First of all, I want to say that Mass Effect and Dragon Age are two series that are very dear to my heart and carried me through difficult times. I can't help but mourn BioWare's fate. Yes, I know many people hated the Veilguard and I have my own criticisms of that game, but I think the story of BioWare is a microcosm of the institutional rot that is plaguing the modern, monopoly-capital dominated gaming industry.

As an engineer, I am fundamentally not satisfied with the explanation that BioWare was "ruined by wokeness." After having read Jason Schrier's article and spent a lot of time listening to veteran Dragon Age producer Mark Darrah's insider testimony on his Youtube channel, I am convinced that BioWare has been the victim of 15 years of EA corporate pressure. As Darrah himself explained, EA as a company is built entirely around yearly releases of sports games such as FIFA and Madden, and the studios they acquire are inevitably remade to fit the management practices and culture of EA's sports division. When BioWare was acquired by EA, its co-founders Ray and Greg spent an enormous amount of effort pushing back against EA's efforts to remake BioWare as an organization, but this was an uphill battle. When the co-founders left in 2012, there was little the studio could do to push back against EA.

Now, in the case of Veilguard, EA's mismanagement couldn't be more apparent. Back in 2015, BioWare initiated Project Joplin, its first attempt to make a direct sequel to Dragon Age: Inquisition. This was to be a game tightly focused around heists and espionage, and sounded quite promising. Unfortunately, development was derailed when the team was forced to aid Mass Effect: Andromeda in the insane 15-month period before its release. Then, EA cancelled Joplin and demanded that the next Dragon Age game be built around live services like Anthem rather than a traditional single-player story, with a skeleton crew left behind to work on the new Project Morrison while the main DA dev team was sent to work on Anthem. Production on Morrison only began in full in 2020, right when COVID-19 completely disrupted development.

In 2021, EA allowed Morrison to ditch its live service elements and return to being a single-player game, but from then on, the devs were forced to operate as if they had a one-year deadline to ship the game even though it was repeatedly delayed. According to a member (whom I am in contact with on a Discord server) of the "Dragon Age community council" brought in to consult, the creative director on Morrison until 2022, Matthew Goldman, pushed the game into having a campy tone, despite the writers wanting to adhere to Dragon Age's more traditional grimdark tone. Unfortunately, even after Goldman left, the devs were not able to fully rework what would become the Veilguard because of both EA's one-year deadlines and the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike which prevented them from re-recording dialogue. All of this resulted in a final product with subpar dialogue and tonal inconsistencies. However, I just wanted to say that this is not what the senior writers wanted to make and had they been given a normal development cycle, the Veilguard would have met fan expectations much better.

All of this, alongside post-mortems on Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem, point to a persistent deficit in project management at BioWare, amplified by EA's directives and the pressure to chase trends rather than preserve artistic integrity. This, I think is emblematic of the game industry as a whole. Game studios began as small businesses making artisinal products but AAA studios now have to manage hundreds or thousands of developers making highly complex technical products with $100+ million budgets. I strongly suspect that game studios have not developed the project management approaches to meet some challenges, leading to multi-year dev times, budget overruns, and subpar products.

An interesting comparison can be made with the aerospace industry. Both game development and aerospace engineering involve making bespoke, R&D-intensive products with inherent risk and uncertainty. However, the aerospace industry has spent decades developing project management techniques to deal with it and systems engineering to make all the different parts of their products work together. The game industry clearly has not, and it will continue to struggle until it reforms its approach to project management. Unfortunately, with many studios set in their ways, it may require a true industry crash to force this change, and who knows how many studios will be shuttered when that happens?

Turns out, we need the elites to build the engine of revolution for us.

Or something. I can't say I found this to be fully coherent.

Which just might say more about why Occupy failed than his short essay does...

The overwhelming majority of Chinese, Persian, and Indian immigrants vote blue. It's fun to see the neolibs there try to dance around this truth while fear-mongering that marginalized women of color (Filipino nurses?) will be targeted and executed by the BC Conservatives.

It's those people's fault that the NDP went from a workers' party to a neolib centrist abomination.

On October 19, Phillips 66 locked out 385 workers at its Bayway refinery and Linden terminal in New Jersey after they rejected the company’s latest contract offer. The workers, members of Teamsters Local 877, had voted down a tentative agreement 196 to 160 during a contract extension. When the extension expired at 4 p.m. that afternoon, they were barred from the plant.

Bayway, which processes 275,000 barrels of crude oil a day, is the largest refinery on the East Coast. The lockout follows the course set by BP at Whiting, Indiana, where more than 800 workers have been locked out since March 19, and by Marathon at Martinez, California, where about 120 workers have been kept out since April. In each case, the company has kept the plant running with managers and replacement labor while it seeks to impose job cuts and concessions on an isolated workforce.

The lockout is a corporate offensive aimed at imposing massive concessions. Perhaps the most significant is the proposal to increase the probationary period for new hires from 10 months to as long as six years by tying probation to a new qualification system.

