A reminder during Prison Banned Books Week: Prisons & jails are the largest censors in the U.S. They say it's for "security," but the most banned book is a cookbook. 🤨 Book bans are designed to isolate and control incarcerated people — not keep them safe.

Kinda weird they never freak out like this about all the parents who cut their kids off, huh?

Michael Hobbes@michaelhobbes.bsky.social · 3d ago

This is a quietly metastasizing moral panic

This video left me speechless because he captured what it feels like to be Black perfectly.

Ida B Wells' Winchester Rifle@dytsras.bsky.social · 5d ago

Being Black in America like being on The Truman Show...

Hey WA State! Ballots are about to arrive if they haven’t already so: please vote NO on both I-001 and 1-638. The wording is deliberately deceptive to try to make you think that voting yes protects kids; neither of these bills do that and in fact go out of their way to hurt them

and don't get me wrong, FUCK YEAH TO THOSE KIDS. but everyone who was worried about military police at the polls needs to be *losing their fucking minds* over the fact that they shut down polling places at HBCUs and if you're not, what are you even doing

Students from North Carolina A&T can be seen marching back to their HBCU after voting on the first day of early voting in the state. The Guilford County Board of Elections voted to remove the school’s on-campus polling site. (video via Todd Simmons) greensboro.com/news/local/g...

The "roles a community actually runs on" section of this essay is useful. zuhdae.substack.com/p/not-everyo...

Not everyone is an organizer, but your community still needs you

'I'm not an organizer" is not a get-out-of-community-free card

zuhdae.substack.com

Yesterday, Wizards informed us that it doesn’t intend to voluntarily recognize the D&D or Studio X units of our union ahead of a vote. We remain committed to creating a workplace focused on wellness, transparency, and collaboration by winning our coming election.

YOU ARE AN ELECTED OFFICIAL. STOP TELLING PEOPLE NOT TO BE NUMB AND TELL THEM WHAT YOU PLAN TO DO.

this country will not be transformed without addressing policing, prisons, surveillance and militarism. Sorry. Cannot get around it. The carceral socialists may make incremental progress but they will ALWAYS come up against state violence.

Capacity at nonprofits is magic. There is endless capacity for scope-creeping new priorities and targets and whole campaigns, but when it comes to using AI slop to replace legit research they’re helplessly under-resourced and have no choice! Schrodinger’s capacity.

This morning, the D&D team and Magic's Studio X informed our leadership of our intent to unionize. We love the games we make and the work we do, and unionizing is how we protect that work. unitedwizardsofthecoast.com/news/dnd-stu...

Holy shit.

The Black Cauldron fucked me all the way up.

Im Gonna Get You Come Here

Alt: A gif of the skeleton lich villain from The Black Cauldron animated film lunging forward as if to grab the camera.

static.klipy.com

Sleepy Hollow Reviews 🎃🐎@sleepingvillage.bsky.social · 3w ago

In honor of scary media month: what is the first piece of media you remember truly frightening you as a child?

Using LLM-based products like chatGPT doesn't make you "understand AI" any more than smoking crack improves your knowledge of pharmacology. The technology is inherently misleading and self-propagandizing, it's a pump for exploiting user bias.

I cannot WAIT!

Vajra Chandrasekera@vajra.me · 3w ago

My third novel, HERO COME HOME, officially has a cover! Preorderable from the usual places us.macmillan.com/books/978125...

you will encounter more opportunities in life to change the batteries on a smoke alarm than you will to run into a burning building and no one gives a shit you changed those batteries but it is still very important and why are you waiting on a burning building, know what i’m saying, it’s a metaphor

It’s amazing how many different ways “AI” manages to be horrible: political, ethical, environmental, philosophical, aesthetic, functional… It’s bad in like EVERY SINGLE WAY it’s possible for a technology to be bad, which is pretty much unprecedented in human history.

Pookleblinky@pookleblinky.bsky.social · 9mo ago

There would be no ethical use of generative AI even if it weren't *literally* bankrolling the goddamn gestapo and its concentration camps and providing them the ability to generate infinite nazi propaganda slop. But it is also doing that too.

There’s a term I’m forgetting for when this happens with an individual product. Like, a corp raises the price of their bread just a little, and most people keep buying it, so the corp thinks they’re all good, and they do it again, and maybe again. BUT!

mtsw@mtsw.bsky.social · 3w ago

Maybe the reason the economic vibes are so off isn't that things are *worse* than the great recession but because back then we all thought the pain was temporary, whereas the things that are wrong with the economy today have all been getting worse for a long time and show no signs of improving

If you are a graduate student in the humanities (construed as broadly as possible), what is the MOST EXCITING book published in the last five years to you? Please repost if you’re not a graduate student!

The very cool thing about this is that there are some kinds of brain cells we weren't able to grow before because we didn't understand they were different, and now that we've figured out that they are different, we can grow them.

⚡⚡MAD DOCTOR IMPOSSIBLE⚡⚡@impossiblephd.bsky.social · last mo.

*Frothing at the mouth with excitement* HEY GUESS WHAT, YOU DON'T HAVE ONE BRAIN, YOU HAVE TWO! med.stanford.edu/news/all-new...

If you are trans you are taken to a Catholic hospital, the staff is forbidden from even administering your maintenance medications. The personal beliefs of the staff and your medical history are irrelevant. About 1 in 7 hospital beds in the US are controlled by the Catholic church.

This is a good reminder that the Catholic church in the US has imposed a trans health care ban so severe that no elected Republican has been willing to even suggest making a similar law. The Pope has acquiesced to this ban.

jenny tightpants@jtp.bsky.social · last mo.

the pope is anti-trans too and i'm nooticing a lot of you seem to be chill with that

I hate doing the "a rollback of trans rights is the gateway for a rollback of women's rights" thing because trans rights are human rights in and of themselves, whatever the impact on cis women. But goddamn I wish more cis women had a sense of history and self preservation.

HUGE: Elizabeth Warren, AOC, and other members of Congress have introduced a bill to push private equity out of healthcare. The Stop Corporate Takeovers of Physicians Act would make it illegal for private equity, insurance companies, and for-profit corporations to own or control medical practices.

Hall of Echoes - for Magic: The Gathering's Reality Fracture This painting took me quite some time to wrap my head around. The description my art director Sarah Wassell sent me was very abstract and hard to visualize, but I'm very happy with how this turned out in the end.

LRT because I know some oomfs still play F*rtnite It contains AI slop and continues to implement AI slop frvr.com/blog/epic-ga...

Epic Games confirms Fortnite characters, skins and environments are now being made with AI tools

Epic Games confirms that new Fortnite characters, skins, and environments are now being made with heavy AI assistance.

frvr.com

Individual trans people NEVER have to shut up and accept disrespect. Never. The people who need to shut up and stop disrespecting trans people are the POWERFUL and these include fucking elected officials. GET IT STRAIGHT IN YOUR MINDS.

thought this comment was actually quite perceptive – maybe the realisation is not quite "it's going to imminently kill us all" but rather "there's *literally* no way to control what it does on the way to a goal"