Rob’s parking garage is falling apart thanks to a cold snap, but still found another way to experience weather in Against the Storm, a roguelite city builder with beaver people. Ren’s checked out Your Only Move is Hustle, a turn-based fighting game that plays like an old stickfight animation, and Patrick’s bopping beats in Rhythm Sprout. Naturally, Rob’s found yet another way to talk tanks, thanks to The Great War: Western Front. After the break, we take a dive into the question bucket to talk pranks, gentrification, and coastal food fights.
There was some weird landlord apologism at the end of this one. Like the message seemed to be that if a landlord was at some point poor and then somehow came into enough money to buy property to rent out, you shouldn’t think too poorly of them? It’s a nonsense argument because there are probably a few ultra wealthy exploitative capitalist assholes who genuinely grew up poor and aren’t just saying that for PR also, does the fact that they were poor at some point absolve them too? I mean, I’ve daydreamed before about what I would do with a whole bunch of cash and at no point was becoming a landlord ever something I even thought about. Idk it felt like a massive champagne socialist moment from a pod that normally is good about centering workers.
There is a world of difference between someone who own and rents multiple big buildings and someone who rents out their attic. I suspect they were talking about the latter.
As a Bay Area native who also works in service industries I have a lot of sympathy for the Seattleite who wrote in. But as they said it is important to remember that many of these systems, especially the gig economy, is built to create adversarial relationships between workers and customers. The web developer who is too busy to cook has a lot of interests in common with the UberEats driver that messed up their order. Those low level tech workers that got laid off are not the people fighting new housing. They are, for better and for worse, too busy to be politically active. The people fighting new housing are the retirees who bought in the 80s and “don’t want the character of the neighborhood to change”.
It’s also very easy to get mad because this boom feels especially hollow. I now live in Chicago. While this city’s own economic boom in the late 19th early 20th century had horrific consequences (read The Jungle) it’s material legacy is robust public infrastructure, incredible museums, and some of the finest architecture in the world. But the centers of the tech boom are just dull. Carl Sandburg’s writing is filled with his love of the paradoxical brutality and vibrancy of turn of the century Chicago. I can’t imagine anyone writing poetry about Mountain View.
I don’t disagree with this at all, but at the same time I think about the times I’ve tried to have politically productive conversations with people in similar situations and hit a brick wall. Mostly out of apathy, occasionally out of deeply rooted conservative beliefs that only make their way to the surface when you ask them why they believe certain things or act a certain way. I 100% agree that we should direct our anger at the people who create these situations rather than the people we rub up against in our daily lives (and found it really refreshing to hear that idea so succinctly worded in the podcast, I’m going to be stealing that for my own conversations lol), but while I may have a lot in common with low level tech workers it is hard to feel that way at times. It’s easy to understand all of this from an ideological perspective, but the individual experience of asking for even just a statement of support only to be shrugged off is very demoralizing
I’m currently playing podcast catchup so I am late to this but I recently took a week long trip to NY for work and had pizza 4 times and only one of those pizzas would I actually consider really good. Everyone hyped NY pizza and the truth I found was unless you know where to actually go a lot of it is on par or below a Dominos. All the reviews online are useless because everyone just says it’s the best pizza.
The worst I had though was the udon. People at work hyped this place up and it was I kid you not chicken noodle soup broth with some mediocre udon noodles. It had no spice at all to it or any real good distinguishing flavors.
