today's reason I fucking love the open source community: Ageless Linux, a brand new Debian-based operating system specifically designed to break the law by giving children access to computers that explicitly refuse to track their age.
A law that the largest companies in the world already comply with, and that hundreds of small projects cannot comply with, is not a child safety law. It is a compliance moat. It raises the regulatory cost of providing an operating system just enough that only well-resourced corporations can afford to do it.
The enforcement mechanism is the point. AB 1043 does not need to result in a single fine to achieve its purpose. The mere existence of potential liability — $7,500 per affected child, enforced at the sole discretion of the Attorney General — creates legal risk for anyone distributing an operating system without the resources to build an age verification infrastructure. Most of these projects will respond by adding a disclaimer that their software is "not intended for use in California." Some will simply stop distributing.
The law does not need to be enforced to work. It works by existing. It works by making small developers afraid. It works because the cost of defending against even a frivolous AG action exceeds the entire annual budget of most open-source projects. You do not need to swing a cudgel to get compliance. You just need to hold it where people can see it.
Ageless Linux exists because someone should hold it back
Put in the tags the completely finished (whether cancelled or wrapped up on its own terms) TV series that has YOUR perfect ending, however you define that
Please don’t include huge spoilers for the specifics of the endings, and it would also make me happy if people don’t use this to talk about the shows whose endings they hated
Thousands of bottles of Duloxetine delayed-release capsules are being voluntarily recalled by Breckenridge Pharmaceutical, Inc. The pills are commonly used to treat depression, anxiety, and fibromyalgia, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
We're taking today to celebrate Meatloaf, the more than 200-pound green sea turtle currently recovering in our care. 🐢
Meatloaf was rescued from the San Gabriel River after being found entangled in fishing line and tethered to debris. The line cut off blood supply to one of her front flippers, and our vet team performed surgery as part of her ongoing recovery. She's healing in the new sea turtle rehabilitation area near our Molina Animal Care Center.
She follows Porkchop, who spent nearly a year in our care before being released back into the river and has since been spotted thriving with the river's other resident turtles.
Stories like these start with our community science volunteers, who have monitored green sea turtles in the San Gabriel River since 2008. They were the ones who spotted Meatloaf's entanglement and got her the help she needed.
If you'd do anything for love of sea turtles, donations to our Sea Turtle Rehabilitation Program go directly toward Meatloaf's care.
Support the Sea Turtle Rescue and Rehabilitation Fund https://support.aquariumofpacific.org/campaign/629267/donate
So this morning I found out that the RPG Maker forums will be shutting down this year, and it’s really just another depressing thing to see.
If you read the link the company does of course say they’re replacing the existing forums with new ones, and I’m sure no one would say the old ones didn’t perhaps need a lil bit of a glow up, some tech debt fixing… but there’s a few key notes in there:
They are NOT carrying over any history, data messages etc. from the old forums
They are NOT archiving, retaining or in any way saving the existing forums in any way
They have NOT provided any reasoning past ‘as part of continued efforts to support developers’
As an offhand, moderate read, this sounds to me like a desire for some change in the forums but deciding nuking everything is less expensive than rebuilding and carrying over info.
If I’m cynical, and likely realistic? Probably to increase sales of their latest GameMaker software by making it inherently more difficult for someone getting the older software for cheap pushing it to its limits. The amount of institutional knowledge on those forums is absurd.
And even if it is a benign reason, it’s still terrible because what do you mean you’re doing this with no recourse or potential for change? You sell software that runs on community goodwill? In an era where people are pulling away to open source software?? Crazy.
There are yeeeaaars of answers, plugins, suggestion, community built up on those forums - I’ve used the em to learn and grow my own skillet!!! And soon it won’t exist.
At the very least, they gave a ‘heads up’ - the deletion occurs mid December, so archiving by the community is possible from now. It’s just absurd that it needs to happen in the first place.
It’s just reflective of how the industry is right now - and why it’s so important for communities to grow and build up knowledge together, knowledge that is NOT reliant on a company that can pull the plug at any time in the very name of the very customers, users and supporters they are screwing over.
The rule could have heavy impacts towards trans people across society.
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.
Importantly, the gender ideology prohibition has no age limitation—hospitals could be targeted not just for providing care to minors but for providing gender-affirming care to adults, because prescribing hormone therapy to a transgender patient of any age could be deemed promoting the belief that "sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic."
This is all very bad and horrible, but I want to be clear that it’s worse and more sweeping than just eliminating trans research.
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.
Please, if you only ever write one public comment, this is the one to do.
Bringing back this guide to writing an effective public comment. This gives you the basics you need to know, what you need to include, a basic outline you can follow, etc.
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"
But also, if possible, don't stop at writing a comment. Don't stop at calling your representatives. You should ideally be talking to people in your community about this and organizing resistance on-the-ground; there is a good chance people are already doing that even if you aren't hearing about it.
