i was telling my dad, ever the skeptic, about corrupted blood back in March at the start of lockdown, and how the cdc studied it. how it can be used as a model for what to do and how people might act in the event of an unpredicted pandemic, and how people were playing out the same behavior during covid.
he said “so they fixed it, right? how did they fix it in the game?” and i told him the truth: they didn’t. they couldn’t control it. they had to reset the servers and roll them back to the time before the ZG encounter.
it really feels like that meme where it’s like “wow, cool video game reference!” and the point soaring over their head says THE DAMAGE WAS IRREVERSIBLE. THE THREAT SPREAD TOO RAPIDLY AND EVERYONE DIED.
weird reframing of the corrupted blood incident to make it seem, for some reason, like it was all selfish actions that people said was unrealistic because real people would help others. in fact its literally the opposite, it was used as real world data specifically because of the player driven efforts to fix it
The reason this plague in the game was a good model is because we had all walks of life type people reacting in different ways.
Those with healing magic would go into infected areas to see if they could save the infected or at least keep them alive through the disease. Those that couldn’t do that tried to warn players before they entered infected areas. NPC could be infected and have “no symptoms”; they could be asymptomatic carriers and pass it to nearby players.
The best part though was by the time Blizzard had finally come out and said “if you are infected, try to quarantine yourself so you don’t spread it!!” the player base was ALREADY DOING SO. The players had recognized the problem and worked together in myriad ways to fix it.
They also had negative reactions as well, another reason this was such a good example of a real outbreak. They had a couple people report healers or alchemists who were claiming to sell cures/treatments to the disease that ultimately would do nothing. They had a group of players that would hide in the mountains near cities and just pass the disease back and forth between themselves and then raid cities to infect them all over again. They had higher level players start rebelling on the servers. Saying it was an overreaction and if you get it you’ll just die and you can come back and be fine, etc. Since they could get the disease and survive, ie it didn’t do enough damage to them since they were higher level, they felt it unnecessary to care about whether they got it or not. They complained about not getting to play like normal just because this plague could kill lower level players.
ALL of these reactions, good and bad, were real enough to what we assumed a real life epidemic would play out that people started to use it as a model. And now look, we have proof that it was accurate.
However, what we needed to learn from it was primarily that it wasn’t reversible. The bad reactions and lack of care from the few players that weren’t cooperating made it impossible in the end to contain. The only reason it was fixed at all is the game had to reverse time, literally just delete their entire game log a few weeks and time travel weeks into the past to before the plague even began.
Think about that.
The reason no one believed it was a valid model is that it was a video game and thus the consequences weren’t permanent. “No one would act like that in real life.” But look at how we are handling this outbreak. Is it not eerily similar?
Please don’t pay the extra 30 dollars to watch Raya and the Last Dragon on top of the subscription fee you are already paying. Do not normalize this. There is no reason you should pay that much to watch a movie in your own home, a few months earlier than everyone else. If you buy into this, they will keep doing it. They are calling it an experiment for a reason.
and while it was thoroughly humiliating and i’d much rather forget about my moment of poor judgment entirely, i’m posting about it in the hopes that someone out there can learn from my mistake and save themselves a lot of trouble and money.
like millions of u.s. americans, i found myself unemployed due to the pandemic and have been searching extensively for a new job. i was recently contacted by a hiring consultant on behalf of a prospective employer, who had seen my resume listed on indeed. as directed, i contacted the employer and set up an interview. the questions were standard, and the only thing that was strange was that it was conducted over whatsapp. since i’ve worked with startups before and had some unusual but ultimately harmless experiences, i didn’t think too much about this, but in hindsight, these were red flags.
after being offered the job, i was sent the offer letter, which looked official,
to sign and return. the name was of an existing company, and it had good reviews on both indeed and glassdoor, as well as a website. then i was sent a check, instructed to deposit it, and then contact a third-party vendor to pay for necessary work materials. i didn’t know it at the time, but this is a huge red flag. the materials never came, the checks the “company” sent bounced, and the funds i paid to the vendors ended up being taken from my own checking account. i was also liable for the chargeback of the bounced check, and in less than a week lost all my meager savings.
by the time i realized something was wrong and contacted my credit union, it was too late for them to halt any payments or refund any of my money.
no one ever warned me about this, and i was raised to be obedient, and not to ask too many questions or challenge authority figures, and that really bit me in the ass. so please be careful, and if you have any doubts about a company, ask questions, do all you due diligence, and never send any money on behalf of an employer.
please boost this so others whose mamas didn’t teach them this can learn from me
(and finally, if you wanna help me out, i have ko-fi and paypal. y’all have my everlasting gratitude ♥ )
“C’mon Keith! Just follow the instructions! When I say Vol, you say Tron! VOL-”
“Voltron?” Lance facepalmed for what felt like the millionth time, a headache already forming once again. He’d been trying for a week to get his teammate to understand the chant, but he just couldn’t get it! It was frustrating beyond belief.
“PALADINS! THE GALRA ARE APPROACHING! TO YOUR LIONS!” Allura’s voice rang out from the speakers in the hallways, and both Paladins wasted no time rushing to their hangars. Shiro was already out and racing towards their enemies, and Lance and Keith followed soon after. Hunk was the last one out, once more complaining about the stupid zipline not supporting his weight.
There were three cruisers advancing on the group, and fighter jets rushed towards the humans in droves. The team began blasting immediately, explosions lighting up the nearby space more than the stars and the Castle’s light. They fought hard, but it was obvious they couldn’t do much individually.
“We need Voltron!” Shiro called out, and the group went into formation. As they did, an idea struck Lance.
“WHAT TEAM?” he screamed as they merged.
“WILDCATS!” four voices screamed back. The Paladins felt the rush of confidence that came from the simple call and response, and it was enough to let them finish off the Galran ships in only a few minutes.
The humans boarded the Castle laughing, meeting in the lounge with grins firmly in place.
“Lance, that was perfect,” Hunk told his friend, pulling the other into a side-hug. “I can’t believe none of us have done that sooner.”
“Well, I thought it was better than the Voltron chant,” the Blue Paladin responded, eyeing Keith.
“That one actually makes sense,” the boy said defensively, arms crossed.
“That’s why I think it’s better. The Voltron one makes sense to most of us, this one makes sense to all of us.”
“Excuse me,” a voice interrupted. The Paladins turned towards Allura, only now noticing she had entered the room. Both her and Coran seemed rather confused. “But, who are the Wildcats? They are a team? Of what?” Pidge smirked at the princess, glasses glinting in the artificial lighting.
freud: EVERY dude wants to fuck his mom and and EVERY girl wants to fuck her dad and also wants to be a man secretly
men: WOW!!!!!!!!!
“In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest. Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the “Oedipus complex,” which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women’s and children’s reports of mistreatment by men.”
— Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men
So what you’re saying is, Freud wasn’t wrong, he was literally manipulated by other men in the same way as his clients, in order to uphold the wider patriarchy?
I’ve always understood it as “Freud gave results that would please the people who were paying him.”
