Teaser trailer

• https://youtu.be/826WlpkBZOQ

Rise of the Deceiver is an action co-op game in which players, imbued with powers bestowed upon them by the legendary members of the Wu-Tang Clan, fight against invaders that wish to corrupt their home. It’s been in development for three years, and started as a companion piece to Angel of Dust, a movie produced by Ghostface Killah and directed by The RZA.

While there have been numerous hip-hop-centric video games over the years, very few of them tackle the artistry, history, and culture of the genre beyond using it as set dressing. “We wanted to create something where it was built from the ground up,” Dabby Smith said. “It was by the culture, for the culture, and actually representing what [Wu-Tang Clan] put out there through the years.”

Written by George Takei, Steven Scott, Justin Eisinger
Art by Harmony Becker
Published by IDW Publishing

It Rhymes with Takei fills in the massive blanks George left in his bestselling autobiography of the 1990s by sharing the story of his being a secretly gay man. It’s a book about love, not sex, a book about the pain of hiding one’s true self. It’s a book about fear, about ambition, about shame, about hollow success, and, most of all, it’s a book about growth.

Exactly what it says on the tin.

The Voice has some artifacts, but I had to get it out of my head and into yours.
Peter Griffin Backed by the Sky Power Band:

On May 19, 2025, federal prosecutors charged Rep. LaMonica McIver, a New Jersey Democrat, under a little-known federal statute—18 U.S. Code Section 111—for allegedly assaulting and impeding Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers during a visit to a Newark detention facility. The officers refused her entry to conduct a federally authorized oversight visit. It’s still unclear whether the claimed assault was alleged to be physical or verbal. But what’s clear is that Rep. McIver’s prosecution reveals something much larger: Under the current administration, Section 111 is being reimagined as a blunt political weapon. Not to deter violence—but to silence dissent and criminalize opponents.

Section 111 makes it a crime to “forcibly assault, resist, oppose, impede, intimidate, or interfere with” federal officials engaged in their duties. But here’s the problem: You don’t even need to know they’re federal officials. You can be convicted for shoving someone you think is just someone yelling in your face, even just placing them in “reasonable fear of harm” without physical contact—if they turn out to be a plainclothes agent. That’s not hypothetical.

That’s precedent, courtesy of the Supreme Court over 50 years ago.
Which means this: An undercover agent embedded in a protest, a public meeting, even a constituent town hall could claim to have been “impeded,” and the federal government can treat that moment as a federal crime. Under the current administration’s appetite for authoritarianism, that’s not a loophole, it’s a feature.

Archived at https://archive.is/JvUOO

Out of five critical tech sectors, “China has the most immediate opportunity to overtake the United States in biotechnology,” the Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs said Thursday in its release of a “Critical and Emerging Technologies Index,” covering AI, biotech, semiconductors, space and quantum.

Online culture and censorship have broken the ties that once spurred protesters.

Today, June 4, marks the 36th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre—a moment of both tragedy and hope. It was the bloody end to a nationwide democracy movement that brought together workers and students, the most promising push for political reform in the history of the People’s Republic of China. But despite the courage of many individual Chinese who fought for democracy and the solidarity of their international supporters, there has not been a comparable movement since—and it’s hard to imagine one arising anytime soon.

It wasn't paywalled on my phone, but apparently it is when viewed elsewhere.

One of the key factors mentioned in the article: the erosion of the "the middle ring" from many societies (not just China): "close-ish" but not intimate/familial face-to-face relationships (neighbours, coworkers etc.) that are key to growing a social movement with real world activity.