For those able to do so, donating or fundraising for charities seems like a good idea, especially with the holidays coming up. For USAmericans, this has the dual function of denying your tax $$ to the incoming government and helping the people that government wishes to harm. I thought it might be nice to crowdsource a thread of charities which do useful work for the communities under threat. Below are a few to start us off:

RAICES - Texas-based group helping immigrants and refugees United We Dream - working for immigrant youth Trans Lifeline - phone hotline, microgrants and legal help for trans folk The Trevor Project - helping LGBTQ+ youth NAACP legal defense fund - among other things, very useful for arrested racial justice protesters Southern Poverty Law Center - social, racial and economic justice National Network of Abortion Funds A couple of election integrity charities, since that will be crucial in the near future: Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law - civil rights, election integrity, voting rights VoteRiders - Election integrity, voting rights But that's just a few! Please post the orgs you know of doing good and useful work.

We have had previous Metas around ableism and conflicting needs here on the grey. And we've gotten better on how we discuss mental health. But as someone living with a mental health condition, it appears that many discussions that implicate mental health on Metafilter are still touched with a lot of stigma: I would like us to do better still.

I think that we are getting better at understanding neurodivergence when it comes to things like autism, or ADHD - ways that people process the world differently. We are getting better at how we understand depression as a condition rather than a choice, for example. But discussions of some of the more stigmatized mental health conditions - levels of anxiety high enough to prohibit work, nonconsensus realities, paranoia, borderline personality, severe post traumatic stress - still wind up often displaying a lot of the stigma expressed in the broader world, as well as some common myths and misunderstandings. Some misunderstandings I have seen here on Metafilter - - that people who have these conditions can't function without medication - that people who have these conditions are inherently destructive or 'dangerous' to 'normal' people - that people with these conditions are displaying personal weakness when they don't 'cure' themselves or act in ways considered appropriate to people without mental health conditions - that people with these conditions shouldn't have access to support or resources until they are 'cured' - that people with serious mental health conditions need to be institutionalized or at the very least have long residential inpatient periods - that family members should separate themselves from people with these conditions for their own safety While seeing some recent comments has spurred me to make this MeTa, I am specifically not linking to any individual comments because I don't want to make this about individuals, but rather broadly about how we discuss these issues overall. I know that seeing these types of comments hurts me, and makes me feel as though the people in the discussion do not see me or the people I live in community with on a daily basis - both medicated and unmedicated- who have caused me, overall, far less harm than people part of the dominant and normative majority living without such conditions. I would like to ask us to try to consider this and reframe our thinking.

Downticket Democrats highlights candidates for the House of Representatives and state legislatures in competitive districts, making it easy to donate for maximum impact.

Donations to House and state candidates can have a much bigger impact than donations to presidential and Senate campaigns. This site helps you find candidates by state or rating (toss-up, lean Democrat, or lean Republican), and offers lots of ways to donate, from links to the candidates' campaigns to featured slates that let you donate to several at once. All the data comes from MeFite Michal Migurski; he sources it from Sister District, Cook, and other reliable sources. He supplies the links and maps, as well. I was inspired to put together a quick website when Mike posted this:

I've started running a Downticket Dems bot on Bluesky (link) and Fedi (link) focused exclusively on D candidates in and near districts that Cook Political Report defines as competitive. Follow and donate!

A Free 42-page PDF you can read on your phone, tablet, or laptop and enjoy!

My friend Jordanlafordan, organised and compiled a Fanzine to celebrate Star Trek: Discovery. Full of Fanfic, essays, photos, games, poems, and quotes from our beloved Star Trek: Discovery, this is the first annual Celebrate Disco fanzine! I (Faintdreams) submitted the crossword. Enjoy! If you like it please let the organiser know. They have a mastodon account here: ( https://tenforward.social/@jordanlafordan )

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Radio Static is a small and ultimately pointless internet radio that plays nothing but various forms of static and occasionally some industrial noises that also kind of sound like static (can also be downloaded here for offline play).

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Reg Smythe's Andy Capp was the greatest British newspaper strip of the 20th Century, but few people realise how much of his own troubled childhood Smythe poured into Andy and Flo's lives. Andy was essentially a portrait of Smythe's wastrel father, Flo a version of his formidable mother, and their neighbourhood a portrait of the pre-war Hartlepool where Smythe grew up. My new book traces Smythe's own biography, explores its parallels in Andy's world, and tackles the strip's early wife-beating jokes. There's also a look at how the balance of power has shifted between Andy and Flo down the years and my own analysis of just what made Smythe such an accomplished and stylish cartoonist.

