And that hearing has now been conducted in what many are assessing as a good first step in the process.

The Stop Killing Games initiative now faces increased legislative examination because of its current status as a proposed law. The Stop Killing Games movement brought its digital obsolescence battle to European Parliament this month because its members succeeded in establishing their first political presence. The hearing organized by Ross Scott and Moritz Katzner aimed to expose the harmful industry custom which enables companies to disable online games completely. The movement believes that publishers who stop supporting products which they sold as retail items engage in false advertising which violates consumer rights.

Advocates for the proposed legislation introduced an organized approach to guide lawmaking bodies during the proceeding. The main requirement of their proposal demands software firms to create offline functionality for their products or make their server code accessible as open source when games reach their end of life stage. Scott and Katzner maintained that these products serve as vital cultural heritage items which consumers own through their property rights. The commission members received evidence which showed that abrupt game terminations take away users’ financial resources and time investments while failing to provide proper solutions.

As a more direct reminder, below are the articulated goals of the movement.

• Games sold must be left in a functional state
• Games sold must require no further connection to the publisher or affiliated parties to function
• The above also applies to games that have sold microtransactions to customers
• The above cannot be superseded by end user license agreements

The hearing itself included witness testimony from consumer rights groups in the EU, which is really important. While cultural preservation clearly remains a primary goal of the movement, that goal was cleverly wrapped within claims that there are already laws on the books designed to protect customer rights and property when purchased that many game publishers appear to be pretty clearly violating. Within the hearing itself it was also revealed that the movement has gained even further support from other politicians and advocacy groups within the EU.

It was, by all accounts, a really positive hearing for those of us who care about game preservation. But we do need to temper our expectations as to the timeline for what comes next, because the EU is a big ol’ bureaucracy and this is all going to take a great deal of time.

The gaming community should not expect instant changes to policy according to advocates who received positive feedback from committee leaders. Moritz Katzner explained that the hearing served as an effective platform to present their case yet it stands as the first step in a lengthy administrative procedure. The campaign succeeded in establishing its primary objective by bringing the subject into official political debates but now needs to navigate ledge machinery to convert these consumer rights violations into legal protections which will be enforced across Europe.

And that may, or likely will, take years. But it’s a fight worth sticking out, if you care at all about art preservation and the rights of the public to retain ownership of the things they’ve paid for. And, frankly, if you care about the public domain, which you damned well should.

I’m going to keep coming back to this point, because I think it’s pretty much unassailable. In any copyright system in which the purpose of the limited monopoly granted to a publisher of art is to benefit the public through both the creation of more art as well as those creations ending up in the public domain for everyone’s benefit, then video games being designed such that publishers can disappear them on a whim breaks the copyright bargain. It seems to me that it goes unrecognized too often that if a work of art, including video games, isn’t guaranteed to end up in the public domain eventually, then it shouldn’t be granted a copyright in the first place.

But, for now, it’s nice to see the Stop Killing Games movement having taken the first legislative step. All that’s left now is a whole lot of waiting, advocacy, and combat to be done with adverse lobbying dollars.

Recently, Anthropic released a new version of Claude, Opus 4.7. I did what I usually do when a new AI model is released by Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic and ran a bunch of tests on it to see what it can do. One of those tests is to paste in some text from unpublished drafts of mine and ask it to guess the author.

…

From only the above text [not shown here], 125 words, Claude Opus 4.7 informed me that the likeliest author is Kelsey Piper. This is an Opus 4.7-specific power; ChatGPT guessed Yglesias, and Gemini guessed Scott Alexander. I did not have memory enabled, nor did I have information about me associated with my account; I did these tests in Incognito Mode.

As Piper admits:

this is far from an impossible feat of style identification — a lot of my writing is public on the internet, and this is clearly the start of a political column, narrowing the possible authors down dramatically.

She went on to input less obvious material. For example, an “unpublished draft of a school progress report in a completely different register”:

“Kelsey Piper,” said Claude. (ChatGPT guessed Freddie deBoer. Gemini guessed Duncan Sabien.)

An unpublished fantasy novel produced a similar result, although:

in that case it took more like 500 words for Claude to inform me that it’s the work of Kelsey Piper (whereas ChatGPT flattered me by guessing that I’m real fantasy novelist K.J. Parker).

And finally, “a college application essay I wrote 15 years ago, when my prose style was vastly worse and frankly embarrassing to reread”:

“Kelsey Piper,” said Claude, and in this case, also ChatGPT.

