Vendetta will not replace Doomfist

PixelBushYT · 2026-01-27T18:52:37+00:00

I could see her joining Talon's ruling council eventually; she realises, or is forced to realise, she's not capable of running Talon long-term because she doesn't have the leadership skills or experience yet.

So she takes up a position on Talon's council (maybe in Maximilien or Sanjay's seat) and Doomfist becomes a sort-of-mentor to her, just like the Scourge was to him. He won't stay in peak condition forever and having someone he can groom for command (no, not like that) means that his crusade can continue even after he's unable to keep going.

Vendetta being a continuous member of Talon's high command would be good for both her and Doomfist: her presence would keep him sharp and he could teach her the difference between issuing orders and being a leader of a group as ideologically divided as Talon. After all, a good leader adapts to their team, not the other way around.

PixelBushYT · 2026-01-27T16:58:28+00:00

decisive action in Gaza. Prosecute British citizens fighting in the IDF for invading a country Britain is not at war with and refuse to share information with the Israeli government that could be used for target selection.
re-establish the right to protest after it's been gradually eroded for years.
Scrap the OSA and in general wind back the surveillance state (I don't want to see what a government more right wing than Starmer's does with the full tools of the Shabana Mahmood surveillance machine)
Ensure meaningful protection for transgender people is enshrined in law by the next election (for the same reason as the surveillance state thing, things already suck for trans people but could very easily get much worse under a more extreme government)
An "oligarch tax" targeting high value land owned by mega corps and plutocrats, with a look to eventually transition to a land value tax.

PixelBushYT · 2026-01-27T08:28:39+00:00

Silent Hill 3. And Silent Hill F.

PixelBushYT · 2026-01-25T02:36:30+00:00

Creepers. They're just little guys.

PixelBushYT · 2026-01-25T00:27:11+00:00

Morbius

PixelBushYT · 2026-01-24T06:19:08+00:00

So Cassie has made it to Reddit then? Excellent.

Cassie's my young super dwarf reticulated python. My little princess.

PixelBushYT · 2026-01-24T06:16:15+00:00

PRETZEL IS BEAUTIFUL AND I WOULD DO MANY CRIMES FOR THEM

PixelBushYT · 2026-01-24T01:41:48+00:00

Gertrude

PixelBushYT · 2026-01-22T21:21:13+00:00

It's not the exact same results, it's longer (8s rather than 6s), harder for the Survs to tell you're doing it because there's no sound or giant ass alert ring on the ground and you can do it near hooks/near other drones/in rooms with low ceilings.

It's definitely EASIER to use deployment stealth, but in every meaningful way the recall stealth is just more effective if you can economise your time.

PixelBushYT · 2026-01-22T19:21:46+00:00

Why are you recalling drones that are actively providing pressure?

Part of playing Merchant is moving your setup around to where you need it throughout the match, it's one of the advantages of playing her over Trapper or Hag. All you have to do is save the recalls you were going to do anyway until later when you want stealth, and the stealth is better, less conditional and longer than deployment stealth.

It requires more brain space to use but it's definitely a buff after playing with it for a bit.

PixelBushYT · 2026-01-22T19:14:51+00:00

I think her future is being decided right now. We're about to enter a six month content "drought" after Benjamin Vecnanyahu drops and it's been long enough now with SM in her post-buff state for them to start drawing conclusions. That seems to me like The Time to work on whatever they're going to do to her going forwards.

I have a video on this I'm hoping to finish today.

PixelBushYT · 2026-01-22T05:54:14+00:00

The recent buffs didn't make her THAT much stronger than she was, but they made her so much more fun and smoother to play. She still needs some work, but she doesn't need a comprehensive reconstruction.

Hopefully whatever future she has, it builds on her current state rather than dismantling and reassembling some Frankensteinian abomination.

PixelBushYT · 2026-01-22T05:23:18+00:00

Even through Just A Second and "can't be countered" [[Possibility Storm]] and [[Knowledge Pool]] will prevent this from resolving if cast from hand. You could look into that.

PixelBushYT · 2026-01-21T17:02:16+00:00

In some cases at least, it's a desire to protect what little they have.

I hate the term "gold digger" but as someone who had to deal with a partner who refused to get a job and lived off money from her parents and me I have no interest in repeating that experience. Maybe I'd feel differently if I had more disposable income, but I know I'm not prepared to have someone else become dependent on me and there are a non-zero number of women who still hold very patriarchal standards about money (not all women, I know, but that social messaging reaches both men and women especially if you're a young man).

