Furry Librarian

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.

Deltarune Fun Fact:

Metro Man was not loved growing up in a way that mattered. His adopted father was clearly very absent, and while we don't know much about his family, their relationship seems superficial. Because of this, his sense of duty to the world is also superficial, hence his boredom.

Hal wasn't raised with power. He gained it and was shown how to use it by a 'space dad' who only taught him power and not love. Hence, he sees it only as a grasping means to an end.

Not really, no. The Nintendo Hire This Man look is generally when something gets chucked into Unreal Engine 5 with all of the visual effects cranked to maximum, but without any effort to harmonize the look and aesthetic with either the game's genre and themes or even with the actual world design.

So a fuckton of bloom and glow and raytracing and 4k resolution textures, but it's all slapped onto Mario 64, a game whose entire design is shaped around low-poly, low-resolution art design and limited graphical processing power.

It's the look produced by a creative who confuses fidelity for quality, who confuses surface level appeal for artistic merit. "If the light is raytraced, that means it's better! If the texture is 4k, that means it's better! If the model has more polygons, that means it's better!"

So if the new Star Fox game looked Nintendo Hire This Man, I would expect the character designs of Fox and the gang to be mostly unchanged, except for being much more detailed. I would expect especially a character like Katt to look unchanged except for being even more yassified, (because, again, confusing appeal for merit) and I also wouldn't expect Falco and Fox to be redesigned in a way that so many people find instinctively uncanny (because they're not used to furry characters that actually look like animals). Basically, I would sooner expect a Nintendo Hire This Man approach to produce designs like 2016's Star Fox Zero than I would expect it to produce designs like Star Fox 2026.

The Nintendo Hire This Man aesthetic is ultimately one which is incapable of meaningfully challenging its original game on the merits of its design language, because it's an aesthetic driven by nostalgia. All it can do is crank the graphics settings up to max with all the modern bells and whistles and go "look how cool the thing you already like is! Look how cool it is now that we fixed the problem of the hardware not being good enough to make it look this cool!" It doesn't want to change the original, it wants to dress it up in the gloss of legitimacy that comes from realistic, high-fidelity rendering technology. I would not expect that design approach to produce animalistic, off-putting furries, I would expect it to produce high-gloss versions of the original designs, unchanged in their fundamentals. Star Fox 2026 does seem to want to challenge the original a little bit—or at the very least, if it's trying to pull for nostalgia, it is a nostalgia for the original 1993 box art puppet designs, rather than the 1997 Star Fox 64 designs.

Honestly, right at the moment I'm more concerned about the Ocarina of Time remake being a Nintendo Hire This Man situation, since the only brief scene they showed of it was one of Child Link looking overdesigned and weirdly quasi-realistic, laying in a scene of glow and bloom lighting... but I need to see more of the actual game before I make that call. I want to see how (and if) the world design and art design of the whole game has been changed to suit the new look.