt nervous to have the man he was supposed to be putting pressure on towering over him at the top of the stairs, but as he came to the top he saw why; Joey Drew was on crutches, and obviously favoring one leg over the other. Health issues, a more common reason to funnel money out of a business, and Larry had seen it half a dozen times at least. Still, he felt a little sorry for the man; Joey winced when he shifted his weight to free one hand for a handshake, and yet he was still on the premises, doing his job.
“Perfectly understandable,” Larry said. “I’m Larry Bower, from Ruthford Collections Agency. You’re Mr. Joey Drew, I trust?”
Mr. Drew’s face paled a bit at that, but he nodded.
“That’s me, all right,” he said. “I imagine you’re here to try collecting on some of the company’s debts?”
“That’s correct,” Larry said, slipping into a more cool and collected persona. “Mr. Drew, my company has been sending requests for collection for over six months now, but we haven’t heard from anyone at your company.”
“Ah yes, well, paper letters don’t tend to last long around here,” Joey said. “There’s all the ink, and it’s only so long they can go without any of it spilling on them, you know.”
“So you acknowledge you’ve been receiving the letters?”
“Well, yes, but they’re usually illegible by the time I see them personally.”
“And you didn’t hire a secretary or mail handler to ensure that didn’t happen?”
“We’re in enough debt as it is without hiring another employee! We’ve had to cut a lot of costs lately, you know.”
“Like your phone service?”
Joey’s face paled again, and he shifted his weight and readjusted his crutches.
“That’s the least of it, I’m afraid,” he said. “But! I do believe we’re on the edge of a breakthrough! Within the year, Joey Drew Studios is going to be back on top again, with cartoons like no one has ever seen before. Faster releases! Higher-quality animation than ever! So, with that in mind, I do think I will be able to write your company a check today. Not for all I owe you, of course, but a good chunk of it.”
Larry didn’t really know what to say to that, and he was fairly certain his surprise was showing on his face. No one, no one, had thought Joey Drew Studios would ever so much as pay its interest, and here Joey Drew himself was offering to write a check!
Joey laughed.
“Don’t look so startled, boy! Half the trouble your company has had with me has been miscommunication! Now, I just need to fetch my checkbook. Care to come with me?”
Larry nodded, not quite trusting his own voice. If he missed this chance to get a payment out of Joey Drew, there was no way his boss would ever let him hear the end of it.
And of course, if he got the payment, he might even get a promotion. This was a nightmare account, and Larry was handling it like a pro!
Larry followed Joey as he made his way down the hall, back through the main room and down a hallway on the other side. They turned and took a set of stairs across from an old, abandoned desk covered in cobwebs and sheets of rough paper, and it seemed Joey wasn’t kidding about needing to cut more than the phone if they’d fired an animator to make ends meet.
“Ah, that was Henry’s desk,” Joey reminisced. “He was one of our best animators, kept the whole department in line, you know. But when the money got tight, we couldn’t afford to keep him around. I keep hoping he’ll come back one day, and leave his desk; I’ve become something of a sentimental old man, I’m afraid.”
Larry tried to catch Joey’s face, because it almost sounded like the man was about to cry, but Mr. Drew’s back was to him, pointedly looking at the stairs. After a moment, he ventured forward and started climbing them, an awkward affair with his crutches, as if nothing had happened.
Larry followed a few steps behind, wondering if he should be ready to catch the man if he tumbled backwards. If was hard to reconcile that stubborn, extravagant Joey Drew was a man getting on in years who couldn’t even walk without crutches. Why had it taken the agency so long to send someone out here and get this whole mess cleaned up?
They reached the second story, and Mr. Drew paused at the beginning of a long hallway.
“My office is on this floor, but it’s a bit of a maze, I’m afraid. You don’t mind following, I assume?” he asked.
“Of course not, sir,” Larry answered, and Joey took off down what very much resembled an actual maze, hallways splitting and twisting. The building hadn’t seemed as big on the outside as it was on the inside, and Larry hoped Mr. Drew would lead him back out again, because he was hopelessly lost.
"Just through here," Joey said, pushing open a seemingly random door, and Larry found himself on a catwalk overhanging an enormous machine. He couldn't help but gawk at the sheer size of it – it had to be taller than a person, and weigh thousands of pounds. An enormous, open vat of ink bigger than a bathtub standing on one end was hooked to one end, and the other dripped traces of ink onto the wooden floor below.
