Lemmy Today

The reason this is relevant is because he has spent the better part of a year complaining about “illegal immigrants” who are “invading” the country. But an old video from 2013 resurfaced on Saturday that appears to show the billionaire admitting he was at one point building his small business in the country illegally, describing it as a “gray area.”

*Edit: typo

Several loud explosions were heard in Iran's capital, Tehran, and the nearby Karaj city early on Saturday, semi-official Iranian media said.

The best part is that fully half of these are addressed to my mom…

"A Maryland Republican who leads a right-wing coalition in Congress says North Carolina’s legislature should consider awarding Electoral College votes to former President Donald Trump before citizens’ votes are counted, according to Politico.

Rep. Andy Harris, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, made the comments at a dinner on Thursday, saying the idea “makes a lot of sense” because the western part of the state, a rural area where Trump is popular, is still dealing with the impact of Hurricane Helene."

This is my cat's cousin. (My brothers cat) Lol

And yes, I'm also shocked and saddened that there is a Caillou fandom site.

Shaming and scolding didn't work so the DNC has escalated to vague death threats.

A shady new super PAC named for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg just spent nearly $20 million on efforts to help Donald Trump appear more moderate on abortion, but the group won’t reveal where its money comes from until after the election.

The pro-Trump RBG PAC (a massive insult to the late justice, who hated Trump) is attempting to use the liberal justice’s legacy to try and boost Trump ahead of the election. Its website even features photos of Ginsberg and the former president, captioned “Great Minds Think Alike.”

Nicholas McGeehan, director at the UK-based human rights organisation FairSquare, said the working hours of the labourers at The Line were "way beyond what the international minimum standards permit".

"The reality is that workers all over Saudi Arabia are subject to deeply abusive and dangerous exploitation. The abuses are systematically happening across the country," McGeehan said.

Migrant workers make up three quarters of Saudi Arabia's workforce and are critical for the Vision 2030 projects.

Based on data released in India, Bangladesh and Nepal, the film reports that 21,000 foreign workers from the three countries have died since Vision 2030 was launched eight years ago in 2016.

i haven't played magic the gathering in ages but i still follow it for some reason. if you're not checked in with the game, here's what's been going on in recent years: it's been enshittifying. i'm fascinated by when gacha games (which this essentially is) start putting the screws to players. here are some of the ways it's gone down

• the game used to have rigorous processes for managing balance, processes which sometimes failed spectacularly, but held up most of the time. empirically, that's pretty much gone. almost all of the cards that have been banned in the standard format have come from the last several years, and they printed a mechanic so broken that they errata'd it to cost more. to be clear, this is a game that is played with physical cards that the text can't be changed on. the situation was so dire that they just said "ok everyone should know, ignore the text on the cards, they are too broken the way we made them."
• they thought a bit about how the majority of their playerbase wasn't playing the somewhat competitive 1 vs 1 style the game was originally designed for. instead, most people play several person free for all formats, in particular these days a format called commander. so they've been absolutely shredding these people's wallets and ruining their games by designing rare cards specifically to end up being powerful in commander. recently they printed a commander card so busted in various formats that the former friend of mine who designed it ended up falling on his sword, writing an extremely apologetic essay about how he personally fucked up by letting it slip through.
• there's a whole much larger drama around the commander format that i haven't got the energy to go into here. the most tolerable summary is that they printed a card so ridiculous that the format dissolved and was remade under a wave of death threats when it was banned. i know that doesn't make sense, just trust me, or write your own summary of it.
• they found out that the more cards they come out with, the more cards they sell, so they've just been cranking out designs at greater and greater volume. at any given time there is a massive chunk of cards that are about to hit the shelves, and which they're 'teasing' and fomoing players about. the game is about 30 years old and they've been hitting a pace of printing something like 10% to 15% of all cards ever, every year.
• every once in a while they release joke sets, with weird or silly mechanics like having to yell things or tearing up cards. generally, these cards are not allowed in semi competitive play. well, they thought the most recent one would sell better if that wasn't the case, so they marked as many of these cards as they could as being tournament legal (but to keep the outcry tamped down, not in their standard format). one of these cards in particular, a goblin that makes you put stickers on things, was so miserable to have in tournament play that they ended up backtracking and banning all the joke cards.
• they found out they could make a big chunk of money by ditching their own setting and making cards for licensed IPs. they've been printing ever increasing numbers of cards themed around everything from the walking dead to fortnite to marvel to street fighter to spongebob, which sell like hotcakes. people who are invested in the style and theme of magic the gathering aren't super pleased. again, to placate the haters, these cards are not allowed in the standard competitive format, giving people who want to do wizard shit a refuge.

the last bullet point brings us to today: just kidding, frog boiled, you will now have captain america and kefka fighting each other at your table whether you like it or not. reactions are not entirely positive:

https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/1gc3w97/universes_beyond_will_enter_through_standard/

something that's quite interesting to me is how few people i've seen bootlick for wizards of the coast in recent years. i've looked at reactions to other games enshittifying and always saw lots of defenders of the company in charge, with four lines of attack being most common:

• they have to put bread on the table
• whew i know this seems bad but i would be ok with it if they just gave us 2% more crumbs. it's sooooo close to the right level of abuse
• stop being poor
• bro, just vote with your dollar bro

i've been seeing very little of that in regards to mtg. some people have denied the pot was getting warmer, but mostly, people have just turned into haters. not sure why; perhaps it has to do with the small scale social aspect of magic. if you're playing marvel snap and having the blood drained out of your neck, you don't really have a group of specific people you're experiencing that in concert with; with mtg you do. it could be the strength of small scale personal ties that both keeps people invested in this game, and makes people angry at how that investment is being treated

unfortunately i don't see any reason that this anger is likely to put a stop to things. after all, arch-enshittifier facebook is still making ultrabucks, despite having destroyed its reputation on every possible level and despite constantly enraging its users. you can do horrible things to people and just coast! it works!

EDIT: this is election relevant btw https://awful.systems/comment/5086076

Self explanatory.

"The Army on Friday released the report from a controversial August incident between the Trump campaign team and an Army staff member working at Arlington National Cemetery, in which the campaign staffer made contact with the Army official ‘with both hands,’ according to the heavily redacted document,” Politico reports.

“The release, which identifies the incident as ‘simple assault,’ comes amid fresh scrutiny over Trump’s treatment of veterans, including comments by former chief of staff John Kelly, who said the former president disparaged wounded and fallen troops.”

My favorite is Bog king from Strange Magic - Has a song talking about how evil he is. But all he does is prevent the spread of dangerous mind control magic, and quarantine people under the effects of said magic. Yes he greatly annoys people doing so, but honestly? If I get hit by a love potion, please quarantine me.

Archive/mirror: https://archive.ph/SaBu4

This is a nice win for self-repair hardware rights.

For context, see their old video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uCpY3tFTIA