Doing another of these again. I didn’t do it last month because my tablet got run over by cars (yes, plural) and by the time I got a replacement I had much bigger fish to fry.
You might have noticed I changed the name of the blog. I suppose I’m just in a different headspace now than I was when I started the blog. To be a bard in today’s society is to dwell in obscurity unless you’re lucky enough to win the publishing lottery and be chosen by the ruling class if they think they can profit off your work. To create anything is to scream into the abyss. Eventually our voices will be silenced one by one, and eventually we will be forgotten no matter how famous we become. I care not for fame anymore, because I’ve realized this. I’m just going to keep writing and drawing whatever I feel like. The audience for my webcomic is growing, though. Ultimately, the thought of being famous, of being heard by a large number of others, kind of scares me, and yet I keep screaming because I can’t stop. It’s what keeps me alive.
Anyway, yes, online rubbish from November. I have a nice selection of it to go over this time.
Black Friday Blackout and Reddit Drama
I made sure not to spend a dime on Black Friday, did you? To not consume is an act of rebellion against our wealthy overlords. I’ve worked through a couple Black Fridays in my day, and they are hellish for people in retail or in call centers. People are forced to work overtime, unable to call in sick without being fired, and trampled over by customers either figuratively or literally. The whole machine would come to a screeching halt if everyone stopped spending money on Black Friday. Not that I hold much hope for enough people participating in Buy Nothing Day for that to happen. Then again, sales were down this year. Maybe it worked? If it turns out to be a trend, maybe.
The online push for Black Out Black Friday came loudest from Reddit this year. And this sadly came around the same time that the capitalist class discovered the Antiwork subreddit, and moved to extinguish their dangerous ideas, which to be clear aren’t necessarily against all forms of work, just the exploitative kind where you’re giving up years of your life to make someone else richer. Yes, in the midst of the Great Resignation, with more people quitting their crappy jobs than ever, the subreddit hit a million subscribers, and then the media took notice. Even Goldman Sachs started shaking in their breeches because the subreddit was getting too big. My beloved little club of like-minded individuals who see the truth of the situation of workers in the US was then quickly subverted and compromised. Flooded with posts from suspicious brand new accounts gradually changing the conversation of the subreddit from discussing the reality of the exploitation of the working class, to discussing wage inequality between races and genders, how they quit their jobs, the ethics of tipping waiters, or blaming everyone’s woes on Boomers instead of the rich. Things that either pit the working class against itself or otherwise don’t threaten the system as a whole. It was being brigaded by fake accounts started by corporate shills. The bots haven’t been enough to completely derail the subreddit, but they’re clearly trying. The people who were serious about Antiwork fled and created their own smaller subreddits. The post I’m about to share below might well have been the final nail in the coffin:
When Reddit Inc. posts something like this, it’s over. “Aww see, not all business owners are bad. We got them to listen to us, mission accomplished. Now stop complaining and get back to work.” If anything in this post really happened, it wasn’t in America that’s for sure. But I think it’s fake. “I’ll take ‘Things That Never Happened’ for $500, Alex.” Something similar happened a few months ago when the media discovered the Herman Cain Award subreddit, and it was subsequently forced to block out the names and pictures of idiotic antivaxxers who chronicle their ironic demise to Covid on their public Facebook pages. This practically neutered the subreddit, it’s not nearly as effective anymore if you can’t see the names and faces behind the posts. The Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements took some time for the capitalist class to subvert and extinguish, but they’ve really been on top of nipping the antiwork movement in the bud before it caught on. Probably because that’s an even bigger threat to them.