Down The Tubes has already reviewed the book, calling it "a terrific re-examination of Andy Capp, smashing myths about the strip". Paul Gravett, the UK's leading comics critic, describes it as "a rich, revelatory study". MeFites discussed an earlier version of the book's Andy Capp material here.

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It's a GPT that rates your existential dread

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In which I write about Islam, spirituality, my Hajj pilgrimage in the summer of 2024, living as a USian in southern Spain, and change both voluntary and unwilled.

Example of what I write about: I just added a post about how fear of Satan, which was encouraged by the Catholic church and pop culture, scared me off from belief in ANYTHING Unseen (including God) for decades.

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Stark Raving Mab, the third book in my urban fantasy trilogy Gravity's Daughter is out as of yesterday. If you're intrigued by any of the following: action-heavy urban fantasy, less-traditional faeries, gravity-defying antics on public transit, Canadian settings or in-over-their-heads characters who will not give up sarcasm 'til you pry it from their cold, dead hands, then give the books a look or request them from your local library.

I did a projects post back in 2022 on the first book but I think I forgot to crow about the second last fall, because I have trouble regularly remembering to talk about myself. (Or even, uh, irregularly--like when I publish a literal book.)

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North Continent Ribbon is a collection of linked short stories including an assassin with a crystal sword, a judge whose best friend is a book, and spaceships on strike. I wrote about the way the worldbuilding intertwines with eighteenth-century crime records for Mary Robinette Kowal's column My Favorite Bit, and the first story, Closer Than Your Kidneys, is available for free at Frivolous Comma.

You can find North Continent Ribbon at Neon Hemlock Press as a paperback or ebook, buy it from your favorite bookstore, or request it from your library.

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The polls in the headlines are alarming ... but polls have been way off in the past few years. This website documents some of the huge discrepancies between polling predictions and the actual results; notes some reasons for those errors; and suggests some other indicators that may offer a better sense of how the candidates are doing. The site's main message: don't panic - take action instead.

I was inspired to create this site after posting some of this information in various threads on MetaFilter.

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For the past almost 40 years, Treb Heining has engineered the balloon drops at every Republican National Convention and most Democratic National Conventions. I photographed how he and his team inflated and then dropped 100,000 balloons on the final night of the RNC this year in Milwaukee.

This is a story I'd been wanting to do since I noticed the balloons suspended from the ceiling during the 2016 conventions. I though, "Huh, there's got to be a story behind these balloons." What I found was Treb Heining, who got his start in balloons at age 15 selling balloons on foot at Disneyland. Heining went on to invent the balloon arch and built a balloon decorating business that now spans the globe. He invented the Glasshouse Balloon, a clear balloon surrounding the Mickey-shaped balloon sold at Disney resorts worldwide. And he's been in charge of the balloon drops at every RNC since 1988 and most DNCs since then (he was not involved in the 2004 DNC failure). He's also been in charge of the Times Square New Year's Eve confetti drop for more than 30 years and engineered balloon events at Super Bowls and Olympics opening ceremonies. For the conventions, Heining and a team of balloon decoration professionals and some local volunteers spend a couple days before the convention inflating and tying approximately 100,000 balloons by hand, putting them into giant net bags, and rigging them to the ceiling of the arena. Then, after the final speech on the last day of the convention, the balloons are dropped onto the delegates. I pitched this story to Bloomberg Businessweek in 2020, but the conventions were initially cancelled and then held in a modified form without balloon drops, so the story was killed. I pitched it again for this year, and it all worked out. Here's the Businessweek piece online and the larger edit with some videos and animated gifs on my website.

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A fundraising drive for the Election Protection Hotline. (Not a US resident or US citizen? Hate all the major parties? No problem! You can donate!) Then, on Oct. 26th, watch 8 minutes of nerd jokes about open source software and how programming skews your brain, and none about politics.

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The Shakespearean Sonnet Machine is a slighty pointless little randomiser app that spits out endless variations of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets. (Well, not quite endless, but there should be 562,448,656 different ones in there if you're patient enough to keep reloading.)

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I've done my best to collect and catalogue all of the storyboards from the production of 1983's Richard Marquand hit Return of the Jedi, driven by wanting to see what unfinished or cut scenes could be revealed.

