Tootfinder

I’ve had this contingent of the language police show up in my replies a few times now over the word “cosplay,” and look…
OK, I get it, I get the instinct to say “Don’t drag me into this!” and I applaud the effort to push fascists out of communities, yes to all that…
…and also we need to recognize that what ICE is doing absolutely •is• cosplay. The word means “costume play.” It refers to assembling and wearing costumes that are not necessarily functional, but show affinity for a particular subculture by reproducing characters from that subculture’s popular narratives.
ICE are cosplaying Call of Duty. That is an accurate description of what’s happening. (Listen to “Gear.”)
I make software and I make music. I don’t think either one of those things •should• be about violence. I don’t •want• them to be about violence. But both are used in the service of violence, like it or not. I shout the violence out whenever it shows up. But would be ridiculous for me to point at what Palantir does and say “That’s not software!” Unfortunately, it •is• software. To deny that would be beyond self-defeating; it would be irresponsible.
ICE •is• doing cosplay, and we hate it. It’s an insult to the cosplay subculture. It is an insult to the whole of humanity. Fascism creeps into all of our spheres, into every beloved craft and community, and the response is never to pretend it’s not there. The response is to drive it out.
@…
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@wildrikku/115956545807535535

Current ethnic cleansing in US is making some a lot of money, while destroying others.
“When ICE takes…person…system around them…built to swallow everything they ever touched.”
“Towing companies profit. State agencies profit. &…people who once lived in…homes & drove…cars & held…IDs are left w/nothing but…clothes on their backs. This is not a broken system.”
“…system functioning exactly as…designed.”

When ICE Takes a Person, Why Do Their Possessions Vanish Too?
An investigative expose. Forty-one percent of migrants say their belongings never returned from ICE custody, and the items left behind at the moment of arrest disappear just as quietly.

Real conspiracies tend to come out, but some of them take a while. Information on the Iran/Contra scandal broke out about 5 years after the conspiracy started. That would have taken several hundred people to carry out, so it was somewhat hard to hide. Even so, they largely got away with it.
The moon landing conspiracy theory would have taken thousands of people, so it would have come out more quickly. Since we have an example of a real secret program of a similar scale as what would be required to fake a moon landing (that is, the Manhattan project), we know that the fake moon landing conspiracy theory is not true. (There's also the literally tons of evidence in the form of rocks and other samples, and all kinds of other ways to debunk the claim.)
Could Kash Patel's FBI have been trying really hard to entrap people into carrying out terrorist attacks in order to justify #Trump's occupation of DC? Could they have helped a guy plan an attack then just failed to arrest him? There are reasonable scenarios that fall in between malice and incompetence while still indicating some level of false flag.
Could someone have just snapped and ambushed some guardsmen without any involvement from the FBI? Yeah, totally. The US is a country full of guns with a completely non-functional mental health system. Someone coming from a country that the US destroyed, twice, could have a lot of untreated trauma. Might they see the national guard as a threat (even if that wasn't totally true)? Yeah, they were deployed to threaten people (even when they were just picking up trash). The point was to incite this kind of response. It's completely reasonable to believe that the FBI would not need to be involved at all, that this would just be the stochastic response they were looking for.
So the point here is that everything is on the table, nothing is really known, nothing should be surprising, and no matter what it's Trump's fault. This is exactly the escalation he was looking for. If he didn't get it naturally, he would also have had ways of making it happen.
He will use this in exactly the same way as the Reichstag fire, to drive a wedge between liberals and radicals. Don't fall for it.
Edit:
There are plausible reasons to not believe the official narrative at all right now, or maybe ever. The official narrative is also plausible, but there are plausible reasons to disagree with the response even if the official story is true. It is unnecessary to resort to conspiracy thinking in order to account for what happened and to disagree with the response. But it is also understandable why someone might jump immediately to a conspiracy given the circumstances.

@… wanted to make sure you saw this.
https://mastodon.social/@GeekAndDad/115606048944508598

#idw Studie “#Femizide in Deutschland” vorgestellt
Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen
Tötung am Ende einer Partnerschaft häufigste Art des Femizids – Verstärkte Präventionsbemühungen könnten Femizide verhindern helfen – Einführung eines „German Homicide Monitor“ gefordert.

Studie “Femizide in Deutschland” vorgestellt

Out of context, "Why isn't Gargamel as sexy as I remember?" might be the funniest thing that I've ever heard from a podcast.

New background finished, and I think it turned out better than it should have. I really enjoy writing, but trying to write background for characters that are very, very different than yourself are also very, very difficult. However, I'm gonna call it done for the time being and just relax.
#pathfinder2e

One of this year’s home-made Christmas presents made me think of @… and @… for some reason … :D

Q&A with Roblox co-founder and CEO David Baszucki on using face scans to verify age, having a chat function on Roblox, AI content moderation at scale, and more (New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/podcasts/hardfork-roblox-child-safety.html

We Asked Roblox’s C.E.O. About Child Safety. It Got Tense.
This week the company announced that it would require users to undergo an A.I.-powered age estimation process in order to chat with others on the platform. Will this change reassure parents?

I've listened to enough episodes of Revolutions to have a rough idea of what's coming next. If you're in the US, now is a good time to do some more long-term (the system will be down for months or years) kind of disaster planning.
That means building connections with your community, because you can't do everything yourself and you may have to figure out how to get things without state/capital functioning to facilitate that.