Nuclear Monster

  • This is an excellent article from Dale Beran that helps explain the connection from 4chan to Trump supporters:

    How did we get here? What is 4chan exactly? And how did a website about anime become the avant garde of the far right? Mixed up with fascist movements, international intrigue, and Trump iconography? How do we interpret it all?

    When it was discovered that Trump had bragged about sexually assaulting many women, it made sense to me that Trump supporters would have continued supporting him. Why not, they may have made mistakes in approaching women, or even done things that amount to assault, themselves.

  • Susan Fowler writing about a year working for the illegal taxi service, Uber, and describing what happened after reporting sexual harassment:

    I was then told that I had to make a choice: (i) I could either go and find another team and then never have to interact with this man again, or (ii) I could stay on the team, but I would have to understand that he would most likely give me a poor performance review when review time came around, and there was nothing they could do about that. I remarked that this didn’t seem like much of a choice, and that I wanted to stay on the team because I had significant expertise in the exact project that the team was struggling to complete (it was genuinely in the company’s best interest to have me on that team), but they told me the same thing again and again. One HR rep even explicitly told me that it wouldn’t be retaliation if I received a negative review later because I had been “given an option”. I tried to escalate the situation but got nowhere with either HR or with my own management chain (who continued to insist that they had given him a stern-talking to and didn’t want to ruin his career over his “first offense”).

    Don’t worry, you weren’t there and nothing anyone ever reported has happened:

    Myself and a few of the women who had reported him in the past decided to all schedule meetings with HR to insist that something be done. In my meeting, the rep I spoke with told me that he had never been reported before, he had only ever committed one offense (in his chats with me), and that none of the other women who they met with had anything bad to say about him, so no further action could or would be taken. It was such a blatant lie that there was really nothing I could do. There was nothing any of us could do. We all gave up on Uber HR and our managers after that. Eventually he “left” the company. I don’t know what he did that finally convinced them to fire him.

    This kind of harassment happens at every company in SF and the valley. The men are allowed to threaten and cajole women until the women either give in or get fed up and leave because human resources refuses to do anything.

  • The internet has provided us with an early look of the operating system on the Nintendo Switch and it looks much better than anything Nintendo has provided us with previously.

    I recently spent about two hours inside a Game Stop trying to do a system transfer from one 3DS to another, which failed the first two times and worked the third for no apparent reason. Unless the Switch literally kicked you in the crotch it couldn’t be worse.

    The Switch will be out on March 3rd.

  • Christinne Muschi:

    Nine asylum-seekers, including four children, barely made it across the Canadian border on Friday as a U.S. border patrol officer tried to stop them and a Reuters photographer captured the scene.

    As a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officer seized their passports and questioned a man in the front passenger seat of a taxi that had pulled up to the border in Champlain, New York, four adults and four young children fled the cab and ran to Royal Canadian Mounted Police on the other side.

    The photos and story in this article are some of the most depressing scenes I’ve ever seen. 

    The background for the Sudanese refugees is that their nation has been in an unending civil war since 1955. That these people can’t find refuge in the United States is truly awful.

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkslF3X5YY0

    Games with pieces in them similar to tetrominoes aren’t usually my thing. I like them stacked up at a similar height until they’re removed. Wacky tetrominoes that don’t clear lines or have wacky physics applied to them are even worse. You think you’re better than Alexey Pajitnov? Nah, keep trying.

    Robots In The Wild, from Heatbox Games, is a kind of spin on Rampart’s strategy. Instead of overhead castle building, you’re playing the side-game. Building up structures out of tetrominoes to survive and fight back. Different combinations of tetrominoes turn into energy robots, or laser shooting robots, or lanterns for night missions, and so on. Keep the heart of your base alive for multiple nights and you’re on to the next planet with a new twist.

    The whole intro sequence involves the menu talking. A talking menu. Like Talkie the Toaster but without the aggravation.

    I’ve played a bit of it, and enjoyed what I’ve played so far, but not enough to give it a full review yet. It’s one of the few games that aren’t Tetris and uses those tetrominoes well.

    Robots In The Wild is in Steam‘s Early Access program now for a tenner on Windows and macOS.