Hello, good morning, happy Friday. This week has been a rough one for a lot of us, right? It was rough for me - I had a good weekend, but then I had to come back to the real world, and there is just a lot going on right now. In fact, there is so much going on that I am cutting this intro section short so that I can fit in all the content. There is so much content, I hope you like it.
The money is there if you care enough
Why am I leading with another (more dire) stonks image? Well. This happened:
And then the markets crashed, again, immediately.
That money could have solved the student debt crisis. They spent it without debate or authorization - they just did it. And now it’s gone; an immediate wealth transfer to the rich assholes who don’t need it.
However, stocks quickly traded back towards their session lows as investors awaited more aggressive measures to support the economy and target the virus outbreak directly.
Cool. So it turns out we do have social safety nets, just not for the people who really need them.
You’re the asshole
Via the Am I the Asshole? Twitter account that posts threads from Reddit, I discovered this incredible thread:
She got all upset and told me that she thought it would be cute to live in the same village and be neighbors and I told her that simply wasn't the case. There's only one town per game, and I don't want somebody who has zero concept of how the game should actually be played making decisions that negatively affect the town. I don't want her stealing exotic fruits from my orchard that I plan to sell, I don't want her buying furniture from Tom Nook's that I might want to adorn my living room with and I certainly don't want her placing her house next to mine because she thinks it's cute, thus spoiling what I plan to develop into a lavish estate.
There are several glaring issues in this paragraph alone:
Fruit in Animal Crossing grows on trees, and the trees repopulate after a short period of time. Even if you assume for the sake of argument that the fruit does not repopulate, each tree produces multiple fruits, and you could chop down the tree and re-plant one fruit to satisfy the needs of both players. Plus, she would probably be happy with just one of each, come on.
Historically, almost every item Tom Nook sells can be ordered additional times via the catalog feature once initially purchased; that first purchase “unlocks” the ability to buy multiples as much as one desires.
You can build your fucking “lavish estate” around both houses and involve her in the design process.
These are just the mechanical, gameplay-based issues with his assertions. It is also obviously the case that he is a toxic, manipulative, and controlling asshole. It’s good that he offered to buy her her own console, but he should have done that in the first instance instead of exploding at her, or at least explained in a gentle and compassionate manner why it was important for him to have his own town.
I'm not bitter at all.
Sure.
Setting boundaries can be fine and all, but 1) as an avid Animal Crossing fan, I think his boundaries are ridiculous - the grind IS the game and min-maxing is neither necessary nor important, and 2) the way he went about this was both wrong and disrespectful. I cannot believe that he is (apparently) 31.
He did not learn from the comments, either, by the way:
I don't have issues. I just don't want her fucking up my experience. […]
I went through the same shit with my siblings 20 years ago and I'm not about to do it again. I'm too old to have my gaming experiences infringed upon. [emphasis added]
No dude, you’re too old to fucking act like this. I hope she dumps your ass.
By the way, he is a repeat player on AITA.
Lucid dreaming
I like to follow bad gamer bullshit with good gamer bullshit, so here we go:
Not all art is polished and professional. Sometimes, it’s crude and still speaks truth. Mans Best Friend, featuring a man kneeling next to his dog, only has 74 likes in Dreams. It only takes a moment to understand why that’s the case. The dog looks like Clifford, a puppy hit with a ray gun and was grossly and awkwardly increased in size. There are typos. And yet. […]
Inside, recreations of both characters square off. By square off, I mean Mickey Mouse declares “I want someone to kill today,” Goku responds by saying “Kill me,” and Mickey says “OK.” There is no animation, and you don’t interact with the scene. At one point, there’s a loud explosion, and Goku announces “Im dead,” as he lies on the ground. That’s it. It’s over.
Patrick Klepek is a great writer, this is a great story, I kind of wish I used my PS4 more so I could play Dreams. I am assuming that at some point it will get a PC analogue, although there is almost certainly a console exclusivity period baked into the publishing contract.
I like this story, and the concept of the game (platform?), because they focus on user creativity. They are not about what you are expected to do - what is obvious to do - but instead they focus on what is possible to do and what it occurs to random users to do. I, like Patrick, am fascinated by the art that kids create when they should be sleeping.
I love Minecraft because it facilitates player creativity and helps give people - children and adults alike - a platform and a toolkit to bring their ideas to life. More than that, though, it helps them imagine those ideas in the first place. The more the world is full of those kinds of tools and platforms, the more amazing art we’ll see, and the better we’ll all be for it.