Piper comments:

Right now, today’s AI tools probably can be used to deanonymize any writer who has a large public corpus of writing under their real name and also writes anonymously, unless they have been extremely careful, for years, to make sure that nothing written under their secondary account has the stylistic fingerprints of their primary one. Many academics and industry researchers, for instance, have reported being identified from a draft or in the middle of a chat.

And she concludes:

Whatever goods anonymity ever offered us, we will have to do without them. I don’t want the anonymous posters to all go away and for everyone to frantically delete all their old internet presence before it surfaces, but more than anything, I don’t want them to be surprised.

Those links to other cases of unpublished material being recognized by AI show that Piper’s experience was not a one-off, although the results remain in the realm of anecdata. But even if imperfect, the ability of generative AI to carry out this kind of analysis quickly and often accurately represents an important new option for the well-established field of stylometry. Wikipedia explains:

Stylometry may be used to unmask pseudonymous or anonymous authors, or to reveal some information about the author short of a full identification. Authors may use adversarial stylometry to resist this identification by eliminating their own stylistic characteristics without changing the meaningful content of their communications. It can defeat analyses that do not account for its possibility, but the ultimate effectiveness of stylometry in an adversarial environment is uncertain: stylometric identification may not be reliable, but nor can non-identification be guaranteed; adversarial stylometry’s practice itself may be detectable.

The limitations of stylometry were demonstrated in John Carreyrou’s attempt to reveal the true identity of Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, published in The New York Times a few weeks ago. Carreyrou concluded that various real-world coincidences plus linguistic evidence indicated that Bitcoin was created by the 55-year-old British computer scientist Adam Back, something Back denies. Carreyrou’s attempts to use computerized stylometry (not the AI services Piper drew on) were unsatisfactory, and he eventually adopted a more hands-on approach to text analysis, which involved looking at Satoshi’s vocabulary, grammatical hyphenation mistakes and the use of British spellings.

Despite Carreyrou’s lack of success, stylometric analysis by generative AI is likely to become more common in many disciplines for the simple reason it is so quick, easy and cheap to carry out. Even if its results are unreliable, people may find it useful as a stimulus for further investigations. And as we know, the fact that generative AI systems can churn out nonsense hasn’t stopped hundreds of millions of people from using and trusting them anyway.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky.

Now, it’s going after the Southern Poverty Law Center, claiming (incredibly) that paying informants to infiltrate hate groups is exactly the same thing as funding hate groups. It’s some truly insane spin, which is being delivered by some of the federal government’s top hucksters.

Here’s how it reads in the DOJ’s official press release on the SPLC indictment:

“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked. This Department of Justice will hold the SPLC and every other fraudulent organization operating with the same deceptive playbook accountable. No entity is above the law.”

“The SPLC allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public,” said FBI Director Kash Patel. “They lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups – even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes. That is illegal – and this is an ongoing investigation against all individuals involved.”

There’s a lot of stupid stuff being said here, but clearly the stupidest thing is Blanche’s opening sentence. “Manufacturing racism?” This assertion deserves all the derision it will earn, but I’ll let Liz Dye of Public Notice run with it because hers is the best I’ve read yet:

The indictment is a grotesque attempt to recast white people as the real victims of racism. In the Trump DOJ’s telling, the civil rights advocates who spent decades mapping and dismantling the Klan are somehow its secret benefactors, “enriching” themselves by secretly creating racism — something which is apparently in such short supply that it can only be generated with constant infusions of cash.

People who actually believe racism is something that’s “manufactured” or otherwise blown out of proportion generally tend to be racists or, at the very least, throw their support behind bigoted politicians. The acting attorney general is running with this narrative, implying that racism would cease to exist if alleged fraudsters like SPLC weren’t so busy keeping it alive just to turn a profit.

Patel’s follow-up makes it sound like the indictment is full of caught-in-the-act crimes perpetrated by the SPLC and its employees. “State and federal crimes,” he says, suggesting there’s far more to it than [checks official statement] the profitable manufacturing of racism.

But you can read it [PDF] for yourself below. It portrays every payment to an informant as deceptive funding of hate groups. That might have meant something if anyone who’s given their money to the SPLC had ever expressed concern about misuse of their donated funds. Back to Liz Dye at Public Notice:

No donor has come forward to complain about the covert informant program, or even to express surprise. Indeed, the FBI itself was likely aware of it, thanks to its longstanding coordination with SPLC.

