🧵🧵🧵 Trump often lies about Chicago, using a great American city as a punching bag to entertain out-of-town racists who are scared of Black and Latino Chicagoans whom they’ve never met. He’s threatening a military occupation. Here’s a thread about Chicago, Trump and crime. 1/

Welp, time to blowup my notifs! Thesis: Worldcon COULD be good, but we may have to drag it there kicking and screaming.

There’s nothing like attending Worldcon in-person as team @khoreo.bsky.social's representative, as one of the actual Finalists for Best Semiprozine, only for our masthead to be entirely skipped over, while everyone else’s names and mastheads were read in full, exactly as it was on the program sheet.

I am genuinely happy and surprised to see a change and an apology. www.lacon.org/2025/08/21/s...

This whole essay is great, & worth reading. but this particular part leapt out at me so strongly: "When you claim to be an ally to those different from yourself, do you accept (both intellectually and emotionally) that they have certain issues which you cannot comprehend but should believe?"

Next year's WorldCon is in Los Angeles, and the theme appears to be Westward Expansion or possibly Manifest Destiny. The guests are referred to as Pioneers and the venue as The Frontier. This year the awards were swept by Indigenous writers. The choice is stunning in its ugliness.

This is a heartwrenching, extremely relatable work. I've written veritable reams of words about names and the importance of getting them right. I'm someone whose own family won't learn to pronounce my name right. And I'm the kind of person who checks the pronunciation of my Lyft driver's names.

Something very very weird happened during the Hugos award ceremony... It's been on my mind for days, and so I wrote this blog: "When People Giggle at Your Name, or the 2025 Hugo Awards Incident" grigorylukin.com/2025/08/21/w... #Worldcon

"The law prohibits public schools from denying access to a free education based on immigration status. It also requires schools to have procedures for law enforcement requests to enter a building." chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/...

I say this regularly: we’d all be better off if we focused at the local level.

Some details on the massive assault on the humanities (and tenure) unfolding at the University of Oregon here: newsletter.uauoregon.org/after-accept...

The president credits democracy superfan, Vladimir Putin, with the idea. Yes, really.

Hello my friends ☕❤️ Today marks our 5th Coffee Day, and I’m so happy we get to share it together. This week is even more special because two cafés in Italy will be joining us in raising a cup for Gaza 🫂

I see a lot of people promoting their gaming podcasts on here, and week after week, it's always men chatting to other men. invite a woman onto your podcast ffs!!!! if your instinct is that there are no women that you consider peers in the industry, then maybe it's time to think about why that is!

I’m a queer Palestinian. Stop using my identity as cover for the destruction of Gaza | Jad Salfiti

once again I must tap my own sign

Excuse me while I go scream forever

if you're still offline, stay offline

this rules "I am old, and I am a legend, and fuck you all I'm going to use my platform to support trans people" good for him

There's 1 day left in the @locusmag.bsky.social funding drive, & if you're able to kick any support their way I'd love if you did; there's really nothing else like Locus out there, I've been a subscriber for years, & their reviews & reporting & interviews are a superb treasure trove of good works.

A friend of mine alerted me to some fun fandom discourse (about a property she pays attention to; I'm not familiar with it.) Basically, there was a bit of a furor over an anonymous opinion stating, "<Artist> draws <butch4butch couple> well, but it's not REALLY butch4butch representation."

Ah yes, as guaranteed in the First Amendment, Americans may enjoy free speech as long as it’s in sync with what the administration is trying to accomplish

So basically BlueSky is treating "being Palestinian" as a violation of their terms and conditions 😒

Delete a letter, ruin a movie: The Neverending Tory

Most of us who play TTRPGs know what an X-Card is--a safety tool for content moderation in game--but do you know how it all started? Turns out, it was because a guy named Dave didn't like the vibe.