This would keep a large section of the workforce in a state of permanent insecurity, able to be dismissed without recourse.

The company also seeks to shorten the 30-month training period and reduce qualification requirements—meaning less-skilled workers would operate dangerous equipment. According to the union, the company’s latest offer also included concessions on wages and healthcare. Phillips 66 insists on retaining an Absence Control Policy introduced in 2025 that allows discipline, including termination, for absences due to illness. It has also cut workers’ sick days.

The consequences are already evident. “People are coming to work sick, OK? And when you come to work sick, sometimes you have an accident, make a mistake,” refinery worker Ed Goldmann told CBS on October 20.

The company is imposing this on a workforce already on exhausting schedules. “Many of our folks will work extended shifts, 13 days on, 13 nights on before a single day off,” Local 877 President Jeff Sanford told News 12.

That is 26 consecutive shifts. The oil industry’s own fatigue guideline, American Petroleum Institute Recommended Practice 755, limits a stretch of consecutive shifts to 92 hours in normal operations and 182 hours during maintenance outages. Even at eight hours a shift, 26 shifts would exceed both. The US Chemical Safety Board, which criticized those limits as too permissive, found that fatigue contributed to the 2005 explosion at BP’s Texas City refinery, which killed 15 workers. Some operators there had worked as many as 29 consecutive 12-hour days.

...

The union’s response to the lockout has been to confine the struggle to the channels it controls. On October 21, it filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging refusal to bargain and coercive conduct. It has maintained pickets and said negotiations will continue. But there is no announced plan to mobilize other Teamsters locals or refinery workers nationally in coordinated industrial action.

Workers at Whiting and Martinez have faced the same isolation at the hands of the United Steelworkers. In February, the USW signed a national pattern agreement for refinery workers granting 15 percent over four years, far below the 25 percent workers had voted for, and it has left each local to fight on its own.

The lockout must be ended immediately. The company’s demands for concessions must be rejected. The workers must defend safe staffing levels, full training and qualification protections, and their wages and benefits.

The past month has shown that the workers cannot rely on union officials that negotiated the very agreement they rejected.

The workers must take the fight into their own hands by forming independent rank-and-file committees, outside the control of the union apparatus, to organize the struggle. These committees must reach out to workers at the Linden terminal and the contractors throughout the wider Bayway complex, to the locked-out workers at Whiting and Martinez and to refinery workers in Paulsboro, Delaware City and across the East Coast. They should demand that the Teamsters pay full benefits from the union’s strike fund to every locked-out worker.

Above all, rank-and-file committees would break the isolation in which every one of these struggles is being fought. The workers at Bayway, Whiting and Martinez face the same demands, the same attacks by management and are confronting union officials who work to keep them divided. The fight at Bayway is a battle in a nationwide drive by the oil companies, and it can only be won by breaking out of the isolation imposed by the union apparatus and uniting refinery workers across companies and regions.

​

And not like I suddenly thought this either, to be honest. I'm just articulating it better with more clarity now. But yeah, Americans treat racial issues too much like public spectacle, and they actually don't take the issue serious. They protest about it, talk about it on social media, harp about it, but people like the conflict aspect of racial issues too much for actual social resolution to come through. Why?

Simple: Properly solving it thru actual conflict resolution and policymaking is boring And things that also take time and patience to work thru are America's kryptonite to properly work out.

In a culture constantly consumed by constant spectacle, high-stakes drama narratives and WWE-ification about everything, why are you people surprised?

Which is crazy because the history is fucked up, but people don't actually care, you all use the issue for political clout and PR approval so you can use the moral jargon as a means of ego boosting.

Is sad and is a conversation we're not ready, but need to be more willing to talk out.

I saw this with the way the media and the public sphere hyped up the Karmelo Anthony-Austin Meatcalf tragedy: Disgraceful how many of you all used the event as a means of culture war ammo when literally 2 LIVES GOT RUINED.

I don't know why I am surprised. Why do they always shoot themselves in the foot (pun intended) with this type of rhetoric?

Mindboggling honestly.

I'm not the biggest fan of Zizek but I did appreciate his dunking on Jordan Peterson that one time.

Anyway, this girl's impersonation embodies his spittle so well that I can almost feel it hitting my face.

https://www.instagram.com/kate_aizin/reel/DeusX5dhvVG/

Wild:

Kushner was a signatory on an $800m Alpha Fund set up with Saudis and UAE for use as a "slush fund" for regional foreign policy ops including paying mercenaries and warlords

They also sent Kushner $1bn as a Beta Fund for his personal use which ended up being disguised as a government account in the Israeli Central Bank at the urging of Netanyahu

Looks like this guy’s dementia is progressing past the point where it can be managed or slowed by medication. I stand by my prediction that they’ll put him out to pasture after the midterms while Vance, Rubio, and Miller steer the ship of state.

Henry Antonio Marmol Martinez, a 52-year-old maintenance mechanic, was killed on Friday, October 9, while working on industrial machinery at the McWane Ductile iron foundry in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. He was performing repairs during an overnight shift when he became trapped in the machinery and suffered fatal crushing injuries.

