winter???

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.

but like…Becky, of course LGBTQ+ people existed before Stonewall. We’ve all existed since the beginning of time. But the movement got a shock to its senses, a jump-start, a rocket-into-space when that glass shattered via Marsha P. Johnson, and when Sylvia Rivera was up on-stage protesting guess who was on the sidelines heckling her?

Without a trans black woman, LGBT+ rights would not exist. Never forget. Never “pay it no mind”.

nigel farage is, if you're blissfully unfamiliar, a pissbaby who wants to ride on the trump playbook into power. his party, filling the power vacuum of the dying conservative party, has gained a worrying degree of popularity in a very short time, despite spending most of his time getting 'milkshaked'.

it'd be funny if it wasn't scary. the conservative party, which has been the shitty right-wing party of the uk since the beginnings of its weird as shit democracy, is on the precipice of collapse, and into that gap has come farage with the 'reform' party. it's far-right and it's currently very popular and it's very very fragile. nigel farage is its sole face. it requires him to function and without him the movement has no establishment figurehead.

so. farage is a member of parliament (you basically need to be one to be a prime minister) who's eyeing the PM job in a couple years. he's got a non-zero chance of making that happen. but his party has to survive to the finish line, and he needs to be an MP to make it happen.

this situation became tenuous for him when it turned out he'd been taking millions of pounds of mysterious backhanders juuust before he was elected from, primarily, a crypto billionaire and a man named 'posh george'. all in all he pocketed £5 million for fully unclear purposes. you're supposed to declare anything above £300 received in the last 12 months when you get elected to parliament. you see the issue.

so there's a parliamentary investigation going on, and how is farage to stop such a thing? well...

at a time where his position is tenuous, he can stop the clock, make every news cycle about him, and reinvigorate his base and mandate by resigning, triggering a local election, and then standing in that election. in his area no party stands a chance of being the One True Opposition against him; they'd just split all the votes amongst each other and farage comes out on top having tamped down the whole 'millions of dollars of ??? money' thing. genius, thinks farage.

seeing that it's a fool's errand, though, no party has taken the bait. everyone has allowed him to run unopposed.

except this guy.

this is count binface. his entire career is being The Guy Who Stands In Elections. if the prime minister's local election is getting contested, he's there.

nigel farage is in a one-on-one battle for his political future, and the future of his party, against someone he never thought he'd be directly pitted against, and who now, if he remains the sole other candidate, controls the narrative for the next few weeks of his life. it's Farage v Binface.

what does binface stand for, though? is he just a guy with a bin on his head? well, he's got strong opinions on stuff. here's his manifesto from when he ran for mayor of london:

the only thing that really remains consistent between his manifestos is the hand dryer thing. it's fair enough.

all this to say. it's a non-zero chance that, with a single unity candidate against farage, people just say 'fuck it' and tick count binface on the ballot.

and now nigel farage and his team have to stay up at night sweating about it.

I dont know for sure how many of those ~4,800 layoffs were specifically in game development,but I do know Sales/promotion of alot of game releases have been cut back alot.