Aim for the Zs!

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

I assume this is in reference to some posts I made on Bluesky about overused critical buzzwords and/or the post where I said the new Rayman Legends remake adds "MCU dialogue." The phrase has absolutely been overused to the point that it's often thrown around where it doesn't apply—people will use it to complain about anything they don't like that has jokes in the script—but I do think it's at least sometimes a useful point of critical reference. It's referring to an identifiable style of writing used in a massively popular and influential franchise that spans dozens of movies, after all.

One of the defining traits of "MCU dialogue" or "Whedonesque dialogue" is having lots of quippy banter and one-liners. And this can of course be done well, but it's often done very poorly. I think to me bad "MCU dialogue" is quippy and gives off the air of comedy without actually having actual jokes. (Again, it is crucially important to me that there is a difference between this stuff and the concept of comic relief as a whole.) At its worst you get the stock "he's right behind me isn't he?" "sooooo that just happened" "they fly now? they fly now" type dialogue that gives off a slightly flippant, sarcastic, joke-adjacent tone without actually being funny. You see this a lot in genre fiction that's afraid it'll lose the lowest common denominator audience if it takes itself too seriously, so it undercuts itself with a vague air of humor. The MCU did not invent this style of dialogue, and there are definitely some MCU movies that pull off comic relief better than their imitators, but given they've been so dominant in pop culture for almost 20 years they're just an easy face to attach to a style people are getting tired of in genre fiction.

The Rayman Legends Retold trailer gives us a good example of this with the bit where Rayman's like "It's four against one! You don't stand a chance!" and then it cuts to a roaring monster and then he's like "Maybe he stands a LITTLE bit of a chance." This is just total screenwriting 101 filler joke stuff, just having the characters say a cliche for the sake of saying something even though it's not actually funny. The scene gains nothing compared to if it was a completely silent exchange—which it WAS in the original version of the game! But the data says quips make a story go down easier, so now there's a quip.

lately ive been imagining things in a sentence mixed gwonam voice. most recently this image

To go along with the sequel announcement, for a limited time, the first game is free to grab on Steam! 🎮

✨That's FREE as in F-R-E-E, no strings attached!✨

Claim the game while the offer is available, and keep it forever!

Find the Steam page here:

VGAPride is my DOS program for displaying pride flags. So happy pride month, everyone! Here's a selection of pride flags as displayed on a Pentium 60.

and a cover too for @plutosoda