It is so so important to show that queer people have always existed and are allowed to live long, happy lives. Young queer people–especially those in conservative areas–need to know that beingqueer is not a death sentence. Despite the many struggles we have faced, throughout history there have always been queer lives filled with joy and love. and you will find yours.
The future is unwritten, and in writing it we have a choice: To take control of our own destinies, or to leave things up to the very people who built this hell in the first place.
The House Has Gone Bust: Climate Change and the Super Rich
War … War changed a little bit.
If you’ve followed me on any social media platform at all for any length of time, you’ve probably gathered that Fallout: New Vegas is one of my top favorite video games. New Vegas is a first-person wasteland shooter RPG, if you didn’t know, and Ron Pearlman sets the scene in the game’s intro far better than I ever could, so go watch that, but the long and short of it is: 200 years after global thermonuclear war ravaged the planet and wiped out most of the human race, enough time has passed for civilization to rebuild in the irradiated wasteland, and it takes many interesting forms. Most organization centers around small tribal bands and microstates reminiscent of the Mad Max franchise, or around dwellers in the series’ infamous Vaults, but a few places have spawned nation-states reminiscent of pre-War society, and the American Southwest is one such place. A town called Shady Sands along the California/Nevada border rose to prominence and began a swift westward expansion, eventually forming the New California Republic, a liberal democracy reminiscent of pre-War America. By the time of Fallout: New Vegas, the NCR controls California, obviously, as well as large swaths of the Baja Peninsula and Pacific Northwest. NCR is structured as a liberal democracy, and is therefore far less unpleasant than a lot of other wasteland societies such as the overtly fascist Enclave or Legion, but NCR is still almost comically corrupt—its senate is controlled by cattle barons, weapons manufacturers, and its transportation industry—and is downright imperialistic in its drive to expand; as a friendless bastard of the earth and dynamite-hoarding fuck NPC named Easy Pete that the player meets in Goodsprings, New Vegas’s rookie village, has to say: “They make you part of them whether you like it or not. Towns like Goodsprings and Primm don’t stay independent for long, not if you’ve got something the NCR wants.”
Further east from NCR, with its base of power in the southwest’s Four Corners region—the place where Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico meet—one finds Caesar’s Legion, and Caesar’s Legion is … something else. A couple of decades before the events of New Vegas, a scholar and humanitarian aid worker named Ed Sallow went on a mission trip deep into Arizona to help out some of the tribal societies living there, and he grew disgusted by what he saw, holding the tribals in utter contempt compared to the clean and easy living he’d known back in the NCR. During this time, Ed also happened to be reading some pre-War history books including Gibbon’s Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire and Julius Caesar’s Comentarii de Bello Gallica, both of which informed his growing chauvinism. During the course of the mission, Ed and his companions ran afoul of one of the tribes they were working with and were taken hostage. Ed managed to gain the favor of his captors by sharing his knowledge of technology with them, and became their leader by using his knowledge of technology and history to help them defeat their enemies against steep odds. Ed used this newfound position to conquer and assimilate tribe after tribe, christening himself Caesar and his new empire Caesar’s Legion. The Legion is an overtly hegemonic, imperialistic society, wherein individual and group identities are erased in service of the whole and every facet of society is geared towards endless war.
If you’ve got a map of the American Southwest handy, you’ll see that these two armed and agile nations are uncomfortably close to one another. Around when the events of Fallout: New Vegas pop off, the NCR and Legion share a border roundabouts the Mojave Desert and the Colorado River. The two nations’ scouts—the NCR Rangers and Legion Frumentarii—made expeditions into the Mojave at around the same time, and in addition to discovering one another they discovered a couple of interesting things. They found the massive Hoover Dam spanning the Colorado River to still be mostly intact, still able to generate electricity, as well as Lake Mead, the vast, seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of clean water the dam retains. And they found a pre-War city, thriving and intact, mostly untouched by nuclear annihilation, still maintained after two hundred years. The city of New Vegas.
And so war were declared, and the Legion and NCR found themselves to be about evenly matched. Fielding roughly equal troop numbers, the NCR has the upper hand in terms of technological sophistication, whereas the Legion runs a far more efficient war machine with a highly sophisticated military intelligence network.
The player character of Fallout: New Vegas, the Courier, is dropped into the middle of this conflict. The Legion has made one attempt to move west over the Colorado River and been repulsed at great cost on both sides, and over the course of the game the NCR attempts to cement its control over the Mojave while Caesar’s Legion rebuilds its strength for a second assault. The Courier progresses through the game with the expectation of having to eventually pick one of the two sides hanging over their head … until. Until the Courier reaches New Vegas, and reaches the New Vegas Strip, and enters the Lucky 38 Casino, the massive skyscraper looming over the Mojave, and meets the mysterious ruler of New Vegas, the enigmatic Mr. House.
