this site definitely doesn’t allow you to paste the link to any article blocked by a paywall (say, a NYT article) so that you can read it free of charge! that would be illegal and would benefit broke college students too much. it definitely does not do that. promise.
Man called Owen Wilson made these posters (found here on Twitter) and the English are going absolutely bonkers with fury, cancelling holidays and supposedly “reporting” him to various UK authorities…and he’s just like, “off you pop,” “Wales isn’t in England” lmao
Ok, per his twitter, the fellow’s name is Owen Williams, not Wilson, but for a moment in time, I heard “off you pop” and “Wales isn’t in England” in Owen Wilson’s voice, followed of course by a “Wow,” about being reported.
i was telling my dad, ever the skeptic, about corrupted blood back in March at the start of lockdown, and how the cdc studied it. how it can be used as a model for what to do and how people might act in the event of an unpredicted pandemic, and how people were playing out the same behavior during covid.
he said “so they fixed it, right? how did they fix it in the game?” and i told him the truth: they didn’t. they couldn’t control it. they had to reset the servers and roll them back to the time before the ZG encounter.
it really feels like that meme where it’s like “wow, cool video game reference!” and the point soaring over their head says THE DAMAGE WAS IRREVERSIBLE. THE THREAT SPREAD TOO RAPIDLY AND EVERYONE DIED.
weird reframing of the corrupted blood incident to make it seem, for some reason, like it was all selfish actions that people said was unrealistic because real people would help others. in fact its literally the opposite, it was used as real world data specifically because of the player driven efforts to fix it
The reason this plague in the game was a good model is because we had all walks of life type people reacting in different ways.
Those with healing magic would go into infected areas to see if they could save the infected or at least keep them alive through the disease. Those that couldn’t do that tried to warn players before they entered infected areas. NPC could be infected and have “no symptoms”; they could be asymptomatic carriers and pass it to nearby players.
The best part though was by the time Blizzard had finally come out and said “if you are infected, try to quarantine yourself so you don’t spread it!!” the player base was ALREADY DOING SO. The players had recognized the problem and worked together in myriad ways to fix it.
They also had negative reactions as well, another reason this was such a good example of a real outbreak. They had a couple people report healers or alchemists who were claiming to sell cures/treatments to the disease that ultimately would do nothing. They had a group of players that would hide in the mountains near cities and just pass the disease back and forth between themselves and then raid cities to infect them all over again. They had higher level players start rebelling on the servers. Saying it was an overreaction and if you get it you’ll just die and you can come back and be fine, etc. Since they could get the disease and survive, ie it didn’t do enough damage to them since they were higher level, they felt it unnecessary to care about whether they got it or not. They complained about not getting to play like normal just because this plague could kill lower level players.
ALL of these reactions, good and bad, were real enough to what we assumed a real life epidemic would play out that people started to use it as a model. And now look, we have proof that it was accurate.
However, what we needed to learn from it was primarily that it wasn’t reversible. The bad reactions and lack of care from the few players that weren’t cooperating made it impossible in the end to contain. The only reason it was fixed at all is the game had to reverse time, literally just delete their entire game log a few weeks and time travel weeks into the past to before the plague even began.
Think about that.
The reason no one believed it was a valid model is that it was a video game and thus the consequences weren’t permanent. “No one would act like that in real life.” But look at how we are handling this outbreak. Is it not eerily similar?
So, this hasn’t crossed my dash yet. (Not blaming anyone, there is soooo much going on in the world and I’d also missed it in the noise).
There is currently a strike at Frito-Lay. in Topeka. These workers are striking because:
They were being forced to work 84 hour weeks. The company’s best offer so far is a 60 hour cap. This is shit we fought for a century ago, people.
Their generous offer also includes a whole 4 percent wage increase…over the next 2 years. I’m not sure what COL is in Topeka, but… Well, it’s better than the entire 77 cents they’ve apparently gotten in the last decade.
There’s also a report that a worker literally collapsed and dropped dead on the line and the foreman’s response was to make them move the body out of the way and put in a replacement. (However, this is unconfirmed and, of course, the company denies it).
There have been multiple OSHA violations at this plant over the last few years, including a forklift accident that’s under investigation.
They’ve now been striking since July 5 but, of course, it only hit the national media yesterday.
Because Frito-Lay is refusing to budge. They are attempting to make the excuse that union leadership agreed to the 60 hour work week and crappy pay cut…when union leadership only agreed to put it to a vote.
And this means that we need to put the thumbscrews on them. Remember, this is about 19th century style working conditions.
So, I’m calling on my followers to boycott Frito Lay’s until the strike is involved.
Frito-Lay owns:
Lay’s
Doritos (Sorry. I really am. I KNOW there’s no good alternative to Doritos, although Zapp’s are good if you can find them).
Fritos
Tostitos
Cheetos
Ruffles
Sun Chips
Baken-ets
Chester’s
Cracker Jack
Islen plantain chips
Funyuns
Grandma’s (the cookies)
Matador Meat Snacks
Maui style potato chips
Miss Vickie’s
Munchies
Munchos
Rolled Gold
Sabritones
Santitas
Simply
Smartfood
Stacys
The Walking Taco
NatuChips
PopCorners (this one wasn’t on their website, but was bought by Pepsi’s in 2019 with the intent of adding it. So best avoided just in case).
Yes, this really is more than half of the snack aisle. Suggested alternatives:
Kettle Brand Chips
Zapp’s (If you can find them. My supermarket had them once and not since, so I’m guessing the culinary cowards in this neighborhood were afraid of “Voodoo” flavored chips).
Pringles
On the Border for salsa.
Wise Cheez Doodles
Bugles
Utz
Store own brand alternatives, if your store has ones that are any good.
Cheez-its
Check before you buy and let’s tell these people they don’t get to treat workers like that.
This was posted on FB recently by someone supporting the strike!
Queer, Black, A n x i e t y, she/her, heretic, grad student. Here you will find: queer things, mental health things, pretty things, things that make me laugh, things that make me angry, shameless fandom and a lot of blackness. Send me Stony fic recs. Sometimes NSFW in the likes.