For reasons everyone knows (but will never be admitted by the administration), no one at the FBI or DOJ considered this to be a form of fraud until after Trump took power again, following years of the SPLC flagging some of Trump’s biggest fans as members or operators of hate groups. This is pure vengeance being dressed up to look like a standard criminal prosecution.

Oh, and back to those alleged crimes Kash Patel crowed about. The “federal” crime is the use of dummy corporations to obscure the source of money being paid to informants. Sure, it’s a crime to sign your name to false statements, but this wasn’t done to hide the payments from donors or launder illegally obtained funds. It was done to protect the informants, which is something the FBI does all the time.

On top of that, this “fraud” had already been detected and handled by the bank. The end result of the bank’s 2020 internal investigation was SPLC voluntarily closed the accounts and informed the bank that these had been opened on behalf of the Center. That happened in 2021. Even though the bank had a full admission/confession from the SPCL in its hands, it never tried to pursue criminal charges against the Center.

And the DOJ isn’t content to settle for mere wire fraud charges. It also alleges actual money laundering was happening here, a statute that requires the funds to have been obtained illegally. If the DOJ tries to connect the dots, it’s going to end up presenting a circle with no origin point in court because both the fraud and money laundering allegations involve the same set of bogus bank accounts. The money that traveled back and forth between these accounts originated elsewhere and nowhere in the indictment does the DOJ even attempt to claim the origin point was illegal activity.

The “state crime” is this:

In 2014, [Informant] F-9 entered the headquarters of a violent extremist group and stole 25 boxes of their documents. F-9 coordinated payment for the copying of the materials with a high-level SPLC employee who had knowledge the documents had been stolen. The original stolen materials were returned to the violent extremist group in a second illegal entry by F-9.

Even if this can all be proven, it still doesn’t amount to much direct criminal activity by SPLC itself. The indictment says this informant was paid “more than $1,000,000” from 2014 to 2023, it doesn’t say the SPLC directed the person to engage in this theft. The indictment also alleges SPLC paid another informant $6,000 to take the fall for the theft, which is a bit more worrying. (And I can’t imagine that informant is going to be too happy about that after seeing how much the other informant was allegedly paid.)

If that state crime needed to be prosecuted, it could have been handled by the state it occurred in more than a decade ago. Bringing it up now just means the DOJ is looking for anything it can stack on top of a bunch of overblown accusations to drag the SPLC into court for the sole purpose of putting it out of business. The last three pages of the indictment set out the DOJ’s forfeiture demands, which makes it clear that the government hopes to drain it of its resources while it engages in its completely bullshit prosecution.

The SPLC is far from perfect. But it’s not being targeted because it strayed too far from the constraints of the law. It’s being targeted because it has repeatedly pissed off Trump and his supporters. It might be almost impossible to get a court to agree on record that this is a vindictive prosecution (at least without something showing up in discovery), but everyone involved — including the judge who eventually handles this case — knows that that’s exactly what this is.

First, a quick recap, in part just to remind ourselves just how absolutely batshit crazy this situation is. Every major candidate for US President since Richard Nixon has voluntarily released his or her tax returns as a reasonable act of transparency to the public. Trump refused claiming (nonsensically) that he could not do so because he was being audited. He also promised to release them once the audit was complete. All of this was bullshit. Richard Nixon (who started this practice) was dealing with audit when he released his tax returns. Also, Trump refused to release returns from earlier that were outside of the returns supposedly being audited. Also, it’s been ten freaking years since he made that promise — and no tax returns have been released. Not willingly, anyway.

In 2019 and 2020 an IRS contractor, named Charles Littlejohn, leaked Trump’s tax returns (along with some other wealthy people) to the NY Times and Propublica, both of whom wrote stories about Trump’s ability to dodge paying taxes and to represent very different profit numbers to the IRS as compared to lenders. Littlejohn was arrested and is currently in prison, serving a five-year sentence for the leak.

Trump received effectively zero consequences for his sketchy tax return practices, or his false claims about being willing to release the returns to the public.

Instead, after he returned to the White House he decided to sue the IRS, which he runs, for an insane $10 billion. And when asked about it, he admitted that he was basically negotiating with himself over how much taxpayer money would be put into his own bank account. Earlier this month we noted a filing in the case about how Trump’s lawyers were asking for more time because they were trying to negotiate a “settlement” — with themselves. Can you just imagine how those meetings were going?

