Vegas Stakes - simple casino games, perfect time-killer for the format.

Wendy Every Witch Way - concept of reversing gravity has been used in other platformers since, but this might be the OG, and is very solid.

This was my first thought as well. My second thought is all the harms we’ve caused to ourselves in the digital age, and we only start to care when it hits our pocketbooks.

At some point during his attempted coup, he realised it wasn’t going to work

When was that, exactly? Putin fled, reserve forces were standing by and not fighting Wagner, and he was a day out from an undefended Moscow. Worst case scenario was a protracted civil war, but he still would’ve lived longer than this.

Honestly, none of this makes sense. The fact that he aborted in the first place makes the idea that he was conspiring with Putin the whole time to flush out disloyal elements within the Russian armed forces seem credible… but then why kill him after? I’m not ruling out the possibility that either this was a genuine accident, or it was another false flag and he and his second in command just faked their own deaths.

A lot of bullshit work is administrative, jobs that exist to meet regulatory requirements (compliance jobs).

Or contract requirements (eg. sometimes one company will be contracted by another company to produce X amount of Y, then the other company will go bust and have no real need of Y, but the first company still needs to produce a minimum amount of Y for several more years to avoid being in breach of the other company’s creditors and get sued, or a specialised worker will be given a 4-year contract on a project that gets cancelled, and it’s cheaper to pay him to do nothing than it is to pay him out of his contract early).

Or as a result of a freak accident or screw-up that the company over-corrected on, at which point you’re basically being paid out of the marketing budget to perform security- or QA-theatre, or being paid by another company or govt department to confirm that the security/QA-theatre is taking place whilst taking really long lunches.

A lot of the time a business or govt department will be too organisationally complex for anyone to figure out where the bullshit jobs are. You could have 5 departments under you, all of which justify their existence with a bunch of dense jargon, and any one of them could be operationally useless. And if enough time passes without you figuring it out, the personal cost to your career in just playing along will be less than if you admit that you had your bosses pay 12 people for 5 years to push and rubber-stamp papers that could’ve just been handled by two other departments knowing how to email each other.

Reddit became too toxic for me around 2014. That’s when they started replacing default subs with shit like r/sports, trying to court the most general audience possible, then forcing everyone to exist in the same space and expecting it to go well.

Same thing happened with Digg. Digg went from tech-news to general-news around 2007… 2008 we hit a US election year and the site became a cesspool. The Diggnation Podcast was hosted by the site’s founders, they had to talk about the top 10 digg posts each week… they repeatedly had to feign interest in UFO and Ron Paul stories at that point.

It’s not an issue of if there’s any patriarchy, but that Universal and Mattel obviously limited how much the film makers could critique capitalism, corporatism, and this general issue of forced competitiveness (of which patriarchy is a symptom - make 10 people fight over 5 sticks, act surprised when whichever people end up grabbing the sticks first use them to leverage an advantage and beat down the others, and it eventually turns into things like patriarchy and white supremacy and class systems).

So instead the film has to pretend that patriarchy is the core issue, despite undermining that notion itself multiple times (eg. multiple powerless male characters in both worlds, Ken being unable to get a job, most of Gloria’s grievances about being a woman being grievances many men share or basic human insecurities, etc.) The film even tries to lampshade some of its own shortcomings (“thanks, white saviour Barbie” and the line about Margot Robbie being the wrong casting choice).

Thematically, the film is a hot mess. It degenerates into bullshit twitter mottos and catchphrases from about 10 years ago and dance numbers instead of plot resolution.

If you’re using this, of all movies, to “test” your boyfriends and partners - well a) testing your partners is not a great sign in itself, but also b) you may be an idiot.

Don’t accuse me of being obtuse and conflating different situations when you just attacked a massive strawman. I’m not talking about rumours, more like someone showing up to a party at your place, acting weird from the moment she showed up, locking herself in the toilet, self-harming, then wasting weeks of your life and doing a number on your sanity after going to the police, claiming she was raped. This isn’t a hypothetical.

Compared to actual real sexual assault, which IS a huge problem

You repeat some variation of this about 3 times in your reply. This is called relative privation. Two things can be problems at the same time, and it doesn’t need to be a competition over which one we’re allowed to care about.

The issue of how to handle sexual assault accusations is not complicated. I told you, we handle them all the time in the medical field. You default to protecting the accuser, you do a thorough investigation, if the investigation turns up no evidence, you move on.

Speaking of conflation… most people don’t have the luxury of a professional environment with oversight and procedures for handling these situations. You live in a fantasy land if you think this is how actual human relationships play out, or if this is how they’re investigated.

This is way too close to “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve got nothing to hide” logic.

What exactly are you doing out there in the world that this is a major concern in your life?

Making terrible choices in friends, for one. Never been accused of SA, thank christ, but figured out too late that many people live in their own reality, and rewrite history once the friendship ends. Have also known people who have been in that situation, and even if no charges end up being pressed, it’s still a gut-wrenching situation to be in.

The issue of how to handle SA accusations is such a nightmare that it’s practically inevitable that we have both innocent people convicted, and guilty people acquitted at the same time. Most of the time we don’t have the kind of oversight and institutional procedure you would enjoy if accused.