Open Channel D

(inspired by this post from @consumerofshorthomies )

(Pic alongside my old PS Vita ☺️ It runs one of my all-time favorite games, the Vita exclusive Soul Sacrifice, better than the Vita itself, which is awesome)

And honestly I’m kind of obsessed with this lil thing. It runs on Android OS, and it can play everything from obscure 70s home console games to emulated arcade machines, all the way up to PS2 era for consoles and 3DS (and even some Switch) for handhelds. It can play PSP and Vita, it can even play older PC games apparently (though I haven’t tried that yet). Bottom line is I’m having a blast with it, playing so many old games I had as a kid and a bunch I never got to try.

It was a bit of a bitch to get everything set up (and I’m still not done weeks later, lmao) but I found a good video guide that walked me through it all, and so far I’ve only downloaded (1) program that was bundled with malware 😀👍 I got rid of it…I think

It even plays freaking Dante’s Inferno!!! (the PSP port) like what more do you need?!

In conclusion this is not a paid ad, I’ve just been meaning to ramble about my Retroid here ever since I got it.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I go back to playing Croc

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"