This was where all the money went. It had to be. But what did an animation studio need with a machine like this?
"Beautiful, isn't it?" Joey asked, his voice momentarily tender. "This is the big project we’ve been trying to keep secret for a while now; the Ink Machine. It supplies all the ink the animators need, directly to their desks! And it does a few other things, too, but we have to keep some secrets around here!” Joey chortled, even though Larry didn’t think he’d said anything funny, and then his tone grew serious.
“With this Ink Machine, we're going to revolutionize the animation industry - hell, the whole world!"
Larry took another look at the machine, this time doubtful. Sure, it was impressively big, but what use did it serve outside of animation? How many other industries needed ink delivered throughout a building so often?
"Take a closer look if you want, it's perfectly safe turned off like this," Joey said, gesturing for Larry to look closer. He decided it couldn't hurt, worst he'd do was stain his shirt, so he leaned over the railing a bit to look.
“If you look into the ink supply, you’ll see what makes this machine so revolutionary. Think you can guess?” Joey asked playfully, like some of Larry’s seniors at work when they were showing off new cars. Larry decided to humor him, trying to look at what lay in the ink tank, but he couldn’t see anything past the solid black surface of the ink.
"I don’t know, Mister Drew,” Larry said. “It’s hard to see with all the—“
But before he could finish his sentence, Joey lunged forward, all traces of limp and joint pain gone. He grabbed the belt of Larry’s pants and, with surprising strength, tipped him over the railing of the catwalk, into the ink.
At first, all Larry could feel was how thick it was; thicker than any liquid he could think of. Maybe quicksand could compare, he thought vaguely as he tried to kick and claw his way to the surface to take a breath, only to get sucked deeper in. But with every passing moment, it pressed on him more, and he could feel the cold. It wasn’t like ice, wasn’t chilly or freezing; it was cold because it was sapping the warmth out of his body, swiftly and surely. Larry raised a hand for the surface, thought he felt air against ink-covered fingers…
Up on the catwalk, Joey winced as the gears snagged on Larry's body and struggled for a moment. They were built to work through thick chunks of pigment and goo, not human bones and organs, but after a little whirring and grinding, the Machine seemed to find its stride, and it worked through Larry's body in no time, spitting out a thick and gooey glob of ink before returning to gushing the normal liquid ink.
Joey flipped the emergency stop back off. It was regrettable, killing the man, but he couldn't have the studio collapse because of monetary debt of all things. Not when they were so close to success, to immortality.
At least he'd had time to disconnect the machine from the main pipe system. Saved Wally having to fix a clogged pipe later on, which could easily be a day or more of work for the man. He really should consider firing him... but no, he couldn’t risk him spreading the Studio’s secrets.
Joey climbed down the service ladder to the level of the machine and set about reconnecting the outflow pipes that supplied the studio.
As he worked, the thick puddle of ink that held Larry's earthly remains bubbled. Then it writhed. Finally, a shape broke the surface of the puddle, a surprisingly human hand, and slapped onto the floor. Joey dropped the wrench he was holding at the sudden noise, and turned in awe to watch as another hand emerged, then arms, pulling up a torso and a head with a familiar face
"--ink," Larry finished saying, before he seemed to realize the change in surroundings.
First he looked up, at Joey himself. Then down, at the floor, and then at the base of his own body, which seemed to stop and melt into the floor at his waist. He held his hands out in front of himself, flipping them over time and time again as ink started to drip and splatter off of them.
“No, no, no, what happened, what happened!” he muttered, flying into hysteria as the ink making up his body lost its solidity, started dripping. But Larry didn’t dissolve into a puddle.
Joey watched, stock-still, his face unreadable. It wasn’t anywhere near perfection, but it was an enormous improvement over his previous experiments with the machine.
"Larry, I do believe you've just solved an enormous problem we were having here at the studio," Joey said, an unsettlingly wide grin spreading across his face.
What was that saying, about two birds and one stone?
