J. C. Cantwell 🌻

👇🎯💯 The. Platform. Must. Be. Institutional. Reform.

bsky.app/profile/mcop...

some jackass whining Chief of War is in Hawaiian and you have to use subtitles

reactionaries when it's black elves: THIS IS UNREALISTIC! IMMERSION BREAKING!

reactionaries when indigenous Hawaiians speak actual Hawaiian:

Reporters shouted to ask what he was doing up there and he said he was "taking a little walk." He said something about the White House ballroom and made some gestures but it's not really making a ton of sense yet. Normal stuff

This is real: President Trump is standing on the roof of the White House briefing room right now and no one knows why

Today, IGN Entertainment announced that it would be laying off eight members of the IGN Creators Guild. This is 12% of our bargaining unit, and comes just days after our sister union, the Ziff Davis Creators Guild, underwent similar layoffs impacting 15% of their members. It also comes just months after our multibillion-dollar parent company, Ziff Davis, instituted a company-wide buyout that shrunk our unit numbers, with the express intent of avoiding future layoffs. And it comes just a little over one year after three of our members were laid off almost immediately after our union went public. The company has told us that the reason for this layoff stems from a Ziff Davis-mandate to cut costs despite several quarters in a row of year-over-year revenue increases, to which IGN Entertainment responded by coming for our members' jobs. This is perplexing to us, as we are told again and again that IGN Entertainment has had a tremendously successful year thus far thanks to their hard work. In just the last few months, our members have been absolutely essential to major events and livestreams, including San Diego ComicCon, Summer of Gaming, and IGN Live. Every single person impacted today was involved in and critical to the success of those events. Meanwhile, IGN Entertainment continues to spend money on costly acquisitions, only to turn around and gut those companies in the same way it is cutting away at IGN itself. For instance, last year, it acquired Gamer Network, and almost immediately laid off a number of staff critical to making those sites successful. The company has not responded to the union's questions about whether its budget for future acquisitions is being reconsidered as a cost-saving measure alongside these other apparently necessary personnel cuts. At a time when it is more necessary than ever to support its creators, IGN Entertainment is choosing to eliminate the individuals who ensure IGN remains competitive as generative AI

threatens our reach. We have been told that expert opinion pieces, original interviews, and work that leverages our staff's deep knowledge of gaming, tech, and entertainment are all essential to combating AI summarization and regurgitation of our work. Management has responded by cutting several individuals who do that exact work, as well as others whose job it is to ensure that these written and video pieces are published in a speedy manner — another component of combating AI we're told is critical. This continued cycle of repeated, aggressive cuts to our staff and being asked to do more with less, only for management to continue to spend on new business it isn't interested in sustaining cannot continue. We will enforce our interim agreement that guarantees better severance and other protections to laid off members, as well as demand additional support for those impacted. We will continue to bargain over our first contract with the aim of enshrining even better protections against further layoffs, working conditions continuously degraded by understaffing, and the encroachment of generative AI. And we won't stop fighting to ensure IGN remains the best destination for trustworthy, original, exciting, and creative work covering video games, entertainment, and tech. While IGN Entertainment management may not value us, we value one another and the incredible work we can do together. Behind the articles, videos, social posts, playlists, and maps of IGN are human beings, not just numbers on a spreadsheet to be pushed around when some number at the top isn't big enough. Without us, there is no IGN.

Today, IGN laid off eight extremely valuable members of our union and workforce via directive from our parent company, Ziff Davis. This, after two incredibly successful live events IGN Live and SDCC, and yet another corporate acquisition.

Please take a moment to read and share our full statement:

It's pretty wild. I feel like virtually every star at the Post is leaving. I'm sure there are people I'm missing. But I'm really not exaggerating. They've chased/induced virtually everyone out. I really can't think of ANY example remotely like it.

note that very smart young women and very smart young people of color very rarely get this reflexive "oh, this kid must be a GENIUS" treatment in our culture and in media that a certain type of privileged young white man in a stained hoodie always does

genius is something one must accomplish by means of their works, not because they took a standardized test

The Boy Genius Who Killed 14 Million Poor People What is the moral weight of responsibility for the men who carried out DOGE’s work?

i think the most important point made here is the one that’s not getting a lot of discussion; what ferritor did didn’t require any particularly unusual level of skill, and while i think he should be held accountable for the damage he did, so should the people who were responsible for oversight

texas democrats should stay away from texas to block redistricting *and* oregon, new york, california and any other blue state that can should nuke their red districts

The Spanish word for 'film' is 'película'.

