Brekna The Excation

every month or so, a thick, glossy, full color catalogue lands in my mailbox, full of dentist chairs, dentist lamps, dentist tables and dentist art to put on the walls of your dentist waiting room.

(the catalogue makes for a great bird toy, my babies take at least a week to reduce it to shreds.)

i've received ads full of smiles full of teeth, addressed to doctor and doctor so and so. they just keep coming and i'm too exhausted to do anything about it.

thing is, it was just something funny, a cute anecdote. look at my new dentist catalogue! i'll order the reclining chair on page 24, the one that costs 8000$, it would look cute in the living room.

and then earlier tonight (around 3AM, yes i was awake) a pipe of our dishwasher decided to disconnect. (yes we'd just started a load, our upstairs neighbor is deaf, no guilt whatsoever, when you're depressed most of the time you clean when the energy comes and sometimes it's on friday night 3am)

anyway. it's earlier tonight, at 3h15 AM, that I found myself in front of the fuse box in the basement, water cascading around me, panicking, trying to find the kitchen switch to turn off everything electric

and.

the switches were labeled.

dentist lamp 1

dentist lamp 2

x-ray

waiting room

dentist lamp 3

..

oh. oh no.

His name is Jim Sterling and he is a rather… colorful games journalist who actually uses his platform to report on stuff like horrible working conditions, abuse and even stuff like sexual assault in the games industry.

Why? Because a massive scandal broke at the major game publisher Ubisoft revealing a culture of systematic sexual abuse, including high-ranking officials within the company that would regularly drug and rape female employees, which management and HR seemed fully aware of and would protect and move around the perpetrators Catholic-church-style. Reviewers were told not to talk about it and, when it became impossible to contain, to not talk about it where it’s “irrelevant” – that is, never mention or hint at any such stuff when actually reviewing and promoting Ubisoft games, because it’s a separate thing, see, no need to distract from the game (Ubisoft’s goal here was to be able to continue to advertise their games to players who hadn’t heard about it, and wait out the scandal until those who had just assumed everything was dealt with and forgot, which worked).

Jim refused. They knew this would tank their career, they knew they were throwing away an incredibly promising future. They did it anyway.

James Stephanie Sterling in one of a very small number of game reviewers out there with an actual fucking spine and a moral code made from titanium. They’re still effectively blacklisted from the industry, because since then they’ve refused to reform and play Good PR Robot like reviewers are supposed to do (because the AAA games industry thinks ‘reviewer’ and ‘critic’ are synonyms for ‘PR person in a gig economy’), shining light on repeated abuses and scandals in the industry, both internal scandals like this (discrimination, worker abuse, fraud, the normalisation of crunch culture and not paying workers) and ways at which the AAA industry scams players (abuses of early access, loot boxes and ‘pay to win’ mechanics that used to be the realm of free-to-play games now dominating paid titles while the prices of those titles also go up, abusive subscription models and ‘always online’ services, fun little tricks that companies love to pull with “remastered” games, and lately NFTs). Jim’s usually a good six months to a full year ahead of the curve on spying out this bullshit, able to see and warn about it before it becomes trendy enough for other reviewers to touch, and the result has been being continually silenced by game companies and passively buried by algorithms due to illegitimate DCMA takedowns, incorrect copyright strikes spurious lawsuits, being frozen out of gaming news, and whatever other nasty tricks people can pull. They came out as nonbinary very shortly before hitting a million subscribers (despite the forces agaisnt them) and then suddenly lost a lot of subscribers over a short period of time. Which was surely a complete coincidence. Yep. Just a coincidence. Have they backed down on literally anything? No. Because they decided to do this properly despite the cost and they are NOT fucking around.

They also call out particularly bad bullshit of indie developers (we’re talking the con artists and bigots in indie development in particular), not just AAA, which once hilariously resulted in a tiny no-name developer attempting to sue them for TEN MILLION DOLLARS. (Well, I found it hilarious after the fact. It was incredibly frustrating and somewhat stressful for Jim at the time, if one of the more ridiculous silencing tactics.) You can see them report on that here:

The members of this genus (Hypoconcha) have a series of unique adaptations that facilitate this kind of camouflage behavior. Many of the Dromiidae crabs (e.g. hermit crabs, sponge crabs, shellback crabs, etc.) are equipped with a specialized pair of legs that enables the crab to hold a shell, sea sponge, and/or ascidian against their body, but shellback crabs also have a flexible, semi-membranous body that can be tucked more firmly into the contours of a bivalve shell, producing a suction mechanism that keeps the shell firmly locked in place.

The body of the shellback crab is also covered in a very fine layer of hair-like structures called setae, and when the crab presses itself against the shell, these membranous "hairs" can take on an almost translucent appearance, particularly around the margins of the crab's body.

I recently posted some photos/info about some of the crabs in the genus Lamarckdromia (which belongs to the same family) and as I was doing the background research for that post, I was just kind of mesmerized by all of these weirdly adorable crabs that seem to exist within the Dromiidae family tree. Each genus has its own unique adaptations that allow the crabs to use specific materials for camouflage -- some of them use living sponges, clamshells, ascidians, etc.

And I could not stop laughing at the little faces on these crabs. They've all got the same bemused/indignant expression...as if some random asshole has just walked up to them, shoved them over, and announced to the entire ocean that there's a crab hiding beneath that disguise; as if that actually happens to them quite a lot, and they're getting really sick of it.

Sources & More Info:

Crustaceana Monographs: Comparison of the Shell-Carrying Behaviors of Desmodromia, Conchoecetes, and Hypoconcha (the relevant info is on page 191)

South Carolina Department of Natural Resources: Shellback Crabs and their Larval Stages (PDF)

South Carolina Public Radio: Shellback Crabs

Here's an article from last year about his life and work and his reaction to being a meme:

[...]

The Tsuchinoko is a Japanese yōkai that looks like a short, rotund snake. Considered folklore by most, some claim to have seen it.

貓 (Mandarin Chinese) māo [mɑʊ̯˥˥] a cat.

bingle (English, Baseball or Upside-Down Dialect) [ˈbɪŋgəl] In Baseball Dialect, a base hit. In Upside-Down Dialect (Australian English), a minor collision, especially between motor vehicles.

Reblog this if you pronounce “.gif” as “GIF.”

NOT JIF,

GIF.

And here is the link for the opposite.