Just a bit of a ramble but when I switched high schools near the end of my education, my new principal looked at my unimpressive test scores and said something along the lines of, 'well, somebody needs to drive the trucks.' It was reflective of the attitudes drilled into me through my primary educations, that Blue Collar work represented the 'bad path' you'd fall onto if you failed your education.

So, even though I had no particular interest in academics at the time, and had no idea what fulfilling work felt like or what I wanted to do with my life, I had always told myself that I needed to end up in White Collar work. That I would have at least 'made it' then and not be cursed to labor, something I saw as a punishment for lack of performance. I went to uni and accomplished it, too, ending up in a comfortable but deeply unfulfilling bullshit job.

I'm the rube, of course. As I became more politically actualized I realized who actually held the value, it became clear that I had put myself in the ideal position for a worker under capitalism. Earning hardly enough in an insecure position - I'm not exactly a specialized professional. I could be laid off in one bad swing of the job market and since my skillset is built around a bullshit profession, I am vulnerable to having to accept any work should this happen.

My peers from school, the ones seen at the time as lacking promise and doomed to 'drive the trucks,' have of course built practical and valuable skill sets directly valuable to the economy and always relevant for society - concepts I had never been properly exposed to in my education. They're not on the greener side of the fence, of course, as they are dealing with their own material issues like health issues and longer work hours. It just amuses me sometimes how effectively me, a young directionless boy, was steered away from work that would have built character and purpose, in favor of chasing a deadend desk job that, at one point, made me feel superior.

I think this is actually a pretty common experience for not-dirt-poor white dudes in the western world, and is of/c reflective of that deep societal rot everyone is ignoring. There's a lot of complicated feelings causing that build up of resentment among the White Collar world to their Blue Collar comrades, and I find, more and more, that it doesn't go the other way.

Lots of anti-games work for this. DayZ, at least, the hook of it's original experiment, cannot work without the interactive layer and other players.

oh that really hurt my heart this morning. we're all struggling with something but I am so lucky, and there are some truly evil people out there.

Lol what is the context of this? I don't know anything happening in Australia that could be construed as recent socialist development. Actually, we have low petrol prices compared to a lot of other countries, but they probably won't be mentioning that.

If you like the writing in Half Life I really recommend reading The 37th Mandala by Marc Laidlaw. The writer for much of Half Life's golden era is an actual author and so much of the body horror/sci fi dread that Half Life 2 captures so well is almost straight out of The 37th Mandala.

more people die during America's Halloween celebrations per year than have been killed by Chinese police, in the entire country, in the same time period

I think there's a clear difference between testing it in areas where the fallout will affect a population, and intentionally ending the lives of 200K people in a flash.

200k people were vaporized by atomic bombs in an utterly indiscriminate manner. This is inclusive of babies, little infants literally melted in a second. The radiation persisted decades after the blast.

We give it a special status despite conventional warfare still being capable of greater numbers, because of how exceedingly cruel and indiscriminate it is.

Historians described it as an 'ethical shock' and I agree with the term. If the yanks did not elect to exclusively melt civilians with their demonstration history might look at it differently.

smh these are actors, this is a staged fun time. if you look closely you can see the crowd and horizon is a comically large cardboard cutout painted to resemble a beach.

chilling in the communism backrooms

These movies also look like pure shit

No way. They're pushing CGI technology, bro.

mfw invoking the dunning kruger effect is an example of the non existent dunning kruger effect