#bendy and the ink machine#bendy and the ink machine fanfiction#batim#batim fanfiction#joey drew#zen talks#fanfiction#body horror#death mention#zen writes
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EA RANT
Ok so I was reading reblogs and comments under a post that someone created in appreciation for the new Cats and Dogs expansion and calling out people who are crying they aren’t getting what they want. First of all I want to say that I agree that simple hate for something will never get you very far. EA won’t listen to you if you scream in capital letters that you want a different expansion or if you want horses in your game. They will just laugh at you as they cash in their millions in november.
BUT, I do agree with the core of what these people are trying to say. I think it’s better though to form a well thought, well written opinion which explains exactly why Cats & Dogs and the Sims 4 in general is such a disappointment so that everyone, even the die hard Sims 4 fans, understands what these ‘hating’ players are going through. So I decided to post a rant about EA and the direction they took with Sims 4, which will forever make me sad and disappointed and this is why (I’ll add a read more button but please do read more):
First of all: I am 25 years old now. When The Sims was released I was eight and I can still remember very well the first time I played the game at my friend’s house. She was so kind to lend me her disk set so that my dad could copy it (yes, very oldskool, back in the day copying disks wasn’t a crime yet lol). And so i had my very first Sims game and I fell in love with it immediately. From then on, I patiently waited for every christmas, birthday and the Dutch holiday Sinterklaas to ask for new expansions and I played them more than any other game we had. All the way up to Sims 3 Into the Future. Sims was and is my childhood, my teenhood and now even my tweenhood (are those real words? lol). So you can imagine how excited I was when Sims 4 was announced!
Sims 4 looked amazing in the first trailers. I didn’t care for the change in art style. Cartoony would be fine with me because this was going to be a new Sims and it was going to give us even more than what Sims 3 already offered. EA’s campaign focused greatly on the new improved CAS and their emotion system. The way they presented it made it look really cool. It actually seemed like you could knead your sim in any way possible and those emotions felt like a true enrichment to storytellers. As a storyteller, these teasers and trailers and gameplay trailers made me incredibly excited!
I was lucky enough to be asked to review The Sims 4 by my current employer back then a gaming website called XGN.nl (right now it’s just a clickbait SEO mania there but when I worked there back in 2014 they did produce some quality). This meant I received a copy of The Sims 4 for free. This is when I was first encountered with how EA deceived us with their trailers. Every company does this of course, but I had to say it was a great disappointment to try out the new CAS and bump into very strict limits when it came to kneading your sim. The sliders were basically still there, just hidden behind a different mechanic that also didn’t work very well yet (they patched it later). Second of all, the emotion system was completely dominating the game, meaning that sims were ALWAYS feeling a certain emotion. They were never ‘neutral’. Another ridiculous element they added was the sudden change of moods whenever your sim walked into a room with a sculpture or painting that was created in a certain mood. Did your sim’s father die 5 minutes ago? No worries, just take a look at a playful painting and you’re all good again. This was not the emotional system they promoted. This was a mechanic that was way too flexible and not realistic at all even on a cartoony level. It completely destroyed the possibility to make beautiful screenshots and stories of your sims without having to use posepacks and this was exactly what I loved doing.
Of course there were also the other restrictions like the lack of toddlers, swimming pools, dishwashers, pregnancy leave… the super tiny neighborhoods with fixed lots and those horrible loading screens… It was definitely a step back from Sims 3. They did announce they would prioritize performance over content this time, but it seemed to me that they weren’t given the appropriate budget for this game. Even back in 2014 it should’ve been possible to create at least an open neighborhood with lots you could move around to your desire and still imrpove performance compared to Sims 3. Of course that would mean the development cost would be higher so this is where I start my actual rant. I’m pretty sure EA didn’t give them the money they needed to create a proper sequel. EA is notorious for being a cashgrab company and they saw more profit in a low cost model that would attract the new generation who grew up with mobile games and NOT with the older Sims games. They saw money in those teens and younger kids who weren’t in the possession of an up-to-date gaming pc and therefore were used to playing stuff like candy crush on their phone. And of course, they were right. This was a huge group of people it turned out and they considered Sims 4 a success.
But what about their old player base? What about me? What about everyone else that was like me? We had been looking forward to a sequel for five years already. This was no sequel. This was a different game made for different players who never experienced the enormous and free worlds of Sims 3. On top of that, this wasn’t a game for creative people either. They took away create a style, they took away toddlers (thank god they fixed that one though), they made the baby stuck to a crib, they added loading screens, sims would look vastly out of place now if CC’d, everything a creative person loves to do, to direct their game and have all the freedom to create any kind of picture they desire was taken away.
