The first concept for one of the playable characters in my game! I’ve planned several paths you can take following one of the main characters. This one is the scholar, modelled on my grandfather.

"My husband loves me and will make sure that I never have to work again. It's what's right for our family. We're equals even though he makes all the money."

If people choose to have tons of kids, that is their choice. If they choose to have zero, that is their choice. Society can choose how to deal with it but it fundamentally must be forced to accept population trends as outwith its control as any control in this is an attack on human liberty.

Got a text from Cub pharmacy - they’re now offering walk in COVID shots. Or make an appointment . Also, HIGHLY recommend switching to your local Cub pharmacy over Walgreens or CVS if your insurance covers it. They are nice! And answer the phone when you call! cub.imagemovermd.com/my-store/3?o...

Highlights this morning @WETAClassical include a violin & piano concerto of Mozart at 6:50am, incomplete at his death but reconstructed in the 20th century; Classical Sunrise spotlighting horns at 7:11am; and Chopin's variations on a Polish song, for piano & orchestra, 8:16am. 🎵

I think people feel the most comfortable defending old books bc they're "canon" bc we've made the mistake of trying to defend each book on its merits-- when it's not about the books at all. They're banning good books and mid books and bad books bc they want to defund public education 😤

Autonomy News is THE publication to read for the most accurate, up-to-date, and straight-talking abortion news just about anywhere on the internet.

In this case, ADF “cited several scholars to support its argument that conversion practices should once again be permitted. Two of those experts, however, told the Guardian that ADF had ‘profoundly’ misrepresented their research, which discussed the ‘psychological damage’ of conversion therapy.’”

This is the state secret police committing acts of public humiliation and torture. Americans don’t have a language for this in the public consciousness but that is what this is with no exaggeration or embellishment.

if you ask the average American to describe what they think a tougher immigration system should look like, they will describe something a degree of magnitude softer and more generous than the current reality. The lesson here is that people are both better and dumber than they appear.

NEW: Tomorrow, a church in between Keller and Southlake will host the area's first-ever Pride festival. I spoke to one of the organizers about hosting Pride in a conservative stronghold, as well as the attacks she's endured from Dallas conservatives: www.chron.com/culture/arti...

“'The fact that we don't have money to pay journalists, but we have money to pay Bari Weiss between $100 and 200 million is indicative of what the Ellisons' true goal here is,' a network correspondent said. 'And it's not journalism.'"

BREAKING: The 1st Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 100-page opinion -- says it is unequivocally, lopsidedly easy to determine that the Trump administration's view of birthright citizenship is wrong. www.documentcloud.org/documents/26...

Right now, the unemployment rate is 4.3%, but for Black women it's a staggering 6.7%. Over 320,000 Black women have lost their jobs from the federal govt to the private sector. This systematic targeting of Black women is intentional. It's devastating for our communities, economy, and our country.

Shocking revelation to some people apparently unaware of this, but you can in fact separately condemn two atrocities in two different countries without feeling obliged to try to compare or connect them.

As if irony isn’t already dead, the Hatch Act violation on the DOJ website, which blames Democrats for the shutdown, appears on the page advising DOJ employees they are subject to the Hatch Act. joycevance.substack.com/p/a-note-abo...

not a single news org signed. that's what it takes. stand together. everywhere, every time.

It’s so stupid. And I don’t like, as a woman of childbearing age, being one step closer to a preventable death because some blue state guys think we have to sacrifice vulnerable groups to the tent’s expansion

Trump and his cronies spent the day trying to blackmail Democrats into giving him a blank check for his lawlessness. It won’t work. We don’t bow to wannabe dictators who use the American people as bargaining chips.

Just so everyone is crystal-clear, this is NOT related to the government funding because the USPTO is self-funded.

Why is there no mention at all of every federal bureau putting out politicized messages blaming Democrats and "the far left" for the shutdown? I realize this administration breaks roughly 480,000 laws per day but this seems like a really easy and off putting thing that people can understand.

Good morning. The government is shut down because Trump wants to act like a king and steal from you. Democrats have no obligation to support a budget that funds the destruction of our democracy - and DOUBLES health premiums to fund a tax cut for billionaires.

Not a typical place for a spider lily, but I'll take it

ICYMI: I wrote about why it's impossible to compromise with conservatives on trans issues. They've already rejected the common sense compromise positions and lie about us anyway.

