Walt J. Rimmer

Most people don’t actually know what logic is. I would ask him to define logic to see where he’s coming from. Because most people either don’t have a definition or if they do it’s different than the one the person they’re talking to has. But to do that, you’ll also want a definition you could explain to someone else going into asking the question.

Twenty tracks? You whippershnappers don’t know how good you got it! When I was growing up, we only had eight!

USAers or United Statesians

Most things are probably fine, though Windows updates might do something funky or just put it back from where you threw out that trash.

But Edge is a different story. Microsoft in their infinite wisdom decided to make Edge, their web browser, essential for Windows Explorer, their file manager and desktop among other things, to function properly.

So if you get rid of Edge, things can get kinda fucky. I haven’t looked into if someone has made a workaround, I know that there are modified “debloated” Windows installs that do some heavy duty mucking about in there, but I don’t know if anyone’s figure out how to give Edge the ax without making your desktop freak out.

Started out as co-workers in a university work-study job, had a short relationship.

I mean, a union is simply a way for workers to organize independently from management. While it’s useful for countering bad management and things like that, that’s not its only purpose. And anyone saying that it is either doesn’t know as much about unions as they think or is anti-union while trying not to say as much directly.

That was one part of a whole that a never got anywhere near finding out the entire story. With that and her stories of being damn near abandoned as a child, it really worried me as to what might have happened to her that she never felt free enough to tell me.

I tried to explain, “Like, no, that’s normal.” And she was just insistent that it was not. I didn’t know about the believing herself to be half-succubus until later, but when I found that out, it kind of clicked into place that something happened to her and she just cannot believe that a normal person should enjoy sex the way she does. And that is… Really troubling.

I never knew my Set Theory professor was so against workers’ rights!

Sadly, with recent events, all I can think about with this is how Linus Sebastion would go on the WAN Show and say things like, “You don’t need a union unless you have bad management, and I never want my employees to need a union.”

His NAME is ALEX!

I don’t remember exactly how old she was, but we were in our last years of university (I failed out, she graduated) so she was definitely in her early twenties, 22-24, somewhere in there.

And, yeah, no, my amateur and as such meaningless guess of a diagnosis was also that part of the delusion was a need to feel special. She talked about how most other people didn’t know the truth, they couldn’t know the truth, because she had magic power that let her know things about the world that normal humans couldn’t. You get that sort of language in conspiracy theorists and other types of people who want to feel special, they want to be in on some secret that everyone else can’t be. So I’d say that’s definitely part of it. But I also think, especially with her believing in a third parent when she was initially abandoned by her father and effectively abandoned by her mother until her father got custody of her again, I think most of it stems from her trauma as a child. Even that need to feel special, with no real parental figure for many of her formative years (I don’t remember how old she said she was when her father regained custody of her), probably stemmed from that lack of anyone encouraging her.

But, ultimately, I don’t know. She didn’t tell me half of this stuff until we were breaking up. And I’m not a psychologist, and she very much needed one.

If you think horoscopes don’t make any sense, you’re really going to be boggled by its sister, numerology.

It really was. While there were bits and pieces of this that came up during the relationship, the bulk of this came out as we were breaking up. She had been abused as a kid, though I’m not sure the extent of that abuse. At the very least, she was abused by being effectively abandoned. She said she fended for herself, mostly eating canned food she got for herself through grade school, things like that.

I was upset for a while, she’s not someone I want anything to do with, but mostly I just feel bad for her. She was traumatized as a kid, she receded into a delusion to try and escape that, and her delusion came to define her to the point where she got incredibly defensive if you tried to challenge its reality. She had said that she tried therapy before but that it didn’t work because she knew better than the therapists how to deal with her problems, and I’m certain what that actually means is that they tried to talk her out of her delusion and she wasn’t having any of it.

I really hope she got the help she needs, but I sadly doubt it.

She didn’t just think she was a witch, which I was mostly OK with because religions are weird and stuff, so I thought as long as it doesn’t reach the realm of life-affecting problems, it’s a non-issue.

She also believed she had friends who were werewolves, she could do magic, the date of your birth determined your personality, because a planet was in retrograde good things were about to happen, vampires started the Red Cross so they could always have access to blood, and, oh yeah, along with her two mortal parents she also had an incubus second father and that she was half-demon and that’s why she liked sex when she wasn’t supposed to.

That… That girl needed some serious help, but claimed that she was well-adjusted and fit to help other people instead. Because, of course, she was also an empath…

Edit: I want to make something clear that it suddenly struck me I haven’t; with all this craziness that she believed, that young woman had her life a hell of a lot more together than I did or do. She graduated university while I flunked out, she found a job while I’m being rejected every time that I apply, she found a low-rent apartment to live in while I’m still living with my folks. Don’t get me wrong, girl had some trauma and had some problems. But she was contributing to society while I’m fucking around on the internet because I can’t seem to make anything of myself.

To some extent, I agree. But while you’ll never craft a perfect response and some people will always call your response, “Not enough,” or, “Disengenous,” there are better and worse ways to do it. Dan Harmon sexually harassed a coworker, created a toxic work environment, and harmed one of his writer’s careers. When that started to come out, he talked to her first, then he laid all the cards on the table, took full responsibility, and talked about how he’s trying, not always succeeding, but trying to improve and not do the same things again. It’s impossible to ever say that a simple apology is enough, but even the person he hurt said that his was the kind of apology that people should strive for. It was brutal, honest, and it didn’t shy away from anything. He admitted fault and talked about the very real and non-idealized path forward.

