stabtown

spooky stuff and vidya games

[ammnontet]

confrontation at blasphemous keep

[campsis]

Eden Kalif, Good Cats

[nitewrighter]

Ozempic scares the shit out of me. You're telling me there's a drug that takes away both the craving side of hunger and targets the brain's rewards center for eating. You're telling me it takes the joy out of eating and it turns you into a skeleton. Why did we turn The Curse of the Black Pearl into a drug. What the fuck.

[nitewrighter]

I actually want to thank the diabetics coming on this post like "actually it genuinely is a great treatment for diabetes and it hasn't affected my mood or my enjoyment of food. The real issue is it's getting abused as a weight loss drug which also makes it scarce and more expensive for those who can genuinely benefit from it." Kind of reminds me of the time my brother got permission from our family psychiatrist to try my ADHD medication and his reaction to it was "what the fuck are you on. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU ON. WHY DO I FEEL LIKE CRYING. YOU'RE ON THIS EVERY DAY!?!"

Body chemistry! It makes a big difference in how your body processes a drug! What can be genuinely helpful for some folks is The Curse of the Black Pearl for others!

[laclefdescoeurs]

Forest Scene, Vladimir Archipovich Bondarenko

[fishpondfish]

it is impossible to watch a movie. every night i think i want to watch a movie. no movie gets watched. because it's not possible

[kaijuyuri]

i like how all cats regardless of species can either look rlly badass and cool or just incredibly silly stupid

[kaijuyuri]

my proof

[dizzyghoast]

honestly fandom has ruined me because now any time i'm in the desert and i see two vast and trunkless legs of stone or a half-sunk shattered visage i'm like "omg just like in Ozymandias" and its like come on girl not every half-sunk shattered visage is Ozymandias

[justsomeguycore]

i think everyone in the whole world forgot that mystery doesn’t have to equal crime

[justsomeguycore]

sometimes it’s just like. what happent ?

[prokopetz]

You know, when I've remarked that a lot of the responses to my posts feel like people are just plucking out keywords they think they recognise based on the shape of them and replying to what they imagine the post says based on that, the possibility never occurred to me that this is actually how many American schools are currently teaching kids to read.

[prokopetz]

Like, my assumption this whole time has been that when folks go "I misunderstood this post that says [thing] as saying [unrelated thing] because I mistook [word] for [completely different word that happens to start with the same letter]", that was a bit. What do you mean they're teaching kids a reading method that's tailored to produce this exact error?

[buggyhuman]

Three cueing. Once you learn about it, a whole lot of very frustrating online discourse with US Americans makes so much sense 😭

How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers

For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have

[woodsfae]

If you were taught to read with the three cueing method, and now struggle to read fluently, you can still learn to read properly!

-> Phonics For Adults <-

If you're a teenager, you can still use this resource.

[evilwizard]

me: *covered in scratch marks* i am still a powerful and respectable wizard, you know

my imp krongus: *doubtfully* yes, my lord

me: i did eventually kill the mouse with a needle for a sword

krongus: it’s just that it was so close, my lord

[iamheavymeta-lll]

[adamsmasher]

WE WERE ON JEOPARDY!!!!!!!!!!

[rouge-the-bat]

thank you for coming to my this #mythis

[geniusbee]

comic for a little seattle anthology i did. this is my cat db cooper :)

[demilypyro]

My first video essay is now on YouTube. It's about my experience with a "cozy" game called Wanderstop. Please check it out. Thank you.

[demilypyro]

rave reviews

[png-archive-chaos]

I roll up

[the-valiant-valkyrie]

i really appreciate seeing all the posts on my dash recently to the effect of "shutting down conversations about race/gender/minorities in fandom spaces because 'fandom is meant to be fun' is just an excuse to not think critically about the bigoted behaviors you are exhibiting". i hope that this energy carries over into the gaming sphere next pleaaseee

[the-valiant-valkyrie]

pokemon is a series about building Your own team and going on Your own adventure with creatures that You collect and befriend, and is designed from the ground up to be personal and immersive. i have never been able to look like myself in a pokemon game. if i bought pokemon z a today and booted it up and tried to customize myself, i would not be able to look like myself. just fuck me i guess.

[the-valiant-valkyrie]

ok yay

[bovid-beauty]

"Fascism"—New Federal Rule Would Require Federal Funding Recipients To Deny Trans People Exist

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."

[junequeer]

THIS IS OPEN TO COMMENT UNTIL JULY 13, 2026

[featherandstorm]

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.

[genderkoolaid]

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.

[cherrispryte]

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.

[mikkeneko]

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.

[grison-in-space]

As of today, 7/8/26, we have five days for public commentary on this to go through. I am begging y'all: if you care about independent science in the country that produces the most global science funding in the world, please leave a comment.