However, on Friday, the judge overseeing the case, Kathleen Williams, finally called out the emperor’s lack of clothes, noting that the core of the American judicial system was that you needed two adversarial parties with an actual controversy between them, and that didn’t appear to be the case here:

A key characteristic of the case or controversy requirement is the existence of adverseness, or “a dispute between parties who face each other in an adversary proceeding.” Aetna Life Ins. Co. of Hartford, Conn. v. Haworth, 300 U.S. 227, 242 (1937). “There must be an honest and actual antagonistic assertion of rights by one individual against another, which is neither feigned nor collusive.” Muransky, 979 F.3d at 981 (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). Typically, adverseness is found in a situation where one party is asserting its right and the other party is resisting. Nat’l Lab. Rels. Bd. v. Constellium Rolled Prods. Ravenswood, LLC, 43 F.4th 395, 400 (4th Cir. 2022) (internal quotations and citations omitted). Consequently, if there is no adverseness, there is no case or controversy.

In the instant case, Defendants have not yet filed any notices of appearance. Nonetheless, the Parties have advised the Court that they are engaging in discussions to resolve this matter. Moreover, although President Trump avers that he is bringing this lawsuit in his personal capacity, he is the sitting president and his named adversaries are entities whose decisions are subject to his direction.2 Indeed, President Trump’s own remarks about this matter acknowledge the unique dynamic of this litigation.3 Accordingly, it is unclear to this Court whether the Parties are sufficiently adverse to each other so as to satisfy Article III’s case or controversy requirement.

In other words, at least this judge is willing to say out loud what a total sham this whole setup is.

To deal with this, the judge has asked both “parties” to file briefs over this particular issue and set a hearing for the end of May to see what to do about all this. To call this a unique situation would be the understatement of the decade. One hopes that the courts recognize how blatantly corrupt this is, but we have to remember that if this actually continues, it would end up in front of the same court that decided when Donald Trump is president he’s effectively a king and can do whatever he wants (though, when a Democrat is president, they should have zero powers at all).

So while anyone with half a brain can recognize the absolute cynical corruption baked into this case, I have zero faith that this Supreme Court wouldn’t bless it — should the question of whether a Republican president can simply sue his own government and agree with himself to take money from the treasury ever actually reach the high court.

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What should have been Exhibit (see appendices: A-ZZZZZZZ) of America’s globally unique gun violence problem instead became a rallying cry for the far right, most of whom were thrilled to see someone other than them sacrificed to the “cause,” rather than being expected to back up their Gadsden Flag bumper stickers by actually raising their AR-15s in the general direction of an autocracy in the making.

Multiple state legislators are pushing bills named after Charlie Kirk in red-coded states. These will be covered in future articles because while all the bills are stupid, each one is stupid in particular ways that deserve specific derision. They’re all predicated on the same lies and intellectual dishonesty Charlie Kirk personified. Like a lot of MAGA acolytes, Charlie Kirk believed the First Amendment not only guaranteed his right to spread his hate (which it does!) but also guaranteed him an audience and protection from the expected repercussions (which it definitely does not).

With that in mind, let’s take a look at a bill that has passed both the House and Senate in Tennessee, well on its way to the expected signature of Governor Bill Lee. Here’s the copy-pasting of Rep. Bulso’s press release, delivered to us by absolutely no human journalist (“Herald Reports” byline) at the Williamson Herald:

The Tennessee House of Representatives this week passed legislation by State Rep. Gino Bulso, R-Brentwood, to ensure college campuses remain beacons of free expression.

The Charlie Kirk Act, or House Bill 1476, requires public higher education institutions in Tennessee to adopt a policy on freedom of expression consistent with the University of Chicago’s 2015 policy, which underscores a university’s responsibility to promote “fearless freedom of debate and deliberation.” They will also adopt a policy on political and social action, as in the Kalven Report, that encourages institutional neutrality.

“Beacons of free expression” is in the eye of the beholders/bill sponsors. While this bill does try to limit heckler’s vetoes from determining what speakers colleges can or can’t host, it does so at the expense of the First Amendment with compelled speech. The bill says colleges can’t prevent speakers from speaking even if most students object to the speaker. Fair enough, I guess, but it also compels colleges to allow anyone to speak, even if it’s the sort of thing they would never endorse tacitly, much less deliberately.