So yes, back to Black Friday. A new subreddit called Black Friday Blackout was started as kind of a sister subreddit to Antiwork, in hopes of spreading the word to boycott Black Friday. Then the media caught wind of Antiwork. Shortly after, one of the moderators on Antiwork did a post trying to call off the Black Friday Blackout, calling it unrealistic, and instead encouraged only boycotting Amazon and nothing else (which wouldn’t actually hurt them much, since they do Cyber Monday). It was obvious that the mods had either been bribed, threatened, or had guns pointed to their heads. This resulted in a messy divorce between the two subreddits, and a splintering of the community. Now Antiwork has been largely de-fanged. Maybe it’s not completely hopeless, not every post seems to be from a mysterious bot and you still see some traditional antiwork discourse on the subreddit. Even if the mods have sold out or been replaced by corporate shills, it’s not like they can go around deleting posts for no good reason without people getting suspicious. But it’s clear that the subreddit has been compromised. It is now under the microscope and subject to the Psychological Operations of the ruling class. I’m just sad that it got discovered, I miss the days when it was more niche. It definitely changed my perception. But, the fact that the subreddit blew up the way it did means enough people are waking up. It’s bigger than Reddit. Can the idea be subverted forever?
The most depressing job recruitment ad ever.
So you’re 65 years old, you’ve been working since you were about 18, and finally after almost 50 years, you can live your life again as you choose, for the years you have left. But why retire when you could be flipping burgers while being yelled at by customers and managers? All the younger employees got fed up with the abuse and left, but that just spells opportunities for you! You can even relive your youth by getting uncontrollable facial acne!
Don’t the people in the picture just look like they’re laughing at you? Oh haha, look at that old geezer who needs to go back to flipping burgers for poverty wages to get by, what a loser. Are these just corporate executives dressed in normal people clothes? I can’t imagine reaching old age and being forced to work fast food. It used to be that the elderly lived with their families and were taken care of and treated with respect. Nowadays they’re just thrown to the wolves. They have to keep working until they literally can’t work anymore, at which point they’re thrown into retirement homes that take them for every penny they’re worth, and forgotten. If they don’t end up homeless. Everyone in the US is too individualistic to care.
Fast food jobs are best done by people who are still in denial that they’re going to die one day and they’re giving up their best years to a greedy CEO. By the time you’re of retirement age it’s a little harder to live in denial about impending death. I know some elderly people get bored after retirement and actually choose to work (likely due to a lifetime of brainwashing and basing their self-worth on their employment status), but you really want to spend the last years of your life where you still have your wits and your motor skills doing this kind of a job? Would anyone ever actually choose that? Not to mention the job is a lot harder if you have arthritis, back pain, a bad hip, etc. Managers don’t let you sit down and rest, and they’re not going to like it if you need a lot of bathroom breaks, as elderly people often do. I remember at the call center I worked at, there was this elderly guy who had to work there for the insurance. He had a weak bladder, and he still got chewed out by his supervisor all the time for taking bathroom breaks too frequently. He shouldn’t have been working, he should have been on disability. It’s like the rich are trying to squeeze every last bit of toothpaste out of the tube, getting as much work out of the poor as they can, even at the end of their lives. How sad that anyone has to do this. If I got to this age and had to work fast food in order to survive, I would probably consider just ending it all on my own terms because by then life’s not going to get any better. At least if you’re doing this kind of job when you’re young there’s still some sort of hope that you’re eventually going to get a better job. By 65 and older it’s a little too late to climb the corporate ladder.
Cartoons then and now
This is at least a couple years old, but it’s been making its rounds on Facebook again. It mocks the homogeneous so-called CalArts style of animation that was popular for most of the 2010s. In some ways I agree with it, but it is being a bit disingenuous and unfair. Firstly, you really can’t use anything by Hanna-Barbara that isn’t 1940s Tom and Jerry as an example of good character design and animation. Only someone with their nostalgia goggles on would forget about the cheap, thick-lined, jerky animation of the dozens of Scooby Doo clones they produced. Animation really reached a nadir in the 1970s, and hasn’t been that bad since. The 1950s through the early 1980s is known as The Dark Age of Animation for a reason. I’m sure none of the cartoons below are quite as bad as that.