Five days ago, an ICE agent shoved a woman asking questions about the detention of her husband. Today they attacked two journalists. We cannot accept or normalize what has now become routine violence at 26 Federal Plaza. It has no place in our city.

Just a reminder that only 14 of the 94 Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action have been implemented in Canada. The history of settler colonialism in Canada is uninterrupted, violent, ongoing.

The dramatic lighting and red sky is seriously making this feel so strange

Something to lower your heart rate & maybe give you hope: You can help out pollinators & other wild critters no matter where you live (if you want to, that is!) This piece on monarch butterflies, gardens, green-space advocates & biodiversity in NYC is very much my jam 💚🦋 www.vox.com/down-to-eart...

Everybody should read this. Gives you a really good idea of the types of questions trans people have to ask ourselves almost every day just to do normal things that others don’t even need to think about.

Make time tomorrow to call your Congressperson and both your senators tomorrow. Remind them that trans rights are human rights. Hell, call your reps even if they're Republicans. Let's remind them that they will eventually need to be reelected.

That’s not how copyright works. Lawless stuff, and for what

If it’s copyrighted material, it seems to me either you can’t use it without running afoul of copyright or you cannot. “This would be infringing except for that we give you an opt-out” is not a thing, that I know of. Your copyright *is* your reservation of rights, you don’t have to say “Even you.”

A lot of people think that every international student admitted means one fewer spot for domestic students, when the opposite is more likely true - the tuition revenue international students bring allows public universities to provide substantial discounts to domestic students, improving access.

Even more, university professors are teaching *how to think*. I am not interested in outsourcing my most human capability to a magic box. Yes, I use calculators, computer algebra, etc. If those vanished tomorrow, I would still be able to do physics, because I learned how to do the integrals myself

For all that it's been hollowed out and taken over by Sinclair and the like, I have noticed that local TV news is producing a lot of local angle ICE stories and that actually seems good.

we all kind of let the conservatives win the narrative on the 2020 protests. the reality is, and everyone knew this at the time, the violence was almost always started by police brutalizing peaceful protestors. the ICE playbook is the 2020 playbook

There's a town ~12 miles west of Chicago that is a warzone at the moment. It's called Broadview. It's home to ~8,000 people & every day for 3 weeks, ICE & other state agents have launched increasingly violent attacks against its residents & peaceful protesters, defying the mayor & local fire dept.

The pro-EU Party of Action & Solidarity has crushed the pro-Russia Patriotic Electoral Bloc in the Moldovan election. It won 51 seats - an outright majority. Moldova is now on a trajectory towards EU membership. A very bad night for Putin, who targeted Moldova with a wave of election propaganda.

Trump is building a personalist regime where every university must bend the knee or lose funding and every business must bend the knee or face tariffs, H-1B fees, and regulatory blackmail. You can't cover each domain in isolation; they are all the same story.

A bunch of people dismissed the bomb threats to polling locations by the Russians during the last US election as "more Russiagate" but this seems to be a pattern of theirs

Think of this as equivalent to removing the merit system from government employment. Your tax dollars deployed to serve the goals of a personalist authoritarian system. All the talk about banning DEI because of merit shown to be nonsense when they also remove merit-based processes.

I hold many grudges against "Artificial Intelligence", but perhaps the biggest one is how confusing this era is for all us Weird Al Yankovic fans.

'out of the three mass shootings today'

The medbed thing is funny but maybe it’s bad that the press has no interest in evaluating whether the president has functioning reality-testing

This is, after all, the original and authentic meaning of "stay woke." In fact, the perversion of "woke" into an epithet is perhaps the defining metaphor of our moment: Historical victims are not only being revictimized, but also mocked for never forgetting this is always a possibility in the US.

AND ANOTHER THING! With all of these conversations around censorship, I continue to be really upset about some people refuse to see the through line to trans and reproductive rights AND our countries rejection of comprehensive sex ed.

A tangential point but it is humiliating as a feminist—and a sign of the ways that endemic misogyny abridges women’s citizenship and dignity—that someone like Klein can be considered authoritatively well informed about American politics while also knowing so little about the politics of abortion.

One of the best things about Liberalism is that it freed people from the tyranny of communal and traditional rule.

Another example in what I see as the objectification of other people. Do your loved ones exist for how they emotionally support you or for their own sake?

Grijalva: I was looking at the example of now-Representative Walkinshaw from Virginia, who was elected two weeks ago Tuesday. The following Wednesday—less than 24 hours later—he was sworn in, with unofficial results. So for me, apparently the rules have now changed in just two weeks.