It's hard to explain to normies how much effort Trump is putting into anti-trans policies. This is like the 12th thing just this week. And there were 12 things the week before, and 12 things the week before that. There will be 12 things next week. This is almost everything the government is doing.

I love this intro to a philosophy paper, though I can't actually remember which paper it's from.

This is not a birth certificate and that footprint does not belong to the child discussed on the tablet. They're not even from the same city; the footprint is from Nippur, the text is from Ur. So why did the Penn Museum bring these objects together like this since 2016?

good article though unfortunately the game industry is largely controlled by people who are unfamiliar with the history movies, theater, literature, or basically any art form that does not have stats

[Werner Herzog voice] He is monstrous, but in a more profound sense, Cookie Monster is also a victim

The annual 2023 figures for US ped / cyclist fatalities from collisions with motor vehicles are about 7,300 / 1,100, respectively. The US is so built around car use that drivers are enraged by policies that add friction for them. They will harangue elected officials about it until they relent.

What a lede on this story: Man who complained about narrowing a road in order to protect pedestrians, so much that the city eventually reversed the change, then kills a woman on that very road with his car www.washingtonpost.com/business/int...

Shakespeare was just like, “enough historical drama, time for Island Wizard uses his daughter as sex-bait while disciplining these two mutants”

there's a certain personality that's very debilitating in modern life. 100 years ago, if you wanted to buy something, you'd go to five local shops and decide. now with the internet, you need to spend 1,000 hours so you can own the best version in the world like you're some venetian patrician

bluesky wrapped but it is just a wikipedia article explaining the prevalence of the three cue reading system in american schools and how it rendered 20% of their entire population functionally illiterate

We have lived in a world where government data was... good. And we no longer live in that world. Where I could pull up a government website and be like yes this many people live in this country, this many people got sick from this disease this year and so on, and know that info was pretty good

look I’m not an evangelical but “a guy calling himself the Beast wants control of your earthly wealth” feels like some kind of sign, no?

Horses' only sin is that its broad themes don't entirely pay off its loaded imagery. Otherwise, it's an effectively uncomfortable games that turns life's mundane humiliations into surreal horror. If anything, its bans fill in its thematic gaps for it. My review. www.polygon.com/horses-banne...

this is Senator Send In The Troops talking, so it’s not surprising, but just take a minute to sit with the utter inhumanity of “they were trying not to drown because we blew up their boat, and that was a hostile act worthy of blowing them up a second time” a moral black hole

this is the moral panic the idea that a story, painting, drawing, video game, or other creative work that depicts uncomfortable topics is the same thing as real life CSAM or violence against women is how we end up having to scan our faces to open Spotify no one is harmed by fiction or art

If we can only have art from people who "aren't in it for the money" that means we can only have art from privileged middle-class dilettantes. Making art being a viable career is responsible for nearly all worthwhile art, and if it's not a viable career any more we will get drastically less of it.

The one year anniversary of Yoon's failed martial law takeover just passed and lots of untold stories came out proving that THE ONLY REASON KOREA IS STILL A FREE COUNTRY IS BECAUSE PEOPLE DISOBEYED ILLEGAL ORDERS. The coup was over in hours because people said no.

Reading old court transcripts and, I mean, whomst

Historian of eugenics here. I don't normally like to retweet bad arguments, but this is such a fundamental misunderstanding of eugenics, I think it's important to point out. I don't have time to debunk all of the ways this is inaccurate, but I'll highlight a few things and then recommend some books🧵

i am going completely insane watching gamers make up shit about horses and interrogating every single thing the devs have said for inconsistencies and then deciding well it probably had cp in it. this is the easy mode version of the kinds of censorship that are to come and you're failing like babies

I think any conversation about whether or not Horses’ ban is justified is immediately shot down by the fact that Silent Hill 2 has existed for over 20 years as a celebrated mainstream classic.

the HORSES affair is a startlingly low bar to cross to see if people actually care about protecting games from censorship of upsetting themes because it's far tamer and has way more moral clarity than a lot of stuff that doesn't get banned. but it's also very clarifying to see who can't cross it

Also how childish is it to be boiling down a piece of art to just an enumeration of things it depicts that you find objectionable. If we care about video games we have to eradicate this kind of reductive nonsense.