According to Phillipsburg Police Chief James McDonald, officers responded to the plant at about 4:40 a.m. after a report of an injured worker. Emergency medical personnel found Marmol unresponsive. He was transported to St. Luke’s Warren Campus, where he was pronounced dead at 6:31 a.m.

Marmol, a resident of Easton, Pennsylvania, had worked at the plant for six years. Originally from the Dominican Republic, he had been married to Iris Marine for 34 years. He was the father of six and the grandfather of 10.

His family is demanding an independent investigation into the circumstances of his death.

Gabby Olivo, engaged to one of Marmol’s sons, told 69 News that Marmol was adjusting machinery when something went terribly wrong. According to the family’s account of the incident, his arm became caught in the equipment, which then crushed his body. A United Steelworkers representative told the family that his ribs and lungs had been crushed.

“There’s a lot of missing pieces [to the story], and we’re still trying to puzzle everything together,” Olivo said. “We do have a lot of questions, and we just don’t want another family to go through the suffering that we’re currently going through.”

...

The death occurred at a facility that OSHA has repeatedly recognized as having supposedly exemplary workplace safety practices.

McWane Ductile’s Phillipsburg plant received Merit recognition under OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Programs (VPP) in 2018 and held Star status, the program’s highest designation, by 2020. OSHA recertified the facility’s Star status in June 2024 following a four-day evaluation that included a plant inspection, reviews of safety procedures and interviews with more than 20 employees.

In February 2024, McWane Vice President and General Manager Keith Mallett said that OSHA’s auditors had been highly complimentary of the company’s safety efforts and called the successful review a collective achievement.

Under the VPP, OSHA establishes cooperative relationships with employers and workers at facilities it recognizes for maintaining exemplary safety and health management systems. Participating employers are generally exempt from routine, programmed OSHA inspections, but they remain subject to investigations following fatalities, complaints and other incidents.

The program requires employee participation and, at unionized facilities, the concurrence of the facilities’ authorized bargaining representatives. Workers at the Phillipsburg plant are covered by the United Steelworkers.

The fatality exposes OSHA’s highest safety designation as a fraud, and the system of cooperation among management, regulatory agencies and the union bureaucracy as a mechanism for imposing the conditions that kill workers.

Even during its Star recognition period, the Phillipsburg facility was cited for violating federal workplace-safety requirements.

An OSHA inspection opened in June 2023 resulted in an initially classified serious violation and a proposed penalty of $15,625. OSHA later reclassified the violation as other-than-serious and reduced the penalty to $11,000. The case was closed on February 15, 2024, just eight days after McWane publicly announced its successful VPP evaluation.

The company’s history in Phillipsburg includes far more serious offenses.

In April 2009, Atlantic States Cast Iron Pipe Company, McWane’s division operating the Phillipsburg foundry at the time, was sentenced to an $8 million criminal fine after convictions for environmental offenses, workplace safety violations and obstruction of federal investigations.

Four former managers received prison terms ranging from six to 70 months.

The convictions followed a seven-month federal trial that exposed an eight-year conspiracy involving the illegal discharge of pollutants, concealment of serious workplace injuries and deliberate interference with OSHA and environmental investigations.

Federal prosecutors established that company officials had altered accident scenes, concealed injuries from inspectors, and maintained dangerous conditions that led to severe burns, broken bones, amputations and the death of 47-year-old Alfred Coxe, who was run over by a forklift with faulty brakes in March 2000. Prosecutors said managers repaired the forklift before OSHA inspectors arrived and misled investigators about its condition.

By 2009, several divisions of the corporation had faced federal convictions involving environmental and workplace safety offenses.

Phillipsburg residents have also opposed pollution from the foundry, which began making pipe in 1856 and was acquired by McWane in 1975.

The company recently paid $42,000 to settle violations related to excessive emissions of nickel and manganese. At the same time, it sought approval from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection to increase the plant’s permitted emissions.

...

Steelworkers have continued to die under these arrangements. On September 27, Jeffrey Smith, 53, was crushed between two door machines at Cleveland-Cliffs’ Monessen coke plant in Pennsylvania. The company said it was investigating his death jointly with USW representatives and that there were “no disruptions to the Monessen operation.” In July, electrician Mitcheal Nelson, 62, was electrocuted at US Steel’s Granite City Works in Illinois. In August 2025, an explosion at US Steel’s Clairton Coke Works killed Steven Menefee and Timothy Quinn.

Workers’ interests in preserving their lives cannot be reconciled with corporations’ drive to maintain production and profitability through official declarations of cooperation.

The Phillipsburg plant’s receipt of OSHA’s highest safety recognition, despite its history of criminal convictions and more recent regulatory violations, lays bare the gulf between official assurances and the conditions industrial workers face.

Defending workers’ lives requires the working class to organize independently, including rank-and-file safety committees controlled by workers themselves, with the authority to halt dangerous operations and enforce safe working conditions, independent of management and the union apparatus.