In the beginning I still had hope. I thought: expansions are going to turn this game into something great just like they did with the other series. But even here EA decided to take the cash-grab route instead. Instead of releasing expansions with a decent amount of content they went for the modern way of DLC: add only one or two extra things per DLC. Comparing expansions of The Sims 4 to expansions of The Sims 3 and simply calculating the amount of hours of gameplay each expansion gives if you try out everything once showed how TS4 expansions are only a fraction of what TS3 had to offer. Again: their arguments were about keeping the performance good enough for even low-end laptops. But seriously my phone could probably run TS4 without any lag. This day and age it IS possible to create way more than what they do with the TS4 and still have a decent performance even on an outdated PC. So this had to be a matter of budget. I don’t blame the developers. They get their money from EA. I blame EA for not giving the developers enough money to make a worthy sequel or to make worthy expansion packs. And it’s not just with Sims 4 btw. They completely ruined the Mass Effect series as well with that monstrosity they call Mass Effect Andromeda. If you google a bit about what happened there, you can see how bad management, a low budget and a deadline pushed way too early by EA messed up the entire development of that game. I wouldn’t be surprised if the same thing is happening behind the screens of the Sims 4, but we just don’t know about it.
The worst thing is, at least here in Europe, Sims 4 isn’t any cheaper than Sims 3. Even though the development cost was clearly a lot lower and even though they give us a lot less content, the base game and its expansion packs still cost the same amount as a Sims 3 expansion. You pay 40 euros for Get to Work, which gives you only 3 new careers. This is the same amount you pay for Ambition, which adds so much more. I don’t even want to speak about the Vampires game pack which is the prominent example of how EA decided to cut previous expansions into thousands of little pieces and then sell them for a high price each to get more money.
This finally brings me to the newly announced Cats & Dogs expansion. Again, at least half was cut off the content we had previously gotten in pets expansions and the only new thing they added was a vet career. To make it even worse, cats and dogs won’t be controllable so when the crappy AI abandons you and fucks one of them up, you are basically screwed since you can’t control them to fix the issue. We will have to see about this when it is actually released, but it’s perfectly possible your pet will get stuck in your house somewhere and die of starvation simply because you can’t get to it in any way. Besides this possible issue, it’s another restraint for creators. A lot of stories including pets can’t be made now since the pets can’t be directed into a desirable action or position. I can’t imagine every storyteller is patient enough to wait until the pet performs the desired action by themselves. Back in Sims 2 pet’s weren’t controllable either, but at least they had a cheat so you had the option of you really wanted to. Now they announced they won’t even give us that cheat. This isn’t because they don’t want to give us a cheat, it’s most probably because they never developed the possibility of controlling a pet to begin with. Again, I suspect this was a budget issue. If they wanted to make pets controllable, with their given budget they probably had to cut down on other stuff like autonomous AI. Again, EA decided to go cash grab instead of giving us more options and more freedom to create whatever we want with this game.
They have derailed from a sandbox game into a more RPG/mobile game kind of feel. I just can’t understand why they did that. Did they underestimate the size of their creative playerbase? Did they underestimate how restrictive some of their choices would be? I don’t think so. I think they simply didn’t care. They care about money, that’s what EA is famous for. They have been given ‘awards’ for being the worst gaming company plenty of times already. Sims 4 is one of the shining bright examples as to why they deserve those awards.
One can only hope that one day a different developer with a less money greedy publisher will pick up Sims where the third series left off and make their own version of The Sims. This already happened with for example Cities Skylines and Planet Coaster, who are succesors of Sim City and Rollercoaster Tycoon created by different companies. But as long as there’s no announcement about such a thing, all I can really do is be sad about what Sims 4 never was and never will be.
#ts4#sims 4#sims 4 rant#ea rant#ea#electronic arts#sims 3#ts3#i hope it's clear now for all of the sims 4 fans why the game receives the criticism you guys hate so much
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The Decision.
