sine lucro friget ludus

This paper intended to test whether would mice would run on a wheel if they found one, to try and determine if this was a natural behavior or a stress response in captivity. They put a wheel in a protected little box with a camera that took pictures any time the wheel turned, and tallied up how often it was used by what.

Mice were, happily, the most common users of the wheel, and their patterns of use indicated they were doing so voluntarily once they figured it out.

But the second most common users.

Those were slugs.

“We do not have trade schools,” he said. “We are not investing in educating a next generation of people like my grandfather who had nothing, who built a middle-class life and a future for his family.”

Buddy - your grandfather was probably able to find a job that would teach him what he needed to know in order to do the job.

If FoMoCo offered Promising Earnest Young Persons $120K/year - or even a lot less than that! - to be mechanics, with the promise that you'd provide the needed training, I have very little doubt that you'd fill all your vacancies pretty much immediately.

Maybe I'm a bit more focused on the "intense love and care can still exist in such horrible circumstances" than the fact it's expressed in unhealthy ways because they also live in a toxic waste dump. I think people who grew up in the torment nexus are going to reflect that in their behaviours. I think a poor understanding of consent might be a part of that actually. I don't think it's reasonable to expect better from these characters and they're doing the best they can with a crappy existence. Obviously dark fiction and fantasy is also fine but this specific attitude I find also strikes me as deeply unconcerned with understanding how a character's context is important when it comes to understanding the choices they make and things they do.