Pillow Fort of the Random

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"

Okay so. It’s traditional that on the last day of Faire, the show goes a little off the rails due to the cast’s final-day pranks on each other. Faire management hates it, so we’re not technically supposed to do it, but, like…they never quite manage to stop us.

Anyway, last year, I was playing one of the lead villains. I was the second in command of the viking king, and it took approximately ten seconds for everyone to start shipping our characters. There’s at least one ship every year that gets popular, and that year, it was us. The vibe was 100% “Viking Mom and Viking Dad are getting a Viking Divorce and the berserkers are stuck in the middle of a custody battle.” Like, five minutes after opening gate one day, I had a patron strike up conversation with me about how I needed to get a better man, lmfao.

By the end of the show, my character betrayed the king and joined the Good Guys, and I got this epic showdown with him at the end where I kick his ass and get in a one-liner.

So for my last-day prank, I replaced my usual one-liner by just full-volume screaming, “And the divorce is FINAL!!!!”

The audience, and the rest of the cast, lost their absolute shit.

And @borinquenaqueer​ managed to take a picture of the exact moment of reaction, in which my costar later told me he actually broke character for a split second and didn’t know how to react because he was just caught so off-guard:

Elon Musk accidentally revealing his mom's account is one of his alt's means that he has both impersonated his own infant child and mother online.

Which also means when she posted to try to end the fight rumors between him and Zuck it was actually him.

There's this Stop Killing Games movement in the European Union (which is GOOD and SHOULD HAPPEN and I hope they SUCCEED WITH PREJUDICE) but. That's the European Union. That's not Australia. Or the USA. Or any number of other places. Will a win there actually affect any of us outside the EU?

The reason that most of the momentum related to this issue is in the EU right now is because that's the most important and influential target; EU consumer protections are better and easier to influence than other Western major markets like the USA. Frankly, it doesn't matter where these protections happen so long as it's a market big enough that the developers can't afford to lose it. If Ubisoft can't sell games in any EU country unless they give them an end of life plan and aren't allowed to destroy them, then they have to obey those rules or they lose one of the biggest non-China markets in the world. There are several petitions and soforth targeting the EU directly and various European countries right now, some directly related to the global movement of Stop Killing Games and some completely independent but with similar goals. You can of course start a petition or whatever equivalent exists in other countries, but unless you think we can get regulations in China, they're not going to be nearly as influential as going for the EU. But I'm sure that if someone got one off the ground intheir own non-EU coutnry, the Stop Killing Games supporters in the relevant country would back it.

For anyone interested, Ross talks a lot about the Stop Killing Games movement on his youtube channel:

Etho "no it's not"

Tango "falling, look up"

Scar "whoa what's that?"

And the thing that made it absolutely terrifying was that Hamlet was the only one who reacted. He was cowering, and covering his ears with both hands, and yelling to be heard over the noise.

And no one else seemed to know why he was doing that. The other actors didn't even raise their voices.

“Cenotaph.”

“What?”

“It’s only a gravestone if it marks the location of a body. A monument honouring someone whose body isn’t present is a cenotaph.”

“I’m… not sure that’s how it works if the body gets up and walks away on its own.“

“There’s precedent for gravestones being reclassified as cenotaphs if the body is later removed and reinterred elsewhere. There’s no rule that says the body itself can’t do the removing.“

“Okay, but the body very much is coming back. That’s kind of what we’re here to accomplish.”

“So it’s a temporary cenotaph.”

“And naturally our greatest concern here is avoiding semantic ambiguity.“