As always, if you want to make one donation that helps multiple people on the ground in Gaza, I recommend the Sameer Project, a mutual aid groups that's doing incredible work despite the horrific conditions: linktr.ee/thesameerpro...

the deportations are not final. the regime and security forces fuck up constantly. escape and survival are not just possible but probable. this nightmare engine can be fought and is being fought. don't forget.

Special thanks to everyone who reviewed, revised, shared and signed on early to this letter but huge thanks to Alaa Salim who from Gaza reviewed and then translated it into Arabic so that it could be shared among our Palestinian friends. You can help Alaa here: chuffed.org/project/1252...

We were hoping that this letter to @bsky.app could first be shared by a Gazan, but we were too worried that doing so would get their account deleted so we are sharing first. You can sign on to the letter about the unfair treatment of Gazans on Bluesky here: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

i asked my lawyer (who has defended legions of extremely radical people) their thoughts on this moment and how people are responding to it: “i think everyone needs to shut the fuck up for like, one minute.”

I’ve heard of people having morning routines where they don’t look at their phones right away, so they don’t start the day in a negative mood. I’m trying a new morning routine where I bury my phone in the yard and never touch it again.

This is exactly what I mean when I say that it is impossible to reduce friction, only to move it around. The text-making-up machine dropped the friction of "research" to zero, but every single person downstream of that "research" who has to act upon it now shoulders a double workload.

2)THIS MAN HAD ACCESS TO FREE BOOKS BEFORE THEY CAME OUT, AND NOT ONLY DID HE NOT READ THEM, HE COULDN'T EVEN BE FUCKING BOTHERED TO COPY-PASTE THE FUCKING TITLES! COMEMIERDA!!

Contributor @federicomuller.role.ar went on the ground in Buenos Aires to report on how the Argentinian actual play scene is organizing against Milei's far-right, anti-queer regime. "What does a queer tabletop group have to do with Milei and his politics? Everything."

So yeah, if you're one of those "sitting quietly on the side", go fucking support some people that are taking the hit on this on your behalf. Buy their game, their book, fund their crowdfunding campaigns when they get fired - if you're going to shut up at least fund resistance.

We live in a time of resistance. You don't have to pick all fights, nobody can, but for the love of all that can still be saved, pick a fight. Make the effort to be informed. Make the effort to make a stand. If our window of resistance slips by, it'll be behind us for years and years.

Saeed is friends with @sakheringaza.bsky.social and spoke with @ahmedhijazi.bsky.social who verified his and his family’s stories. Saeed is raising only on PayPal, but he has been verified by two Gazans I trust. This is the easiest way for him to get help and means you can donate under $5 too ❤️

I get when visibel white folks message me to apologize for not speaking up about the genocide in Palestine earlier/at all, but that still leaves a reality in which brown folks and minorities took all the flak for years of doing the right thing. Late is better than never, but there's more you can do.

So tired

Ozzy sitting at the table for breakfast

SINNERS is now the biggest Hollywood original movie of any kind at the box office since 2017 when Pixar's COCO came out. To find a live-action movie that made at least $200M domestic, we have to go back much further. This is truly bananas. www.slashfilm.com/1857902/sinn...

this is great on so many levels. I love it when brilliant art also succeeds financially, I love this affirmation for Coogler and everyone involved, but I am a petty enough bitch to also love it because this is EXACTLY what the suits tried to keep from happening and you know they are SUFFERING rn 😂

It is genuinely so hard to fight against people who have no compunction or shame about lying. They just lie! And then the rest of us have to both debunk the lie AND make the counterargument. It's exhausting and stupid and also so effective, it makes me feel like I'm losing my M I N D

The year is 2457, humanity is long gone, generative AIs keep crunching out articles "Biden is old"

Read why Sam is mad here: www.lawdork.com/p/scotus-aea...

AWP has one of these surveys going around and I filled it out b/c I'll almost always take an opportunity to sound off on genAI but the way it was framed did not inspire confidence that they're taking this seriously at all. If they want to go the way of NanoWriMo that's gonna be on them 🦤