Hello, good afternoon, happy Friday. Sorry for the delay this week - I have been finishing my move to the new apartment all week, and I had to take care of some related business this morning. But the good news is that the move has gone well, and I am basically done, and I am very happy about it.
Also this week the police nearly killed another person and are entirely indignant about it, and conservatives are openly endorsing fascism and murder, and everything is getting horrifyingly worse horrifyingly quickly. So.
Would you kindly
Things I learned this week include that there is an office of etiquette and that it is full of turmoil. I mean, really, this is… something:
Officials described an environment of yelling, cursing, “overconsuming alcohol,” and intimidating and abusive behavior, according to the report, which was obtained by The Washington Post.
“Mr. Lawler had an explosive personality and regularly would throw papers and binders,” the report said of his tenure from December 2017 to July 2019. “Several employees reported that he would crack a horse whip in the office and that, given his general demeanor and conduct, these actions placed them in fear of physical harm.”
Spicy
This is another “not new, but new to me” article. I am also going to jump past the first few paragraphs to the one that I think should hook you into reading the whole incredible thing:
For customers who preferred their cardamom pods without a side of flaming liberal politics, another spice company awaited with open arms. A few days after Penzey’s e-mails exploded onto the national stage, the Spice House, another Wisconsin-based retailer, posted a message on its own Facebook page. “My husband and I are very careful to never bring politics or personal opinions into our spice company, they have no business there,” Patty Erd, who owns the Spice House with her husband, Tom, wrote. Never mind that the spice trade itself is one of the most intensely political industries in history, or that “staying out of politics” is, of course, its own kind of political statement. “Heck, I would not even want to get into a subjective debate over which cinnamon is the best!” Erd wrote. It may have been mere coincidence that she chose to single out cinnamon only days after the meticulous kitchen testers at Cook’s Illustrated had named Penzeys Spices’ Vietnamese varietal their pick for the best on the market, praising its “big, spicy flavor” and high percentage of volatile aromatic compounds. It was not, however, a coincidence that Erd felt the need to distance her business from Penzey’s: the two of them are siblings.
Not all fun and games
Developer studios have continued to grow larger and take on more ambitious projects, which is cool if you’re a gamer, but the way they’re getting there is… not great. Increasingly, corporations around the country are relying on “contractors” rather than true employees. And in addition to the tax benefits and liability reductions, the companies hiring these contractors also enjoy the benefits of treating them like shit:
As Christmas 2018 approached, workers at Activision Blizzard Inc. were busy doing what they always do—writing code, modeling characters, and designing landscapes for the next Call of Duty games. At the company’s campus in Santa Monica, Calif., everyone got hand-delivered invitations to the annual holiday bash, where staff could drink, unwind, and celebrate the year. Some recipients, though, were soon told they’d received the invitations by mistake and wouldn’t be welcome at the party, according to three people familiar with the incident. The reason: They were temporary contractors officially employed by a staffing agency, Volt Workforce Solutions.
That treatment isn’t unusual in the gaming industry. While executives rake in millions of dollars and some full-time employees can expect Porsche-size bonuses when a hot new title drops, many people working alongside them get nothing but a salary that barely keeps them above the poverty line.
Their employee badges typically come in a different color. They rarely get paid vacations. Their names sometimes aren’t included in the credits. And when full-time co-workers get pricey swag such as statuettes of game characters, they’re often left out. At one studio, a contractor says they were given cheaper, less comfortable chairs. “Temps will be told that there will be opportunities to prove themselves and possibly transition to full time,” says Emma Kinema, a Communications Workers of America organizer seeking to unionize video game makers. “In reality, the vast majority of people in ‘temp’ roles in the game industry get trapped there forever with terrible conditions, no benefits, low pay, and no ladder for career progression.”
Dealbreaker
I have included a lot of stories about TikTok recently, and that is both because I think TikTok is an incredible platform and also because I think what is happening with the administration’s attempts to quash it is… bizarre. So here’s some more about that:
When Microsoft began talking this summer with the popular video app TikTok and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, no one had any intentions of pursuing a blockbuster deal.
With tensions swirling between the United States and China, along with the complexities of running a social media company, any large acquisition appeared too treacherous to navigate. So Microsoft discussed taking a small stake in TikTok and becoming one of the app’s minority investors, said four people briefed on the conversations.
Even a small deal would be a win-win, the thinking went.
For Microsoft, a minority investment would potentially bring TikTok over to using its Azure cloud computing service, immediately making the app one of Microsoft’s biggest cloud clients, said the people, who declined to be identified because the details are confidential. (TikTok has been using Google’s cloud computing services to power its videos.)
