wouldst thou like to live deliciously?

Kiki’s Delivery Service: takes place in the regular world— albeit at some nebulous point in time— but also magic is real and witches are a thing. Witches exist in this world because it’s fun and we like them. It’s fantasy elements in a familiar setting— essentially urban or modern fantasy.

Porco Rosso: takes place in an extremely specific place and time and contains exactly one fantastical element— Marco’s pig head— which is never given an explanation and is never questioned as a biological impossibility. It’s clearly a metaphor and commentary on a real world issue but it’s also very much literal. This dude 100% has a pig head. No other mentions of magic are made. This is magical realism.

the scene: Wrigley Field, Chicago.

the players: Me, a novelist and unpaid intern for a coffee company that gives all its profit to charity.

A Nice teacher named I think Claire

An older gentleman with hate in his heart

the precise circumstance: It's the eighth inning. The Chicago Cubs are losing 17-1. For those of you who don't watch baseball, a 17-1 game is not competitive. The game is over. They only continue playing because major league baseball has not yet adopted a Mercy Rule.

the event: The nice teacher named I think Claire stops me as I am returning to my seat from having visited the restroom. She says that she is a big fan of mine, and that she really loves my books, and asks if she can have a picture. I say of course. It is a genuine delight to meet Claire at this noncompetitive baseball game mostly notable for the pounding heat of Chicago summer.

And then the older gentleman with hate in his heart leaps up and shouts, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING? YOU'RE IN MY SIGHT LINE."

Apparently, Claire and I are blocking his view of one pitch of this blowout baseball game. I apologize to the man and explain that we're just taking a quick picture, and then he says something that I can't repeat on tumblr*, and then we take the picture and the encounter ends.

DO NOT BE LIKE THIS OLDER MAN WITH HATE IN HIS HEART. ALLOW PEOPLE TO TAKE PHOTOGRAPHS WITH UNPAID INTERNS DURING NONCOMPETITIVE MOMENTS IN NONCOMPETITIVE SPORTING EVENTS.

thank you for coming to my ted talk.

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.

A ban on international collaboration with a list of the "scary" countries (like China, one of the US's strongest research partners despite It All), and a presumptive ban on ALL OTHER international collab.

An end to any binding peer review process in funding. All review will be by Trump stooges, deciding what has scientific merit. This isn't the top headline evil thing about this rule change, but it means that even well-meaning, very careful scientific review boards can't try to evade censorship. JD Vance is essentially in charge of deciding whether your metabolic enzyme computational model can exist or not.