LMG’s response… Was horrible. Even if the apology was only for the bad data stuff, it felt like one of his joke videos like the April Fool’s Day slave farm video, in tone. Sponsor segues, jokes, merch promotions, things like that. I admit that maybe a little humor could be justified because some people make jokes when they’re stressed out, I do that! My mom was damn near on her deathbed a few years back, barely made it out of that alive, and between the sobs, I cracked jokes because that’s how I handle things, so I fucking get that! But that was a scripted video that was supposed to be their apology to the fans, and it felt like an insult. They didn’t feel like they were taking the accusations seriously, it didn’t feel like they were taking responsibility for the problems, and it didn’t feel like they were serious about making changes going forward. It felt like a hollow, “This will help us ride out the storm,” response.

So, I agree with you that even if they’d done the best apology video they possibly could have, people would have still criticized them for it. You’re right. There’s no way around that. But it doesn’t change that that’s not what they did. They put out that apology video instead. And that was just an insult.

So its interesting that these issues are coming out near the same time.

I don’t think it’s that unusual, really. LTT and Linus specifically have had people accuse him before of being unprofessional or creating a toxic work environment or bolstering a toxic fanbase or putting out bad content or all those things. Things I didn’t know about because I just started getting into his stuff a couple of months ago. But all those things are being reexamined now because he lost favor for a second. The Gamer’s Nexus video opened him up to be criticized where normally he’d have a loyal fanbase that would rush to his defense. But even then, it wasn’t until he made that first bad response and Gamer’s Nexus responded to the response and called out his gaslighting on the topic that a lot of the controversy blew open.

People who had long been ignored or felt like they weren’t safe to speak out against the harm they felt LMG or Sebastion had done to them saw an opportunity to let their voice be heard. And people who had been ignored in the past are being looked at again in new context and by more people. This is a common thing. People often feel frightened to speak out about something because they feel they’ll be dismissed or punished for it. Everything from people simply telling them to suck it up because that’s just life to people threatening violence to people getting you blacklisted. This is why after just a couple of sexual abuse allegations started coming out, an entire flood of them suddenly were made public and #MeToo happened. That was a case where speaking out against producers, writers, directors, actors, or anyone else big in the motion picture industry would usually be an end to your career, so most people weren’t willing to do it. And most of the ones who had spoken out in the past were made fun of, actually laughed at, before being blacklisted and relatively forgotten by the wider audience. An individual victim had no power to do anything, but once a few did, some of the others joined, and then it became a movement.

The LTT scandal won’t be anywhere near the same size as that, of course. It’s one relatively small company. But my point is that it’s the same phenomenon at a different scale. The group and specifically Linus have a fan base that has been absolutely brutal to dissenters before. Sebastion on the WAN show and in previous replies to criticism always dismisses it as invalid and that emboldens his fanbase to hit back at people who are, “Just hating,” or, “Don’t understand what they’re talking about!” The Gamer’s Nexus videos started to form a little wedge between Sebastion and his fans as they showed how he wasn’t being fair to them either. That created an opening.

Not actually what I meant. I would have no idea if he mixed personal money and business money directly, but as the co-owner of the business with his wife, and last I knew they were the only owners but I’m not actually certain about that, they could have allowed for the company to keep a better safety net and reduced their own take-home as owners even while keeping their compensation as CEO and CFO. Instead, they made a lot of large purchases, I’m not sure which allocation they took this stuff from because a lot of it was their own but a lot of it also became content for the channel so I have no idea if it was personal or company money they spent, while claiming that the company was in a debt that would take years to see any return on much less profit. It seemed a little tone-deaf to be moving from a small mansion to a “real” mansion while also complaining that the company they owned and at the time were CEO and CFO of was taking on dangerous levels of debt.

Now, I’m not saying that he shouldn’t have a salary or that he shouldn’t be able to spend his own money. But he’s talked before about how his finances and the company’s profits are closely linked as the owner of LMG. He has said, “Any extra profit that we have as a company goes in my pocket,” when trying to explain how he thought stepping down as CEO and hiring someone else would create less incentive to run the company for maximum profitability. That has… It’s own problems that tie in with his wanting to keep employees hourly and not salary and a bunch of other things, but none of that was my point or the point of this comment. The truth is that we don’t know how he runs his business in great detail or how the financials are handled. But at the very least, it was not a good look even at the time before this most recent controversy.

Well, then it’s a good thing that he didn’t also blow a bunch of money on a mansion, a “true” mansion, and then a badminton court. That would have been a real waste of money that could have gone to a safety net for the company instead, so, you know, it’s great that he didn’t do anything like that.

I like what Linus states

I’ve only watched LMG content for a few months, but this out-of-context snippet sums up my feelings on the company.

Sebastian says that it’s a consumer-first, employee-second, profit-third company. But his actions don’t always support that.

Sebastian says that he doesn’t believe anyone should ever be a “fan” of anything because it’s irrational. But then he turns around and dismisses anyone who doesn’t show his brand absolute loyalty.

Sebastian says a lot of shit which sounds absolutely amazing if you can assume it’s true. And the problem is that you can’t assume that the company line is true coming from any company. You can just watch their business practices and make the best judgment on if the company seems honest. And Linus Sebastian, who effectively is the company as the owner and face of it, has increasingly come off as dishonest. It makes it damn near impossible to trust any of the good things he says that he does.

Getting a second OS on that drive is doable, but I mean, I find it a headache sometimes, not sure about other people. But if you’ve got a spare flash drive, you can live boot into some free distro to run some tests.

But, sorry, no idea what the root cause of it might be. Last time I saw something like this was when I had a Windows 8 laptop that got an update to Windows 10 and I got hit with a rare bug that apparently only occurred in some Windows 8 laptops that updated to Windows 10 where my boot drive (an HDD) would be constantly at 100% read/write without actually reading or writing anything. But it was sure trying to. There were about seven potential solutions for that and none of them worked for me. I ended up just mostly ditching the laptop as it had other issues as well, like a failing WiFi adapter somehow.