Beginning of 2017, I was in Sacramento, still looking forwards for a chance to chase a dream and working hard and looking for a promotion. In early March, I took my talents back to the Bay Area and got hired for the new job. Then 2 months of licensing and another month of training, July 24, 2017. I made a decision. I'm leaving a job that I've had since April 13th, 2001 and I'm going to leave it all out on this blog. Reason being? I loved it for a lot of years and I want to remember what I can remember. So if there were anyone and anything that you can blame me for, then, here's my side of the story. 16 years at a company, I think I have the rights to say whatever I want to say. '''Twas was the day that was senior year in high school. I went and started looking for a job because I chose to go to Chabot College, a community college local to most of the East Bay. I went in, first one I met was the General Manager, Eric Martin. When anyone ever talks about first impression, that guy impressed me. I was a 17 year old, looking for a job with no resume in hand. He professionally told me to fill out an application and asked if I wanted to be interviewed immediately. "Sure, let's do it." Two days later I was sitting in the middle of a store front inside Bayfair Mall going through orientation with a bunch of other future co-workers. First person I met, Nam Huynh. We eventually even served popcorn and trained together in Union City. We took over the A side and we had tons of fun. If you want to teach your employees to upsell, just say "managers said if we don't make enough profit, they won't give us raises". Never not upsold ever since then. I met a lot of people like Yolanda, and later on "Army" (yeah I graced him that name) and also Soap, his friends, his family. Hell, we even joked and called ourselves a race team, "Century B16" as in Bayfair 16. The chance came around August, Rush Hour 2 weekend. One of the managers asked if I was interested in working in the booth, turned out to be one of my future best friends, Marvin Capistrano. On to the booth I went. Talking about building up movies, breaking down movies, hanging out with Duane talking about Pootie Tang. Man, crazy days. First time I ever built a movie was, Zoolander. Dry runs after dry runs, hot print break downs on Thursday. I slowly but surely deterred from going to school. Then, a GM put me on probation and wanted to fire me. I will never forget this, simply because I wasn't properly trained and this 30 day probation, I lasted longer than the GM and his crew. I learned one important thing, training. Which is also another thing that I've learned, to be a people's person. Next GM came, Charles, I breezed through it and apparently we were doing a bad job. Let me remind you, at the time, the ATM at Bayfair was stolen!!!! Then, during that time I met my little big sister Erica. Although we didn't exactly work together all the time but we were always close. I love Erica to death. She's definitely bff status. Meanwhile, supposedly the theater wasn't doing good, so this Latino dude name Lazaro came along, and this other Asian ricerocket driving dude name Anthony Tan came about... with Brian Pacquing.... The rest was history. Rios, if you ever get to read this, I still hate you for making me cry. But it was definitely tough love. I learned the most from him. I learned how to be tough on someone, but real. You can't yell at someone that consistently yell, nags and bitch about things. You MUST teach. For that, Rios, I forever owe you. To Anthony Tan, you taught a young kid what's right and what wrong. You taught me how to grow up and be a man. I might not always understand you at the time, but boy I sure received the message. Rios did good and took over and taught me how to be good, but when it was his time to leave, here comes Julius. David Wilson-Scott bka Julius Pirie Scott, you are way beyond a father figure to me and even more as a brother. You taught me how to trust my skills and be great. We went to see Usher, we saw Kanye, and we saw riots at the theater, but you taught me everything and you did not hold back any knowledge. I learned from you to give your knowledge out unconditionally. Thank you. Then, it was time for me to leave. Cinedome 8 East Fremont. Ben Lin, Montry Souvanthong, Ashley Perreira. You three were more than what I can ask for from a new GM, Ben knowing me the most by working with me at Bayfair but the other two kept me sane. Jeff Herzstein, thank you for trusting a 21 year old kid to tell you to spread your wings and trust your skills, thank you for helping me become a fair and smart GM. Adam Bebee and Adam Bauer, you guys were good and ya two taught me how to be a fair GM and I love the fact that you guys gave me respect. To the late Jane Benjamin, may you Rest In Peace, or well, keep going to forever create havoc! I love you Jane, I love the fact that you wanted to work and you love me and respected me. When everyone told me to avoid you, I didn't, I got close to you. Thank you for the countless meals of country way, Disneyland Mickey ears and the bottle of champagne for the holidays. I love you. I hope you look after me. Two years later, when Cinemark came running and bought out Century. I took my talents to Union Landing. Jacqueline Brooks, for the record, I hate you as a co-worker, but I love you as a brother. We never get along not because we have differences, but