Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

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Melanie D’Arrigo @darrigomelanie.bsky.social · 3d

I feel like this photo of masked, armed men pepper spraying a pastor protecting his community is going to be a defining picture of this moment in America for a long, long time.

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Felipe De La Hoz @felipedlh.bsky.social · 3d

You cannot be fucking serious

SCOOP: Apple Quietly Made ICE Agents a Protected Class

Internal emails show tech giant used anti-hate-speech rules meant for minorities to block an app documenting immigration enforcement.

migrantinsider.com

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Sheryl Weikal and the colorful Parrotlegals @leftistlawyer.com · 5d

I INVOKE MY RIGHTS TO SILENCE AND COUNSEL AND WILL NOT ANSWER ANY QUESTIONS WITHOUT MY ATTORNEY PRESENT.

Then shut up until you have that attorney present. You cannot invoke your right to silence just by being silent. You have to say the words.

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Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal @jayapal.house.gov · 9d

The Republican Shutdown has a devastating impact on our federal workforce, with nearly 750,000 workers affected.

This means missed paychecks for working families and more uncertainty and chaos for this country. Trump and Republicans must end this shutdown.

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FANGORIA @fangoria.bsky.social · 16d

He may play a CREEP but Mark Duplass is a stand-up guy, as Duplass Brothers Productions is teaming up with the Transgender Film Center to launch the Found Footage Fund for trans filmmakers.

CREEP’s Mark Duplass Launches Found Footage Fund For Trans Filmmakers

He may play a CREEP but Mark Duplass is a stand-up guy, as Duplass Brothers Productions is teaming up with the Transgender Film Center to launch the Found Footage Fund for trans filmmakers.

dlvr.it

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Arthur G @causticchemist.bsky.social · 16d

I am officially sworn in and now a practicing attorney within the state of Washington so that's neat.

A smiling bearded man stands in a blue suit with a paisley red tie in a court house, hands crossed in front of the single button of his suit.

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Kyle Orland @kyleor.land · 19d

Are you or someone you know skipping GDC (or considering doing so) because of worries about coming to the US/San Francisco in the current environment?

If so, I want to hear from you for a piece. DM me here or kyle DOT orland AT arstechnica DOT com.

Please spread the word

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Dana Terrace @danaterrace.bsky.social · 21d

Knights of Guinevere PILOT

youtu.be/MCAdbUaMlAE

KNIGHTS OF GUINEVERE: PILOT

YouTube video by GLITCH

youtu.be

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SUEDE DIED TEN YEARS AGO @suede.bsky.social · 22d

Here's one thing you can do: a disney+ subscription is around 16 dollars.

Go on Patreon/Kofi, find your top 16 creators/youtubers with less than a million subscribers and give them each $1 a month.

Changes lives, believe me

Mathew Buck @filmbrainbmb.bsky.social · 22d

I think it's becoming clear that if you like indie creators, you're going to need to support them any way you can. And that doesn't mean money, just spreading worth of mouth can be powerful as well.

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Swara A.S. ☀️🍉🌊🧿 @spiderswarz.bsky.social · 23d

Do this to voice your outrage at Disney's unjust cancellation of Kimmel and other people's shows for simply practicing their free speech, ASAP.

A post on the importance of sending letters

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Karen Attiah @karenattiah.bsky.social · 22d

I gave my heart and soul to that place. Built entire sections for journalists pushed out of their home countries.

When the writer I hired, Jamal Khashoggi was murdered by Saudi Arabia, they paraded me around as a symbol for press freedom.

I put MY LIFE on the line to defend journalism and WaPo.

bmazing.bsky.social @bmazing.bsky.social · 23d

weird that neither of these articles two main stories decrying censorship mention WaPo's firing of @karenattiah.bsky.social I guess democracy really does die in darkness

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derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 22d

I wrote something about respectability in dress over on Twitter. The topic is nuanced for me, so unfortunately the post had to be long. Since Bluesky (reasonably) has character limits, I can't easily import the text here. So I'm including screenshots, if you would like to read it.

ON RESPECTABILITY IN DRESS

Every once in a while, people here will get mad at me. And it often involves the same issue: respectability in dress. Or its related cousin: dress codes.

Judging someone's deeper, more important qualities based on attire often feels so natural; people get upset when I refuse to engage in the same judgment. To them, it feels as though I'm denying something so obvious, I'm dishonest.

I've written about dress respectability no fewer than half a dozen times in my 15 years of writing about menswear, but never so thoroughly and comprehensively on Twitter. This post will be long, but I hope it is engaging. And I hope you stay with me because I find this sentiment to be so noxious — so antithetical to any notion of "good," whether religious or secular — that I hope I can convince a few people to resist such temptations.

What is respectability in dress? It's the idea that you can show respect through clothes, such as wearing a suit to a wedding. Or the idea that people in certain clothes are more deserving of respect, such as a man in a suit versus another man in a hoodie. I will address each in turn.

I believe dress is a form of social language. And thus, you can signal certain things through clothes. For instance, if I were to attend a wedding, I would wear a suit as an outward expression of a sentiment in my heart (e.g., "I'm happy for my hosts and wish to honor them on this day"). The suit is simply a representation of my sentiment, which already exists, even if I was in jeans.

