As discussed previously, on Fridays, I present my weekly social media roundups. Note that toots of articles generally include header images from the articles, which I don’t include here unless their creators happen to have released them for use under a free license, and I notice. Most have not, or I don’t notice. But I now add my commentary here, where I don’t feel restricted by message length.

diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week

Also, I don’t generally attach pictures to posts with quotations.

2:03 PM – Sun 23 July 2023

Asked on Lemmy

I could use some input. For context, I write a blog where, among other things, I run a “book club” for Free Culture fiction, figuring that the least that I can do is spread the word about interesting projects that can use some help. I’m always looking for new things to cover on Saturdays, but games (that make sense in context) especially seem elusive, so I’d like to see if anybody has any possibilities that I hadn’t considered.

So far, I’ve gotten to Forgotten, Endgame: Singularity, Nothing to Hide, The House, A Dark Room, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, Space Company, Learn to Code RPG, Dead Ascend, Level 13, One Hour One Life, Counterfeit Monkey, The Command Line Murders, SQL Murder Mystery, Colossal Cave Adventure, Death off the Cuff, and kiki the nano bot. Hopefully, I didn’t miss anybody. A couple also sit in my queue waiting for a free day when I can make sure that I can run them and confirm licenses.

What I’m specifically looking for are games that (a) exist somewhere that a person can find them, even if that means (occasionally) spending some money, (b) has a license compatible with CC-BY-SA, at least for the storytelling aspects and (ideally) art assets, which generally excludes the GPL, but I make an occasional exception for exceptional cases, (c) ideally not related to a prior game by forking or overlapping authors (though still mention them, because I’ll come back to those when I run out of new things), and (d) has some kind of narrative that goes beyond the literal main character overcoming obstacles. I’m somewhat lax on my definition of “narrative,” where I’ll accept world-building as long as it’s evident in-game and not in an unlicensed design document.

Thanks in advance!

While not strictly necessary, I figured that I might as well reach out from my new Lemmy account in hopes of finding a few new games for the Free Culture Book Club.

7:04 – Mon 24 July 2023

Post on Mastodon

The allegory runs in the wrong direction, but the current #Twitter drama reminded me of this gem, from early Sesame Street, possibly the best two minutes that you’ll spend, today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRj0oub2TLY

I assume that the townspeople map to enthralled Twitter users, not those of us watching from the outside.

I couldn’t not comment on the corporate name change, particularly since I’ve always had a soft spot for this sketch. Any time people make a big deal about something changing names, this comes to mind.

9:06 – Mon 24 July 2023

Content Warning: US Politics

Image Not Shown: A group of women wears jackets and stands in front of a podium outside the US Capitol.

Democrats revive the Equal Rights Amendment from a long legal limbo – facing an unlikely uphill battle to get it enshrined into law from The Conversation

Some state legislators argued that the amendment was too controversial given its potential to upend traditional gender roles and legalize what they called “abortion on demand.”

Hashtags: #USPol #ERA

It occurs to me that we have a lot of hand-wringing about the artificial and unconstitutional “expiration date” put on the ERA, and we don’t talk enough about how the Corwin Amendment still quietly waits for some right-wing state legislator to push the idea that the Federal government has no right to interfere with how the states prevent—or more to the point, fail to prevent—slavery within their borders.

Really. We set a time limit on the discussion of whether we should treat women like people, but not on the discussion about treating people like livestock due to race.

12:02 – Mon 24 July 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

These Ministers that be Slave-keepers, and are in such very great Repute…and in short strictly exact in all their Decorums, except Slave-keeping, these, these be the Men, and the Women too, for the Devil’s purpose, and are the choicest Treasure the Devil can or has to bring out of his Lazaretto, to establish Slave-keeping.

Benjamin Lay

Hashtags: #Quotes #DisabilityPride

9:05 – Tue 25 July 2023

Image Not Shown: Lim Seonjoo #6 of Korea Republic tackles Alex Morgan #13 of United States during the first half of the International Friendly match at Children's Mercy Park on October 21, 2021, in Kansas City, Kansas

Women’s soccer is just as great, test shows from Futurity

The results show that the videos showing men were rated significantly higher only when participants were able to tell the players’ gender. However, when the videos were blurred and the players’ gender unrecognizable, participants’ ratings didn’t differ significantly between men’s and women’s videos.

Hashtags: #Sexism #Sports

As a rule, I don’t follow professional sports, because the nature of the situation means that you have owners and trade organizations becoming wealthy at the expense of the players, who then need to scramble and find a second career, because the human body can’t take decades of abuse. That said, if I watch professional sports, I try to make a choice that’ll destigmatize a sport that gender- or race-coding keeps people from enjoying.

12:07 – Tue 25 July 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

Tom DeLay’s effectiveness was not his ability to raise money, but the amount of money because people were afraid not to give.

