My Personal Dumpster Fire

Trollmoot is an online 18+ gathering space for those who worship and work with troll spirits and the Jötnar. Whether you're experienced in trolldöm (Scandinavian folk magic), curious about working with trolls, or seeking community with fellow practitioners, you'll find a home in Trollmoot.

How much environmental legislation might have been passed by a President Gore, in comparison to President Bush's real life terms? Great job, Ralph Nader--you handed anti-environmentalist Republicans two presidential terms and set the fight against climate change back by a decade.

Fuck Ralph Nader. Fuck him and his bullshit and fuck Jill Stein.

I'm old. I voted for Al Gore. I sat up all night watching the tallies for each state come in on TV and seeing how Ralph Nader had given George W. Bush juuuuuuust enough of a margin to be able to twist our stupid Electoral College in his favor and take the election.

And then we had to wait for Florida and their goddamn "hanging chads" which is a debacle of its time that will make anyone of a certain age groan and roll their eyes. Because Florida.

George W. Bush received fewer votes than Al Gore. Period. More Americans voted for Al Gore. By all rights he should have been our president. The man who was pushing for climate change science 20+ years ago while everyone openly mocked him in the media.

But Ralph Nader just kept running for president!! 1972, 1980, 1992, 1996... and nobody ever really took him all that seriously. He never had a real political "party" until the Green Party formed in 2000. But the thing is. Ralph Nader purposefully fucked the election. He wasn't trying to win. He knew he could at best, hope for 5% of the popular vote. Towards the end of the campaign time, the "run up", the candidates should be focused on states that will matter most. Him being a small, supposedly environmentally focused independent candidate, should have been campaigning to get tons of votes in big liberal states like California and New York where he had the most appeal.

What did he do instead?? He spent all his time in swing states like Florida and Pennsylvania, attacking Al Gore. He knew he was pulling Democratic votes away from Gore in states where it would matter. He was purposefully trying to run as a spoiler. And he spoke often about his support for Bush. Fuck Ralph Nader. Thanks to him we got George W. Bush and watched our civil liberty erode for decades. (Reminder, Bush INVENTED the Dept of Homeland Security. And it was supposed to be temporary after 9/11. Now they treat it like our very own secret police. But I digress.)

Now we've got Nader 2 Electric Boogaloo with Jill Stein in the 2016 election. The Green Party strikes again. Using the same old playbook. It's the exact same story. Hillary Clinton wins the popular vote, more Americans voted for her. But the Electoral College says the other guy is president because Jill Stein and the Green Party did such a good job siphoning off liberal votes. Nice work!! Hope you all enjoyed the fruits of your labor with the state of the world you ushered in.

And now in 2024 they're looking for a repeat. Fuck off. Just fuck all the way off.

It's global and crowdsourced and points you towards FREE FRUIT. (And herbs and nuts and things.) They have an app too but the app costs $2 and you can still pull up the map on your mobile browser for free.

This is how I found those park cherries!

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:

They choke slam people

Now, every time I wake up about three am, knowing I have to get up at 6.45, instead of stressing and panicking about how my day is going to be sleep deprived and miserable, I just tell myself 'Time to activate Mythbusters Protocol' and lie there with my eyes closed safe in the knowledge that I am measurably reducing later feelings of exhaustion.

And when this happens, about 70% of the time the reduction of guilt and stress means I actually do fall back asleep, so all in all instead of getting only three or four hours sleep, I get five to six and a half.