But yeah, other than that, the character designs in a lot of modern cartoons might be the same, but character design and animation are two different things. The characters can be much more expressive than this meme suggests. Another thing that was rather new to television animation in the 2010s was the storytelling. American cartoons almost never had ongoing storylines before then. They were always episodic, each episode was standalone so someone who was new to the series could jump right in without missing anything. The most you might see was a two-part episode. Anime always did storylines though, and that’s probably what influenced American animation. The only one out of the new ones I’ve watched is Steven Universe, but that had a very intriguing story that kept me watching the whole series. There were a few standalone episodes, but not many.
I do miss hand drawn animation, and I think it can still do things digital animation cannot. Nothing today quite captures the animation style of the 1930s and 1940s, when the art form was at its peak. But, this meme is cherry-picking. I’d much rather watch Steven Universe than Woody Woodpecker, who I find to be one of the most annoying classic cartoon characters, even if the animation was better (although I don’t think it was, from what I’ve seen it really wasn’t the best of the 1940s cartoons, Universal’s animation really couldn’t hold a candle to Warner Bros., MGM or Disney). That just goes to show, there were crappy cartoons back then too. Every era of animation is a mixed bag.
Are Right Wing Libertarians even Real?
Oh Chris Farley, how I miss you. Adam Sandler, not so much. Anyway, when I take those political compass tests, I come out as a left libertarian. There’s also left authoritarian (people who believe Stalin did nothing wrong, and would probably call my grandfather’s memoir about his time in the Soviet gulags CIA propaganda), right authoritarian (fascists), and right libertarian (republicans with bongs). But the more I think about it, I don’t think it’s possible to be both conservative and libertarian. Conservatives love authority. The self-professed conservative libertarians say they’re are all about no government, but really they just want to cut out the middleman and be ruled directly by corporations, without the pretenses. They believe in anarcho-capitalism; they want to get rid of government but still keep capitalism. Who needs health regulations and antitrust laws? Why shouldn’t five year olds be sent to work in factories and coal mines? Let’s just allow all the corporations to merge into one mega conglomerate and declare Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk the overlords of Earth and be done with it. Of course without government who’s going to bail out the corporations with our misappropriated tax money every time they tank the economy? That’s probably the only reason we still have a government at this point. That and paying for the military.
But anyway, wanting to give all the power to the rich and have nothing to regulate them is still authoritarian. In fact it’s even more authoritarian than a traditional dictatorship or a theocracy. These are the type of people who fly both the “Don’t Tread on Me” and the “Blue Lives Matter” flags in the back of their rusty old pickup truck, oblivious to how those two flags actually contradict one another. I’ve seen them compared to indoor house cats; they believe themselves to be independent, but their lives are dependent on systems they don’t know exist. They think they want freedom, but when they escape the house and have to face nature and the elements they don’t know what to do and they starve. They have no idea how horrible it would be if they actually got their way. And in the US the word “libertarian” is always equated to these self-deluding fools. I think it was done on purpose to whitewash actual libertarianism, which is a leftist political position. It’s all about muddying the waters, that’s how the wealthy stay in power. Those political compass tests are bollocks.
See this? Racist Karen and Facebook Conspiracy Theorist Karen are almost always the same person. What we call conservative libertarianism is really just a different brand of conservative authoritarianism. That’s why the political compass fails, and it was probably invented for the sole purpose of granting legitimacy to this actually nonexistent political ideology.
The Horrors of Fire Emblem Heroes Addiction
This blog post is getting too political, let’s talk about video games for a change. In February I started playing a mobile game called Fire Emblem Heroes. It’s the first mobile game I’ve ever really gotten into, since I’m a bit old school and prefer playing video games on the TV with a controller. I’ve been a fan of the Fire Emblem games for more than a decade now. It’s a series of strategy role playing games that play like a more complicated version of chess, or like Dungeons and Dragons but it does all the math for you. In 2017 Nintendo came out with this mobile game, which crosses over all of the Fire Emblem games and lets you collect characters from every game to use as your own little army. It’s very fun, it has a good story, and it’s very addicting.
