JcDent

heh totally timed this to be on a monday

People talk a lot about "what radicalized them" and in reality it's likely that many things radicalized you gradually until you looked around and realized it.

But the earliest memory I have of realizing "something is not right with this" is of me as a child, freaking out about what I wanted to be when I grew up. As a fucking nerd, my first instinct was research and I started reading and watching and listening to anything that had to do with work and jobs and labor... And welfare. I was curious as to why people "didn't want to work" (I grew up in a very centrist, neoliberal family), or how to avoid unemployment (I was also an anxious child)

And I remember reading (or hearing?) some guy talking about welfare and saying something along the lines of: It's not that there isn't work available. Look around, there's plenty of work to do! The streets are full of potholes and the schools are falling apart and there is plenty of work to do! The problem is that nobody is paying for that work to get done. Even if it's necessary. So it won't get done. And people that could do that work, that want to, cannot, because they need to get paid.

And I though that was bullshit. Except I must have been like 10 so I wasn't swearing yet.

Now looking around I see the other side of it as well: people do want to work. People do dream of labor. But it's labor that serves us and the people around us, so it's not the kind of labor we're allowed to dream about.

People dream of having time and space to garden, to paint, to bake bread, to build furniture, to make clothes, to program open source projects. But we need to get paid.

And I still think that's bullshit.

This is a microblogvember post! Here's the list of prompts if you want to participate

The secret of the modern economy is that we have so many bullshit jobs around - and no, I have not read the book.

But there are entire industries of remora-like parasite companies that only exist because we CBA'd to make the world a more just place.

Probably the most lenient industry like that is flight compensation companies. EU and some other places mandate that airlines should compensate passengers if their flight is borked. Sounds easy enough, but then we have to define what constitutes a borked flight and what kind of borking could be considered the fault of the airline. Then you have airlines fighting tooth and nail against having channels for claiming compensation be open to passengers.

So flight compensation companies take the whole business of claiming compensation off the shoulders of the disgruntled passenger - who has better things to do that know what flight compensation is or to argue with airlines about METAR data - and uses their expertise to maybe squeeze some money out of the airline.

You don't even pay anything upfront, the company takes a success fee if the compensation comes through - if you're not compensated, you don't pay.

But it's an industry that exists because we have commercial airlines that will fuck up flights via overbooking (x% of passengers miss their flights, so you sell [plane capacity]+x% tickets to maximize flight efficiency) or pilot scheduling issues or maintanance and has an interest in lying about the reasons to withhold compensation.

Anyway, I dream of a world where people who don't want to "work" don't have to because I believe that, at least for the game industry, people who aren't forced to grind away 8-10 hours of their day is a great boon. If nothing else, the mod scene shows how willing people are to put in hour after hour of work into something that won't net them any monetary gain!

This was probably the hardest topic thus far and partially why I didn't post yesterday.

Because I write these based on the first idea that comes to my mind - and I don't really have fidget toys.

I'll fidget with an interesting object that I have in my jacket's pocket.

But if I'm bored and have nothing, I'll either be poking and prodding my head to feel the bones and musculature or whatever under my skin or using my tongue to explore some dumb feature of my mouth.

This leads to dumb bodymod fantasies like drilling tiny holes in forehead to implact electrodes or a morph sequence that sees teeth merge into a beak.

mine is that soft scifi > hard scifi

Nowhere was it more annoying than in Mass Effect, but it can be found as far as Star Control III

Was it what made Star Control III bad? No, but it didn't help, I bet

Among the reasons why I hate it is that stellar civilizations getting wiped out would not only leave a lot of trash and signs of their activities, but also worlds that have been stripped bare of raw materials

So while a galaxy is a big place - a really big place - you'd still encounter patches of stuff that has been mined out to fuck

There wouldn't be any legendary homeworlds that are top-of-the-line in 4X desireability terms because everything would have been nommed up already

Plus, in ME at least, the reason for wipes is extremely fucking dumb, the dumbest thing in the fucking series that also includes "Asari don't look like blue space babes since every species sees them as their own space babes" ass-covering retcon delivered as a throwaway background NPC chatter which makes no God-damn sense and is as obvious a reaction to criticism as declaring that Asari don't actually use material from non-Asari parents for babies