Horizon Forbidden West Exemplifies Bad Characterization | Extra Punctuation – YouTube

There’s an uncomfortably good point being made in this video. The literal entirety of the future of the human race is riding on Aloy. She knows this. Her friends know this. It should be imperative to all concerned that she should be kept from danger. Everyone should have helped to shoulder her burden, and forced her to accept their help, if need be, instead of allowing themselves to be sidelined, and letting her trot off into the wilderness alone.

This second game could have allowed you to play as Aloy’s friends. You could have cleared the way for her to come in, unlock this, and upload that, and generally be the DNA-gated hero she is. As her ally, maybe you could have died, and been replaced by another ally for a different chapter of the game. Maybe you could have unlocked different allies — you accumulate a whole bunch in the home base by the end — each with different abilities, and chosen who would perform each mission. Each “herald” could have had access to a subset of the skill trees, forcing you into whole new play styles throughout.

Dang.

That would have been amazing!

I hate realizations like this.

I’ve been stuck finishing the game, because I’ve just gotten bored with it. It’s just not… fun. You know? You remember, Guerrilla Games? The whole point of a video game? I want to unlock the upgrades on the few pieces of legendary-level gear I’ve managed to score, and the process is just ridiculous. Even with the difficulty turned down, and with “easy loot” turned on, trying to farm enough parts to upgrade everything turns the game into an MMO-level grind.

I’ve put the game aside, and been playing through Skyrim Anniversary Edition (the one with all the Creation Club content), and it’s been awesome. There’s enough new content mixed into the game that there are little surprises all along the way. Most of all, it’s fun. The first time I fired it up, I was grinning from ear to ear. After you start getting into the higher levels, you can have several different play styles available to you, and they all have their utility. It’s just fun to play. I guess that’s why Bethesda is still rereleasing the game after 10 years.

Christian Hypocrisy (About Healing)

Classic Jeff Arnold.

First, he hammers ministers.

“We are supposed to reveal Jesus; not us. And we are supposed to reveal redemption and not perfection. And you cannot reveal Jesus (just) because you talk in tongues, and don’t smoke cigarettes.”

Then he turns around and hammers congregants.

He points out that we go to the doctor, wait forever, spend a lot of money, take the medicine, and then we don’t get better. We go back to the doctor, adjust the approach, repeat the process, and keep trying. But then, when it comes to God, we go to the altar, pray and get prayed for, and if we DON’T get healed on the spot, then we get discouraged, think that God doesn’t love us any more, and give up on the process.

I may or may not see myself in his comments, which is a weasely way of saying that I’m convicted.

Sex Education Acts As A Wake Up Call To Parents And Teachers

Old-fashioned parents and teachers needed a wake-up call, and Netflix’s Sex Education has provided just that.

The hit series, which recently blessed our screens once more for its third – and not final! – series, should act as a bible for all teachers and parents who are still stuck in outdated views about sex and relationships.

Parents and teachers no longer have any excuse to slut-shame, be judgemental or show anger or discrimination towards young people’s sexual endeavours – it’s 2021, and as Sex Education says, we should be ‘f*cking [that] pain away’.

Source: Sex Education Acts As A Wake Up Call To Parents And Teachers

I can’t imagine stringing together more wrong words in a row. You only have to look at social statistics for young people for the past 20 or 30 years to understand just how terrible modern society has become as an environment for growing up. Anxiety and depression are becoming staggering problems. I just read a study that reported that the average teenager’s anxiety is what people sought professional psychiatric help for 50 years ago. I’d try to find a source, but only the most-ardent contrarians would dispute that general idea. Doubling down on the behavior that’s making people crazy is probably not the right answer.

Reselling gig work is TikTok’s newest side hustle

Resellers buy gig work for as cheap as $5 to resell for profit

Source: Reselling gig work is TikTok’s newest side hustle

Yes, you can make money by looking for opportunities to match up supply and demand, and legitimately take a cut of the transaction. I didn’t read the whole thing, but I doubt that they talk about the flip side of this “work.”

I read a classic Hacker News comment by a person who claimed that they were employed by 3 or 4 companies at any given time, and sent all of their work to 3rd-world countries, to be done by contractors. They “did nothing,” and collected multiple salaries. Except that… they didn’t “do nothing” at all. Managing all of this work would be a lot of work in and of itself.

See, in either the case of using TikTok to work the arbitrage, or in misrepresenting yourself as an employee (and not a outsourcing firm), this takes real work. You have to constantly be hustling. Not only that, but in doing all of these things, you’re going to frequently be getting mixed up, caught in the middle, and have people (from both sides) getting mad at you. You have to the special kind of person — e.g., a psychopath — for this to not affect you, if you want to do this sort of thing for any length of time. So this is hardly some sort of quick and easy way to get rich doing nothing.