we don't get along because we all want to look out for each other. Two years at 25 made me love you like you're the big sister I never had. To Leticia Gonzalez Solis, you, you're a beast. Hug hug, kiss kiss, little hug big kiss little kiss. I taught you everything I got and you gave me all your effort every day. Out of all people that followed me, you were not the smartest but I know 100% you worked the hardest. Baby boy Ali, I know you got my back and I'm sorry I wasn't there for you when you needed me, but trust me, if you ever need anything, you know I for damn sure wish that was me that took that bottle to the head instead of you. The two years of 25 was so good, it exhibited my skills. Then I earned a promotion to open my own theater. For the fucking record. These years at Hayward, forever let me say what I feel, because I am, and still am very angry about the process on how and what happened. First, when the audit program happened, I was opening the theater. Second, my self destruction and choice of going back to school was directly affected by Cinemark. I opened the theater, the shopping complex and the recession hit hard, so the projected attendance was short by almost 40%. It was 2008. Then Cinemark gave all the managers in the Bay Area reduction in geographical allowance. Mind you, all managers in the Bay Area were "century" pat while I was "Cinemark" pay but the cut was all across, so I got less money. Not to mention, the first day the paycut happened was at a Cinemark conference, that's not encouraging to me. Not to mention, my superior discouraged me for getting higher education, simply telling me to focus more at work and talk about how great advancement is. Then came the budgeting process, I was compared to a 8 screen cinedome on payroll, to reduce payroll at a new location, I was told to also act as the MR guy and the GM 5 days a week during slow season. Then I was blamed for lack of production, bad audit scores, no bonus and also more paycuts. 1600 bi-weekly check to 1200 when I decided to leave. So I'm tired of people saying "you were never there" or "you fucked up the payroll", because I didn't. Snitches gets stitches and even if I blamed my regional manager or higher ups, the small potato in me would never win. The Cinemark algorithm on reduce cost of living in 2009, made us, the managers get a pay cut. I have yet seen the facts and studies. And the small potato in me never mattered. Cinemark, century pay grade, they didn't care. For the second time I'm mentioning it, you take 1/4 of my paycheck and decrease my pay within 3 years, trust me, you would be as mad as me. I did have a good time at Hayward because it was challenging, look at it now, not too shabby, but I hate it. While I was working at this location. I lost my girlfriend. I never get to see her and I was stressed all the time. Don't like Hayward. The city hall wanted the theater to play at least 2-4 art films every week, so they can "attract" people. I was invited to the city hall meeting to have almost 2 hours to answer the fine citizens of Hayward on how a movie theater should be ran. Same people that discouraged me to be around and just wanted things their way. Not a happy place. Then due to poor mid 80s audit scores, I was told that I would have no chance to survive as a general manager, for the third time, let me remind you that you lost 1/4 of your pay at the same time since the beginning. I chose to go to Fremont. I will end this chapter like this. Fremont. It was a time for me to leave the moment I got there. Jason Cardosa, I gave you my all. I don't like to belittle people and it doesn't make me feel good. Countless times I was reminded how poorly I ran Hayward and how much I wasn't trustworthy enough to run a department, while every single department I ran was the best that you ever got when I was there. Strange. Apparently because I have GM experience then it's expected. I know I got skills, but you never really cared and tried to find a solution to solve the issue. You provide patchwork and I provide solutions. We had our differences, but it was much like Jackie and I, because we care. You stuck with me for 2 more years and how ungrateful am I but to leave you so shortly and with pretty close to no notice. I popped my last batch of popcorn, sold my last ticket and used my last set of movie theater broom. I don't care what anyone says, you out of every one that I know have the best potential and you're definitely not too young for a regional leader role, but be personable. That's what Farley taught me. Be there for your people and understand how they feel. I got to know you so much more when we went to watch Oblivion in LA and that was a good trip. I was happy we made that trip because I feel like you actually do care about people, but try that on some other people, they respect you more that way. To every single person I've trained, thank you for listening. To everyone that I screwed over. 16 years later, I am 100% proud to say that I don't have any. So, boom. Cinemark, Century, thanks for the memories. Notice I put all the memories on people? The people made it for me. The lives that I made better and taught, I'm proud of that. I always said I'll go back to Bayfair and kiss the floor before I quit. Well, I'll officially do that on Friday, but 100%, my theater life is done and thank you all.
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