quixotic chaotic

Finding out that Bram Stoker was in a sexless marriage and that scholars believe that he very likely was closeted gay puts the entire book into perspective as to WHY it reads EXACTLY like a self insert wattpad Dracula kidnap fic:

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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"

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.

Heehoo the bots are fighting

murderbot talks about the Company with internal knowledge—it doesn't mention the Company's reputation. the presaux crew talks about the Company in tandem with the CR; it's all equally horrible to them. so this is the first... not unbiased, but first real outside perspective we get of the Company, that gives us actual context for where murderbot came from

this, coupled with the detail that Three, unlike murderbot, was allowed to communicate w/ other secunits and work together makes me wonder just what is or is not actually typical with secunits. i wonder... was the Company, of all the secunit manufacturers/renters, worse?

"Company units have a reputation for being dangerous." why? do they "malfunction" more? are they taken advantage of by third parties more (combat modules, the ganaka pit hack, etc.)? are they kept alone, obedient, disposable, until they can't endure it? until they go rogue?

Also, it didn't have the best of clients, either. MB mentions things like being tortured for sport or forced to fight other units by clients. And when MB first became a rogue, its first instinct was to go on a killing rampage, but the media saved it from that. Compare this to Three, whose first instinct was to help. Yes, MB influenced that, but Three seems significantly more mellow than MB. Maybe Three's clients weren't as bad.

Another comparison is their armor and non-organic parts, MB mentions that Three's materials are nicer and more expensive in comparison to its own cheap components. Three also seems a lot more durable than MB, at least physically.

Maybe the company is a low-bidder, low trust bond company. Like a loan office that doesn't check for credit history, just rents it out without considering how good or bad the clients are, and that's their business model.

HOWEVER-

What if, to make up for all of that, company SecUnits are smarter. Murderbot, for all it discredits itself, is able to take on CombatBots and survive, and wins in SecUnit-to-SecUnit combat, even when outnumbered (see Exit Strategy when it took on three other units and won, and System Collapse when it fought another, supposedly higher quality SecUnit, while being at half capacity, and also won). MB's performance feels above average for a SecUnit. Mostly because it actually uses its brain and doesn't just shoot blindly at stuff.

HOWEVER- Them being smarter comes with a downside. It makes them more prone to becoming rogues. More prone to breaking through their governor module. This, combined with the fact they don't get treated well, to say the least, makes them the most likely to become the cliché rogue on a rampage.

I'm so tried of those people lying and manipulating everyone.

No one ever said "they were tired of seeing it (mensahbot ship)" in 2023. No one.

"...like the recent request, they began as requests to hide the ship from more general channels"

Also untrue. There were other big ships that had their own channels. Is Mod Dearest implying that from the start they wanted to remove artmb and mbg from general channels? And the request began because 1) in 2023 there was a no-mb/human shipping role, which meant that if you choose it, you would not be able SFW mb/human channels BUT you would still be able to see mb/human ships in general nsfw channel. Why even give people option to filter mb/human ships, if you're not going to build your server around it? That role was quietly removed after the initial drama/discussion. More details here:

2) the ship was very popular among mods (all 4 mods at the time shipped it + a couple of members. If that seems like not much, is because ships like mbg and artmb also had a couple of people interested in them at the time. Fandom was much smaller, especially shippy fandom.

Below I'm attaching the proof of how it all went down.

Please be warned that there might be snippets of adult conversation interspersed thorough.

Ozai loyalists: Zuko? More like. Sucko. Go Ozai

Admiral Chan: That motherfucker invited himself to my son's party, broke my mother's vase because he was jealous, was told to leave, left, and then came back to burn down my vacation home.