FIND ME: https://teapawt.net/t.co/OuViKiLZoL Inventor of Free-to-Play. Game dev. Frogdice CEO (video games), College professor.
Lexington, KY
Joined September 2011
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Only here occasionally. I do not support anything Elon Musk does or stands for. Please find me here:
bsky.app/profile/profhartman…
Woah. @KirbySmartUGA @GeorgiaFootball please sign this monster.
Agree completely. I am happy for Red Baron man specifically, but he represents MILLIONS of people getting fucked by our billionaire elites just as hard, but didn't have a viral moment that makes him a lotto winner.
He is a real life version of Katniss Everdeen, but if President Snow won.
What happened with that viral Red Baron Pizza worker is not a feel-good story, it's a feel-bad story. Everything about it says horrible things about where our society is headed.
Some obnoxious prick films a guy working his fingers to the bone for a "prank" hoping to get social media clicks, and the worker flips out at him because his shitty, abusive job had stretched him a hair's breadth from snapping. The video goes viral because people sympathize with a father shouting at a creepy live-streamer about how his shift was supposed to end an hour ago and he needs to get up at five in the morning to do it all again so his family doesn't get evicted from the home he's struggling to pay for, and then a fundraiser is launched which winds up giving the man half a million dollars.
Sounds like a happy ending, until you look at it. None of the other Red Baron workers are getting fundraisers to help them make ends meet; they're all toiling and suffering along with everyone else in similar socioeconomic positions, just as the man in the video would have been if he hadn't gone viral. Turns out the guy who set up the fundraiser for the Red Baron employee was himself a homeless veteran of the US military, who received his own far less successful fundraiser when this revelation came out. When you zoom out, this is just a story about how incredibly bleak life is for ordinary people in the heart of the US empire.
And yet capitalism proponents have seized on this story as an example of the system working perfectly while portraying it as a victory in their weird culture war theater. Conservative media platforms like The Daily Wire, The New York Post and Barstool Sports have framed the worker as a people's champion standing up to an entitled coastal liberal while working hard for his employer as Judeo-Christian God intended. Red Baron posted on social media that they are part of their employee's "fan club" and that he is their "employee of the month", causing conservative figures like Laura Loomer, Benny Johnson, Kevin Sorbo and Tim Burchett to swoon with approval.
They want you focusing on this one particular instance where it all worked out fine so that you don't think about the exponentially greater number of instances in which it doesn't. Billionaire corporations are exploiting workers around the world for appallingly meager wages, causing a combined amount of suffering too vast for the human mind to comprehend. People resonated with that worker pouring his heart out into that click slut's Meta glasses because so many of us have been there and know what it's like to be stretched to the breaking point just trying to feed your kids.
The capitalist class squeezes the life out of workers, and then they manipulate working people's thoughts at mass scale so they don't understand what's happening to them. They tell them their suffering is because of immigrants, or welfare recipients, or an amorphous cabal of "elites" who always conveniently belong exclusively to the opposite political party. They feed them media convincing them that the system is working fine and that if they can't hack it it's because something is wrong with them. They offer them the occasional "feel-good" viral story about someone who got lucky, like feudal serfs listening to fairy tales imagining that they too might one day marry a prince or discover that they are a member of the royal family who was lost at birth.
They pour all this energy into convincing workers to accept the status quo because they are at all times acutely aware that as soon as the workers stop accepting the status quo, it's over for them. The most under-discussed political reality in the world is that there are a whole lot more people suffering under the status quo than there are people profiting from it, and that the sufferers are fully capable of overturning the status quo by force whenever they decide to.
Our entire society is built around the need to manipulate our attention away from this political reality. All our mainstream culture. All our news media. All our politics. All our education systems. It's all designed to direct our gaze away from the reality that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them, and that they need us infinitely more than we need them.
They don't want us to look at this reality. They don't want us thinking about it.
But we really, really should.
Just in case you needed a reason to hate this guy more... here you go.