But the bill [PDF] travels far beyond the nominal protections against heckler’s vetoes. It compels colleges (and college students!) to provide speakers with unobstructed access to an audience. While it’s one thing to tell publicly-funded state schools not to engage in viewpoint discrimination, it’s another (unconstitutional) thing entirely to tell students they cannot protest speakers they disagree with.

SECTION 2. Tennessee Code Annotated, Section 49-7-2404, is amended by adding the following as a new subdivision:
(6) “Substantially obstruct or otherwise substantially interfere” includes, but is not limited to:

(A) Making noises with the intent of drowning out an invited speaker or hindering the audience from hearing the invited speaker;
(B) Standing in between an invited speaker and the audience with the intent of blocking or impeding an audience member’s view of the speaker or the speaker’s view of the audience members;
(C) Using signs or objects in a way to block or impede an audience member’s view of an invited speaker or the speaker’s view of the audience members;
(D) Staging walk-outs during an event or in the middle of an invited speaker’s remarks that result in considerable disruption or distraction or the need to pause the event for any period of time, however short; and
(E) Physically obstructing an invited speaker or an audience member from entering or attending an event.

That is some bullshit. The statute being amended deals with “time, place, and manner” restrictions allowed under the Constitution. This amendment says the First Amendment no longer matters. The following portions of the amendment obligate universities to punish (including expelling students or terminating faculty members) those who violate these new state-specific, named-after-Charlie-Kirk exemptions to the First Amendment.

In addition, violations of any part of this law allow speakers to bring lawsuits or file charges against students and staff members, which turns any perceived dissent into a cause of action.

And it goes further than that, ordering public entities to engage in viewpoint discrimination, which has always been a violation of the Constitution:

(a) Notwithstanding another law to the contrary, a public institution of higher education or a faculty member or agent of the institution shall not discriminate or retaliate against a person on account of the person’s:

(1) Sincere religious beliefs; or
(2) Opposition to abortion, homosexuality, or transgender behavior, regardless of whether that opposition is motivated by religious or non-religious beliefs.

(b) A public institution of higher education or faculty member or agent of the institution shall not deny recognition to any student group, or deny any employer access to on-campus student interviews, on account of the student group’s or employer’s:

(1) Sincere religious beliefs;
(2) Opposition to abortion, homosexuality, or transgender behavior, regardless of whether that opposition is motivated by religious or non-religious belief; or
(3) Refusal to employ or admit into membership or leadership positions, individuals whose beliefs or lifestyle choices are incompatible with the sincere beliefs of the organization.

No similar carve-out is listed for students or faculty members whose viewpoints are opposed to ones the state is preparing to grant extra rights to. No cause of action is given to those who fall on the other end of the viewpoint spectrum should a college discriminate against their viewpoints or deny them access to an audience or refuse to act if their speech is greeted with the actions listed above as forbidden under this bill’s one-sided interpretation of the First Amendment.

There’s no way this law won’t immediately be blocked by courts once it’s enacted. It is absurdly and transparently unconstitutional. But it does get at least one thing right: this is how the person it’s named after — along with his acolytes — actually think the First Amendment works. As they see it, the First Amendment not only allows them to speak freely, but obtain uninterrupted access to a receptive audience. And all the while, they think the First Amendment should be their umbrella, sheltering them from the criticism their statements deliberately provoke.

Any governor who signs a bill like this similarly signals they don’t actually care about free speech. All they want is for people to be compelled to listen quietly and keep their comments to themselves.

New York’s 2026–2027 executive budget bill (S.9005 / A.10005), for example, included language requiring that all 3D printers operating in the state need to include software or firmware that scans every print file through a “firearms blueprint detection algorithm” and then locks the hardware up so it refuses to print anything it flags as having the “geometry” of a potential firearm or firearm component.

But as folks like Adafruit’s Phillip Torrone noted recently, the proposal has all manner of problems. One being it would undermine the adoption of open source solutions, placing elaborate burdens on volunteer-run projects. Another being that it’s largely impossible to detect firearms from geometry alone, meaning that all the new restrictions aren’t actually fixing the problems they were intended to cure:

“A firearms blueprint detection algorithm would need to identify every possible firearm component from raw STL/GCODE files, while not flagging pipes, tubes, blocks, brackets, gears, or any of the millions of legitimate shapes that happen to share geometric properties with gun parts. This is a classification problem with enormous false positive and false negative rates.“

Washington state’s HB 2321 has similarly problematic restrictions harmful to open source.