Prior to the War, Robert Edwin House was a technocrat and a highly successful business magnate with a particular interest in shaping the future of Las Vegas. House’s greatest successes were in technological developments, such as the RobCo Securitrons and Protrectrons, the delightfully clunky retrofuturist robots so iconic to the series, and the RobCo Pip-Boy, the Nintendo power glove iPhone contraption that serves as the player’s heads-up display interface. Much of House’s success in business came from his personal aptitude for probabilities and statistics, and he would often design and run mathematical projections based on global political situations. Thereby, he knew that global thermonuclear war was inevitable a full fifteen years before it happened, and Vegas was spared annihilation due to his preparations. House devoted great swaths of his financial resources to ensuring that Vegas was protected by America’s satellite defense system, and to installing air defense artillery batteries atop his towering Lucky 38 Casino, and he took even more drastic steps. In the heart of the Lucky 38, House built a supercomputer from which he could access both the city’s utilities and his RobCo Securitron robots, and, having done that, he connected his brain to the supercomputer and sealed his body inside a life support chamber. When the Courier meets Mr. House, his “mind” is his sprawling information network, while the Lucky 38, his army of robots, and even the city itself serve as his “body.”
The Courier speaks to Mr. House via a massive computer monitor on the top floor of the Lucky 38, and he reveals that it was his machinations that set the Courier’s quest in motion, all to further his vision for New Vegas, for the Mojave, for mankind. And in laying out his plans and means, it’s shown that Mr. House’s grand vision is … unimaginative, boring, and utterly, utterly banal. Bob House, a man cut from the very same cloth as the muckedymucks who destroyed the world in the first place, wants to rebuild it in his image, to build a world of industry and technocracy wherein humanity is saved from itself, saved from primitive notions of “rights” or “self-determination,” all of this overseen by a great immortal all-wise autocrat, who is of course Mr. House himself. House spews all of his plans for the coming self-aggrandizing techno-futurist autocracy with genuine glee and optimism, seeming not to notice how he sounds indistinguishable from the very pre-War bigwigs he claims so much to loath. Technofuturist autocracy is a staple of the Fallout franchise, both in the pre-War lore material and in the worlds that the player explores. And pre-War America failed, and the Enclave failed, and the super mutant Master failed, but surely Mr. House knows the way; after all, nobody is as super smart and special as him.
Out here in the real world, those of you with a weather eye on the news may have noticed that our real world is running headlong into disaster. The threat of global thermonuclear war is farther off now than it’s ever been since the bomb’s invention, but we’re even now feeling the pains and degradations of climate crisis, and all projections say that things will continue to get worse. The seas rise, coastal cities collapse, the deserts expand as the forests retreat, and millions of people are displaced. Social strife increases, divisions within society are widened. The people who sit before the levers of power in our societies seem profoundly uninterested in doing anything to prevent this utterly preventable situation, despite the wailings of a thousand Cassandras throughout the scientific community … but don’t think that they’re just sitting around doing nothing.
All over the world, stories are hitting the media about Silicon Valley executives, hedge funders, venture capitalists, and other members of the super-rich moving millions of dollars of capital not to alleviate the degradations of climate crisis in any way, but to prepare for it and even profit from it. As you’ll see in the articles linked to at the bottom of this post, derelict missile silos, disused Cold War fortifications, tracts of land in places like Siberia and New Zealand are being bought up by the supremely affluent and converted into habitations hardened against the economic breakdown and social strife of the coming crisis they call “the Event,” into so-called “underground yachts” from which they’ll sit in affluence weathering the storms and overseeing the aftermath, leaving the rest of us to take our chances.
Now, in the game Fallout: New Vegas, after discovering the third-faction ending, the Courier might discover a secret, fourth-faction ending. The Courier has the option to kill Mr. House, to replace him as the central node of his information network with an artificial intelligence programmed to accept all user input, and to establish the city of New Vegas and the surrounding communities of the Mojave as an autonomous region, independent of both the NCR and Caesar’s Legion. It’s possible, also, in the process of this quest, for a Courier who’s taken the “Cannibalism” perk while leveling up to break into Mr. House’s private chamber, tear his desiccated body out of his life support system, and consume his flesh in the course of freeing the Mojave. It’s very satisfying, and you get an achievement for it.
Biden, nearly 80 years old, has a radically higher chance of dying of covid than a 10 year old. Children are much less likely to spread covid between them than adults. These risks to kids have to be balanced against the real harms of remote learning, like reduced access to lunch programs, reduced visibility of child abuse/neglect, weaker socialization of children, and lack of internet access for poor families. Biden taking precautions does not contradict saying schools can reopen with precautions. His assertion obviously assumes mask wearing/immunizing teachers/basic safety protocols.