Sam Altman says its bad that everyone's personal computers are using the world's limited supply of memory chips.
"It’s quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAMs sitting in their own computer, and being used 5% of the time. Like, you want maximum utilization."
Professor Hartman 🇺🇦 retweeted
SIR PATRICK STEWART (1940-2026)
Before everything else, Patrick was defined by being born and bred in Yorkshire, the proud county in the north of England which he loved to the end. You could hear it in his accented voice and in the stern honesty with which he told you what he thought and felt. Yorkshiremen have no truck with half-truths or avoidance of big issues. He wore his heart on his sleeve, which made him a man to rely on, to admire and in my case, love.
We first met as ambitious young actors with the Royal Shakespeare Company half a century ago but we weren’t in the same productions. My first strong memory was a few years later, meeting him in the street in central London when he told me about an offer to take over a leading part in 'Star Trek'. “But Patrick think of your stage career in the UK. Do you really want to risk—getting lost in Hollywood for years and years?”. Well, he took the risk and thank goodness for us all that he did for not just his devoted Trekkies but film and theatre audiences, who marvelled at his using international celebrity to star in a string of cinema successes ('X-Men' of course) and in great classical plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Arthur Miller, Peter Shaffer, Pinter and Beckett at Stratford-upon-Avon, in London’s West End and on Broadway.
America was his adopted home, where he met his adored Sunny who has cared for him through sickness and health, through thick and thin. But he never forsook his origins: and the proudest achievement of the most respected and beloved actor of his generation on either side of the Atlantic, was his appointment as Chancellor of Huddersfield University in Yorkshire.
His farewell performance in 'Avengers: Doomsday' is yet to be seen.
Ian McKellen 29 October 2026
Photo: University of Huddersfield
I can’t believe he is gone. This one hits me really hard.
I first saw him in Excalibur, around 8 years old: a young boy falling in love with fantasy and swords and sorcery that would ultimately define so much of my life.
From the loyalty of Leodegrance: “I saw what I saw! The boy drew the sword. If a boy has been chosen, a boy shall be King!” - Excalibur
To the wisdom, integrity, and courage of Captain Picard: “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.” - Peak Performance
“Live now. Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again.” - The Inner Light
And finally the hope of Professor X: “Mankind is not evil, just uninformed.” - X-Men
He gave us so much.
Why do we care? Because art matters. Art sustains us. Art sees us. In his own words:
“The obvious conclusion is that art must be somehow essential to life. Art is part of survival. Art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say I am alive and my life has meaning.” - Sir Patrick Stewart, Oxford Union
This guy is so confident. He should pledge to shave his head if they win again since that will SURELY never happen....
MetroMina 1v2: "I’m not locked up in here with you. You’re locked up in here with me!"
twitch.tv/centre_esports/cli…
Professor Hartman 🇺🇦 retweeted
Dollar General makes $1.5 billion in profits, gives its CEO $8.1 million, spends $700 million on stock buybacks & pays cashiers $8/hour. Over 5,600 Dollar General workers need food stamps & Medicaid paid by U.S. taxpayers.
It robs customers, workers & taxpayers to enrich the 1%.
Very well said, @georgebsocial !
Steam really should have much much lower fee tiers that would benefit most small indies developers.
It would be a rounding error in terms of profit for Valve.
Scale from something like 15% on the low end (or even 10%) then 30% at a million bucks.
Valve already offers the uber high earning developers a lower rate because they want to keep those people happy.
Valve offers nothing for small indies who need a break the most and where every dollar counts and is significant. Again, any fee discount here is an utter rounding error to Valve profits. They would not feel it.
EVEN APPLE offers 15% until you hit $1 million in revenue then the 30% kicks in. Apple!
Before you say "Valve offers you access to their users", like a Muppet, consider that this doesn't concern you (a user) at all. You pay no more and no less for a game. Why do you even have an opinion here?
