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Cake day: November 22nd, 2023

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  • The original comic was rather popular at the time, and as a result, it became an early meme before mass-scale meme culture had really taken off besides doge memes and “I can haz cheeseburger.” So it quickly entered the cultural zeitgeist of the early internet because the kinds of people into memes and gamer culture at the time would’ve been about the size of the terminally online crowd today.


  • Another possibility is that she’s XY, but the Y never activated, so she developed female but with a single “faulty” X chromosome.

    I don’t remember my biology classes well enough to say, but wouldn’t that also mean that potentially neither of her parents were colorblind, since the Y would’ve come from her father while the faulty X would’ve come from her mother? And, if she were XY in this scenario, wouldn’t that mean that she’d pass that trait along to her kids as well?






  • The short of it is: why is he making that much money in the first place, especially at a time where the game’s industry has seen record-breaking layoffs for the past 2 years - worse than during the 2008 financial crash.

    The long of it is that they’re symptoms of the same problem and show the ever increasing wealth disparity between the aristocracy and the commoners in the US. In 2020, the wealth disparity in the US was said to be on par with France just before the French Revolution, where the price of a loaf of bread hit a full day’s wages for the average worker. To add to this, at least one of the people laid off was going on scheduled maternity leave the next day, which is probably in violation of some workers’ rights law, but because the majority of states are “at will” employment states, Bungie won’t face any consequences. The average time for people in the industry to find a new job is 2-4 months, and with all the layoffs, plenty of these people will never work in the industry again. And on top of that, these workers are already exploited so badly for their passion for making games that they could see a 50% or more pay increase with lower responsibilities for the same skill set just by changing industries. There are people working at Activision-Blizzard-King who are living out of their cars because they don’t get paid enough to afford rent within commuting distance of the studio.

    People are waking up to the fact that the boss makes 10 grand while we make a dime, and they’re getting pretty pissed about it.




  • On top of that, it doesn’t even do a good job of preparing kids for work since the majority of jobs will be in a team based environment while schools focus on individual/isolated learning almost exclusively.

    The modern school system was largely developed around the early 1900s with the intent of creating factory line workers: people who could remember and perform 2 or 3 repetitive tasks. This is further compounded by the rise of standardized testing, which provides a good base level for quality of subjects across the range of individual teacher’s skills but has become an administrative crutch that puts test scores above everything else, leading to a cycle where kids are taught only to remember stuff long enough to pass the next test and then dump it from memory for the next set of test subjects.

    Schooling needs a major revision from the ground up for the modern age.



  • Not blatantly, but there are signs of it even in the first book; and as the books go on, you can see almost in real time her political views shift from criticizing the system to defending it as she started becoming wealthy and benefiting from the system.

    I highly recommend watching Shaun’s 2 hour video on the subject, as it goes into great detail on the subject and makes for perfect podcast material.

    Some highlights include:

    • Obesity as a moral failing - want to make a character seem bad? Just make them fat!
    • Masculine features as a negative trait for women (sound familiar?) - want to make a teenage girl bad (and ugly) but don’t want to make her fat? Just talk over and over about her “mannish hands” and sharp jawline.
    • Token minority characters that are often stereotypes or border on racism - the black kid is named Shacklebolt, the Asian girl is named two single syllable last names (might as well have called her Ching Chong), the 12 year old Irish kid is obsessed with turning drinks into whiskey and blowing stuff up, etc.
    • The defense of the slavery of house elves using the exact same arguments that slave owners used before the Civil War in the US mentioned by somebody else, with a bonus criticism of Hermione as a girl with blue hair and pronouns for questioning and trying to change the system.
    • There are no good or bad actions, only good or bad people. It’s okay for the right people to use the torture spell, because they’re the “good guys.”
    • And a resolution that basically resolves nothing. Harry doesn’t kill Voldemort, he kills himself due to a magic technicality, and Harry goes on to become a magic cop to ensure the flawed system that the early books criticized doesn’t change.


  • Welcome to the hypocritical world of Puritan culture.

    Some of the earliest British settlers in the US were so extremist that the Church of England kicked them out after they tried to assassinate the king and replace him with a puppet of their own to force their beliefs on the rest of the country.

    It was partly these crazies that started the whole sex and bodies=bad and shameful thing in the US that advertisers still believe in today. And swearing is yet another of those weird things. But sex sells, so it’s okay to imply it as long as it’s selling a product and no other time.