That being said I remember in late high school feeling pretty frustrated because I had a good grip on the rules by now and wanted to try adding some zest to my writing.
But zest is difficult to grade, my teachers were not paid well enough to deal with ambiguity and to be honest most of them didn’t strike me as particularly imaginative in the first place.
I’ve never seen a more accurate depiction of my typical experience in a professional environment. “Nobody wants to speak up or handle things correctly because someone senior with direct responsibility for your employment shouted down any dissent because they want to meet a metric” is apparently a timeless experience.
It’s really disheartening. I originally pursued tech for the money but I fell in love with it as a sort of creative outlet a few years into my career. I actually WANT to make new tools but my coworkers immediately outsourced their brains and come asking me for help because the code they got from copilot (and didn’t test) is breaking something in production.
I’ve worked with people who read Capital annually and I can’t get them to show up to an action on time or to get through it without calling a mentally ill unhoused person a reactionary.
I’ve worked with people who haven’t skimmed the manifesto but work every week getting food for their communities.
The latter are much better to work with.
Ideal conditions would mean organizers are all super politically literate and active, but I agree with you that you can’t expect every member of a movement to read stuff like this as a prerequisite to organizing. Cadre members? Of course they should read. But the fascists aren’t making general members read hefty political tomes.
I can’t believe they just put the source code out there like this
There’s people who won’t like me saying this, but I put a pin in the revolution talk to work on what’s immediate.
Like you, I’ve tried local groups and found they tend to have small, disconnected local chapters and actions sometimes have questionable efficacy.
I think some of this comes from being so focused on “the revolution”. I get it, groups like PSL don’t want to get bogged down becoming a band-aid organization. They want to get rid of the broken system, not be a food bank in a system designed to make people hungry. I’ve done the reading so I understand where they’re coming from here.
But then I attend meetings with groups that have about 10 regular attendees who mostly seem to tell each other to read more theory and paint a lot of banners. They get frustrated that the revolution didn’t come after the latest sit-in, call each other every political science term in the book, and break off to form an even smaller, less effective group.
What I’m trying now are advocacy groups for specific causes I care about. They more often seem to include members of impacted communities and have a better idea of their needs.
Rimworld
Stellaris
FTL: Faster Than Light
Crusader Kings 3
XCOM: Enemy Within
Honorable mentions:
No Man’s Sky, Baldur’s Gate 3, Dwarf Fortress, Skyrim, Fallout: New Vegas.
I work in IT infrastructure (not AWS but something like it) and the reality is that there are a few blocks like AWS and Cloudflare out there. That doesn’t really make things less concerning considering if they were actually pulled it would cause a lot of problems.
So to be clear, if something managed to completely disable or “control” AWS it would be disastrous, and AWS is under attack from multiple vectors including AI Agents, including their own INTERNAL AI Agents. In December 2025 Amazon’s internal coding AI agent Kiro decided the most efficient course of action to resolve a minor bug in AWS Cost Explorer was to completely rebuild the production environment, causing a 13 hour outage for Cost Explorer while engineers manually rebuilt the environment.
The thing is, in the picture you posted AWS is this fragile single block holding everything up, when in it might be more useful to think of it conceptually as say, a major highway. Would it be a disaster if terrorists were able to suddenly destroy/control all of I-75? Yes. Is that feasible? No. Kiro caused a really bad traffic jam in one segment of one highway, it didn’t destroy the whole thing.
A highway can experience traffic incidents and recover. Major jams could be intentionally caused by bad actors or poor maintenance, and highways have to be altered, upgraded and maintained to limit the situations that can completely shut down segments of it.
But the concern is more that key segments will be impacted, not the entire thing.
That’s more of what people in my field are concerned with, and there’s efforts to try to lock those key segments down and account for potential threats. How well that’s being done is a different story.
Not really. Sometimes I think about it but it’s sort of hard to find the time. My interests also just started to shift away from writing after high school.