This hypnotic command makes you see a pretty title

This sort of problem runs deep and i see it fucking everywhere.

Never repeated, never pointed to by any other passage, not even given in an index or glossary, just secreted away in a seemingly random spot like a game of Where's Waldo in a 200+ page text.

This isn't meant to be venting, it's genuinely perplexing that an approach so specific and so counterproductive seems to happen so often. What's the deal?

Most tabletop game designers are very bad technical writers.

The first-edition of The Joy of Gay Sex, published in 1977, declared, “Vegetable shortening may be the best lubricant, since it is not only greasy but also digestible”[4] Such a statement perhaps gives new meaning to the companies boastful declarations that “Its digestible” and “Crisco has been making life in the kitchen more delicious for years.”  Similarly, in the 1978 sex manual The Advocate Guide to Gay Health, Crisco even earned an entry in the book’s index.  Discussions of the shortening’s use as an anal lubricant indicate its popularity, with statements such as: “The lubricant, typically the cultic Crisco, must be copious.”[5]  In fact, Crisco was so synonomus with gay sex that discos and bars around the world took on the name, such as Crisco Disco in New York City, which was one of the premiere clubs during the 1970s and early 1980s.  Other clubs or bathhouses, such as Club Z in Seattle, even featured murals with Crisco.  Thus, Crisco was conversely also one of many things that led to the formation of gay identities during the 20th century.

from this essay: http://www.columbia.edu/~sf2220/TT2007/web-content/Pages/drew2.html

KOSA IS MOVING FORWARD IN THE HOUSE!

It's part of a package called the KIDS Act, filled with digital ID and age verification and censorship!

MAKE THOSE PHONES RING!! CALL YOUR HOUSE REPRESENTATIVES ALL WEEK

202-224-3121 i HIGHLY encourage everyone to read the bills in the KIDS Act, because you will be doing more than 95% of people who read and introduce these bills

Succubi, a divine work by Iranian-born and now French-based artist Bahman Pezeshkzad, depicting an ample beautiful woman well worthy of adoration! Per Wikipedia, in modern representations, a succubus (succubi denotes plural women) is often depicted as a beautiful woman seductress or charming, rather than as demonic or frightening, to attract people instead of repulsing them. The male counterpart of the succubus is the incubus. Historically, folkloric belief in succubi was motivated by distressing nighttime phenomena, chiefly wet dreams and sleep paralysis.

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"

Don't let fear or feeling doomed stop you. If you're overwhelmed that's okay, but take a break, take a breath, talk to someone about how you're feeling, and continue.

DOGE as an organization has been linked to 300,000 deaths due to its cuts and multiple significant data breaches. All the while, DOGE did not actually reduce the government’s deficit. 

[...]

After watching hours upon hours of this footage, what stands out to me is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the arrogance. The surefootedness that this was the correct thing to do despite no experience in government. The presumption that they were entitled to use their own uninformed judgement to cut funds to things that they don’t personally value but do positively impact others. Even by their own metrics of merit based activity, this campaign was a failure. Fox believes these particular cut contracts did save hundreds of millions of dollars, but the cuts ultimately did not reduce the deficit. Not even close. It makes for strangely captivating viewing, seeing someone part of a team that has caused so much damage coldly explain the flawed thinking behind what they did. The answers are sometimes defensive and coached because they’re in a lawsuit, of course. But taken as a whole they show at least these members of DOGE are essentially unapologetic for what they did.  In a statement published last week, American Council of Learned Societies ​​President Joy Connolly said, “Our lawsuit reveals this administration’s contempt for that principle and for public investment in research for the common good. DOGE employees’ use of ChatGPT to identify ‘wasteful’ grants is perhaps the biggest advertisement for the need for humanities education, which builds skills in critical thinking.”

On Friday, a federal judge ordered the videos be removed after a complaint from the Trump administration. However, much to the chagrin of the U.S. government, internet archivists and forums like Reddit's r/datahoarders have already re-uploaded backups of the videos.