The Spazzinggrounds

Leverage had a lot of well-researched things to say about the real world, but the one I always come back to, from The Double Blind Job:

Sophie: These are not small fines. Last year, my department handled a case where the company had to pay out $2.5 billion.

Hoffman: Oh, yeah. Everybody heard about that. But what the news didn’t tell you is that that company made $16 billion on the same drug. That fine was 14% of the profit. 14%. That’s like tipping your waiter.

“A fine is a price” – John Rogers, creator of “Leverage”

In some countries the fines associated with things like parking tickets are defined in terms of the offender’s income, so that a ticket that might cost an average person $20 would cost a billionaire millions. I think we should do the same with corporate fines - if a company does something that breaks the law, it should be fined in proportion to how much it made from breaking the law, so that a company that makes 16B through illegal means gets fined, say, 18B for doing so.

Not to be a Boomer but your social media should be your own space, not something employers are allowed to look at to judge you beyond the qualifications stated in your resume and cover letter

The other day my work had us take a social media survey about what social media platforms we’d be comfortable posting about our products on and I selected “I don’t use social media” before immediately coming over to Tumblr to dunk on them

@claracaboozle

you are right this is wild

someone needs to say very loudly that peaceful protests are not morally superior to violent riots or any other form of violent resistance. people do whatever works for the specific goal in their situation. if the university students are peaceful it is because that's what their strategy is. it is not because peace and dancing is the only legitimate response to seeing a child on your phone with half his head blown open.

And that ppl have different standards of what a peaceful protest even *is*, so I'm not particularly concerned about seeming peaceful to everyone. There's ppl that consider blocking a street violent, after all

you ever see a poll and just Know that a character lost purely because their source material is less well known than the winning character's

there'll be polls that are like "bipolar swag bracket round 1: PIKACHU from POKEMON vs SQUIMBUS from SOME MANGA FROM 2003 THAT ONLY SOLD 40 COPIES"

and you'll look in the comments and it's all "vote squimbus!" and *8 paragraph essay about how squimbus canonically has bipolar* and "#squimbus sweep!" and "squimbus my beloved" and *personal story about how squimbus inspired them to get help for their bipolar disorder*

and the only comment referencing pikachu is like "i have no clue who squimbus is but i like pikachu"

so you decide "yeah sure i'll vote for squimbus why not" and you see the results and it's like

pikachu: 93%

squimbus: 7%

Mental health is just fucked permanently at this point.

It’s exhausting being constantly gutted for everyone hit by wave after wave of stupid fucking studio closures.

fuck this industry holy shit

you see news of nintendo & capcom etc posting big money results and yeah they get that cos they dont periodically gut their own company every year like holy shit guys, you make money by retaining your talent you dumb assholes

every useless brainless executive burn in shitfire challenge

Gods the industry is spiraling hard right now, and the indie scene is terrible for different reasons - most people can't spend their time working on unpaid things, and good luck if you're a small studio that wants to find a publisher so you can actually get paid when they expect 4/5 times return on investment, so your 5 person team that wants to spend two years on a project better expect to turn over 4 million, otherwise no publisher is gonna be interested. This is the hell my studio and I are in right now and it's fucking ridiculous.

Sorry to hear that, it's frustrating as hell and the hunt for a publisher is a literal nightmare. Think part of the reason is that sales expectations haven't budged from Covid lockdown levels where everyone was cooped up inside.

Small indie studios can't even bootstrap the business by doing 3rd party/consultancy work.

It does make me genuinely concerned for what the game release landscape is going to look like in a few years. Lack of investment today will absolutely have ramifications.

not only are these pics real, the second one in particular was taken within 10 minutes of my childhood home and is an area ive driven through >1000 times

They absolutely look like that; my fave is the I-10 410 interchange

which has the nice combo of looking like THAT but also you have the ridiculous boom in housing from the baby boom *right there* You can even see the elementary school i went to (on the left, next to the baseball diamond in the private school next door)

Georgia's got a couple of those too! We call this one "Spaghetti Junction". Sometimes I have to use it on my way home depending on if I need to run errands east of my house.

Fun fact: According to a list of traffic hotspots put out by the American Transportation Research Institute, Spaghetti Junction was number 1!

But aesthetically, at least this one looks kinda symmetrical if you squint hard enough. If you wanna see a real doozy, here's where I-20 meets I-75/85, smack dab in the heart of Atlanta.

Art

Watching people call a UFO photo from 1996 "AI", and then someone found a upload of it from 2008 proving it can't be AI & everyone treated that as tantamount to unedited and like

When Photoshop became big we had this wave of people just assuming photos pre-Photoshop had to be real, just forgetting photo editing already existed, and I guess now we have people starting to forget Photoshop exists, and attributing the dawn of fake photos to AI?