However, if I arrived at a wedding and saw someone not wearing a suit, I would not judge the person's more important qualities based on their attire. Perhaps they didn't have time to buy a suit. Perhaps clothes shopping gives them great anxiety. Perhaps they can't afford a suit that fits. If I wanted to know whether that person is of good character, I would judge this off their more direct actions, such as how they treat the people around them. Are they genial to g…

In 1852, Cardinal John Henry Newman penned an essay, initially delivered as a university lecture, titled "Definition of a Gentleman." A gentleman, he says, is someone gentle and kind, considerate of others, humble in social relations, and respectful of boundaries. He compares a gentleman to "an easy chair or a good fire, which do their part in dispelling cold and fatigue." He writes:

"The true gentleman in like manner carefully avoids whatever may cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast — all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint, or suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern being to make every one at his ease and at home. He has his eyes on all his company; he is tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful towards the absurd; he can recollect to whom he is speaking; he guards against unseasonable allusions, or topics which may irritate; he is seldom prominent in conversation, and never wearisome. He makes light of favors while he does them, and seems to be receiving when he is conferring."

There is notably nothing in his essay about clothes.

It's impossible to judge a person's deeper, more important qualities based on clothes because people are often just following social conventions. To go back to the wedding example, many people wear a suit not because they hold a particular sentiment in their heart, but simply because a suit is protocol. A friend who works as a wedding photographer revels in telling me stories about suited guests getting into fistfights—certainly not a way to honor your hosts. The irony of dress codes is that the stronger the enforcement, the less you can tell about someone's character based on dress.

Let's now turn to the idea that people in certain clothes are more deserving of respect. The sharpest, most pointed counterargument for this is Pierre Bourdieu, who in his 1979 book Distinction, pointed out that our notions of "Good Taste" are often nothing more than the habits and preferences of the ruling class.

Edward Carpenter, a gay British reformer in the late 19th century, understood this a century earlier. He hated suits. In an essay about the "simple life," he compared suits to coffins, as they have "stiff layers upon layers of buckram," which he believed prevented people from getting enough sunlight and air. But more importantly, he hated suits because he recognized that Victorian dress codes weren't about dress codes at all — they were about status signaling and social hierarchy.

In May 1889, Carpenter wrote a letter to The Sheffield Independent about how 100,000 of the city's residents were struggling to find sunlight and air, enduring miserable lives, and dying of illnesses because of the thick, black cloud of smog arising out of factories like smoke from Judgement Day. Meanwhile, as Melton-clad plutocrats nattered on about proper dress codes, they concealed their cruelty and vulgarity under refined manners. They weren't concerned with virtue, but rather with showing their supposed higher moral status. And then those socially under them aped those manners to seem higher class. (A dynamic that German sociologist Georg Simmel recognized in his 1902 essay "On Fashion.)

Our judgements of dress are often more about the person underneath the clothes, rather than the clothes themselves. We see this with the pre-war British Guardsmen, who dropped their Edwardian-inspired fashions as soon as they were adopted by the "ruffians" known as Teddy Boys (and some Teddy Gals). Or how the slacker hoodie became a symbol of meritocracy in the New Economy when (white) coders wore it in the early 2000s, but it symbolizes criminality when worn by black teens.

Clothes ind…

I'm fundamentally opposed to any notion of respectability in dress, as I find it antithetical to a fundamental moral principle: you should treat everyone with respect unless they behave in a manner that suggests otherwise. And so, if John Fetterman lumbers through the halls of Congress in hoodies and shorts, you should object to him based on his politics, not his dress. If a student shows up at Oxford Union in sweats, you should consider his ideas, not his pants. I am perfectly fine with saying certain outfits are ugly. I'm deeply uncomfortable when people make moral judgments based on clothes. A person is not more or less deserving of respect based on dress; they can only do so based on more meaningful behavior.

My guess is that you know this in your heart. As you travel through the world, look around you. Are your poorly dressed cousins and uncles bad people? Do shabbily dressed teachers or nurses on the train not actually serve society in positive ways? Do suited politicians not occasionally commit crimes? The idea that appearance doesn't always match character can be found more melodically in Fela Kuti's 1973 album "Gentleman."

If you are already interacting with someone on a meaningful basis, you've hopefully already gotten enough information about them to form a judgement and thus can ignore dress. If you haven't interacted with them in meaningful ways, you can simply withhold judgement.

I will end with an excerpt from Stuart Hall, a Jamaican-born British cultural theorist. In an essay about pluralism, he made a distinction between "common culture" and "common society," encouraging us to embrace differences.

"It should not be necessary to look, walk, feel, think, speak exactly like a paid-up member of the buttoned-up, stiff-upper-lipped, fully corseted and free-born Englishman, culturally to be accorded either the informal courtesy and respect of civil social intercourse or the rights of entitlement and citizenship. Since cultural diversity is, increasi…

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Jessie Gender @jessiegender.bsky.social · 23d

Reading this on loop today.

