VoxAdActa

I was a Teamster when I worked for Sygma, and out of all the unions I’ve been a member of (four, now), the Teamsters were the motherfucking worst. If they were actively trying to take a revolving door of 18- and 19-year-olds just getting their first big-boy jobs and turn them into all into die-hard anti-union voters for life, they couldn’t do a better job than they’re doing right now, and I told my steward that before I quit.

They designed the whole contract specifically to offload all the real work onto the new guys, protect the older guys when they decided to throw hands on the loading dock, and give as much overtime as possible to the ancient, divorced boomers with no family to go home to, that they could spend pretending to sweep the floors while the trainees finished the actual loading. Guys would bid order picking, then use seniority to bump bid loads/receivers off their jobs and wouldn’t pick a single case for the whole contract, while getting paid picker bonuses and shift differentials.

And just to rub salt into the wound, those perks (bumping lower guys off their bid jobs and “sweeping the floor” during overtime) were specifically written out of the latest contract, so only the guys hired under the previous contract would ever get to do them. They straight robbed those kids of even anything to look forward to if they toughed out the low-seniority years. They also negotiated a different pay scale for under 5 years, 5-10 years, and 10 years in, and you can guess which end of that they weighted the raises toward. It was a complete shitshow, and when kids would quit, the Teamsters would keep their initiation fee (taken out of the first three paychecks). You could call to try to get it back, but the best they’d do would be to put it towards your initiation fee for your next Teamster job, as if any of those kids would ever willingly subject themselves to that shit ever again.

AND THERE’S MORE. I just don’t feel like typing up a fucking novel on it. Don’t even get me started on the shady shit they did during the contract negotiations I was actually present for. It was worse than maddening; it felt like it was specifically crafted by the senior guys to make sure that ladder was pulled up as high as they could behind them, while not actually making any waves for the company. And the safety issues they ignored and covered up, and the fancy fucking “union meetings” they never told anyone about so that they were only attended by the office reps, because they were being held at the most expensive restaurants in the city, on the union’s dime, and the number of stewards who were literally fucking floor supervisors, and on, and on, and on…

UIW was kind of spineless and milquetoast, but they took care of us. The Teamsters are fucking old-school mob racket motherfuckers who are single-handedly responsible for an entire generation of workers who think all unions are a scam.

Cool, glad to hear you admit that you’re full of shit and this never happened. Cheers!

Well, if it’s true, you were using another name, because “Facebones” doesn’t show up in any of the modlogs.

Weird how “trust me, bro” suddenly became the standard of proof today.

Who told you that? Name, quote, date, and source, please.

Oh, but you do! I’m one of those autistic people who can’t fucking stand flaming red notification icons and have to make them go away.

There’s no way to turn off the notification without either clicking “Ignore” or “Reply” (maybe it’s “Accept”). It doesn’t go away just from reading the message. I even tried to disable the element in my browser, which worked, but then it disabled the normal notification icon too.

a fucking chat on fucking reddit are you kidding me what?

RIGHT? AND, AND! It’s a chat where you can’t get rid of the bright flaming red notification until you make the neigh-irreversible decision to either shun a person forever or reply to them.

More like r/bots.

Like, ok, there were bots in the previous r/place events, but this one is fucking stuffed with bots. Every piece of art on that page has been entirely botted, except maybe for the sad Turkish flag that keeps trying to get the star right.

POV: You have no idea what POV means.

I was planning a long road trip that I could have done all at once, but decided to break into two days with a hotel stay somewhere near the middle. I was on a bit of a budget, so when I found a room for ~$60, I was thrilled.

When I got there, the shower handle was plumbed backwards (so the “Cold” direction was hot), the first towel on the rack had brown splatters that were very clearly old blood stains, and while I was showering a big roach wandered up onto the lip of the shower like “S’up, bro,” then meandered off like he did this sort of thing every day.

The bed was about as cushy as a gym floor mat, the pillows were bricks, and when I sat down on the desk chair to put on my shoes, the whole thing just about collapsed under me.

The review I left said: “The best $10 hotel room that $60 can buy,” and since then I just make all my road trips in one go if I can’t afford to spend at least $100 for a hotel room.

Glass is half full!

…because the top half boiled off…

One of the biggest hurdles I had was learning to play Saturn games on a modern controller; the Saturn controller had 6 face buttons lined up in two rows of three, while all the controllers out today copy the xbox/playstation setup of 4 face buttons in a diamond configuration. It was a real pain to remap the controls for some games.

I really like one of the survival mods for Skyrim. I think it’s Snowfall? Something like that; it added cold and blizzard mechanics. Now I have a reason to find a bridge over a river instead of just swimming across all the time! It also made me actually use the food I would otherwise hoard, and created a use for those otherwise cosmetic clothing items (many of them are warmer than armor, which doesn’t matter in Whiterun, but can matter quite a bit in Dawnstar). Bad guys becoming arrow sponges with one-shot mechanics just frustrates me, as a difficulty modifier, but getting a warning that a blizzard is coming while I’m in the middle of cleaning out a bandit camp adds exactly the right about of tension, and adds a level of decision-making that really appeals to me. It upped the difficulty level for me just enough to make the game twice as interesting, without making it feel oppressive.

Well, except for that one Stormcloak quest to the frozen island in the middle of an ice sea to get to that one constellation stone. That sucked. But, like, fuck the Stormcloaks.

But the point is, for me, I want the survival aspect to be a constant, predictable mechanic that I can prepare for, but that isn’t a means to its own end. The narrative direction of Skyrim doesn’t change, I just have to go about accomplishing those goals a little smarter.

I’m right there with you on Pixel Dungeon. The identify scrolls are so rare, you just have to grit your teeth and take a chance, especially at the beginning. I probably had 50 runs in a row that ended up being ruined by a surprise cursed item on the first or second floor, even if I survived to the 5th-6th floor. It was to the point where I was like “How the fuck does anyone win this game??”

I did end up beating it once, said “THERE. FUCK YOU.” and uninstalled.

Wow. You’re really sensitive to external stimuli, huh? Even just hearing someone cough disrupts your entire workflow? You know that’s not typical, right?

This was a part of the equation when I decided to pursue traditional publishing instead of going the self-publishing route. I wouldn’t be competing against other authors for the attention of publishers, I’d be competing against an ocean of ghost-written get-rich-quick schemes and bots. Sometimes gatekeepers serve a real purpose.

Got to the one where I had to include an emoji. I know I can get them on desktop, but I wasn’t willing to learn how tonight.

I gotta imagine much of them weren’t actually successful.

You’re right. Any individual person going in for these scams is almost guaranteed to lose their lunch money. But from Etsy’s perspective (and I assume Imgur’s), they only need a tiny fraction of their sellers to get the jackpot in order to keep the money train rolling. If they can get a single dollar a month out of 20% of their users, that’s still a baby dragon’s worth of a horde every 30 days. And I’m sure they have other fees and hedges to ensure that even if you never make a penny in sales, Etsy still comes out ahead on you.

Why does this headline read like some kind of clickbait advertisement?

This sounds like one of those ideas on the level of “If we punch another hole in the ozone layer, the greenhouse gasses can escape!”

It doesn’t help that a bunch of influencers descended on YouTube one day selling classes for how to get rich quick with drop-shipping. A couple thousand gullible dipshits emptied their wallets and dumped a load of cheap crap onto Etsy, with product descriptions that read like they were written by Skaven.