~Tarot Card Witch~

The Crunchyroll store will be paywall-locked to the top two subscription tiers of paying users only starting in August. Anime physical media will be cut off for purchase without a minimum of a $140/year subscription.

Currently CR is the only place selling Aniplex titles, and those are already horrifically expensive on their own. Now CR (owned by Sony) is saying you can't even spend that money without paying for the privilege of shopping there.

This is 100% another symptom of Sony's monopoly practices. 10 to 15 years ago we had a variety of distributors for physical media. RightStuf, Aniplex, Funimation, and Crunchyroll were all independent of each other and all of them offered different series. In the last decade Sony bought and merged them all, dropped dozens of Funimation titles when porting them to Crunchyroll, closed the RightStuf warehouse distributors, and has been clear-cutting the Crunchyroll store which had turned into the only distributor of all those previous sources. 90% of the stock of physical products has been cleared from the shop and what's left are slim pickings of a few massively expensive popular titles. This is the same Sony that promises that physical discs will not be offered for games for the PS6, so I don't have high hopes for their plan for continuing releasing physical media.

Anime is already harder to source, as buying directly from Japanese publishers often doesn't include English subtitles and certainly won't have dubbed audio. If a US licensing company's license expires, the series will go out of print and vanish from streaming with literally no warning and often never coming back. (Just this month Crunchyroll lost over a dozen titles, including Barakamon and Black Lagoon among others.) Physical media is also one of the only ways that older bonus content is preserved, like dub directors commentary or interviews with the cast, and sometimes if a series is relicensed for streaming, it has to be altered (such as Evangelion's rerelease losing the rights to play the original set of Fly Me To the Moon endings and the original dub).

Where do I get physical media now?

The r/AnimeCollectors and r/AnimeDeals subreddits share resources for sales, deals, and places to look to find a specific series you might be hunting for.

AnimeDeals specifically also has users that highlight ebay stores that often resell deadstock from Walmart/Target at steep discounts, so keep your eye out for those. Recently picked up the full series of Yuu Yuu Hakusho for a total of $35!

There are still some competing distributors of new-print anime. Sentai Filmworks, MediaOCD, and DiabolikDVD are all distributors that sell things CR won't. Sentai is currently running a summer sale and the subreddits will point out good prices when they come around.

Amazon (ugh) does often sell Crunchyroll series that CR's own store doesn't stock anymore. Recently the redditor Aside_Intrepid also released a guide on how to use Amazon's location data to find location-based coupons that apply to blu-ray as well. The same instructions can be found on blu-ray.com

Buy a regionless dvd and blu-ray player and buy Region 2 discs. They're usually still the US dub with English subtitles, but STEEPLY cheaper than US licensed releases.

Keep an eye on secondhand media stores, FB Marketplace, and animedeals for people destashing and selling their collections. Thrifting can land you some great finds, especially for harder-to-obtain older series.

Except that this is a lie.

I had not been in before. I had not ordered two broom handles. I had not mentioned two broom handles. I had not browsed the broom handle section, if such a thing there even was. Two broom handles was simply what I had entered the shop to buy but five seconds previously. And the shopkeeper was ready and waiting with two broom handles and knew that they were what I sought with not a word exchanged.

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.

During the stop, Lorenzo had 3 coworkers with him in his truck who have all been taken into ICE custody.

His family described Lorenzo as a hardworking family man who didn’t deserve to be killed. All he wanted was to provide for his wife and see his sons become great people. His eldest son recognized his father by his cries and pleas when trying to identify who the victim was.

The Salgado Araujo family has set up a gofundme to help with funeral and legal costs, and to help keep their family supported since Lorenzo was the sole provider.

1. Do not do age verification.

Adults with Down Syndrome fuck. Adults with Down Syndrome SAY fuck. Adults with Down Syndrome watch porn. Adults with Down Syndrome drink. Adults with Down Syndrome do dangerous things for the fun of it. Adults with Down Syndrome do stupid things.

Autistic adults fuck. Autistic adults SAY fuck. Autistic adults watch porn. Autistic adults drink. Autistic adults do dangerous things for the fun of it. Autistic adults do stupid things.

Adults with Cerebral Palsy fuck. Adults with Cerebral Palsy SAY fuck. Adults with Cerebral Palsy watch porn. Adults with Cerebral Palsy drink. Adults with Cerebral Palsy do dangerous things for the fun of it. Adults with Cerebral Palsy do stupid things.