You can read the entire screenplay, including deleted scenes while looking at the storyboards with a little commentary, or you can see all the storyboards in galleries. I've included some pages with behind the scenes photos and an explanation of my methods as well. If it's deleted scenes you're after, the bulk of those are found the Space Battle and the Rebel Attack sequences. Return of the Jedi ran into some time-and-budget-crunch problems in the last year of production, as well as technical issues, which resulted in some cuts being made to those sequences. Figuring out just what was cut and why was my original motive for the project, and although I'm still missing a lot of the storyboards from those cut sequences, there's enough to get the gist. Oh, and if you are, for some reason, in possession of copies of any of the missing storyboards, please get in touch!

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A 6-page guide for research-group leaders in academia, providing concrete suggestions to make labs more welcoming and accessible to autistic students and postdocs. Written by a late-diagnosed autistic academic.

Contents: 1. Dispel your misconceptions. 2. Communicate clearly. 3. Check the sensory environment. 4. Be aware of different cognitive profiles. 5. Model inclusivity to your group.

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By Satan's forelock, it's Jabo's Annual Halloween Cartoon 2024. Not much to be scared about this year, amirite? So this year I've just drawn up my favorite cartoon scalawags mixed in with a liberal dose of tales about THE END OF THE WORLD! Nuthin' special and no worries about HOW WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE. Enjoy!

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Octothorpes is an open protocol that lets you put hashtags and backlinks on your own website to connect with other independent sites across Rings. We're launching a public beta today.

My friend Nik and I have been slowly rolling this out, starting at the last XOXO, and we just opened the public beta after letting a really fun project called Weird Web October used the protocol to connect their sites last month.

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I started a Substack to promote some liberal, progressive friendly views online.

At this time it feels like the right-wing echo chamber is growing larger and larger by the minute and progressive voices are drowned out. This obviously is a result of the devastating outcome a few days ago. My attempt is to offer some analysis and strategy. I will also try to cover the numbers in a bit more detail while also putting them in a narrative that is easily digestible (or so I hope).

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International Code of Signals Flags in the Browser – is an HTML/CSS implementation for the flags of The International Code of Signals (ICS), a system of signals and codes designed to communicate important safety and navigational messages when speaking is difficult, for use by vessels to communicate important messages regarding safety of navigation and related matters.

The project is published as open source, including a React plugin (ics-css-react) available in NPM, for all your phonetic alphabet enthusiasts who want to add flags to your site :)

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Quest Heroes is a sort of cute and cuddly (and hand drawn and fairly rough) card game version of 80s role playing board game classic Hero Quest which I made for my niece and nephew the other week (who both love Hero Quest a lot for some reason)

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"Honeymoon in Oak Ridge" is a documentary that tells the story of my parents, two young newlyweds who unknowingly contributed to building the world's first atomic weapon.

In 1998, I returned with them to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where they shared on camera their wartime memories with pride and sorrow. Decades later, I sat down with their grandkids to hear what they think about their grandparents' role in this piece of history and how it affected our family and their view of history. The 20-minute documentary won the Jury Award for Best Short Documentary at the 2024 Uranium Film Festival. It's now available to stream on Docsville.com (free trial available).

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a comic about getting stuck on which plan to stick to

a comic about the end of the world! :D

a comic about really liking one song

a comic about living in space

I’m going on a bit of a streaming hiatus because I need to recover from this sickness ASAP so that I can move house which will then come with its own set of streaming interruptions…

I’ll try and fit in some streams when I can until we return to our regular schedule (so you don’t forget about me ). Follow me to be notified!

Til then take care and see ya around the Discord and stuff!

I’m back from the dead! To catch up I’m planning a BIRTHDAY STREAMATHON and you’re all invited!!! ????????????

Starts June 27th, 9am NZT (or 26th, 9pm UTC) see you there!

a comic about moving house

Lost in lavender

Art and comic prints are now in the same store as my other merch! Isn’t that handy?!

I’m also running a 15% OFF EVERYTHING sale right now! Discounts applied at checkout!

