A place for things.

2026:

But Pokopia fully does not do that. The world is lonely without humans and lesser for humanity's absence. So much of the game is about how Pokemon miss humans and are struggling to make sense of a world without us, how the ecosystem is just as hurt by our absence as any other species, and how the things we left behind, even in ruins and burned shells, are often beautiful and strange and helpful to the Pokemon who find them.

Pokemon have always been this allegory for the natural world- back to the original idea of the games inspired by children who caught bugs and kept ant farms- and thus the relationship between Pokemon and humans becomes this allegory for the relationship between nature and humans. And Pokopia looks you dead in the eye and says "the world would be poorer without humans, and if we all vanished tomorrow the echoes of who we are and the things we did would still ring out for eons uncountable. We would be missed and mourned and searched for and the wound of our absence would be deeply felt on this earth for the rest of its turning. The actions of a few greedy short sighted humans will never change that."

Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.

have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.

and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.

black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.

if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you've ever met. it doesn't have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don't know much, look it up and learn about it together.

This is Juneteenth.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

The Star Trek title card generator is over here:

The sitemaker (Josh Mayfield at https://bsky.app/profile/bean525.bsky.social) has asked for people to come in and kick its tires so he can work out any bugs they turn up. So do give him a hand, if you feel inclined. :)

(also, deeply amused by this one...)

My gut reaction to this was "I wouldn't, fuck him", but then I realised that I do actually have thoughts about this.

Open with a white-text-on-black-screen intro that explains that dialogue in this film has been taken wherever possible from historic recordings. Where it couldn't be, it has been constructed from records of the relevant parliament/private discussions that are on record, even if not word for word. Add that all events depicted are real. And, to reinforce this, a huge load-bearing pillar of the marketing for the film would emphasise that this is extremely limited in artistic interpretation, it's all things the man actually said and did. This, the marketing would stress, is the REAL Churchill, in all his complexity. This is the nuanced and complex and very human guy we don't see in the history books, strengths and flaws and all of it.

The first... half, maybe even two thirds of the film would be pre-WW2. A full account of all his actions in power, painting the picture of the man he was. His belligerence disguised as wit, sending in the army against striking Welsh miners, his initial admiration for fascism and eugenics, all of it. All reproduced from things he actually said and did.

Then, the realisation that Hitler included Britain in his fascist plans. The U-turn into hating the guy, all while believing in the same underlying points.

Then, most of the WW2 section would be in montage form. And at this point, the audience sees why he was actually fairly well suited to the task of opposing Hitler, because all those flaws meant he was ego-driven to resist the Nazis or die trying, and that was what was needed at the time. We've set up that ego, that belligerence, that eloquence. Here it is, in context, actually being useful.

But, this would be juxtaposed with all the things we're carefully not told, that are nonetheless historic record. The starving of India to get food to Britain. The lack of bomb shelters in London, and then claiming credit for sending people into the Underground when they thought to do it. The use and abuse of non-British Commonwealth troops in roles kept from the white soldiers. All of that goes in.

And then, once the war was done, the fallout. The rest of the film would cover his fall from power, first of all - the fuck up at the Potsdam Conference, then his continued use of lurid and hyperbolic war rhetoric in the general election campaign that basically made Clement Atlee and let Labour win.

Labour's creation of the NHS, and national parks, and other such things. Churchill's opposition. The fallout to places like India, the Suez, etc.

And then his return for a final term as Prime Minister in which he was unpopular, unsuccessful, and also very unwell; he was 77 and had multiple strokes, which were hidden from the public. He was against the dissolution of the empire, but Labour had already pulled the trigger on it, so his final years were basically a lot of war crimes and whining as countries declared independence; which won't be a surprise to the audience, because we've literally heard his views on eugenics and imperialism already. Of course those didn't go away with WW2. All that congealed ego and imperialist drive, so useful against Hitler while keeping the worst costs away from the UK, made him a fossil unsuited to the role of peacetime leadership in a post-war recovering nation beginning to decolonise.

And finish on how, at the end, he supported the UK's application to join the EEC - the precursor to the EU.

The whole thing would make the Churchill cultists so fucking angry. They'd 100% claim liberal bias and piss themselves. But that's why you'd have to go so hard on stressing in the marketing that all of it is true; he literally said this. He literally did this. It's all real. Even the EU bit. Yeah, you voted against Churchill.

It's choosing to be kind to people when you're in a bad mood, or when they're being annoying.

It's choosing to be kind to people who your friends don't like.

It's choosing to be kind to people who you don't particularly like.

It's choosing to be kind to people who you envy.

I'm not saying that you can't be a kind person and stand up for yourself, or tell someone to fuck off when they're doing something genuinely harmful, but there are a million petty reasons people use to justify treating people badly.

But that's exactly what kindness is. It's making the effort to treat people well when you don't feel like it.

Over 90% of parents of visibly intersex children opt for cosmetic surgery on their infants.

The ones that don't experience medical violence then, likely experience it as a teenager.

I didn't.

I am very rare in that I did not experience medical violence.

Why? Because I learned what intersexuality was as a young age, and I actively fought against what doctors wanted to do to me. All the way down to legal research on what medical care minors can be forced into. I remember walking into that doctor's appointment with the state law written down that proved that if I did not consent they could not do surgery.