Like I was on a few forums devoted to debunking back in the day & a surprising number of people would look up if a photo existed before Photoshop, and post just that saying it's From Before Photoshop, as if it that alone was exonerating and people don't fake photos all the time pre-digital. Or even post-digital, as you could fake photos on computers before Photoshop, as this helpful documentary from 1986 shows

And now, I guess, the halcyon days before fake photos have shifted up to...2022? And people are just assuming it's AI, and when it's proved it can't be moving on like that answers that, the way they used to with Photoshop

being aromantic and into whump is like. shoutout to whump for being a great opportunity to engage with stories about intimacy and vulnerability and powerful emotion and physical interactions with other people and intense relationships that are not presumptively based in romance. what would i do without you.

i truly love seeing both aro and non-aro people reblogging and agreeing with this sentiment. join me, let's appreciate intimacy and vulnerability and powerful emotion and physical interactions with other people and intense relationships that are not presumptively based in romance. i love you whump genre.

their ship name might as well be theseus the way there's not a single original characteristic left there

I want to make sure everyone actually understands the severity of this.

When we say that 1.4 million people in Rafah have nowhere to go we are also talking about how Israel had taken over Rafah crossing, which is the sole access point for Gazans, preventing the movement of people and goods as a result.

For the past 7 months you've heard of famine and witnessed infants dying of severe dehydration. This is only going to exacerbate now that the only source of the already scarce resources of food and water is completely shut down.

For the past 7 months you have seen how many people Israel's weapons have severely injured and maimed and how the only remaining cancer hospital was also taken over by Israel. The situation of these people who are injured and sick is only going to get worse because despite them obtaining permits to leave Gaza for treatment, there is no way out anymore.

For the past 7 months you have seen countless people crowdfunding to evacuate their families and flee genocide. None of these efforts are going to go anywhere and no one would be allowed out of Gaza for the foreseeable future, while Israel goes on with its barbaric mission of attempting to annihilate the people of Gaza.

Absolutely no access. Everyone is trapped. Nowhere to go.

every time i start to feel cringe for being too deep in the hyperfixation i remember the intense depression i have waded through and have to remind myself that enjoyment is fleeting (so grab it with both hands), and life is for loving (so hold that love close), and if anyone thinks i’m cringe they must not be having a very good time (and i hope they can find a good time soon).

oh so they’re just saying the quiet part out loud? Good to know they’re just out and open now

That’s not the quiet part.

There’s something else, something they might not even be fully aware of themselves. The real quiet part is that if it was *their* child or *their* ectopic pregnancy they’d pull out all the stops to save their life or get their grandchild aborted. Planned Parenthood sees reactionaries and regressives all the time, and they are every bit the nightmare patients you’d imagine them to be. But the one thing all those patients have in common is that *their* abortion is *justified*, and the next week they’ll be outside the clinic again, rejoining the protestors for “killing their baby”.

It’d be one thing to have ghoulish principles, but the far-right have none at all.

When I was younger and had more time to waste on the internet, and spent a lot of time in various online forums getting into arguments -- on purpose -- I made up a game I called Six Degrees of Slut.

The game (which is a variation on the well known Six Degrees of Bacon) was very simple. In any discussion of abortion, see whether you could get the other side to articulate, within six back-and-forth exchanges, some variation of The Filthy Sluts Must Be Punished. Regardless of where their argument started, the goal of the game was to get them to admit that.

I never once lost a game of Six Degrees of Slut. On a few occasions the match was inconclusive - the other person left off arguing before we reached round six - but I never lost; I never once reached six rounds of debate with a prolifer without them expressing some variation on this sentiment. But what was really remarkable to me was, a lot of times, that there was no effort involved at all -- they would blurt it out themselves, with effectively no provocation.

Scratch a prolifer, and you'll find right under the surface the conviction that The Filthy Sluts Must Be Punished. I have never once yet found an exception. Sometimes you don't even have to scratch.

That's what we really need to understand about reactionaries. The degrees to which they dehumanize others cannot be overstated. It's never hypocrisy for them if they get an abortion because, see, they had valid reasons. Nobody else ever would. They are just special, they are just better than you.

So I guess the neighbor doesn't need to trim their palm tree anymore.

It's been a bit windy today.

She feels the need to investigate.

I've got good news for you:

Establishing that Minamimoto doesn’t like meat is the bravest thing the twewy sequel could do. This man has FANGS, he is a LION, and he wants his pink stawberry boba or else he will pitch a fit.