If there’s something you want to see as a print and it’s not already in the store, send me an email and I’ll consider adding it: gregor(at)loadingartist.com

a comic about the crazy state of the world right now

a comic about preparing for your end

a comic about meeting a lifelong fan

a comic about making candy

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST: President Trump says he wants America's schools to reopen and quickly. He's undercut guidance from the CDC, calling it impractical. He's even threatened to cut funding for schools that don't reopen. And supporting this push is Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. Here she is speaking last week at a meeting of the Coronavirus Task Force. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) BETSY DEVOS: Ultimately, it's not a matter of if schools should reopen. It's simply a matter of how. They must fully open, and they must be fully operational. MCCAMMON: For more on DeVos' role in this pandemic, we're joined by NPR's Cory Turner, who's been covering her since she became secretary. Hi, Cory. CORY TURNER, BYLINE: Hello. MCCAMMON: So, Cory, let's recap. How did DeVos initially respond to this pandemic? TURNER: Yeah. So back in March, she seemed largely supportive of state and local school leaders' decision to close schools. To help, she waived

Updated at 6:34 p.m. ET In a swift reversal, the Trump administration has agreed to rescind a directive that would have barred international college students from the U.S. if their colleges offered classes entirely online in the fall semester. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement rule change , released last week, would have prohibited foreign students from entering or remaining in the country to take fully online course loads. A number of colleges and universities had already announced plans to offer online-only classes because of the coronavirus pandemic. The agency's July 6 announcement was met with immediate backlash. Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sued the U.S. government in federal court two days later, calling the directive "arbitrary and capricious" and seeking to have it reversed and declared unlawful. Many colleges, universities, municipalities and tech companies expressed their support for the legal challenge in their own court

Updated at 5:45 p.m. ET President Trump dismissed outrage over police killings, saying Tuesday that "more white people" are killed by police than Black people. "So are white people!" Trump said when asked in an interview with CBS News about why so many African Americans have been killed at the hands of police. "So are white people! What a terrible question to ask." Trump added that "more white people, by the way" are killed by police than Black people. More white people may be killed by police annually, but Black Americans are killed at a far higher rate. According to a database of police shootings since 2015 compiled by the Washington Post , 1,301 Black people have been killed by the police in the past five and a half years; 2,495 white people were killed. But, importantly, African Americans, who make up a far smaller portion of the total population than whites, are killed at a rate more than twice that of whites. In another comment also sure to inflame racial tension, Trump said that

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit AILSA CHANG, HOST: President Trump made some incendiary comments today about race and policing. They came during a TV interview with CBS News. He was asked why African Americans are dying at the hands of police officers, and Trump angrily dismissed the question. He said more white people are killed by police. And then he spoke at a news event which was focused on China. That's one of his top foreign policy priorities. NPR's John Ruwitch has spent a lot of time reporting about China. Hey, John. JOHN RUWITCH, BYLINE: Good afternoon. CHANG: Good afternoon. But first, we're going to go and talk to your colleague, NPR White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez. Hey, Franco. FRANCO ORDOÑEZ, BYLINE: Hey. CHANG: Hey. So the president has been under pressure, obviously, to respond to all the emotion and outrage across the country after George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis. Tell us what President Trump said today. ORDOÑEZ: Well, he was asked about

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is back in the hospital, this time to treat a possible infection. She spiked a fever Monday night, according to a press release from the Supreme Court, and on Tuesday underwent an endoscopic procedure to clean out a bile duct stent that was inserted in August. The procedure was done at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore after Ginsburg was first evaluated at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C. According to a press release from the court's press officer, the justice is "resting comfortably and will stay in the hospital for a few days to receive intravenous antibiotic treatment." It marks the second time Ginsburg has been hospitalized recently. In May, the justice underwent nonsurgical treatment for a benign gallbladder condition at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and she participated in oral arguments from her hospital bed. Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Relations between the more than 25,000 U.S. military forces on Okinawa and that Japanese island's 1.5 million residents have long been strained over pollution, crime and overcrowding associated with the 31 U.S. military bases there. Now a new outbreak of COVID-19 cases among American service members stationed on Japan's southernmost territory is fraying things further. As of Tuesday, 100 new cases of COVID-19 have been detected in the past week at five U.S. bases on Okinawa, according to Japan's independent Kyodo News agency. Beyond those bases, where only three cases had earlier been confirmed, Okinawa has had a relatively low impact from the disease, reporting 148 infections and seven deaths. At a weekend news conference, Okinawa Gov. Denny Tamaki called the surge of coronavirus cases among U.S. military personnel "extremely regrettable," according to the Reuters news agency. "I can't help but have strong doubts about the U.S. military's measures to prevent infections," Reuters