The argument isn’t that schools are entirely unimportant, but that ‘reopening’ has been a disaster every time its been pushed. We all know teachers even older than Biden, and at what fantasy school would they be able to remain a safe distance from students? Are we really going to expect 10 year olds to be in perfect compliance with guidelines? How are these students going to feel knowing they’d made they spread the virus to their older and more vulnerable family members?
And those reasons you list are very clearly not the real reason we’ve seen this bipartisan reopening push. Its because these half-assed ‘~shutdowns~’ are an annoyance to the wealthy.
ALSO, you are a despicable ‘i-want-to-go-back-to-sleep!’ liberal who was happy enough ignoring our bombing civilians and breaking deportation records from 2008-2016 and only wants to return to the good old days of not having to hear so many worrisome things on the news. And we aren’t on the same ‘side’, because I want all the people you voted for to be hung from the neck until dead.
Oh we roasting liberals now?
Okay. Let me in.
Ol’ kids in cages then but now padded facilities lookin’ ass motherfucker.
Ol’ believe all women except if it’s a dem lookin’ ass motherfucker.
Ol’ believe science but open schools up in a pandemic headass motherfucker.
Ol’ we are against violent right wing insurrections but support right wing insurrections everywhere else motherfucker.
Ol’ ‘We’ll push them left after we vote blue no matter who’ ass liberal motherfucker.
Ol’ police reform by paying them millions of dollars motherfucker.
Ol’ “My dog wears a Black Lives Matter bandana” motherfucker.
Ol’ Back to Brunch Ass B***ch Ass Basic Ass Motherfucker.
Ol’ Healthcare for all who can afford it motherfucker.
Ol’ Defund the Police is a bad slogan ass motherfucker.
Ol’ war crimes were okay when Obama did it silly ass motherfucker.
@corollarytower join the left or continue to be owned online
On January 25, hundreds of workers at an Amazon warehouse in Chicago were presented with a baffling choice: sign up for a ten-and-a-half-hour graveyard shift, or lose your job.
Management informed workers that their warehouse, known as DCH1, would be shut down, and they were being offered a shift that runs from 1:20am to 11:50am, which is known as “megacycle,” at a new Chicago warehouse.
DCH1 has been the target of protests, walkouts, and petitions organized by workers that have changed Amazon’s nationwide policies for its warehouses. Its closure will force workers to choose between their lives outside of Amazon and keeping their jobs in the middle of a pandemic. […]
The ultimatum presented to workers at DCH1 reflects a broader strategy in the U.S. for Amazon. The company has been quietly transitioning warehouse workers at delivery stations nationwide to the “megacycle” shift in recent months. The megacycle shift collapses shorter shifts into one 10-hour shift that begins around 1 am and ends around lunchtime. It’s unclear where the term megacycle originated but it’s used by both managers and workers to describe 10-hour graveyard shifts, workers tell Motherboard. An Amazon spokesperson told Motherboard that more than half of its last-mile delivery network has already transitioned to the new model.
Workers at DCH1 were previously offered several different shift options, including an eight-hour overnight shift that ends at 4:45 am, a five-hour morning shift, and a four-hour morning shift. Going forward, rank-and-file DCH1 workers will only have the megacycle option at a new facility, DCH1 Amazonians United told Motherboard. […]
Meanwhile, in online forums, such as the subreddit, r/AmazonDS, which covers topics related to Amazon delivery stations, warehouse workers have discussed the punishing amount of strenuous labor required of the “megacycle” shift.
“You will do all the stuff you are currently doing for like 7 hours. Then after you are done sorting, you pick and stage. That’s when you take all the bags and oversized packages and put them on carts for the drivers. IT SUCKS,” one worker recently posted on the subreddit, describing megacycle.
Currently, workers at DCH1 either sort or pick and stage, but not both. Workers have been told on the megacycle shift they’ll be asked to sort for eight hours, and then pick and stage for two additional hours. […]
Posts referencing “megacycle” on Reddit suggest that Amazon warehouses around the country have been rapidly shifting to this new schedule since at least August 2020, often with little warning. For workers used to picking and packing boxes on four or six or eight hour shifts, the transition to the ten hour shift creates an even greater risk for workplace injuries.
The National Employment Law Project found in a 2020 report on workplaces injuries in Amazon warehouses is twice that of the national average for the warehouse industry.
DCH1 is the same warehouse that organized to get PTO for all Amazon employees nationwide during the pandemic, wtf
There’s actually an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, AL, very close to where I live, that’s voting to unionize very soon, setting an example for Amazon workers everywhere
Please raise awareness about the Bamazon Union to help fight back against Amazon’s shitty labor abuses
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