These are good moments to remember that the CEOs of all the biggest companies in America are happy to go to White House dinners and slap this guy’s back. They do not care about this. Remember this, years from now, when they want you to forget.

An experienced organizer I really respect once reminded folks "you can't always win, but you can always, always inflict a cost. Those add up."

a videogame has content in it that i personally dont like which of course mirrors what i see as objectively good and moral so it's a net good i think it was banned

I think about this a lot, I feel like it’s deeply related to generative AI Some things in life are supposed to be a little bit hard! Some things should require effort! Human beings should routinely hear “no” and “not yet” and “you can’t do that” and “that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard”

I think part of What's Going On with billionaires is that the daily friction of interacting with normal people is part of what anchors people to the real world, and once you have enough money to buy your way out of the friction you can knock down a load-bearing column propping up your sanity.

*fires off a single fireball towards you that slowly tracks you* *fires off a single fireball towards you that slowly tracks you* *fires off a single fireball towards you that slowly tracks you* *fires off a single fireball towards you that slowly tracks you*

Everyone is vulnerable to believing that their expertise - writing, tech, engineering, philosophy, whatever - is The Most Important One that’s going to Fix Everything, but there’s something unique about gambling addicts saying “what if we tried gambling our way to the truth?”

Striking a boat full of unarmed civilians is murder. The first strike was murder. The followup strike was also murder. We're not at war. It's not a "war crime". Everyone involved, including the POTUS, SecDef, the Admiral who relayed it and the person who pressed the button needs to be on trial.

Consider the following before adopting a Manticore for your family

"valve is within their rights" is the most cowardly possible "I just want to shut down conversation" response imaginable to this whole thing. You can justify literally anything with "they're within their rights". things that are harmful to games, to art, to society, may well be "within rights".

I have many thoughts about this, one is I can't help but think this is all just shining a light on how games are still being held to wildly different standards than other media like film. I've played very few games like HORSES but watched so many films like it (as a connoisseur of arthouse horror).

re: LLM answers at the top of search results — it's so funny that they put a little imp who lies to you at the gate to All Human Knowledge. Does Google think it's protecting the city of Thebes??

get a musicbee library of things you love. check out Qubuz for things Bandcamp doesn't carry. literally just pirate things because it is about as financially beneficial to the artists you love without supporting an AI-powered ICE recruitment tool that's trying to burn the music industry down.

Former Judge Andrew Napolitano, who worked alongside Pete Hegseth for years at Fox, says the Sept. 2 boat strike is "an act of a war crime." "Everybody along the line who did it, from the secretary of Defense, to the admiral, to the people who actually pulled the trigger should be prosecuted."

Last week, ICE arrested and separated a father and son after a routine check-in. Six-year-old Yuanxin had just enrolled in the first grade at an elementary school in Astoria. Now he's in custody, alone. ICE won't say where. This cruelty serves no one. It must end.

its so crazy that young people became less interested in movies & tv at the same time weird tech guys mostly started deciding what gets made

Let me get this straight: we trained this guy to be an elite killer, abandoned his country to the Taliban, isolated him, arbitrarily banned him from working and so left his family unsupported. I don’t know if there’s any more efficient way of producing a mental health crisis outside of torture.

this is why liberals won't call for actual consequences. nothing trump is doing is something we didn't spend two decades doing throughout the middle east, central asia and africa during the war on terror. it's just that trump brags about it on social media too much

From "Vorace", a very short indie film by Pauline Mauvière & Charles Ouvrard (France). >> www.catsuka.com/news/2025-12...

I remember in mid-2018 sitting down with Zephyr Teachout, then running for New York attorney general, to talk through her call to prosecute ICE officials who broke the law. This was then considered an extreme, fringe position. Maybe if there had been accountability then, we wouldn’t be here now

the year is 2026. the disney-nvidia merger has been approved. erika kirk is the new head of cbs news. bill kristol is extolling the necessity of a vanguard party and permanent revolution