Begin modeling
I struggled to come up with a section header for this, so I just went with the headline of the story. How do you even summarize this story, much less make a joke about it? You don’t - it’s serious and important and deserves to be treated as such.
This is a story about sex trafficking:
He promised that everything would be paid for. The flight. The hotel. The food and transportation. He also promised that the work wouldn’t take more than a few hours and she’d earn $2,000. She could keep her panties on and it would just be pictures.
And most important — nobody would find out.
To Kelly Lanzafame, this wasn’t just two grand and a free trip to San Diego; it was a chance to keep her housing.
Obviously it goes downhill from there. But, as always, the how is significant, and I think stories like this are worth reading. Hopefully this story will help you or someone you know avoid getting caught up in something like this. And it’s hard to say the story has a happy ending, but the final section header is “A Certain Type of Closure,” so at least it comes close.
Pay the women, you fucking cowards
This week, US Soccer made some egregious arguments in the USWNT lawsuit about equal pay (direct document link):
US Soccer also pointed to biological differences and “indisputable science” to argue that women should be paid less because the men’s team “requires a higher level of skill” than the women’s team.
Hahahahahaha. Come on, no. We have done this stupid song and dance before, so many times, it is ridiculous. The USWNT is one of the winningest teams in soccer, the players are unbelievably talented, they deserve to get fucking paid.
That US men's team players often face openly hostile fans at their own home games, US Soccer argued, was also evidence that men work a different, more demanding job than women. The US men’s opponents, like Mexico, sometimes attract more supporters to games played on US soil than the US men do, especially in the wake of the men’s failure to qualify for the 2018 World Cup.
Maybe the men should, I don’t know, git gud? This seems like such a blatantly self-defeating argument - oh, it’s harder to play soccer as a man because nobody likes our team! Yeah, well, nobody likes your team (relative to the women’s team) because you fucking suck (relative to the women’s team), and if you want more fans maybe you should simply play better.
Even if you want to argue that there are “essential differences” (there are not), the pay should be pegged to league performance, not “overall skill” (whatever the fuck that means). Men should not be paid more to perform worse for fewer fans, that is very stupid, I hope the women win their lawsuit.
Little liar man
Attorneys for an Alabama sheriff who’s set to go on trial for felony theft charges were slammed by the judge for seeking a delay by claiming their client was hospitalized with possible coronavirus.
Limestone County Sheriff Mike Blakely’s attorneys made the claim in a filing on Friday, but a rare Saturday hearing showed the claim was false. Circuit Judge Judge Pride Tompkins criticized the defense for making claims that could cause a public panic, The News Courier of Athens reported.
“I don’t know what your tactic is, but it’s condemned by the court,” Tompkins said. “And the court won’t tolerate it.”
Was this idea the Sheriff’s or the attorneys’? (Probably the Sheriff’s, but obviously the attorneys ratified it.) Did they think they would get away with it? (God, I hope not.) Are they just this stupid? (Probably, unfortunately.)
I don’t know what Alabama’s professional responsibility regime is like, but I hope the attorneys get reprimanded for this. It’s bad enough to lie in a court filing, but to lie in a court filing during and about a pandemic? What the fuck?
The government is dead, long live the government
“Conservatives won their war on Big Government. Their prize is a pandemic,” reads the subheader for this article by Alex Pareene:
Donald Trump’s televised address to the nation Wednesday night on the coronavirus pandemic failed just about every single test of political rhetoric. It neither reassured the American people nor did it inform them. The markets have continued their dismal tumble, and the White House took the extraordinary step of correcting (or, in Politico parlance, “walking back”) three separate untruths the president managed to deliver, despite seemingly sticking to his prepared remarks.
Not that anyone, at this stage, expected the president to rise to the occasion. It has become apparent that Trump and his staff view a pandemic as a messaging problem that threatens to become a liquidity crisis. The idea that they should have stepped in to contain the virus is as foreign to them as the idea that they now bear the primary responsibility for mitigating it.
Right - that is a very succinct way of describing how and why the coronavirus situation in the United States is so goddamn awful. And it is so goddamn awful, by the way, we just don’t know it yet because there are no test kits and tests are taking days to return results. We are probably two weeks late to implementing all of the necessary quarantines, and we will probably only know how bad things are two weeks from now, and they will probably continue to get worse in the meantime.