The luckiest I’ve ever been on this game. Three 5-stars.
The game is actually free to download and play. But…there’s a catch. You’ll constantly be tempted throughout the game to spend real money, in order to buy “orbs” which you need to summon new characters. Summoning new characters is kind of like playing a slot machine. You spend orbs on each summoning (the first pull is free) and usually get crappy, weak characters but every now and then you get a good one. You can slowly and gradually earn orbs for free by just playing the game and completing different challenges, which is what I do, but spending money to get them would be so much quicker and easier. The lucky pull you see above is incredibly rare, especially for someone like me who never spends any money on it. But then you get people like the unfortunate fool in the first screenshot above who get hopelessly addicted and spend thousands on it. At least they’re helping to pay for the game’s high quality cutscenes and such, which oddly are far superior to the cutscenes in any of the console Fire Emblem games, even the most recent one, Fire Emblem: Three Houses. They’re the people who always beat my ass in the game with their absurdly strong characters that they’ve been building up since the game first came out. Gives me a bit of shadenfreude to read about stuff like this. But at the same time it’s kind of sad too. This is the devious undertone of the game. Sure it’s a fun game, but its purpose is to drain the wallets of suckers. Not to mention what could happen if an impressionable kid who didn’t know any better started playing it and decided to steal mommy’s credit card.
But what a dopamine rush it is when you claim your waifu. Isn’t she beautiful?
By the way, the Fire Emblem fandom is full of a lot of weirdos and pervs that love to drool over fan art, and you’ll see them on full display in the Fire Emblem Heroes Hell Facebook group in the comments. I follow it out of morbid fascination. Yeah, ahem…just research purposes. Hey don’t give me that look, at least I only lurk there and I’m just quietly appreciating the fan art. Some of these people love to openly and publicly announce their weird fetishes. Anyway, be warned if you decide to tread there.
The Rewards of the Veteran
Isn’t severe PTSD, possibly losing limbs, and watching your friends die all worth it if you get a free donut on Veteran’s Day? Poor fools. Veteran’s Day is known as Armistice Day in every other country, marking the end of World War One. But that was too anti-war for America, so they started this propaganda holiday. It’s all about fooling enough people to fight their pointless wars and bully other countries. Don’t you want to be held in as high regard as our veterans? You even get free donuts! If you really want to honor the veterans, you’d be antiwar. But the US pushes this twisted idea that to honor veterans you should be in favor of more wars so that more veterans will be created. It also helps to have a boogeyman to fight, like “terrorists”. I wonder if the Department of Defense (more like Offense) paid for this promotion, just like they pay Hollywood to make pro-war movies.
Top Five Regrets of the Dying
Anyway, I’m going to go down this list of common regrets of the dying and see how I’m doing.
1. I think I’m doing well in this regard. Especially lately. I’m doing my comic, my blog, I’m writing what I want to write, I no longer care about money or fame. I’m pretty content, all things considered.
2. This one is important to me. I want to watch my son grow up, I don’t want to miss out on his childhood. And I haven’t, so far.
3. You know when I look back on my school years, I do wish I’d talked back more and stood up for myself. I already feel this regret. If I could do it all over again I wouldn’t have taken all the shit I took from teachers and bullies back then. I could be doing better at this from now on. I’m rather shy and timid though, so it is difficult.
4. This one has been hard too ever since I moved to Florida. Facebook is pretty much the only way I keep in touch with friends. If I had more money I would be flying back to California for visits more often. This is one I don’t have much control over, sadly.
5. Thanks, I’m cured! I feel like this one is ableist. When you have actual chronic depression you can’t just decide to be happy. Brain chemistry doesn’t work that way. But just because someone is dying doesn’t mean they’re suddenly all-knowing, I guess. I do my best with what I can.
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