ConstableJelly

The latest appeal comes weeks after the Supreme Court declined to take up a separate case from Trump in which the president is seeking to unwind a $5 million civil verdict that found he sexually abused and defamed Carroll at a Bergdorf Goodman department store in the 1990s.

Trump has denied wrongdoing in both cases.

The new appeal involves statements Trump made against Carroll in 2019, when he was president, that a jury found were defamatory and ordered him to pay $83 million in damages.

Appears he got in trouble twice: once for the actual rape, and another for defaming her in 2019 when that civil case was ongoing.

To repeat: The President of the United States was found “liable” for a rape he did, then got in trouble for defaming his rape victim and is now using the powers of the presidency to both urge the supreme court to excuse him or make the United States government the defendant in his place for the defamatory comments he made while president against his rape victim.

In addition to raising the prospect that Trump should be immune from the litigation, Trump is also asking the court to review whether the United States government should be the defendant rather than the president.

Unforgivably batshit insane.

Conservatives can either stand for freedom, or they can stand for oppression — but they cannot do both. If they truly value individual liberty, they should defend our right to marry. If they turn on us now, they reveal who they really are.

Trump won in 2024 in part due to the left’s overreach. If the right continues down this path, they could meet a similar fate in future elections. As more people come out as LGBT, and as more LGBT people voice concerns with far-left activist orthodoxies, Republicans should be broadening the tent, not excluding these people and pushing them away. Hemorrhaging potential voters to get your druthers isn’t a winning political strategy. The pendulum from hell will just keep swinging back and forth until we all decide we’ve had enough.

“I stood with the Leopard’s Eating People’s Faces Party, but now that they’re trying to eat my face, I call on the Leopard’s to do better, and eat only the faces that reason and fairness dictate should be eaten.”

That’s not the lesson, Reid, you learned it wrong again!

For me, Insomniac’s design style is feeling outdated. I’ll be pumped for their next Spider-Man game because I love that character, I love their version of the character, and the games are fun to play at least in a tactile sense.

This one does not have me convinced.

I know this feeling all too well, glad you did right by yourself. And remember, even if you’re doctor says, “there’s nothing we can do, just rest and let your body recover itself,” it was still worth doing to be safe.

"You can’t rule out the possibility that executives are idiots, but that shouldn’t be your default belief. I don’t think there is any obvious path that would have doubled the revenue from id games.“Could they have gotten more with a different pricing strategy? Could they have created more things for fans to buy? Could they have cost-effectively marketed in a way that reached more players that would have loved and bought the games? Could they have changed the game designs and broadened the appeal to more players without alienating existing ones? Could they have produced the games at a lower cost, faster or cheaper? I really don’t know.”

I’m no expert, but ya doy. Microsoft’s play to pursue low-cost, high-return recurring revenue by shoving their extraordinarily talented single-player studios (Rocksteady, Arkane) at OBVIOUSLY terrible live service titles is bad enough on its own but is also a telling reflection of the executive mindset (this goes for Sony too). Profit is king, data is infallible, and development talent is best directed at our behest and is easily expendable when needed.

Let game devs do what they want. Some games will fail, but jesus, not at the scale and volume that they’re failing at right now.

RPS is one of two video game sites I subscribe to, the other being Jank, which is a direct, independent spinoff of RPS. They have a consistent house style that values the fun and creativity of good prose (even if they sometimes fail to reach that standard). I imagine some people would find their style hamfisted, but it feels authentic to me in a way that almost every other publication doesn’t. They don’t have that homogenizing tone to their voice that’s reaching for the superficial cultural moment and SEO optimization that outlets like IGN have.

I’ve gotten the opposite impression, especially with all those recent AI advocates getting booed and laughed at by students during university commencement speeches. It feels like the usual ‘powerful elites with huge platforms’ - including legacy and independent media - versus almost everyone else.

Grossly inconsiderate of Mamdani to be governing so efficiently and effectively to date for all the conservatives and liberal democrats who now have to work that much harder to continue their efforts discrediting democratic socialism as an unrealistic framework for politics in the U.S.