Tony Coelho

Hashtags: #Quotes #DisabilityPride

9:07 – Wed 26 July 2023

Image Not Shown: Supermarket shelves with a card calling out that the market accepts EBT and SNAP

What Decades of Social Work Taught About Poverty from OtherWords

Not one mother relishes taking three buses in terrible weather to get to the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) office to prove her worthiness to get help buying cereal for her toddler’s breakfast.

Hashtags: #SNAP #EBT #Poverty

One of these days, I’ll write an entire blog post on the broader subject around this, the idea that a lot of politics grows directly out of security threat models. For example, you can almost completely define conservatives by the idea that it doesn’t matter how many people suffer or die, as long as they don’t accidentally help even one person who (in their eyes) doesn’t deserve help. They see this as so important, that they’ll spend many times more money on making help harder to get than it would have cost to help everybody. Meanwhile, the rest of us either mostly don’t care if a middle-class person gets food assistance, or certainly don’t want to spend more stopping that person than it would cost if they succeeded at defrauding the system.

12:05 – Wed 26 July 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

The low murmur of voices reached Miss Prudence in her chamber long after midnight, she smiled as she thought of Giant Despair and his wife Diffidence.

Jennie Maria Drinkwater Conklin

Hashtags: #Quotes #DisabilityPride

9:04 – Thu 27 July 2023

Image Not Shown: Lisa Power, lesbian activist, campaigner and Stonewall co-founder

We founded Stonewall amid a moral panic. History is repeating itself from openDemocracy

Scaremonger about breastfeeding and it diverts attention from the cost-of-living debate, or the profits for water company shareholders as they poison our rivers and coastline. And behind all of that, there’s massive funding from the US evangelical right-wing…

Hashtags: #LGBTRights #MoralPanic

You don’t need me to say anything about this, right? We all understand that moral panics exist entirely to draw attention away from immense harm somewhere else and putting that attention on the shoulders of vulnerable people? Good.

12:04 – Thu 27 July 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

He leaves the prison gates, he makes his way to his old home, but his old home is not there. The house in which he had dwelt in his childhood had been torn down, and a new one had been put up in its place; his family were gone, their very name was forgotten, there was no one to take him by the hand to welcome him back to life.

Harriet Tubman

Hashtags: #Quotes #DisabilityPride

9:03 – Fri 28 July 2023

Image Not Shown: Jaqueline Benitez shops for groceries at a supermarket in Bellflower, Calif., Feb. 13, 2023

USDA, States Eye Cheaper Food by Targeting Anticompetitive Acts from Voice of America

Months of food price inflation, only recently abating, have also raised questions from farm groups and lawmakers about whether companies were artificially hiking prices.

Hashtags: #Greedflation #USDA

It took them long enough to catch up to the rest of us, sure, but the USDA does actually need harder evidence than “the CEO bragged about it on an earnings call” to act…

12:03 – Fri 28 July 2023

Quoted on Mastodon

[Photography] stands midway between the arts and crafts.

Frances Stebbins Allen

Hashtags: #Quotes #DisabilityPride

Bonus

Because it accidentally became a tradition early on in the life of the blog, I drop any additional articles that didn’t fit into the one-article-per-day week, but too weird or important to not mention, here.

Move Forward Party caravan during the campaign period in May 2023. Party leader Pita Limjaroenrat is at the center wearing a white shirt.
Move Forward Party caravan during the campaign period in May 2023. Party leader Pita Limjaroenrat is at the center wearing a white shirt.
Image credit: Photo by Rameshe999 from Wikipedia. (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Protests condemn military-appointed senators for ignoring the choice of Thai voters from Global Voices

Public outrage led to protests in at least 11 provinces. The hashtag #ม็อบ16กรกฎา66 (#RespectMyVote) was used on social media to remind senators and other conservative legislators to uphold the decision of Thai voters. Some activists have called for a boycott of businesses owned by senators and their families.

Best of luck to the Thai people. Everybody deserves a government led by its people, rather than a self-styled leadership class.

Content Warning: US Politics

Image Not Shown: Poor little millionaire Leonard Leo

Federalist Society founder Leonard Leo claims he’s a ‘victim’ of free speech from Daily Kos

In other words, Leo used local government to infringe on a protester’s freedom of speech after securing a Supreme Court decision saying local governments couldn’t do that—at least not when they’re trying to protect the rights of interracial couples, LGTBQ+ people, disabled people, or people of color.

I’ve said for a while that people like Leo only care about one “right,” the right for them to avoid criticism of everything that they say or do. Everybody else should hate or fear each other, but they have too thin a skin to deal with even the most minimal criticism.

Follow Me

If you appreciate this sort of content, then you should probably follow me on Mastodon to get it as early as possible…and feel free to reply, at least to the good stuff.

Credits: Header image is Circular diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week from a manuscript drafted during the Carolingian Dynasty.