For ByteDance and TikTok, a deal with Microsoft could help propel the valuation of the app’s business outside China to as high as $80 billion, the people said. It would also provide TikTok with the endorsement of a blue-chip American company to mollify the Trump administration, which had called TikTok’s Chinese ties a national security threat.
Yet what started as discussions about a small investment morphed into a big, messy, political soap opera. Pushed by President Trump, who has ordered TikTok’s U.S. operations to be sold or to cease operating, ByteDance is now discussing selling parts of TikTok’s global operations to several potential bidders. And with so many groups jumping into the talks to get a piece of any deal, all are trying to drive their own interests and agendas.
Indescribable
No, really, how do you come up with a witty title for this story that does it justice:
For over six years, one Wikipedia user—AmaryllisGardener—has written well over 23,000 articles on the Scots Wikipedia and done well over 200,000 edits. The only problem is that AmaryllisGardener isn’t Scottish, they don’t speak Scots, and none of their articles are written in Scots.
Since 2013, this user—a self-professed Christian INTP furry living somewhere in North Carolina—has simply written articles that are written in English, riddled with misspellings that mimic a spoken Scottish accent. Many of the articles were written while they were a teenager. AmaryllisGardener is an admin of the Scots Wikipedia, and Wikipedians now have no idea what to do, because their influence over the country’s pages has been so vast that their only options seem to be to delete the Scots language version entirely or revert the entire thing back to 2012.
Run for something
This is good and cool, or at least as good as it can be under the circumstances:
For Kelly Johnson, the decision to run for political office came to her suddenly, in April.
The 48-year-old from Dunedin, Fla., had been furloughed from her job as a restaurant manager and after many frustrating weeks waiting for unemployment benefits, she decided to run for a Florida House of Representatives seat, with no political experience, to fix the broken unemployment system she had just experienced firsthand.
Tony Tsonis, 41, made the decision to run for a different Florida House seat around the same time. His father had just died after falling ill from covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and Tsonis was suddenly jobless, after being furloughed from a senior position in marketing at Hilton Hotels in Orlando.
Thousands of people are running for office this year, and while most made the decision well before the pandemic struck, a small crop of candidates have more recently jumped into political races after losing their jobs or dealing with other work-related fallout from the pandemic.
These candidates have little political experience but have survived through the devastating economic fallout that caused more than 20 million workers to lose their jobs. There are no numbers on these candidates nor any guarantee of their chances to win, but they show how, increasingly, pandemic unemployment is becoming a major influence on politics.
If you’re interested in running for office - every office counts, especially small local races - please get in touch with Run For Something, they are tremendous. You can also suggest that someone you know should consider a run!
Editor’s letter
Far be it for me to try to retitle anything written by Ta-Nehisi Coates:
Last year Chicago poet Eve L. Ewing published 1919, a volume that channels her city’s Red Summer into blues. It is a magical work. The voices of house-keepers and stockyard hands are summoned. The thoughts of trains carrying black people north are conjured up. The doom of a black boy is told to the rhythm of a jump rope. The centerpiece of this bracing work is “True Stories About the Great Fire,” a poem inspired by the belief among white Chicagoans that the first Great Migration to the city was “the worst calamity that had struck the city since the Great Fire” of 1871, which took hundreds of lives and burned out the heart of the city. The implications of this equation are haunting. Once a people become a “calamity,” all means of dealing with them are acceptable. I have not yet watched George Floyd’s murder in its entirety, but I have seen enough of the genre to know the belief in black people as disaster, as calamity, as a Great Fire upon the city, has not yet waned.
I don’t know if there is a better way of explaining the police publicly torturing a man on a bright city street. I don’t know how else to think about the killing of Walter Scott, save that an agent of the state had considered him an offense to God. I don’t know what explains Botham Jean nor Atatiana Jefferson, killed in their own homes, save some perverted act of fire prevention. I see the face of Elijah McClain—his deep brown skin, his Mona Lisa smile, his eyes flush with nothing so much as the wide, willing magic of youth—and I think there can be no justification for erasing this young man, save the belief that he is not a man at all, that he is both more and less; that he is Mike Brown, bulking up to run through bullets, that he is Trayvon Martin, irradiated by Skittles and iced tea; that he is Amadou Diallo, whose wallet glinted like a gun. I don’t know how else to comprehend the jackboots bashing in Breonna Taylor’s door and spraying her home with bullets, except the belief that they were fighting some Great Fire—demonic, unnatural, inhuman.
The whole letter is, of course, extremely good - as is the rest of the issue.
You deserve some good animal content
Have a good weekend.