"Republicans are using trans people to generate fear—particularly surrounding children, family, and their ideal concept of masculinity—which is priming their base for genocide... [queer people are] testing grounds to desensitize their populations to violence." www.lemkininstitute.com/single-post/...

In short, every shithead you don't ban costs you ten other customers. "A [potentially regular] customer doesn't say anything but never comes back" doesn't register with you as An Event the way that kicking someone out (temporarily or permanently) does, so it's extremely easy to miss it.

what this week feels like to me

From Twelfth Night, if memory serves.

“I want a progressive movement that is aggressively pro raising wages at the bottom and aggressively pro immigration. These are completely coherent goals.” Great piece by @polphilpod.bsky.social www.liberalcurrents.com/we-need-to-g...

Nice argument, but I have already depicted myself as the decisive female squirrel and you as the feeble male squirrel whose purpose is unclear

"I’m going to pause here just to review: an institution that purports to be a university has told a philosophy professor he is forbidden from teaching Plato." surreal times dailynous.com/2026/01/06/t...

A general “return to civility” is the one thing I absolutely fucking know is not going to happen. Give it up already and figure out who’s deserving of your incivility.

Obviously plenty of people act on a pure might makes right basis, but they rarely feel the need to philosophize about it. They just *do* it. Philosophy is for when you want something other than that

You can’t make a good Star Wars by Loving Star Wars(tm) the most in the same way that you can’t 1) write the greatest song of all time by playing only covers 2) land a baddie solely through simping or 3) open a box with the crowbar inside that box

This is the most concise encapsulation of the game industry heading into 2026 I’ve seen.

THUCYDIDES: In my book I invented the Melian Dialogue as a cautionary tale DIPSHITS TALKING ABOUT IR WHO WANT TO SOUND SMART: At long last, we have done the Melian Dialogue from the classic book Don't Do the Melian Dialogue

what u have to understand is that working on my novel, answering dms, and answering emails all cost 1 spell slot but posting? Posting is a cantrip

shoutout to giant women

Republicans: WE NOMINATE SKELETOR Democrats: We dislike Skeletor but we will vote to confirm him. Please give us between 5 and 50 dollars. <Later> Democrats: I stand before you to condemn the actions of Skeletor. He should have never been given this power. Please give me between 5 and 50 dollars.

nem don't make a social experience about recreational violence challenge: impossible (failed): "anyone at this rave wanna fistfight???"

This sucks but I think non-Americans being justifiably angry at Americans for what the American government is doing and threatening to do, and Americans experiencing that anger and frustration personally in ways that are unpleasant, is probably an important part of any path back to stability

It would be great for Democrats to do good things, but right now I’d accept them actively trying to stop bad things. Instead they stand by while bad things happen and ask the people who hate them whether they should do anything

Apropos of Zork and Hithchiker's Guide to the Galaxy making it into the @polarisgamedesign.com list of influential games, here's the parser interactive fiction I think everyone should play: Aisle Spider & Web A Mind Forever Voyaging Anchorhead Slouching Towards Bedlam Savoir-Faire Eat Me

Get their ass, Emma. www.wmagazine.com/culture/emma...

While I'm posting about Clausewitz and Thucydides I'll bring this back

Been rewatching Golden Girls. Grew up with the dub, it's crazy how different the sub is.

parts of the law enforcement apparatus in this country, both federal and local, is behaving as if we are in an autocracy or a State of Exception is in effect, but they can't actually...do autocracy/SOE things, because of what I can only describe as institutional inertia

another example of our incredibly weird status quo - this happened, the cops couldn't actually charge her, and she's been confirmed as released

one of my long-running campaigns finally died. as an intermezzo before the next one, we've decided to to play a few sessions of Triangle Agency set in 1974

lot of things i could say here but mostly i guess i would like to implore everyone to find a personality other than "least favorite roommate during a house meeting in portland, oregon"

It really bums me out that with how much cruelty we face on a macro level, people are just so committed to being cruel to one another on a micro level too. What’s the point! Anyone with a soul is suffering! Why are we so insistent on making life more unbearable over nothing!

you know one thing dems do not need and have never needed overwhelming majorities to do is to stop talking about republicans as their respectable colleagues who they hope will do the right thing and the fever will break any minute now, and to start talking about them as enemies who must be defeated

it's twelfth night, time to celebrate by finding a loyal sea captain to save you from drowning and fall hopelessly in love with you, then abandon him to rot in jail so you can marry your sister's star-crossed girlfriend

This is why I refer everyone ever to Alice Marwick's theory of morally motivated networked harassment, which studied online communities from politics to fandom and concluded that in those communities we create our own moral framework, then use it to justify harassing other people for peer approval.

three hundred page reflection on the inner life of Big Chungus

Cute that he thinks a civil war will be against a clearly defined ideological enemy and not whatever local militia decides they need your car.

We have published the following update to our article following an email response from the New York Times. Trans News Network has a policy against platforming bigotry. As such, we have declined to publish the Times' statement which included blatant transphobia.

Thinking about how the exceptional amount of time afforded to TTRPG combat is somehow an expression of our own era's military exceptionalism somehow. I published on D&D combat just last year in fact: www.rascal.news/combat-dnd-f...

absolutely monday pilled. i’m toil-maxxing. going drudgery mode. stumblecore. hitting my slog goals.

It's the only game that matters. My SKETCH of British politicians playing the Trump Game.

A beautiful piece of writing about the reality of living with long term chronic illness that doesn't have an end point.

The United States was the gold standard for science and technology for decades, and there was never any reason that had to end.

magical

On Venezuela, Trump, Mamdani, and the "A" word www.kenklippenstein.com/p/mamdani-tr...

We’re old enough to remember when Congress existed

European leaders in response to Venezuela invasion: we welcome the restoration of tutelary democracy to the lesser races European leaders in response to Greenland invasion: wait you’re not allowed to do that to white people

most of our cultural narratives of failure put failure as a kind of stepping stone to success...but often times failure is just failure. you thought you were maybe heading somewhere and you fail and various possibilities are closed off.

ultimately, generative AI is a fascist project being pushed by fascists. if you pull the threads of basically all rhetoric, goals, ideas these people have what you find is eugenics, racism, delusional megalomania, machine worship, weird misogyny, yudkowskyism, moldbuggism, etc etc etc.

new one page rpg dropped

The world wars were actually the end of the world and the only way to cope with it psychologically was to invent new worlds and that is why fantasy fiction isn’t worth the pulp it’s printed on if it’s not anti-war send post

Decolonising the Dungeon Crawl--- Like everything else re: decolonisation and TTRPGs discourse, this is a solved problem. There's only metric that matters: How many creators from the colonised world are participating in and able to make a living from their games? That's *it*. 1/