Professor Hartman 🇺🇦 retweeted
Alcohol causes the most damage overall. It harms nearly every organ system via toxicity, leading to liver cirrhosis, multiple cancers, heart disease, brain impairment, and high mortality risk even at moderate levels.
Ranking worst to least:
1. Alcohol
2. Cigarette
3. Painkillers
4. Cannabis joint
5. Energy drink
Cigarettes drive cancer, COPD, and CVD through carcinogens and toxins. Painkillers risk liver/kidney damage or overdose (especially opioids). Cannabis mainly affects lungs if smoked with lower lethality. Energy drinks pose mostly mild caffeine/sugar effects.
Many doctors just don't listen to women. It is insane. This poor girl (assuming this is real, nowadays you can never be sure).
Professor Hartman 🇺🇦 retweeted
Microsoft got $19 billion in tax breaks from Trump.
It pays a lower federal income tax rate than a teacher.
It’s spending $60 billion on stock buybacks.
Its CEO made $90 million last year.
“Corporations will create jobs if they get tax breaks” is a total scam.
Professor Hartman 🇺🇦 retweeted
EA employees are speaking out about mismanagement, GenAI push and BioWare’s closure🚀
✅Employees report that the "do less, better" mantra has simply resulted in handling the same workload with fewer staff.
✅Upper management is heavily promoting generative AI (specifically Claude), telling staff that adoption is mandatory for the future.
✅Workers believe the technology is being pushed to test how drastically EA can cut headcount while maintaining output.
BioWare’s Decline & Closure
✅BioWare was repeatedly forced to abandon its strengths (narrative choice, consequences, companions) to chase unprofitable live-service and multiplayer trends, wasting significant resources.
✅Studio leadership grew overly reliant on user experience research (UXR) and fear-driven decision-making, stifling creative risk-taking before the studio's closure.
Source: Vertical Slice
Disappointed, but definitely not surprised. So much of what’s said reflects very much how many of us felt, as it was quite obvious for the last 10-15 years.
Risk-averse development, “do less” mentality, cost-cutting..etc.
I feel really bad for the studios and talents that had to be suffocated under EA’s mentality. It’s obvious what kind of people they were ever since they tried to gaslight gamers into thinking single player gaming to be dead.
Professor Hartman 🇺🇦 retweeted
It's really sad that the games industry is drained by a 30% tax on gross revenue.
You could vibe code a Steam alternative in a week. Cloudflare egress is basically free.
The industry is in desperate need of a distribution platform that allows developers to keep their revenue.
Networks effects and the fanatic obsession with "muh Steam library" will make this very difficul.
But if devs could actually keep their earnings, we'd have a greater selection of better games and far more financial success stories.
Professor Hartman 🇺🇦 retweeted
Youtube is coming after CMS channels.
Managed O&O CMS will no more protect you.
Just got hit with GENERIC & REPETITIVE CONTENT.
Even the Partner Manager Could not get the channel Back.
20K USD gone + CMS Penalty for Demonetization.
I used to Post ultra long form History documentaries with complete automation system , 3- 4 videos a day on CMS for 6 Months with no issues at all.
Now they decide to come after CMS channels which used to bypass AI flags.
I present the dumbest motherfucker on Twitter today. He is literally blaming a broken ankle on the person who suffered it.
I don't know, buddy, let's think for a moment why people who are jumping keep their legs under themselves in general, even if they get slammed into by somebody.
Obviously it's because they're planning to land on their feet and absorb the impact the way our entire musculature is designed.
He had no idea he was about to get clipped. Once you're bumped mid-air, you don't get to "choose" a landing. Your body reacts in a fraction of a second.
Do you think that just because he gets bumped mid-air he should try to... I dunno what you think is better... land on his ass and shatter his tailbone? Land on his back and paralyze himself while the back of his head slams against the floor and he is concussed or dies?
Landing on one's feet is the designed behavior for the human body to protect itself from grave, life-threatening injury.
What the fuck else do you think someone should try to land on, you absolute blithering idiot?
Next time you are about to tweet, throw your phone in a fire instead.