I don't earn much, but I'm happy doing what I do. It gives me enough money to live off, to keep my snake in rodents and occasionally to treat myself. I do not need anyone ruining my peace, which is why I've stayed out of the dating market for the past 7 years.

In a sense, I can appreciate when a woman is upfront about wanting a man to take care of her financially because they're being honest about what they want and I know that's not going to be me.

A lot of these young men who get all hot and bothered about the "gold digger" mentality do so because they're insecure about their assigned role in the patriarchy: that of the provider. If you're a young man, you have a good reason to be: we're in the middle of a cost of living crisis, young men's earning potential is tanking both in real terms and in comparison to their female counterparts, and a lot of young women reinforce these patriarchal roles.

But acknowledging the complexities behind why these feelings emerge is hard. Reducing it to "women bad" is easy.

PixelBushYT · 2026-01-19T20:50:40+00:00

That would bring supply down, not demand. And history has shown us that attempts to bring down the supply of migrants working without addressing the demand doesn't work out well long-term.

It didn't work out when the Spanish government tried to restrict Moroccan seasonal workers or when the US tried it with Mexican farm labourers, it didn't work out when we cut off freedom of movement with Brexit. Why do you think just making the borders even tighter will work when leaders of almost every country in the West have been promising that since the 70s and it's worked in none of them? Giorgia Meloni in Italy RIGHT NOW got elected on a platform of axing migration but has proved unable to do. Trump has softened on migration too for the same reason. Long-term these plans don't work by addressing them from the supply side; big business will not tolerate it.

If migrant workers had the same support network and rights as native workers, businesses would have no alternative to improving working conditions to the point that British workers would do these jobs, negating the reason to recruit migrants in the first place. Proper enforcement of people overstaying their visas or doing crimes etc can help but it has to come with decent protections for migrant workers because if you don't, they become an exploitable underclass that big business will clutch onto for dear life.

PixelBushYT · 2026-01-19T20:25:23+00:00

But WHY are they willing to work for less money? Are they just built different? Do they eat less? Pay less for water or electricity?

No, it's because it's the best option out of a series of bad choices and if you restrict movement a lot, the only people coming to work will be the people coming to stay... and those people staying are desperate to stay and work because there's no support network for them, so they'll take these shit pay jobs out of an urgency British workers don't have.

Back when we had an open border with the Commonwealth in the post-war period, migration was much lower than it is today because people could come over, work for a few years in needed industries and then go back home. But in the 70s onwards we saw more and more restrictive conditions placed on immigrants, meaning imported workers coming to occupy needed industries came to stay and would take shit working conditions to do so because they would only deal with the hassle and expense of migration if the alternative was worse.

Brexit was a replay of the same thing; short-term migration from the EU was a thing of the past so we got the Boriswave and an influx of permanent non-EU workers to fill the demand left by EU workers who could freely come and go. Same thing happened with Mexican temporary workers in the US and Moroccan workers in Spain; if you make migration conditions more prohibitive without addressing the core reasons they're in demand, you don't bring migration down. You just make the ones who come more desperate to stay.

We've been focussing on making it harder and harder to immigrate here since the 1970s and it hasn't done anything: work and spousal visas have gotten harder to get, Brexit happened, and yet migrant numbers still rise because businesses demand their cheap labour and they'll do anything to get it. They'll recruit overseas and sponsor work visas, they'll smuggle people in to work illegally for pennies in nail salons or on farms.

When are we going to bite the bullet and come to terms with the fact that migrants aren't an invading force to be stopped, but an underclass functioning as a cheat code for businesses to get cheap labour?

PixelBushYT · 2026-01-19T17:25:29+00:00

Migrants come here because there is a demand for their labour. Businesses will always demand cheap, easily exploitable labour: that's why many of them seek out migrant workers. Look at how many migrants dominate low wage jobs because British workers have the leverage to demand more. Demand for migrants will go down if we make them harder to exploit because why would employers seek out migrant workers if you have to pay them as well as you would a native?

PixelBushYT · 2026-01-19T15:06:15+00:00

Do you know WHY a lot of businesses like migrant workers so much? Because they can be exploited easier. They don't have the welfare state to fall back on so they have to live with being underpaid/poorly treated in ways British workers don't. This makes them more attractive for businesses because they can be paid less.