I will get into all of the coronavirus stuff in a minute - there will be a lightning round, get excited - but I wanted to take this section to highlight that the virus is only shining a light on what has already been true for the last four years, that our government is dysfunctional and that we have been living in a crisis. Like I said above, the money injected into the markets (that then disappeared) could have solved the student debt crisis. Or it could have paid for Medicare for All. Or it could have paid for universal childcare. Again, the money is there if you care enough, but they don’t care, and they’re doing nothing.
It has been the main goal of the right for the last decade or so to completely dismantle the federal government and leave it fully unequipped to handle a pandemic (or, you know, the “mundane” crises we’ve been experiencing for years). Hilariously, that has led to what I like to refer to as “airport socialism” (c.f. “airport atheism;” “only pray when there’s turbulence”), like this bullshit from Ben Shapiro:
Ben is like one more logical step away from realizing that if libertarianism cannot handle a pandemic, then it is not a viable theory of governance at all. Libertarianism - the kind that Ben and the modern right preach, anyway - is a childish thought experiment that privileges some lives over others for no discernible or definable reason. Coronavirus is just exposing it for what it is.
In the absence of a functioning federal government, how the crisis plays out will depend in large part on whether you live in a well-managed state or a poorly managed one. In Minnesota, they are beginning curbside testing. California is dipping into its own emergency stockpile of surgical masks and respirators. The response may be less effective in, say, Texas, where, as Christopher Hooks writes in Texas Monthly, the state’s major public health agency worked out of an office full of rats and mold as recently as 2018.
Cool! Normal country. Vote for Bernie.
Art and mastery
When I say “art and mastery,” of course the first thing that should come to your mind is prank calling:
Prank calls may never regain the artistic heights they reached during their 1990s peak—an era that saw the form’s zenith with The Jerky Boys putting out CDs filled with manically stupid recordings. Still, the spirit of these telephone mavericks lives on through the internet, where channels like Not Even A Show have identified the most fertile pranking grounds on the modern day: Right wing call-in shows where hateful numbskulls like Ben Shapiro, Sebastian Gorka, and Stefan Molyneux field questions and comments from their listeners.
Delicious. I used to make prank calls back in the day, or at least a few. My friends and I would buy Skype credit and use it to call Gamestop to ask for Battletoads. On a few occasions we would conference-call multiple Gamestops to each other and enjoy the unfolding chaos (it worked particularly well if you got stores that were either right next to each other or entirely across the country, no middle ground). The employees obviously caught on to this once it had been going on for a bit, and the best of them would play along, recognizing it as a welcome distraction from the monotony of retail bullshit. I even got some “prank chats” back in the day when I was doing tech support in college.
But there’s nothing quite as satisfying as prank calls played on people who are oh-so deserving, and course I’m talking about right-wing media assholes like those named above. They make their money preying on the oppressed and the delusional, so it’s at least a little fair that their time and temper get wasted live on air. Click through and enjoy.
Party favors
This is another story where I was going to just run with the headline. Not because it’s utterly serious but because I did not think I could do any better. I am pretty pleased with the end result, though, because it fits the story well:
Ruby Streek, a 21-year-old waitress and artist in London, recently got a taste of Twitter notoriety when she made a political T-shirt in the lead-up to the U.K. election. “I’m doing my BA in fine art and specialize in semantics and language. I’d also made T-shirts with my nudes on them before, so it was kind of just begging to be made,” she laughs. “The 2019 election had absolutely no sex appeal and I’d just finished writing my dissertation, so I thought it’d be funny to try and make slutty merch advocating for socialism.”
Obviously this story is NSFW, but you should absolutely click through.
Coronavirus lightning round
Okay, I promised you a lightning round, here it is:
I Did Not Expect Doomsday To Be This Tacky
That’s right. Former Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin was the first eliminated contestant from Group C on this season of The Masked Singer, after her lackluster take on Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” in a candy-colored bear costume failed to excite Robin Thicke. Keep every word of that last sentence in your heart for the next time a conservative American tries to make you feel like a degenerate for any reason.
St. Patrick’s Day parades in Chicago ‘postponed’ amid coronavirus worries, Lightfoot says
“We all know what the St. Patrick’s Day celebrations mean to all of us in the city of Chicago, but we, as elected leaders, can’t take any chances with the health of our residents,” Pritzker said.