Updated at 7:57 p.m. ET To help figure out the U.S. citizenship status of every adult living in the country, the Trump administration has been accumulating driver's license information from states including South Dakota, NPR has learned. South Dakota Public Safety Secretary Craig Price — who was appointed to President Trump's commission on law enforcement this year — signed an agreement in April to share information from driver's licenses and state ID cards with the U.S. Census Bureau, according to a copy of the memorandum of understanding the state's Department of Public Safety provided to NPR. In the past year since the Trump administration failed in its attempt to add the now-blocked citizenship question to 2020 census forms, the Census Bureau has been gathering state and federal records under directives from Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross , who oversees the bureau, and an executive order Trump issued in July 2019 . In addition to allowing states to redistrict using the number of

Updated at 4:45 a.m. ET on Wednesday Jeff Sessions has lost a bid to regain his old Alabama U.S. Senate after falling from grace as President Trump's attorney general. Sessions had been hoping for redemption after enduring months of relentless ridicule from Trump that eventually led to his resignation as the country's top lawyer. But it was not to be. Instead, Sessions conceded defeat to former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville, a political neophyte, who handily beat him in the state's runoff election for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate. "I leave elected office with my integrity intact," Sessions told reporters. "I hold my head high." Tuberville, 65, who was endorsed by the president in the GOP matchup — edged ahead of Sessions in Alabama's state primary in March but failed to secure a majority of the vote, setting up Tuesday's runoff. Tuberville will now face Democratic incumbent Sen. Doug Jones in November. As the race was called late Tuesday, Trump was

Just weeks before his first primary to defend his congressional seat, U.S. Rep. Steve Watkins is facing multiple charges stemming from him registering to vote using the address of a UPS storefront. The charges were filed Tuesday, before the freshman Republican appeared in a debate with two GOP challengers. Shawnee County District Attorney Mike Kagay filed multiple felony counts against Watkins: interference with law enforcement; providing false information; voting without being qualified; and unlawful advance voting. He was also charged with a misdemeanor for failing to tell the Department of Motor Vehicles about a change of address. The charges stem from a ballot Watkins cast in a local election last year. In December, The Topeka Capital-Journal reported that Watkins used a UPS store address on his voter registration. The congressman listed his official residence as a UPS Store in Topeka on a change-of-address form for voter registration in August 2019. Then, he signed an application

Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., said Tuesday that she would lift a hold on more than 1,100 senior military promotions after the Department of Defense assured her that it did not block the promotion of Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman — a key witness in the impeachment inquiry of President Trump. Duckworth, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and combat veteran, put the hold on promotions earlier this month, demanding written confirmation from Defense Secretary Mike Esper that the former National Security Council aide had been recommended for advancement to full colonel. "Donald Trump's unprecedented efforts to further politicize our military by retaliating against Lt. Col. Vindman — for doing his patriotic duty of telling the truth under oath — are unconscionable," the senator said in a statement announcing that she would lift the hold. "I'm glad the Department of Defense was finally able to set the record straight that Vindman had earned and was set to receive a promotion to

In Atlanta today, President Trump will announce big changes to the regulations that govern one of the nation's most significant environmental laws. The aim is to speed up approval for major projects like pipelines and highways, but critics say it could sideline the concerns of poor and minority communities impacted by those projects, and discount their impact on climate change. The 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, was signed into law by President Richard Nixon. It requires federal agencies to consider the environmental effects of proposed projects before they are approved. It also gives the public and interest groups the ability to comment on those evaluations. The administration's new regulations are expected to reduce the types and number of projects that will be subject to review under the NEPA. An earlier version of the proposed rules truncated those reviews in an effort to streamline processes that can take years to complete. It also dropped a requirement

Congressional investigators are launching an inquiry into a handful of companies that landed government contracts related to COVID-19, calling the deals "suspicious" because the companies lacked experience and, in some cases, had political connections to the Trump administration. In a letter obtained by NPR, the chairman of the bipartisan Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis , Rep. James E. Clyburn, D-S.C., asked a roster of administration officials to account for how and why they selected particular companies to provide Personal Protective Equipment, or PPE. Many of the contracts were made without competition at the height of the coronavirus crisis. Seven letters also went out to individual companies asking for information related to those contracts. "The Administration awarded contracts to inexperienced suppliers," Clyburn wrote in a letter addressed to the heads of the Departments of Health and Human Services, Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs. "More than 445

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.