柿の木栗の木カキクケコ

This confirms that there is a civilization older than the Sumerians that we have yet to find

Some people get existential dread from this

Source (non Aboriginal)

And a quote I picked out from a longer interview with an Aboriginal local elder about the area where he touched on the history

♪And don't criticize what you can't understand♪

♪The zoomers and alphas are beyond your command♪

♪Your old memes are rapidly aging♪

♪Please scroll past the new ones if you can't lend your hand♪

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.

Who do you think makes professional quality fanart and fanfic? People who've been practicing it for ten, fifteen, twenty years!

Or even people who've been practicing it for thirty, forty or fifty!!!!!

example: Diane Duane. Currently in her seventies. Star Trek fangirl since the original run. Goddess-level Ascended Fan who has created official tie-in works in more forms of media than pretty much anyone else alive, possibly even Rodenberry himself because they didn't have audiobooks or video games when he was with us. Writer of Spock's World, The Wounded Sky, Doctor's Orders in TOS. Co-writer of TNG script Where no one has gone before, and writer of the tie-in novel Dark Mirror among others. Writer of a half-dozen Star Trek Comics. She has adapted her own work for audio, has written for the Star Trek manga series, has written short Trek fiction for anthologies, and plotted and wrote the video game Star Trek: the Kobayashi Alternative.

In other fandoms, she was a personal friend of Terry Pratchett himself. As a scriptwriter, she's also worked in fandoms like Scooby-Doo, Transformers, My Little Pony, Gargoyles, Batman: The Animated Series, Spiderman: Unlimited (and a trilogy of tie-in novels still in print) and Barbie: Fairytopia. ...And that's just cherry-picking her imdb page.

While she can't give out specific details due to Obvious Reasons, she's still active in the Sherlock BBC fandom - and there's a specific subset of her fans who love guessing which of the legendary fanfics might be her work (I am not one of them, BTW, as it is None Of My Business. I'm old-school that way).

Fandom is not for teenagers. Fandom is for everyone of good heart and enthusiasm for a good (or even bad! No judgement!) story.

The best ones have advice on decor, how to select high-quality furniture, childrearing, fashion, etc--from a contemporary perspective, and the things the authors feel the need to clarify vs the wild shit that will just casually mention like it's something everyone knows and agrees on is REALLY revealing of the culture and how it's shifted.

And while a lot of the advice is WILDLY bigoted or just outright funny, you'd be surprised how much of it is...just genuinely timeless, and shockingly compassionate.

They ALSO, as a writer, have INVALUABLE resources--because, again, they're talking about things that are so MUNDANE that a lot of the time nobody really sat down to formally document what normal, everyday people thought or cared about--because that's boring! But a book written to provide advice and information to, say, a young woman who's never run her own home before? You can fully expect an entire chapter dedicated to The Types Of Oven, and which features are useful and worth spending money on, and which features are a huge hassle to clean and a waste of space, and what to spend that money on instead.

And like. As a writer who frequently works in the 1800s? Fuck inflation calculators, this is the kind of thing I need. This is absolutely priceless.

Now that being said.

My current favorite 'etiquette guide' in the world is actually like....70% purely practical advice, written by a gentleman the groupchat has affectionately dubbed History's Most Autistic Man In The World, and thank god they didn't have Aderall back then

Because the AuDHD is strong in this one and as a result, in addition to the deeply practical and useful everyday reference points, we also have:

scratching my eyes out brother WHYYY are they like this. the problem is what we did get, in the question + (dan's) answer, was SO GOOD. i love the question and agree with you, i think it was thoughtful and well-considered, paid a lot of respect to what they do as a CRAFT (asking specifically about which projects they would redo) while being cognizant of the fact that their personal growth journeys heavily influence their craft (asking what they would have done differently as the people they are now). personally this is the kind of question i wish dan and phil would answer WAY more — if only more people would ask them. like you said it can very often lean all the way parasocial (sometimes invasively but often just like — asking the questions you'd ask a friend, you know. and there is a place for those questions!!! i love those questions. just like, maybe not all the time?)

dan maybe didn't exactly answer what the question was asking but it was SUCH a lovely response and one that carried a lot of emotional weight for us as a community!!! idec that it didn't follow the question to the letter because i feel like it answered the essence of it — how would the person you are now retroactively affect a part of / the course of your career. to say he wouldn't have gone on hiatus is IMMENSELY healing imo, even if that can't actually be taken back and everyone who lived through it still had to live through it lmao.

phil initially completely missing the point of the question can be forgiven because he was being really sweet. it's clear what his brain prioritises and it's their relationship. obviously coming out about it has affected their careers hugely, and maybe that's the angle he was coming at it from — there is no one project he would have specifically redone as the person he is now, rather all their projects would have been affected for the better if they'd done it out and proud. VERY SWEET SENTIMENT. UNFORTUNATELY! RAAAAAAHHHHHHH BC WE NEVER GOT A REVISED ANSWER FROM HIM