I will be downloading everything I purchased from Bandcamp and keeping an eye on it.

Trigger warning for graphic descriptions of injured and dead wildlife.

When a fireworks display occurs near a wild bird roost, the birds simultaneously explode into the night skies in utter panic, which can lead to huge numbers of deaths, usually because these birds either smash their skulls or break their necks as the result of flying into trees, fences, billboards, houses and other solid objects that they cannot see in the gloom and ensuing chaos.

Many of the startled birds who take flight fly at much higher altitudes and for much longer durations than they’re used to to escape the noise, which is energetically costly and physiologically stressful.

Small birds and bats can be knocked from the air and killed by the sonic shock. In 2010, 40 dead sparrows were discovered dead under a roost in a nature reserve after a local fireworks display. The manager of the reserve witnessed a tawny owl fluttering and convulsing on the ground after a particularly loud explosion. It died shortly after.

In Arkansas in 2010, some 5,000 red-winged blackbirds, European starlings, common grackles and brown-headed cowbirds suffered blunt-force trauma after colliding with cars, trees and buildings, an ornithologist from the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission would tell National Geographic.

In 2008, federal officials showed that seabirds in the northern California town of Gualala abandoned their nests after a fireworks show, leaving their eggs vulnerable to predators.

Each year in Austin, Texas, the Congress Bridge bats can be seen fleeing the fireworks display en masse on weather radar, and emergences from their roost diminish noticeably in the days following the Fourth.

In 2018, the Galapagos banned the sale and use of pyrotechnics. According to the BBC, conservationists said that fireworks caused elevated heart rates, trembling and anxiety in many animals. 

The threat to wildlife doesn’t stop at startling lights and sounds; fireworks also have the potential of starting wildfires, directly affecting wildlife and destroying essential habitat. Litter from firecrackers, bottle rockets and other explosives can be choking hazards for wildlife and may be toxic if ingested.

So what do you do if you want to watch fireworks responsibly? Experts say municipalities are more likely to be aware of these dangers than private consumers. Their best advice is to stick to the shows put on by professionals and local governments, which tend to follow guidelines put forth by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, among others, about animal safety.

The National Audubon Society offers similar guidelines: “Commercial fireworks are concentrated in one location, rather than in several locations at once, which is what often happens in neighborhoods. This allows birds to take off and land again in a ‘safer’ location rather than continuing to flee noises coming at them from all directions.”

finally searched for a solution and there IS in fact a giant hand-curated list of sites containing this content. it can be imported to ublock origin on desktop or mobile, and even can be used on iOS via the ublacklist extension in the safari app. it's updated regularly, and importing via the link as described should allow those updates to go into effect automatically.

i've only tested it a little bit, but after importing the list and repeating my duckduckgo search for backpack recommendations, my top results now lead to websites that appear to be linked to actual organizations in some form, with an "about us" page and the name of a founder and everything. the text is still often a bit wordy and SEO-optimized, but it now has actual recommendations that are relevant to the query. BIG IF TRUE???

The kid was picked up by an ambulance 30 minutes later.

Now as an adult working in security I get SO MANY folks- upper-middle aged mostly- coming to me to 'rat out' people they think are faking it.

I was once sent into a bathroom because a client demanded that the "fucker won't get out, so go drag them out"- I was NEVER going to do that, so I did a wellness check instead. You know who it was? A person recently released from the hospital after a car accident. They had a hole in their skull and major hearing loss. They couldn't answer the owner because they couldn't HEAR the owner.

Another time about a homeless man who got around town by kicking the ground from his wheelchair. "You know he doesn't actually need that thing, his legs work fine, it's just for pity points"- Oh, so he's not paralyzed, his wheelchair is performative? Funny story Dale, I actually know that guy, he was backed over by a truck and has chronic pain from his shattered pelvis. But sure, let's make him stand up and walk everywhere so nobody feels too bad for him and tries to help him or something.

"She doesn't need that scooter, I've seen her get out of it."

"Look how fat he is, because he just rides around and refuses to get up."

"She doesn't really need that cane- she comes here without it all the time"

Ageless Linux intends to force the issue before the California state supreme court, then ultimately (probably) the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). It's a stupid, dangerous law, voted into place by legislators who either don't understand the core issue OR knowingly voted for it because they're assholes.

California is an influential state in the US. Many laws & regulations passed there eventually trickle out to most states. That's why it's worrisome to see this kind of thing rammed through, and why it's important to fight it.