I don’t do multiplayer games, so Elden Ring I think is at the top for me at around 200 hours. Although, if you looked on Playstation it would probably be one of the Spider-Man games because my kids use my account to just play them as a sandbox.

I like the Dualsense a lot at its best, but I go through roughly a controller per year probably. One of them something with the rumble loosened. Not noticeable in some games, but when I was playing Returnal it sounded like a jackhammer. Another the sticks got…sticky in a way that was really distracting. Stick drift on another, and my current one the right arrow stopped working. I had to re-map it to the left stick click to play Infinite Wealth, and other games like Elden Ring just won’t work with it.

“If you don’t figure out how to be excited to live here, you’re just going to be left behind.”

We got terribly swarmed in a very remote area in Michigan’s upper peninsula while walking in the woods. My partner and I grabbed pine branches and started waving them around us while we ran back, but my dog kept thinking I was playing as I tried to wave them around her and would run off from me. Within 20 minutes of getting back, she was covered in massive lumps all over her body, her lips and ears were grossly swollen, and she started breathing really, really shallowly.

There were no open or emergency vets anywhere nearby, so we tried to give her some benadryl and water as best we could. Luckily, she was well-recovered by morning. But the danger posed by swarms of mosquitos became abundantly clear to me.

“Actual malice” is the high legal standard that public figures must meet to prevail in a defamation case.

I was curious what side enjoys the benefit here given, y’know… the First Amendment, and it seems like this is definitely a performative move on the government’s side.

Adam Steinbaugh, a First Amendment lawyer at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, shared a different assessment on Monday.

“Patel said proving actual malice is a ‘lay up’ (no), but the allegations in this complaint don’t even hit the backboard,” Steinbaugh wrote on X. “It will, however, accomplish the primary goal: making media outlets weighing a story think about the cost for attorneys to get a meritless lawsuit tossed.”

I’m not sure this holds up logically. WaPo and NYT did gangbusters during Trump’s first term, before their ownership structure and content guidelines pivoted hard toward institutional supplication.

There is value to the credibility that comes from standing up to actual authoritarianism, if you’re not captive to the billionaire mindset. I have to imagine that the cost/benefit for publicity like this is pretty attractive to these publications’ accounting departments.

In the context of the article, this sounds merely like evidence for the appeals case aiming to overturn the order to block information sharing between the two agencies. So…at best they don’t get to continue breaking the law? Which seems appropriate - we can’t just shoot everyone in the back who breaks a privacy law 42,695 separate times. It’s not like they’re teenagers stealing snacks from Walmart.

The ongoing case over IRS and DHS data sharing is now set to be heard by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. DHS is actively appealing Kollar-Kotelly’s November order blocking the IRS from sharing data with DHS, which was signed last year by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. The then-acting commissioner of the IRS resigned after the deal was signed.

The linked article is from California’s office of the attorney general related to an existing lawsuit. As a non-Californian, I am supremely disappointed that this is happening just at the state level, but credit should still go where its due. And if their legal action sets a precedent that makes it easier for other states (or dare I hope, at the federal level if and when we get strong antitrust regulators like we had under Biden), then all the better.

Search results on Amazon are fully pay-to-play anyway. You don’t get anywhere near the top of the list without paying for the privilege. No big deal for slop producers who sell in volume, but basically useless for small businesses or private sellers.

“I have a chip on my shoulder,” she said, describing her drive to prove she can win over private equity in Silicon Valley based on merit, not inheritance or legacy …[T]he young founder hasn’t taken money from her parents for Phia. Instead, she’s insisted on raising outside capital even as some investors remain fixated on her personal life instead of her business venture.

I appreciate the sentiment, but it would be delusional to think her ability to “win over private equity” was divorced at all from her father’s legacy and last name. And actually, I’m not sure I appreciate the sentiment. In 2026, merit is way down the list, like scrawled sideways in the margins, of things that matter to private equity.

I did read the synopsis of it and thought it sounded like an interesting take. I’m not sure I liked the movie enough to bother with the sequel though. As an ending to its own contained story, it felt really tone-deaf.

I just watched The Black Phone last night. Spoiler:

How disappointing…