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Melo @letitmelo.bsky.social · 23d

I'm not surprised by any of this story but this still got an "...oh" out of me.

“It’s all kind of ridiculous, since it’s clear Diamond: never paid for the books to be printed; never paid artists, editors, game designers, graphic designers, and others for the work they did to create the book;, signed contracts with us acknowledging that they don’t own the stock and that they were selling the book on consignment; and never paid taxes on the books sitting in their warehouse,” said Jim Butler, Paizo CEO told Rascal via email.

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Basil 🌿 @basil-mage.bsky.social · 23d

Bruh

Drawing if a tired puppy with the caption; "This too shall pass but like wtf"

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 23d

My entire career, I've been fighting for the relevance and power of TTRPGs and larps. Now, at this point in history, it's not so bad to be (a) largely ignored by the state, and (b) involved with a medium that cannot die, that relies on human interaction and creativity. But the $$$ are an issue.

Rowan Zeoli @rowanzeoli.bsky.social · 23d

Independent media is the only media we will have that will not be beholden to The State

This means it will not have the same reach, influence, or attention as traditional models developed.

This will like be both very good and extremely difficult to maintain.

Tim Onion @bencollins.bsky.social · 23d

Becoming increasingly clear we’re gonna have to build a parallel infrastructure for all the media we really love. The reason all of this is happening under the color of law is hyperconsolidation, dissent being traded straight up for merger approval, or fear of harassment.

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Caræsten 🇵🇸 @cara.city · 25d

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a predictably wonderful essay about the political class's reaction to the death of Charlie Kirk. to quote a post I saw on here a few weeks back, "we're gonna need a bigger Reconstruction"

web.archive.org/web/20250916...

Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause

By ignoring the rhetoric and actions of the Turning Point USA founder, pundits and politicians are sanitizing his legacy.

web.archive.org

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Katy @katyfaise.bsky.social · 29d

still looking for one more player for this. desperately need just one more so we can start! let me know if you need any information and i’d be happy to answer.

would love to get back into running games with this one that i’ve been wanting to run for a while now so sign up and let’s get it going.

Katy @katyfaise.bsky.social · Sep 4

Do you remember the Tall Man? I do. And he remembers you.

Starting Thursdays, bi weekly, a new Monster of the Week adventure. Toby's Playhouse - an adventure into your past.

$20, biweekly Thursdays at 6:30 PM CT.

startplaying.games/adventure/cm...

Join Toby's Playhouse - Zoom / Roll20 - Monster of the Week | StartPlaying Games

Do you remember Toby’s Playhouse? Of course I do. Wait, was that the show with the Tall Man? The Tall Man? Yeah, the Tall Man - he was so creepy. I remember him. My mom hated when I watched that ...

startplaying.games

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Blanksword ⚔️ Kickstarter live NOW!! @blanksword.bsky.social · 24d

⚔️TIME ⚔️ TO ⚔️ RECLAIM ⚔️ YOUR ⚔️ BRAIN⚔️

Blanksword's Steam Demo & Kickstarter Campaign just launched as of RIGHT NOW!

Play the Demo on Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/3484670/...

Preorder the game on Kickstarter: www.kickstarter.com/projects/283...

Join the Discord: discord.gg/ftmCfsupyv

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Night Crew Games - ➡️ Live on KS @nightcrewgames.bsky.social · 24d

Meet Johnny Silverhand - before Arasaka Tower, before Alt Cunningham, before everything came crashing down.

A Night City Legend - and only available to VIPs.

Only 7 more days, then Johnny will be leaving the stage.

Grab him before he goes at presale.nightcrewgames.com

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Zohran Kwame Mamdani @zohrankmamdani.bsky.social · 25d

On June 24, I began my Election Night speech by quoting Mandela: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” That's the spirit of this campaign, and our city.

This is "Until It’s Done,” a new series about New Yorkers who refused to accept that a worthy goal was impossible.

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Preorder Read This When Things Fall Apart @mskellymhayes.bsky.social · 27d

On holding multiple truths: Miller says the administration will use Kirk's death to dismantle leftist orgs, and people are being targeted professionally. The people who said this would be used against folks were right. AND there were also already plans to dismantle leftist orgs (see Project Esther).

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Roxane Gay @roxanegay.bsky.social · Sep 11

It’s an absolute shame that DC fired Gretchen Felker- Martin for exercising free speech and then @bsky.app suspended her account. Every writer here should be decrying this because we have to stand up for each other! This is ridiculous.

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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 29d

Now that Kirk's killer seems to be caught, maybe the news could spare a moment's attention for the right wing, from the commentariat up to the GOP and president, whose immediate reaction was not mourning, but to seize the opportunity to try to incite violence against groups they hate

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Dr. Emily Friedman @friede.bsky.social · 29d

I am teaching students in a game writing course this fall who have no memory of GG.

I’m very, very careful in how I handle that history *because* the playbook that was first used in GG is still active & aimed at folks like me — not because I teach & study games, but because I’m a professor at all.

Gam Silroy ❌️👑 @gamsilroy.bsky.social · 29d

People need to understand that Gamergate is the most important domestic political event of my lifetime

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