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1. Do not do age verification.

Oh no I dropped my link, what a horrible thing! Sure hope this doesn't get reblogged until it reaches users from the UK and Brazil!

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

a bunch of archives of incredibly important government datasets like maternal mortality statistics are about to be deleted forever. in a regime where they're known to fudge numbers, we can't trust a lot of the data coming from them to not be altered. open source backups like those found on data.world are vital to being able to verify that the data coming from our government is still intact and not altered. and they're about to delete all of it.

i don't know if we need to start a petition or what. nobody seems to fucking care. there are millions of users on data.world and yet nobody is raising the alarm bells and it makes me feel like I'm going insane. somebody needs to do something. i don't know what to do. it feels like more and more of this world is being destroyed and dismantled. it's not only US centric data, either! it's all sorts of countries from around the world! and they're about to fucking delete everything.

the only things that won't be deleted are private companies who happen to use the paid version of their platform (which isn't accessible data to the open source community; some people have just been using their service to host their own data on privately)

and the kicker? this announcement was made... via an AI generated blog post. so not even any sort of human touch. just a generic, soulless announcement made by a soulless human about to take a wrecking ball to one of the more important websites that exists on the internet.

an example of some of the things that will be deleted on July 11th:

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.

Ask yourself, how does this piece make you feel? (No wrong answers)

Look for an artist statement nearby. What does it say about the artist and their relationship to their work? What does the artist say that they are trying to convey with their art? What contextual clues can you pick up from what they say about their background, or what they omit?

Look at the title of the piece. What is the artist saying about their work by naming it that, either explicitly or implicitly?

Look at the medium. Is there anything about the piece that stands out to you, knowing what it's made of?

Look at the year it was made. What cultural events might have been happening around this time? Was this piece part of a particular art movement? What was the purpose of that art movement, and what was it trying to say?

Hello, everyone, and happy (slightly belated) start of July! With a new July comes a new season of the Interactive Fiction Competition!

From now through August 1st 2026, 11:59pm Eastern (23:59 ET), the IF Comp website will be open for authors to declare their intent to enter this year’s competition!

Final entries are due on August 28th, 11:59pm Eastern, but you must register by August 1st!

If you miss it, there’s always 2027… If you register and then can’t complete your entry in time, you may always back out of the competition and enter your work elsewhere or next year.

As with the previous iterations of the IFComp, authors will be allowed to participate as judges, vote, and review entries other than their own.

If you have any questions about the competition or its rules, you can contact us at [email protected]

In addition to entries, we are also accepting prizes to award contestants! If you would like to donate a prize for this year’s competition, you can email us at [email protected] — no prize is too humble or too grand.

If you would prefer to donate money, our Colossal Fundraiser will launch by August. Another announcement will be made then.

John Rogers is the creator of two of my favorite things:

Leverage and Leverage: Redemption, show(s) about criminals who team up to punish billionaires and corporations who take advantage of regular people in ways that the law won't punish. It's a great heist show, it's hilarious, it's satisfying in a vengeance sort of way, it's deeply nerdy in sometimes subtle ways (criminals using aliases from Doctor Who, anyone?), and seeing the characters and relationships develop is really nice, too.

Mr Rogers: Be kind

Steve Rogers: Do the right thing

"After they overheard that ICE was at the courthouse to arrest someone, they improperly accessed court databases to determine who was not born in the United States," a DOJ detention filing says. "They then snuck every suspected illegal alien who was at the courthouse out a back door, where ICE, who was waiting in the parking lot for their target to leave the building, could not see them."

Quantum witch who has figured out how to store her nightmares, intrusive thoughts, and crippling depression into patterns compatible with human neural impulses and can project them in the form of hexes onto other people, or reverse the process to siphon thoughts.

Guy who had his entire digestive tract cybernetically enhanced so it constitutes over 1/3 of his body mass but he can use all his organs as extra limbs or attack with them like a starfish throws its stomach at its prey.

Retired military robot whose brain is a daisy chain of forty rat brains who is still trying to get its personhood legally recognized and resents not being able to do anything for itself without the aid of a "service human" who legally speaking technically owns it as a pet.

Guy who has had his entire skeleton replaced with a network of low level AI centipedes allowing him to react at incredible speeds and move in ways that shouldn't be possible.

House sized anthill which lives underground and interacts through a series of dozens of drones which can temporarily assemble into a humanoid shape if needed.

Orca who had most of her body destroyed by a depth charge during one of many surface wars and had her head and remaining spine installed into a colossal multiarmed mech suit to be able to collect the disability compensation after she sued, and uses it to maintain a coffee bar and support group focused on civilians injured in military or police actions.

Guy who installed entropic conversion units at key joints of his body which allows him to become super fast, hyper intelligent, super strong, and indestructible for ten minutes, but anything within a ten foot sphere around him at the start gets turned to ash.

Ratbot has a real uphill battle because if it wins personhood the military has to start paying benefits to every functional ratbot and they were created as disposable soldiers with human like intelligence but without any regulations about their rights. As far as the military is concerned they just need to stall until ratbot parts all run out and the one with the lawsuit breaks down permanently. Bad news for ratbots.

The mosquito hybrid is a low income area doctor. Wealthy people can afford nanoplants that run off vat grown synthetic material and have near perfect cell regrowth and life extension. Mosquito hybrid found their nanoplant as a junk discard experimental model and needed a set amount of insect genetic material before it worked.