Wario Time!

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.

https://youtu.be/m80zFu0D7po?is=2850kMgsmo5CZ5Ni

This is a WILDLY densely packed with info 8 minute video

Did you know? The first PlayStation Network (PSN) avatar featuring Sir Daniel Fortesque only became available in 2014. It was part of a set of avatars featuring characters from PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale.

Have you ever used this as your PSN avatar?

(I ask not because Black people don't deserve to see themselves as the protagonist, but because I recently remembered that the majority of short stories I wrote in middle/high school had Black MCs (12-year-old white kid had a revelation about how white most media is and decided to fix it themself. Whoops). Fortunately kid me sidestepped a lot of awful pitfalls because most of those characters were inspired by and written for/with my real life Black friends--but it's occurred to adult me that the solution to sidelining characters of color for a white protagonist can't always be "just don't make the MC white", especially in stuff I'm working on alone. It's weird if I, as a white person, never write from the POV of a white person.)

This was a bit of a ramble, the question is really the important part--I just wanted to clarify that this isn't coming from a place of not wanting to write Black protagonists but rather from a place of recognizing a potentially concerning pattern in my own writing (and don't worry, if any of those high school stories ever see the light of day again, I'm gonna hire sensitivity readers).

Tbh, my advice is the same! I recognize that not every Black character is gonna be the MC. But being a side character doesn't mean you have to be a plot device, a flat 2D outline meant to bolster whoever the MC is.

I might not need to know what your Black side character does every five seconds, but I do need to understand that they exist in a world of their own that isn't dependent upon the MC! I usually solve this problem by offhand mentioning things in scene that they are doing, or had to do, or will be doing. Writing their thoughts out, their feelings. Are they allowed to disagree? Are they allowed to show their own flaws? Do they have their own issues that might come up, that show they have a life?

Skeletor for the month of February 💀💜

Learning these two were childhood friends has forever changed my brain chemistry, i NEED to see more of their friendship, i N E E D I T