“D&D was the original role-playing game, a structure that has influenced every kind of genre fiction that followed. The game is more popular than ever, reaching far beyond its original audience of midwestern misfits and bookish nerds. And for some fans, that’s a problem.”
“Google is hosting a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) app that uses facial recognition to identify immigrants, and tell local cops whether to contact ICE about the person, while simultaneously removing apps designed to warn local communities about the presence of ICE officials. ICE-spotting app developers tell 404 Media the decision to host CBP’s new app, and Google’s description of ICE officials as a vulnerable group in need of protection, shows that Google has made a choice on which side to support during the Trump administration’s violent mass deportation effort.”
Would Sesame Street still be Sesame Street if it hadn’t been called Sesame Street?
“As a historian of American religion, I am here to tell you: there’s nothing new about the wager Trump is making. All ideas about heaven are, in fact, ideas about earth. What people think about the afterlife always reflects their thinking about this life.”
“The U.S. military is being used inside the United States. There’s a lot we don’t know about how, why, and under what authorities. This page includes a continually updated tracker and map to show what we know—and don’t know—about the subset of domestic military deployments that raises the most questions—federal, non-disaster missions.”
“A recent spate of reporting indicates that Kash Patel’s time as director is going about as well as could be expected — which is to say, it’s an organization-soul-crushing and morale-killing disaster that imperils national security.” I keep wondering at what point the ridiculousness of the Trump/Patel FBI will begin to be reflected in pop culture. I’m not talking about the silly CBS show of the same name, but cop shows and detective/thriller books in general. There are certainly plenty of writers who are capable of making all kinds of hay with this material.
A brief history of the grocery store shopping cart and the so-far unsuccessful effort by the tech bros to replace with with something techier.
“Any public discussion of wokeness that only involves white people is like a public discussion of an internal combustion engine that only involves one-celled organisms. If they want to talk about that to each other then fine, but it isn’t worth blasting it out to the world.”
“Making that conservative belief that progressives scorn them a public or face-to-face reality when there’s a chance of changing people’s minds or just accepting people who have changed their minds is not strategic. It throws away an opportunity for a shift. And yes, you can disagree about almost everything, and a lot of it is moral issues, but if there’s no room for people to change their minds, learn, shift, improve, then there’s no room for your coalition to grow.”
RIP, Alice Wong, disability justice advocate and author.
Get rid of the damn ballroom at the first opportunity. I don’t care what replaces it.
“Vitae in Austin, Texas, is a Catholic-aligned health center that specializes in infertility without offering its most effective treatment. Though the clinic feels familiar to other medical facilities, it represents the new frontier of the anti-abortion movement. National anti-abortion activists have called it a model of what reproductive health care should look like in the post-Roe v. Wade landscape.”
“The White House Intervened on Behalf of Accused Sex Trafficker Andrew Tate During a Federal Investigation”.
Happy 40th birthday to Calvin and Hobbes. Go eat a tuna sandwich in their honor.
“A new report finds that local opposition to data centers skyrocketed in the second quarter of this year.” I’ve covered some examples of that here in Texas. It’s yet another opportunity, if we want to take it.
“It’s that getting into college is, in fact, becoming easier, with admissions offices trying to lure more applicants from a shrinking pool of 18-year-olds.”
RIP, Elzie Odom, civil rights activist and the first Black Mayor of the city of Arlington.
“The Epstein files saga is a total and complete loss for [House Speaker Mike] Johnson, who spent months trying to convince the public that there was no need for them to see the documents related to now-deceased convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, while at the same time attempting to block the legislation that would force Trump to release the documents from ever getting a vote in the first place. In the end, both efforts failed.”
“Judges Are Finding Ways to Deal With the Supreme Court’s Disastrous Shadow Docket”.
RIP, Randy Jones, Cy Young Award-winning pitcher for the San Diego Padres.
RIP, Rebecca Heineman, pioneering game developer, co-founder of Fallout publisher Interplay, winner of the first American video game competition.
“Trump promoting a death threat should not be dismissed as just one more of his excesses. When a wannabe autocrat aligns himself with a call to execute political foes, it’s not just another Trump social media post. It’s another warning.”
“Federal prosecutors are beating a broad retreat from cases they had brought against people protesting the surge of CBP and ICE agents into Chicago.”
The Five Stages of MAGA Scandal Grief.
“Donald Trump may have cleared the high bar of uttering the most appalling remark of his presidency on Tuesday.”
“How can we protect employees traveling to areas with increased immigration raids?”
“The process of FBI deprofessionalization underlines some important points about the direction American government is going under Trump: loyalty matters more than merit; retribution trumps performance; control is more important than accountability.” And again I wonder when pop culture – crime shows and crime books, in particular – will begin to reflect this reality.
“At this time, I suggest the general public avoid the CDC website.”
“Here are some of the high-profile names in the Epstein emails”.
Yeah, local opposition to data centers is increasing, until the one tool to control them gets rejected, like the Hood County voters who rejected incorporation to control a cryptomine because that would mean?
GUMMINT
For an early take on this discussion of D&D and white racism, I recommend a 1960s book by Norman Spinrad called “The Iron Dream.” Spinrad posits an alternative universe in which a young man named Adolph Hitler writes a fantasy novel with a very Tolkien-like cast of monsters and threatened humanity.