Too lazy to think of a title

Holy shit. The Israeli whistleblower story CNN just broke is insane. I cannot believe what I’m reading

Rare firsthand accounts by Israeli whistleblowers cast light on the horrific conditions in the Sde Teiman torture camp in Naqab Desert. Palestinians are stripped down, blindfolded, forced in diapers, and forbidden from speaking. They are subjected to beatings and mental degradation regularly. So much depravity that has gone unseen. Doctors performing procedures outside of their expertise, amputations due to zip-typing of abductees’ wrists, having large dogs unleashed on them at night. Being fed food through straws. I can’t believe it. I am truly in shock. And this is just one whistleblower accounting of this. Who knows what else is happening beyond our knowledge

My heart is breaking into a million pieces

Worth mentioning that multiple Palestinians have recounted these stories before, as direct victims detailing their experiences. What's unique about these accounts from CNN Israeli whistle-blower is that they're from an Israeli, therefore people are more likely to take this seriously.

The thing about Microsoft shutting down Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin is that it isn't really a case of finance bros not understanding how game development works. Sure, saying "we need smaller games that will win us awards" while shuttering studios which have a record of producing smaller, award-winning games looks dumb on paper, but you need to know how to parse corporate doublespeak.

In brief, they want the prestige of producing smaller, award-winning games, but not the risk. The way you get the former without the latter is by constantly buying up independent studios which already have successful titles in their portfolios, keeping them around long enough to provide post-launch support, crank out paid DLC for their already-proven properties, and finish development of whatever is currently in the pipeline, then dismantle them and shut them down before they get any funny ideas about risking your money on new, unproven projects.

If you're thinking "hey, that sounds a lot like a predatory business model", well, exactly.

I hope everyone understands, when I say “most endangered habitat on earth”, I mean temperate grasslands.

They’re more endangered than tropical rainforests, coral reefs, the arctic tundra, all of those go-to environments that get more of the spotlight.

Where I live, maybe 25% of the prairie remains in a natural state and that number is dropping. Even these fragments are mostly missing the keystone species that maintain their health, like bison, wolves, and prairie dogs. I know this is the case for other grasslands like the pampas and steppe as well. Vast lands empty of many species that used to call them home.

If you live on temperate grasslands, hold onto them tight, because they’ve been exploited like no other land and most people don’t even know how far the devastation goes.

please please pleaseeee listen to this post and learn the value of temperate grasslands. it makes me very sad that not only have these landscapes been destroyed by colonizers, but even most of the people who live there now don’t see their value. when i say i love midwestern landscapes, people call me crazy just because they’ve never seen the beauty of the tallgrass prairie :(

An overgrown light pole in Poland

Drake might actually kill himself

this is so compelling and heartbreaking and important and i wanted to share it. this is the reality of getting an abortion even with roe v wade in place and it's about to get worse.

we dont even get 9/11 off of work. like i guess you were never THAT sad about it

floor time save me. floor time. save me floor time

Apparently there was some kind of race scheduled at a local park or something so I've been trying to avoid the main trail but a little while ago when I had to cross near it I overheard the following shouted exchange

And goddamn if that didn't rewire my brain a little bit.

Last place is still a place, baby.

I know of a trail racing company that gives the slowest racer who finishes every race a DFL award: Dead Fucking Last. I was a little taken aback by this until I had it explained to me that those last-place finishers are pretty much uniformly people for whom finishing at all was an accomplishment: people undergoing cancer treatments, absolute beginners, runners in their eighties, extremely pregnant people, you get the idea. Moreover, what you see as this person crosses the finish line is all these sporty trail racers, many of whom finished the race literal hours earlier, cheering their hearts out because they respect that, yes, DFL is still a place, baby.

The history of corporate propaganda.

I vividly remember attending a training session with a scan from an 1880-something newspaper that said "unions used to be something we needed, but we're past that now." The corporate propaganda hasn't changed in 130+ years.

if you play video games long enough you see the fandoms treat black characters the same way over and over and over again (wyll ravengard, felix iresso, preston garvey, vivienne de fer, etc etc etc)

"they're boring" "they're annoying" "they're useless" "I never use them" begging you all to take 3 seconds to examine why you hold black characters to such high standards

The Gospel, the IDF's artificial intelligence system which selects sites to target in Gaza (NPR), has been revealed by Israeli intelligence sources to be joined by Lavender, an AI system which identifies human targets with little "meaningful" contribution being made by actual humans (The Guardian). This system has identified over 37,000 targets with an alleged accuracy of about 90% (+972).

Since I know the majority of you are not going to click on any of the links, here are some quotes from anonymous intelligence officers:

None of this is a substitute for reading the article itself. For those who want context around the authors, +972 Magazine is a nonprofit blog/journal run by a group of Palestinian and Israeli journalists. It is specifically focused on Israel-Palestine relations, and is typically critical of Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel's policies. It has a MB/FC rating of "high" for factuality and "left" in terms of political spectrum.