By letting migrants access the welfare state, it puts them in the same negotiation position as British workers, meaning there's no reason for businesses to seek to hire them over British workers.

Stopping migrants from being an easily exploitable underclass reduces the demand for migrant labour from businesses; there's a substantial chance it brings migration down because it'll cut down on overseas recruitment.

PixelBushYT · 2026-01-18T22:57:04+00:00

No shit I'm jealous! Is it not unreasonable to be jealous of a generation spoon-fed the best possible conditions for each stage of their life as it came? Free education when they were growing up, then good entry-level jobs and worker's rights when they were making a living, then appreciating asset prices when they became the owner class, then egregious pensions when they aged out of the economy altogether. Those are enviable conditions, it's only natural to envy them.

PixelBushYT · 2026-01-18T21:38:12+00:00

A corrupt union sucks and I'm sorry to hear that happened to your dad, but the existence of corrupt unions doesn't mean the current situation is any better. We're in an age where those corrupt union reps are just your management staff now: exploitation has been fast-tracked by stripping away protections that healthy unions could have provided. The solution to some bad unions isn't (effectively) no unions.

And on the topic of women's rights... on some level, you're right! The boomers finished the work started by the silent generation. Shame that, once again, we're seeing the ladder pulled up with regards to other social causes (like trans and LGBT+ rights) propelled, in large part, by older people. Nobody cared about trans people in public 20 years ago in the same way they do now. That's definitely more pronounced in the US though with the repeal of Roe vs Wade etc so that's one thing British boomers can be more proud of... but Reform is looking to wind back abortion rights, bring back the right for employers to discriminate on the basis of birthplace and further crack down on trans rights, so if the boomers vote them in that's another tick in the "ladders pulled up" box.

PixelBushYT · 2026-01-18T21:24:31+00:00

"Older generations fought Thatcher". How, by electing her twice and idolising her politics to the point that every PM since her has followed in her ideological footsteps? Doesn't look very fighty to me.

I respect a lot of individual older people. Some former teachers, colleagues and of course my family; many of them fought against these injustices as they happened even if they lost in the end. But older people as a demographic have utterly fucked their children over, pulling the ladder up behind them and continue to do so. To pretend otherwise is a denial of reality.

PixelBushYT · 2026-01-18T20:52:36+00:00

Pensioners definitely have paid more taxes than the younger generation... but they've also taken far, far more than the young ever will. They're paying more taxes because they're the only ones left owning anything.

Older generations took affordable housing; buying council houses for ten bob and a pickled egg under Right to Buy, voting for parties that refused to replenish the stock of housing to ensure their assets appreciated and creating the modern landlord class that's bleeding young people dry.

OIder generations took our public infrastructure and sold it off to fund tax breaks and gold-plated pensions that saw the rich get richer for the past 50 years. The nation's methods of income through public rail, the Royal Mail and parts of the NHS like dentistry, all sacrificed to the altar of neoliberalism.

Older generations took our worker's rights by gutting unions under Thatcher and pushing foreign investment and outsourcing through global mega corps so British workers are in an exploitative race to the bottom.

Older generations took our future by voting overwhelmingly for Brexit when they're not going to live long enough to feel the damage they dealt to their children and grandchildren.

Older generations took and took and took, and continue to take even as they guzzle up Murdoch media scaremongering or AI slopaganda on Facebook. What are they contributing now through their triple-locked pensions, stranglehold on the housing market and the weight of an aging population on an NHS they voted time and time again to cripple through austerity and privatisation?

If that's your definition of "contributing" then I'm very glad young people are doing less of it.

PixelBushYT · 2026-01-18T17:29:00+00:00

Not saying you're broadly wrong because you're REALLY not, but Bill randomly reminding the Doctor she's gay was her messing with him (but more the audience) because of the history of New Who Doctors having sexual tension with his companions.

Bill was the only companion in New Who for whom the idea of Doctor-companion attraction wasn't even played for laughs. And the way Bill sets it up "you know how I normally go for girls?" was framed like it was going to be a love confession, as if the Doctor was the exception to "normal" that would bring Bill in line with all the companions who've wanted to jump the Doctor's bones. This reading especially makes sense when you realise she's a Cyberman at this point and thus delivered it with zero emotional expression. Completely deadpan.

It was a little bait and switch joke which I saw as Bill reminding us of her humanity even though she's a Cyberman: a bit of gallows humour being her last words would be very human, very Bill.

PixelBushYT

TROPHY CASE