As different as they are, these words derive from the same Proto-Indo-European root.

They originally only meant "thin layer" but they came to denote film tapes as well when these were invented.

My new graphics shows more words belonging to this family:

god, even setting aside the story that he’s trying to tell, he’s just genuinely a very, very poor writer

I mean, it seems like federal elected Ds are, in fact, acting like it?

I genuinely think a lot of this criticism is coming from priors that haven't been updated since May.

When complex systems inevitably fail the only options are (A) understand the system well enough to debug it, (B) place blind trust in other people who have done A, or (C) sympathetic magic. The harder A gets the more attractive C becomes.

If you restate edupol as people who have the background knowledge necessary to understand how the increasingly complex systems they rely on work vs people who don't it becomes IMHO a lot clearer. We've hit the point on the tech tree where untrained observation and intuition can't get you very far.

Hochul is from Western NY we love being a gigantic pain in the ass more than anything else in the entire universe

Donald Trump to appoint Federal Reserve governor and labour statistics chief this week US president set to tighten grip on economic information and policymaking after controversial sacking of BLS official

"tighten grip"

"controversial sacking"

Today in the casual, euphemistic media normalization of the fascism

Frankly, it’s crazy to me that the news isn’t making a bigger deal about Trump’s “antisemitism” crackdown ignoring the massive community of open Nazis in his base. I mean, I’ve long since abandoned the notion that political media has values, but this is HYPOCRISY and safe even for them to criticize

the past decade has been a story of repeated undermining of feminism and gender rights through telling gender minorities to prioritize something other than gender and mocking the idea of gender minorities in power, with the upside of threatening to destroy all progressive causes.

there is no distinction. it's in zero ways a coincidence that "girlboss" sneers coincided with the decision to elect a rapist over a woman the first time, and the associated primary. Sneering at girlbosses/"the next drone will be sent by a woman" = the woke-flavored poison pill to kill feminism

"Girlboss" is just a glove to handle misogyny leftishly

Just say "bitch," this is taking forever

REPORTER: Do you think the independent redistricting commission should be disbanded?

HOCHUL: Yes. I'm tired with fighting this fight w/ my hand tied behind my back. With all due respect to the good govt groups, politics is a political process. And to think we're gonna do this with a purity test ...

Also, PORN IS WORTH DEFENDING. It doesn't have to be a fight for what they most assuredly are coming for next!

and as far as responsibility goes, i think ferritor should be held criminally liable for the laws he broke while doing DOGE's work and referred for crimes against humanity

what ferritor needed was moral education — and the limits and boundaries that come with it. he needed to learn that he had obligations beyond his own interests & personal advancement. he needed to learn that he had duties to other people. his parents fostered his brilliance at the expense of a soul.

The Boy Genius Who Killed 14 Million Poor People What is the moral weight of responsibility for the men who carried out DOGE’s work?

i think i disagree with the idea that the ferritor should have been allowed to follow his own path during his schooling, neglecting assignments and being coddled for his apparent genius. i think, in fact, that this was the problem. www.thebulwark.com/p/the-boy-ge...

that isn't necessarily bad, it just means that an assumption like "people want sex, all things being equal" gets harder and harder to justify (no pun intended) when the conditions get more complicated

i think we're learning that when we relax a lot of material constraints human behavior and preferences are so much more varied and contextual than we gave credit for, and those constraints were a large part of what imposed regularities and generalizability

as an addendum to this thread, i'll be blunt and say that the "crab" form of right-wing sexual strategies is an old man ruling a harem and a bunch of young men who will die before they see a naked woman but believe they will right up until they do