For those unaware, Medieval Times is a dinner-theater that specializes in a medieval ambient experience. Beginning in 2022, two of its locations unionized under the American Guild of Variety Artists (AGVA); and since then, Medieval Times has been waging one of the most vicious anti-union campaigns in recent memory. I am saddened to report that this campaign successfully concluded this week, preventing the union from ever negotiating a contract.

The full details can be found in this Huffington Post article on the scale of the effort. But to summarize how devastating this campaign has been from Medieval Times: last February, 27 workers went on strike against the company. Today, only 7 of those 27 strikers have jobs with it. So many members have been purged or replaced that a looming effort by the the anti-union National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation to decertify the union has finally gotten it to stand down at both locations. This is ultimately an important and cautionary tale in how winning a union is only the first, not last, stage of the fight:

be kind to yourselves please

EDIT: just gonna toss this in here cuz wowzers this reached wayyyyyy more people than i thought it would, go play Get in the Car, Loser! from @love!!!! playing through it was, like, a genuine mental-health-breakthrough moment for me. it helped me recognize a lot of the awful thought processes i'd internalized from my years-long dysphoria-fueled-depression and start the long process of taking better care of myself.

ROGUELIKE MAHJONG

I saw another post about these developments on Mastodon and the link includes pics of the development visions themselves, which look kinda neat tbh (obvious cn for quotes of violent settler nonsense): https://macleans.ca/society/sen̓aḵw-vancouver/

I especially liked this part:

What chafes critics, even those who might consider themselves progressive, is that they expect reconciliation to instead look like a kind of reversal, rewinding the tape of history to some museum-diorama past. Coalitions of neighbours near Iy̓álmexw and Sen̓áḵw have offered their own counter-proposals for developing the sites, featuring smaller, shorter buildings and other changes. At the January hearing for Iy̓álmexw, one resident called on the First Nations to build entirely with selectively logged B.C. timber, in accord with what she claimed were their cultural values. These types of requests reveal that many Canadians believe the purpose of reconciliation is not to uphold Indigenous rights and sovereignty, but to quietly scrub centuries of colonial residue from the landscape, ultimately in service of their own aesthetic preferences and personal interests.
That attitude can cast Indigenous people in the role of glorified park rangers—and even then, with limits on their authority. … But Indigenous nations are accountable, first and foremost, to their own citizens.