Even though McConnell isn’t older, I’d argue he’s a bigger issue because of the power he wields.

That is a valid point about the “Looking like you’re playing by the rules but not really”. It sucks that this isn’t the case though, since this is the first democrat representative for this district in 40 years.

I’m assuming that “big pile of cash” is their emergency fund - Spencer implies as much when he says that it serves as an impediment to buying them out.

It’s not happening for Game Pass right now. If Microsoft hoovered up Nintendo and all the other companies, leaving Game Pass with little competition, they’d flip in an instant. Then you’d have not only Nintendo games for an overpriced subscription, you’d have Nintendo and everything else Microsoft bought for an overpriced subscription, where Microsoft can do whatever they want because only they have the rights to those games.

I’m not arguing Nintendo’s subscription services doesn’t suck ass, I’m arguing that Microsoft would do the same thing if they got their mits on Nintendo’s catalog, except potentially worse because they have more ‘exclusive content’ to lock-away in their garden and they can force their BS into Windows.

Only for Democrats, unfortunately.

It’s an unpopular opinion and even I don’t know how I feel about it, but I almost feel like democrats should run until they get voted out same as Republicans. Because of her being a good person, this seat is now back in contention and the democrats don’t have the incumbent advantage they should. Until everyone is forced to play by the rules, one side playing by the rules and the other not just means that the side that flaunts the rules will win.

The ActiBlizz merger needs to be shot down and Microsoft Games needs to be forced to split off from Microsoft. This tactic of “Make all the money in one sector, then use that unlimited money to invade another sector, force small businesses out by operating at a loss, and then enshittifying the entire sector to a state worse than it was originally” has to stop - across all sectors.

If you can’t survive in your own sector on your own merits without money from Daddy Corpo, you deserve to die.

I also hate that Spencer talks like “sitting on a big pile of cash” instead of gambling it on the market is fucking stupid. Classic “NOW NOW NOW” American capitalism.

Why wouldn’t it happen for Game Pass? It’s happened for every new service. Start them with a great deal to undermine all competition because you can eat the cost and they can’t. When the competition dies, slowly start enshittifying it, until it’s as bad or worse than the original. Arguably Microsoft is already starting that process by killing off the $1 demo.

Microsoft isn’t going to pass up free money, and if anything this email conversation confirms that they’re drooling, waiting for the “fuck them over the barrel” stage.

Are they also going to alter their stance that Planned Parenthood and a children’s hospital aren’t charity?

Yeah, but there’s lots of people who might play the game that aren’t going to shell out for a PS5 for it.

What the hell does “mostly” mean? “It’s just a little screwing you over”

I’d add, though, that the ballooning of responsibilities over time is not unique to staff. Faculty have been increasingly pressured to take on more students, inflate cohorts and class sizes, bring in more dollars in a more competitive funding landscape, etc.

That’s fair, and I don’t want to see faculty cut either - you all do a shit-ton of work that I can’t even imagine trying to do. Fortunately our institution has class size limits and has stood firm on that for at least 30 years, but the rest is definitely still applicable here.

In the same meeting today where I met our new Associate Dean who is filling a newly-created position to chop in half another associate Dean’s duties, we were told there’s a reorganization and one of us has to “volunteer” to take on slew of new admin duties.

Ew, asking faculty to take on admin duties is really wrong - I’m sorry that happened.

How many staff could be hired if the “extra fat” from her salary were directly rerouted to staff compensation?

None, because we already had to promote internally because we couldn’t get someone externally due to pay / benefit reasons. We already can’t get anyone to take the positions we have, even at the current pay rate. I don’t know if that’s because our pay rates are already low, but decreasing them further would probably make it literally impossible to hire. We gave up on getting an Advancement VP, we’re 3 months with no bites on a VP of admissions and 3 months with no fin. aid director.

Maybe we’re smaller than average, but we only really have three levels of staff, and they all have different responsibilities that can’t really be put together. You have regular workers who do front lines jobs, department managers / associate VPs who manage the budget, staffing, and day-to-day management of each department, and then you have the VP level, which represents a collection of offices to the Board of Trustees and works on large scale initiatives across multi-departments. Do you all have more layers?

I wonder if a theocratic state built on a tyrannical religion almost isn’t worse, though…

I’ve not played Tactics Ogre yet, but that’s one of the next games on my list. I was going to start with Let Us Cling Together.

I always get wary of letters like this from faculty bodies. I don’t think my institution is in a unique position here, so here’s what it looks like from our side.

Our faculty flip their shit every time there’s any faculty department even proposed to be cut - no matter how small it is. We have multiple departments that service less than 0.5% of the student body, but they are never considered for cuts because of the political struggle with the faculty. The faculty point at the staff and say, “This must be their fault!” Staff are running vastly more ragged than faculty. In the last six months, we’ve had two different staff departments completely collapse and leave because they ran for so long on such shoe-string budgets, often running 33 - 50% short of staff. One staff member would leave due to burn-out. The next in command in the office, not knowing if that person would ever be replaced, immediately said “I’ve been doing two and a half jobs. I can’t do another,” and left. Then the next in command after them, then the next, until finally both affected offices were empty, all in the span of a month. And when I say “collapse”, I mean completely collapse. No retention at all. 0 people left. Every single drop of institutional knowledge in those offices are gone. We’ve got a third office heading that way, losing the VP and then the interim VP in three months. But no, staff must still be the issue.