Compelled Speech vs. The First Amendment

In the lawsuit, she argues that denying requests to allow her to ignore students’ preferred names and pronouns “deprived her of due process and equal protection of law” and violated her First Amendment rights to free speech and exercise of religion.

Source: A Kansas teacher is suing school officials for requiring her to address students by their preferred names, saying the policy violates her religious freedom – CNN

This is essentially the issue that propelled Jordan Petersen to prominence in Canada, and it seems bound for the Supreme Court. Will the Supremes find an interpretation of the First Amendment that can compel people to say things they don’t want to say, under the threat of the police power of the US Federal Government? No matter how desperately much you might want to use the government’s authority to force people to say things you want them to say — about anything; not just transgendered pronouns — the concept seems hard to square with the clear language and intent of the First Amendment. But, hey, Citizens United, so anything could happen these days.

Ricard acknowledges in the suit that despite being told that another student who was listed in school records as female preferred to be addressed by a different name, Ricard called the student “Miss [student’s last name].” Ricard was reminded multiple times to use the student’s preferred name and pronouns, but continued to call the student by their last name only.

That all being said, according to the article, the teacher in question seems to have been deliberately belligerent in addressing the student, and trying to provoke a confrontation. If that’s true, she is… how you say? A jerk. Kids get called by different names all the time. We call our youngest by his middle name, and no teacher has a problem with that.

Like the case of the no-gay-wedding-cakes baker, this case seems to have been specifically engineered to go to court. I guess the people who cheered Amazon and Cloudflare for throwing Parler off their services can thank Masterpiece Cakeshop for establishing the legal affirmation to do so, but I wonder if the people behind Parler would reconsider their (presumed) support of the baker now. I guess we’ll soon find out whether the Supremes will defend the right of individuals in the same way. I don’t see how they couldn’t, but then does the government (school) have the ability to fire her for these shenanigans, even if she has the legal right to do them? We’re probably going to find this out as well…

Disney CEO apologizes to LGBTQ employees, halts political donations in Florida

Chapek said Disney was rethinking how it approaches political donations on Wednesday; on Friday, he said the company would pause them altogether pending an internal review. However, Disney will increase its “support for advocacy groups to combat similar legislation in other states,” Chapek said.

Source: Disney CEO apologizes to LGBTQ employees, halts political donations in Florida

To be clear, Disney considers stopping political donations in Florida to be a “sanction” against the State for trying to pass this law. Regardless of any personal stance on the proposed bill, I just want people to stop and think about what this says about how our government works, the power that political donations gives to corporations, and how the press reports this threat.

Former CEO Jim Keyes: Why Blockbuster Really Died and What We Can Learn from It – D Magazine

“Contrary to popular belief, Netflix did not kill Blockbuster,” Keyes said. “Blockbuster actually had a better opportunity to be Netflix today than Netflix did, and that’s what I was hoping … to accomplish.”

Source: Former CEO Jim Keyes: Why Blockbuster Really Died and What We Can Learn from It – D Magazine

No, Keyes killed Blockbuster.

I’m watching the Netflix documentary on Prime. It paints a sympathetic picture of Netflix (at least, so far), so I don’t understand why it’s not on Netflix. I’d like to understand why this is the case. Anyway.

In 2007, Blockbuster’s foray into DVD’s-by-mail was going pretty well. They had successfully navigated bringing up a complicated service, and getting a couple million customers. Even though they were still hemorrhaging money at the time, they had something. Around that time, major Blockbuster stakeholder, Carl Icahn, refused to pay the current CEO, John Antioco, his bonus, so he left. Icahn installed Jim Keyes, formerly of 7-11. Keyes wanted to “double down” on the physical stores, and scuttled their postal offering. The documentary has Antioco and the guy running their by-mail service on camera explaining all of this, so this isn’t second-hand hearsay. Yet, here’s Keyes, 10 years later, in 2018, saying that he was trying to lean into the subscription offering, and blaming all of their troubles on banking. I mean, say that you nixed the offering because you had insurmountable debt problems, and hoped that cutting it loose would help you refinance in the current market, but don’t claim that you were hoping to be a “better Netflix than Netflix” when you killed the service.

And, of course, Keyes continued to collect his $750,000/yr salary and $500,000 bonus, in the same year as the company was filing for bankruptcy. This is the disconnect in the American oligarchy. We Americans pride ourselves on our supposed meritocracy, but if we really had a meritocracy, Keyes would only have been able to collect his bonus if he had successfully navigated the banking climate back then, and procured a better exit strategy for Blockbuster than selling it wholesale to Dish. He’s rewriting history here, and I’m betting it’s because he’s looking for another gig. Wikipedia doesn’t list his age, but the date of his MBA puts him still in his early 60’s.

We’ve reached a point with the web now that you can go back pretty far, and still get to actual, reported sources. There’s no running from history when Google makes it so easy to find, and major web sites’ content management systems have gotten so good at keeping their links working…