Some added 101-level context from someone (me) who’s worked in federal grantmaking for 20 years and is literally certified on this document - this is a document that governs all federal grantmaking. It’s been around for over a decade and is a mega-document that combine multiple previous smaller documents that have been around for ages. It is updated every few years and generally the updates are minor - a notable change in the previous update was raising the small procurement threshold from $10,000 to $15,000 for example. Deeply dry boring minutiae that no one outside of federal grantmakers need concern themselves with. It was also federal GUIDELINES, which means there was flexibility.
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.
So yes, please comment. You don’t have to read all 400 pages before doing so, it’s dry and dense as fuck, but I thought this information might be helpful. Also, while there is a public comment period, this isn’t voted on by Congress. The OMB just fucking issues it. Pressuring your elected officials into publicly saying “hey what the fuck are you doing here” is good, though.
Please note the comment period is open through JULY 13th, not JUNE 13th. I saw a lot of relogs yesterday saying "last day!" and I just want to say it is very much not too late.
Jane Yolen was a Jewish-American children’s author, poet, and young adult novelist. Yolen wrote more than 400 books for children and adults,
If you didn’t become acquainted with the work of Jane Yolen as a student being assigned her famous, award-winning Holocaust time travel nove
If you didn’t become acquainted with the work of Jane Yolen as a student being assigned her famous, award-winning Holocaust time travel novella “The Devil’s Arithmetic,” it’s likely you will once you become a parent, reading one of her many, many, many books for kids. My young boys are especially partial to her “How Do Dinosaurs?” series with its captivating, realistic dinosaur illustrations and snappy, funny text (and yes, there’s a Hanukkah “How Do Dinosaurs” book).
The prolific children’s book author, who was the recipient of multiple children’s book awards and six honorary doctorates, passed away this week at age 87. She was just about to release her 450th book. “Monsters of Fife: Terror Birds” will come out posthumously on July 14.
Yolen wasn’t raised particularly Jewish, and her exposure to religion was mostly at relatives’ homes, she recounted in a piece for the Jewish Book Council. As a teen, she did become fascinated with Jewish texts and traditions, getting confirmed at her local Reform synagogue; she was one of the first girls to read from the Torah on the bimah at that temple. And she minored in religious studies at Smith College.
But it took a while for Judaism to become part of her children’s book-writing career. In fact, she was two decades into her career when she got “noodged” into writing Jewish tales.
It all happened in the 1980s, she wrote in her essay for the Jewish Book Council: “One of my editors, who happened to be a rabbi’s wife, asked me why I had never written a Jewish book. And I had to think long and hard about that. And she noodged. Boy! Was she an expert noodge. The result was ‘The Devil’s Arithmetic.’ And then the Jewish stories began to tumble out.”
The books that came tumbling out were as gripping and wonderful and magical as the rest of her oeuvre.
There came magical stories about Jews and dragons and golems (co-written with her son, Adam Stemple).
She published illustrated books about Miriam and other biblical women (and even the children’s book adaptation of the famous “Prince of Egypt”).
She came up with her own twist on the tales of the Wise Men of Chelm.
She perhaps became most known for her three young adult tomes that tackle the Holocaust in novel ways. She wrote the “Sleeping Beauty” inspired “Briar Rose” and the “Hansel and Gretel”-esque “Mapping the Bones.” And of course, she penned the Nebula Prize Winning “The Devil’s Arithmetic,” about a Jewish teen who finds herself transported to 1942 Poland, which continues to be taught in schools to this very day, even as one Texas school district pulled it out of the curriculum for AI-detected “DEI content.” The book was famously turned into a 1999 film starring Kirsten Dunst, Brittany Murphy, Paul Freeman and Mimi Rogers.
Yolen also wrote books about Jewish holidays: “Milk and Honey,” and the lovely “Jewish Tale Feasts” (with her daughter, author Heidi Stemple), a book that my Jewish food-loving family adores.
Heidi, Adam and their brother Jason were all by their mother’s side when she “passed gently with no pain or stress,” Heidi shared on Instagram. Adam was playing his music while Heidi read from her mother’s book “Owl Moon.”
“As you all probably know, she had one of the most brilliant creative minds of our time,” Heidi wrote of her mother. “She has mentored, inspired and nurtured so many authors and illustrators through her words both on the page and off. But, beyond that, she was our mother and grandmother.”
May Jane Yolen’s memory be for a blessing; her books will certainly remain part of our lives for a long, long time.
People demand fans of colour to be soft & gentle & have articulate thought out criticisms at all times. Never be wrong never be loud never be mean you have to coddle White fans and creatives, otherwise you're part of the problem. Never mind that your whole experience in fandom has been one macroaggression after another. Never mind that fandom can never be your escapism, because the discrimination you face in real life is often present in both the media you love and the fandom you participate in. Never mind that even when you are soft & gentle & articulate people will still get angry. Just shut up and let White people go to their beautiful fantasy world where people like you don't exist