Faculty always act like they’re god-sent and the only reason colleges and universities exist, but we’re in this together. Good luck teaching without any software support or classroom technology. Good luck teaching with no students because admissions fell apart. Good luck teaching when no one can afford to attend because there’s no one navigating the mess that is federal financial aid. Stop treating the staff like they’re ancillary fat to be cut. If anything, we’ve got a lot more faculty than we really should for an institution our size.

Now maybe that’s not what’s going on here…but the arguments they make sound almost exactly like the arguments the faculty here make, and I know they’re BS. Yes, our president is the highest paid member of the college, but she gives literally 100% of her pay back in donations every month. My boss makes just 10k more than me despite having 35 years more experience and exponentially more stress. We can’t get people to fill senior staff positions because our pay is so low and our benefits so meager. The only reason we got a CFO to come in and try to save us at all is because his entire career is saving failing institutions in order to maintain their history.

All that “Administration explosion” people keep talking about? Yeah, that’s because the systems needed to keep the school running have become orders of magnitude more difficult. You can’t do regular-ass, physical registrations anymore. All that data needs to be in a system and shipped off to the government, maintained in a very particular format and way. People don’t understand the massive amount of work it takes to keep a school regulatory compliant and running. I’m not saying that regulation is a bad thing - it keeps people from getting taken advantage of by for-profit “institutions” - but that comes with a real, tangible cost for each and every institution, and that cost is higher staff costs. No, you can’t just cut those staff and expect that work to get done. If you fall out of compliance, you lose your accreditation. You lose your accreditation, you lose federal aid. You lose federal aid, the whole institution goes bye-bye. I don’t care if you have Steven fucking Hawking teaching, if you don’t have federal aid, you’re done.

Staff have born the brunt of cuts here for decades - it’s time for the faculty to step up and take their losses too. We have to bear this burden together, or else faculty are suddenly going to find out that it turns out all those staff they mistreated and abused actually were doing 3x the amount of work that number of people should be doing.

And obviously, but I’ll state it anyway because someone will wander in and think I’m happy to see faculty “get their just desserts”, I’d much rather that we not have to cut anybody. As I said, we’re all in this together - I don’t want to see my colleagues suffer and lose their jobs, and the students lose the professors they love. But things are changing in education right now, and either we’re going to weather this together, or we’re going to fall to pieces.

Godot?

Thanks for the recommendation!

I assumed Delita and Ovelia knew about the church suppressing the Durai papers, but you’re right that that probably wasn’t the case and even if it was, it didn’t tell her anything new.

Did Delita wipe out the nobility, though? Because he’s still king, and presumably has a court. He might’ve wiped out those nobles in specific, but it doesn’t seem like he achieved any systemic change - so what happened to Tietra will happen to someone else again down the line. I feel like that’s one of the points of his arc - he “doesn’t want to use people” but starts doing so because he has to, but in the end keeps doing so out of convenience, habit, and the damage he’s accumulated as a person. Him not ending the monarchy is the second biggest indicator of this.

Fair enough - and yeah, Wiegraf was definitely a stand-out character. When I first played it in 2000 I would’ve been scandalized and astonished by the idea that the church was secretly controlled by demons and were fundamentally based on a psychopath trying to rule the world or end it trying, but it felt weirdly grafted on to the class war arc and themes. I feel like the two plot lines could’ve honestly been separated into two different installments based on the same engine and both would’ve been highly praised.

I played some FF14, but got lost in the sauce of the seemingly never-ending story quest. The minute-to-minute gameplay wasn’t exciting for me, so I was trying to hold out for the super duper awesome raids I heard about, but those raids seemed to get further and further away every time I played.

I’m not sure whether to be excited about a remaster or scared. I played the PSX version instead of WotL already, and skipped the out-of-world tie in characters (Cloud / better Mustadio guy). I’d be interested to see what they do with it, but I might not end up playing it even though I’d love to see new Ivalice Alliance content.

IndustrialCraft still exists: https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/ic2-classic

BuildCraft never moved forward past the block ID change in 1.12, but it’s still updated, IIRC.

Forestry hasn’t been updated in a long time, but with the addition of bees in vanilla there’s new bee mods to play with: https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/productivebees

Logistic Pipes also didn’t make it past the block ID change in 1.12, but there are a variety of new storage mods like xNet, Integrated Dynamics, Applied Energistics 2, etc.

My personal opinion is that minecraft modding is a lot quieter than it used to be because Microsoft has been playing down the Java version (the moddable version) and playing up the version you have to pay for addons / mods (Bedrock). But there’s probably a lot of things contributing - aging demographic of the Java version, the fact that the mod API never happened and never will, disillusionment with M$, etc.

I might check that out, thanks!

Olan sees them ride off into the sunset on chocobos, but IDK. It felt kind of cheap, so I head-canon that they died.

+1 for Majesty. The combination of fawning over your champions while also absolutely cursing those stupid useless fuckers was fun.