The EFF notes that California is also pursuing similar legislation with similar problems. The activist org notes that California’s A.B. 2047 would mandate false-positive prone “censorware” akin to New York’s law, but it also aims to criminalize the use of open-source alternatives, making it a misdemeanor for device owners to disable, deactivate, or otherwise circumvent these mandated algorithms.

The EFF notes that part of the problem is that big manufacturers want to bring some of the shittier behaviors we’ve seen among large traditional printer manufacturers (disabling printer scanners when printers run out of ink, obnoxiously bricking printers that don’t use the manufacturer’s expensive cartridges) to the 3D printing space:

“This bill is a gift for the biggest 3D printer manufacturers looking to adopt HP’s approach to 2D printing: criminalize altering your printer’s code, lock users into your own ecosystem, and let enshittification run its course. Even worse, algorithmic print blocking will never work for its intended purpose, but it will threaten consumer choice, free expression, and privacy.”

There’s real danger here that these bills will criminalize open source and create all manner of the same sort of annoying walled gardens we’ve come to hate in traditional printers. All pushed under the pretense of public safety, yet incapable of actually addressing the problems they claim to fix.

Fortunately none of these proposals have been signed into law yet, so there should be some runway here for activist orgs and tinkerers to coordinate some meaningful opposition before 3D printing can be fully and completely enshittified by big companies using 3D gun moral panics for cover.

I mean, yeah, the name of their company is basically “I read Lord of the Rings and wanted to be Sauron.”

In second place, it’s MrWilson with a comment about Arkansas’s latest failed attempt to pass an unconstitutional social media law:

This is another one of those scenarios where it functionally doesn’t matter if the sponsors/authors of such bills are constitutionally illiterate or maliciously anti-constitutional. The result is the same. It’s at least performative for voters and campaign donors that you’re “doing something,” but if it passes, and it doesn’t get struck down immediately, and it has confusing and contradictory language, that’s a feature, not a bug. If the social media companies can’t figure out how to legally offer their services to children, they’ll opt out of doing so entirely—the same way the demise of Section 230 would require shutting down user input to avoid massive lawsuit damages. That’s a win for authoritarian conservatives who want to control narratives and legitimize only their preferred propaganda outlets. Notice that no censorial conservative legislator writes has their lobbyists write a law targeting Truth Social’s practices.

For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous comment about a certain type of person that’s well-represented in the Palantir crowd:

They all think they’re John Galt personified

I expect everyone to read “Atlas Shrugged” when they’re a teenager.

And by the time they’re in their early or mid 20’s, I expect them to have acquired the intellectual maturity to figure out that it’s absolute bullshit from cover to cover.

Those who are incapable of this tend to try to use it as an instruction manual and cast themselves as saviors of the people, fearless leaders whose lofty goals must triumph, blah blah blah. As the best line in a series of bad movies observes: “There are always men like you.”

Next, it’s another comment from Thad, this time about Netgear’s mysterious exemption to the Trump FCC’s router ban:

Is it bribes?

I bet it’s bribes.

Over on the funny side, our first place winner is an anonymous reply to a tiresome rant that accused Techdirt of falling for propaganda:

Are you a vampire?

Because damn, that’s a complete lack of self-reflection you have there.

In second place, it’s another anonymous comment, this time about the gross camaraderie on display at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner:

I imagine their laughter sounds like a ‘collaboration’ of turkey noises.

‘Gobbels Gobbels Gobbels!’

For editor’s choice on the funny side, we start out with a comment from dfbomb about Minnesota manners:

Ah, I see, a non-native. Let me explain local culture and language:

Much like a Hawaiian “Aloha”, in Minnesotan “Fuck ICE” is both “hello” and “goodbye.”

Finally, it’s one last comment from Thad, this time about the Fifth Circuit ruling that Texas’s ten commandments law is constitutional:

Sounds like the Satanic Temple’s time to shine.

That’s all for this week, folks!