What Pritzker is trying to say without actually saying is that he knows how badly everybody wants to get absolutely shitfaced, he’s just asking you to please do it at home and not get everyone sick. And if they’re cancelling St. Paddy’s day in Chicago, you know it’s a big deal.
Disneyland and Disney World will close for the month over coronavirus
Right. A big deal.
Coronavirus books plagiarized from news outlets dominate Amazon search results
Other books that appeared high on Amazon search results had similar issues, as well as authors whose identities could not be verified. The listings highlight the challenge that Amazon has faced as consumers have turned to the company for a variety of goods and information related to the new coronavirus.
Amazon has taken action to limit price gouging and removed more than 1 million products for making misleading claims.Ah, yes, of course - what’s a global pandemic without a heaping helping of scams?
Here’s the Biggest Thing to Worry About With Coronavirus
In an unthinkable fashion, physicians are having to ration care. They’re having to choose whom to treat, and whom to ignore.
They’re having to choose who will die.
Italy, especially Northern Italy, has a solid health care system. It might not be the best in the world, but it’s certainly not lacking in ability. It’s just not ready for the sudden influx of cases. There aren’t enough physicians. There’s not enough equipment.
The United States isn’t better prepared.
Lovely.
Trump’s Dangerously Effective Coronavirus Propaganda
A key strain of the president’s narrative is that concerns about the coronavirus are being weaponized by bad-faith actors—a notion that has spawned a broad range of conspiracy theories. On Fox Business, Trish Regan accused Trump’s enemies of trying to “create mass hysteria to encourage a market sell-off” that would harm his reelection prospects: “This is impeachment all over again,” she declared. Rush Limbaugh has mused that the president is the target of “virus terrorism.” And on Facebook and Twitter, a meme has begun circulating among Trump fans that darkly suggests a new disease is introduced every election year to influence politics.
This shit is going to get your parents and/or grandparents killed. “Boomer remover” is trending on Twitter.
Inside Jared Kushner’s coronavirus research: a wide net on a giant Facebook group
Kloss solicited recommendations on Facebook just hours after Trump’s brief prime-time address in which the president misrepresented his administration's own actions involving a 30-day ban on foreign visitors from Europe.
“If you were in charge of Federal response to the Pandemic what would your recommendation be. Please only serious responses,” he wrote. “I have direct channel to person now in charge at White House.”
No one in this administration knows what they are doing.
Hotel disputes conservative lobbyist Matt Schlapp’s claim of coronavirus ‘screening’ at CPAC site
Allison Sitch, a spokeswoman for Marriott, the company that operates the Gaylord National, in an email to CNBC, contradicted Matt Schlapp’s claim.
“It is my understanding that no screens of either people or facilities has been performed at the property,” Sitch said.
Also, they are liars.
Out of An Abundance of Caution, I Have No Clue What to Do
The advice being offered by public officials, ostensibly via health experts, about whether to keep doing the mundane activities that make up most of my life has been maddeningly vague and with no clear directive to my own life.
Despite the above closings, bans, etc., there has been basically no actual guidance about how any of us are supposed to conduct our lives. That alone is going to tear the country apart by driving us insane. Maybe the most important thing that people need in a crisis - and that we are sorely missing - is clarity.
Love In The Time Of Coronavirus: How The Budding Pandemic Is Making And Breaking Relationships
Naturally, with close contact being intrinsic to dating, people’s love lives are also taking a hit. How are you supposed to make out with your date when the CDC is urging people not to touch their own faces, much less someone else’s?
I am a big fan of Julia Reinstein’s and I had to end the lightning round on this article because it is both great and relatable, and relatable content is the only thing keeping all of us from having our brains fall out of our skulls. Really, this piece is a public service, and we should all be thanking Julia.
Everything, obviously, is broken and terrifying. I don’t have any good answers except hold the people you care about close, listen to the doctors, and don’t panic.
You deserve some good animal content
In order to fit in everything this week I am just going to give you links to click instead of embeds, because I am close to the email length limit and I want to give you as much content as possible. But as a bonus, the replies to the last one are absolutely chock full of some heckin’ good animals. Here are the links:
https://twitter.com/NewhouseRescue/status/1238224339796926464
https://twitter.com/NEHumaneSociety/status/1238149250422374406
https://twitter.com/GhostEsq/status/1237932435112972291
https://twitter.com/BandoManndo/status/1236809607164485632
https://twitter.com/darth/status/1237916498280103938
Okay, please take care of yourselves, I will see you next week.