Someone had to take him down a peg

Well…the problem is reddit’s size.

They’ve never been shy about targeting certain subs and communities for shutdown when it suits their commercial interests. This has nothing to do with size and everything to do with the nature of the content itself.

These videos are pure clickbait. They feed engagement. They build up lots of enthusiasm both among content providers and active users. And, as a consequence, they make the company money.

But reddit bots flagged me of being abusive to other users.

Bots will flag any post purely based on keyword searches and AI parsing of sentiment. Its got nothing to do with your actual statement. But it also depends heavily on who you are, where you post, and how often other users flag you. Very possibly you simply got “Report” flagged a bunch of times by other users for some reason and that - plus a naive parsing - was all the AI bot needed to know.

But I’ll also bet the post wasn’t getting thousands of unique interactions and external visits. If you’d been a power-poster who was posting a face-cam rant rather than a text blob, I suspect you’d have been fine.

Becoming a parent is not necessarily about trauma and anxiety

No. There’s a great deal of joy in being a parent, too. But a big part of caring for a child - particularly a toddler or per-adolecent - is having one eye open to the child’s safety, constantly. Kids be doing crazy shit. Its normal and healthy, from a development perspective. But terrifying for a caretaker, whenever the kid behaves recklessly (or in any way the caretaker perceives as reckless).

Its an inherent trade-off. Watching a kid walk for the first time or ride a bike for the first time inevitably means watching them fall or crash. The agony and the ecstasy.

They can, but the same rules tend to apply. Maturity is a consequence of adversity. People who live frictionless lives tend not to develop it.

One of the big warning flags of the next administration - whomever it ends up being - is whether Khan keeps her job or gets replaced.

True plague of multiplayer, which could be awesome but it’s just not.

People so often forget the joy of multiplayer is in playing with people you actually know. The true scourge of multiplayer is the death of the LAN Party and the high school / college online play circles as people grow up.

Multiplayer is best when you have a large group of people who all know each other and cheerfully rival one another, before periodically going out to test their skills in larger tournaments, learn strategies, and bring them home again to advance the local meta. Its miserable when you’re just connecting to random anonymous people, playing a handful of rounds, and then never seeing or hearing from them again.

Even the most annoying in-group player can become endearing over time. But the anonymous opponent is obnoxious entirely by playing in a way you’re unfamiliar with.

League of Legends has a particularly obnoxious user base: KanyeNo.jpg

League of Legends has a large base of players from overseas, and this drives English-speaking players insane with rage: KanyeYes.jpg

To Serve Man

It’s a good series, broadly speaking. You’ll find a lot of the story beats repeated in subsequent fantasy novels and isekai manga (Terry Brooks, in particular, loves CA Lewis tropes, Terry Pratchett isn’t shy about cribbing from them either, and Brian Jacques’s Redwall plays heavily with Lewis’s style).

The earlier material is definitely better. Lion, Witch, Wardrobe has been reproduced a zillion times for a reason. Prince Caspian is good. The Silver Chair is good. A Horse and his Boy is good, in large part because it heightens the drama of that last chapter of LW&W so well.

And the books are fairly short. Perfect for younger readers. We pick at the bad parts because they spoil what is largely recognized as a genre setting masterpiece. But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. There’s a lot of good material and some incredible worldbuilding in these stories.

Kids generate a lot of anxiety and no small amount of trauma (particularly for the person carrying the pregnancy to term). Even before the child arrives, there’s also the real possibility of failed pregnancies. I have dozens of friends with kids, but I can count the number of women who have never experienced a miscarriage on one hand. Then there’s the first six months of caring for a newborn, which is intense. There are childhood injuries and illnesses that you feel as fiercely as if they’d happened to you. And there’s the general process of watching a child mature into an adult, and the emotional turbulence of that process.

There’s also the experience of watching an elder loved one - a grandparent or parent or beloved aunt/uncle - grow infirm and die. It weighs on you, both directly as a caregiver and indirectly as a reminder of the mortality of younger loved ones.

Grief has a huge impact on personality.

Ananas

Bananas

:-/

American: “Have french people never eaten a good apple?”

Frenchman: “Have Americans never enjoyed a tasty potato?”

Included in that metaphor was a Peter Pan esque commentary of childhood. Susan grew up too fast.

One of the reasons The Last Battle soured me on the series was the way in which they applied these increasingly unpleasant purity tests to the accumulated cast of characters.

Boys never grow up. If you have full grown man in your life, you already know this.

One of the messages of “The Problem with Susan” was that pain is the source of maturity. You tend to see this in older people because they’ve experienced more of it.

Grown men who don’t act particularly mature are ones who have led relatively charmed existences. But there are plenty who have a sobriety and seriousness about them. You’ll inevitably find some kind of trauma behind each of these folks.

If you enjoy dystopian CS Lewis fanfic, check out the book/TV series “The Magicians”.

Bonus: it is very gay

Hard truths

We used to have a bit more of it

When?

You should just vote for democracy if you want it so much

🔻

I’m willing to believe he asked ten of his VPs and nine of them agreed with him. Also, that he’s currently looking to fill a newly opened tenth position.

Amazon policy is to stack rank all of its employees and regularly fire anyone in the bottom tranche. So any kind of deliberate slowdown would need to be incredibly well-coordinated. Even then, there would inevitably be a ton of attrition as the automatic Fire Everyone triggers started kicking in.

Its not enough to play by the rules with a company as vast and encompassing as Amazon. You need to take it a step further and start sabotaging the anti-organizing functions of the company. Start shoving monkey wrenches in the employee monitoring systems. Start dismantling the automation that allows the business to function at such a breakneck pace. You’ve got to get in there and break the machine before it breaks you.