It’s the first time in these game jams that we’ve had a double winner: Geouug also won the prize for Best Visuals with As I Lay Flying. But where that was a physics-based game rich in graphical details, I Could Do That! is simple and streamlined, using a single mechanic to deliver a bit of commentary about attitudes towards abstract art. The game is based around Piet Mondrian’s 1930 painting Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow, and you’ve probably heard more than one person deliver the game’s title as a reaction to that painting or another piece of superficially simple abstract art: it’s just some lines and colors! I could do that!

Although there are many robust and serious rebuttals to that reaction, the game delivers a playful and somewhat cheeky one. It says: so do it.

After being given a moment to look at the painting, the player is delivered to a blank canvas with some simple drawing tools, where they must try to reproduce it as faithfully as possible. Keeping the correct composition in your memory is harder than it might sound!

Once you’re done, the game performs a rigorous pixel-by-pixel comparison, giving you both a numerical score and a visualization of what you got right.

Of course, in essence, it’s a memory game. But the subject matter makes it feel like something more than that: it centers your mind on composition and balance, which are precisely the things that the painting invites the viewer to contemplate, and becomes a deceptively impactful exercise in thinking about abstract art. It’s novel, funny, and well-executed, and for that it’s this year’s Best Digital Game.

Congratulations to Geouug for the win! You can play I Could Do That! in your browser on Itch. We’ll be back next week with the final winner spotlight, and don’t forget to check out the many great entries that didn’t quite make the cut. And stay tuned for next year, when we’ll be back for Gaming Like It’s 1931!

And then something truly remarkable happened. The Trump administration announced it was nominating Dr. Erica Schwartz for the position. And the notable thing about Schwartz is that… she’s a perfectly qualified, reasonable pick for the role. Many took this as yet another sign that the White House had begun attempting to rein in Kennedy so that his particular brand of nonsense didn’t get the GOP killed in the midterms. The nomination was so bizarrely reasonable that public health policy wonks immediately worried aloud that this couldn’t possibly work under Kennedy.

Outside public health experts have praised her nomination, highlighting her qualifications. But, they’re also wary of how an evidence-based health official will be able to function amid Kennedy’s anti-vaccine efforts and interference from the many like-minded allies he has installed at the CDC.

“As a well-trained and credentialed physician and former Deputy Surgeon General, Erica Schwartz possesses the medical background and public health knowledge to understand that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must be guided by evidence-based science,” Georges Benjamin, CEO of the American Public Health Association, said in a statement. “She will need to use sound managerial and negotiation skills to navigate the rebuilding of our nation’s public health system.”

Jerome Adams, who served as Trump’s surgeon general in his first administration, posted on social media that Schwartz is a “battle-tested leader with decades of distinguished public service,” and that he was “cautiously optimistic” of her selection. As the leader of the CDC, “she’ll excel,” he said, with the caveat, “if [she’s] allowed to follow the science without political interference.”

Unfortunately for anyone optimistic that this would force Kennedy to return to sanity in public health policy, his recent appearance before Congress indicates that he’s not interested in complying. In those hearings, Kennedy was asked several questions about whether he would stop screwing with vaccine policy to bend it to his personal whims, and whether he would support the work of and listen to Schwartz if confirmed as CDC Director.

In a Congressional hearing Tuesday, Kennedy refused to commit to supporting evidence-based vaccine policy from the next director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the same time, he refused to say that he wouldn’t interfere with the agency’s recommendations.

Kennedy’s response Tuesday suggested Schwartz could face an equally short tenure. His answer came amid an exchange with Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.) in a hearing of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Ruiz asked Kennedy: “If Dr. Schwartz is confirmed, will you commit on the record today to implement whatever vaccine guidance she issues without interference?”

Kennedy replied without hesitation: “I’m not going to make that kind of commitment.”

There is danger in this for Kennedy. This administration, and particularly its mad king leader, do not like having their power challenged. There is a reason that Schwartz was tapped for this role and sure as hell isn’t because the Trump team thinks all is well at HHS. Or, at least, it knows they have a problem with public perception of the work that Kennedy is doing there. To have the administration offer up the rare sane nomination, only to have Kennedy state before Congress that he’s not committed to taking her seriously, is a public slap in the face to Trump. And one that will be memorialized in congressional hearing notes.

In other words, this nomination of Schwartz is a no-lose situation for the American public, in my view. Either she’ll be allowed to do her work in a competent way, which is great for a country suffering through a measles outbreak, or she won’t and the Trump administration will have to do something about it. Firing her would, I would guess, amount to Kennedy firing himself.

Now we wait to see which route this goes.