Last month I asserted that I would not stand idly by and let harm come to my neighbors through the actions of the federal government. I am therefore compelled to demand that my neighbor Mahmoud Khalil be released from jail, where he sits accused of no crimes, and returned to his family in New York. The state can press charges against him from there, if they wish. I am motivated not just from a sense of basic fairness, but from concern for the ongoing health of the American Constitution, and all of the laws flow from it.

I don’t know Khalil personally; I didn’t even know his name before last week. But I do know that he is my neighbor, and my fellow New Yorker. Maybe he isn’t my fellow American citizen, but he is a legally established permanent resident of this country, giving him nearly all the same rights that I have, short of voting in elections. Those rights include the right not to be arrested at home, jailed, and then transported a thousand away from his family—all without being charged with any crime.

I probably don’t agree with many of Khalil’s political views, in either direction or amplitude, including the speech and actions at Columbia University that brought him to the attention of the second Trump administration. This has zero bearing on my conviction that the law as defined by the Constitution applies to him, and to any case brought against him. If the state thinks he committed a crime, then let the state say this out loud, and give him a chance to defend himself in court. This is literally a bedrock-level right of every citizen and resident of the United States. It’s right there in 250-year-old ink: fading, but I dare say that you can still make it out.

The Constitution protects Mahmoud Khalil no less than it does me. And if it can’t protect him, then his mistreatment makes me—me personally, and everyone in America I know and love—all of us, it makes all of us suddenly unsafe. For the sake of their own stability and freedom, every American should know that Khalil’s fate is very much bound up in their own.

Janet Mills, the governor of my family’s home state of Maine, and governor Kathy Hochul, who leads my adopted home state of New York, are both showing resolve in the face of Trump’s attempts to meddle with state laws through extralegal coercion. I feel grimly proud of this personally resonant parallel, and I join both governors in standing up to a federal government that wasted no time in implementing a stance of bullying gangsterism to rule the nation.

Mills rebuffed Trump literally to his face last month, telling him coolly that Maine would continue to follow its own laws rather than dance for presidential whims about the presence of transgender athletes in schools. Around the same time, after Trump announced that New York would end the Manhattan congestion pricing enforcement that it had begun only in January, Hochul published a statement saying, essentially: Sorry, who are you?

I happen to hold no strong opinion on one these issues, and very strong feelings about the other. I understand the popularity of both policies to be shaky with with the larger public, and I expect that the Trump administration hopes that this gives them more leverage to use these policies as cudgels, in order to make examples out of two uppity states. But the policies’ popularity, or even the policies’ content, barely matters here. If the federal government wants to challenge a state’s laws, there are well-defined legal routes to do that. When Hochul and Mills say “See you in court”, they mean it literally. Trying to strong-arm a state government into compliant submission through targeted federal harassment of the state’s institutions and citizens is not how America is supposed to work.

The governors’ resistance will cost both states dearly. Already, Maine is getting slammed with federal punishment from multiple directions. As ProPublica reports, there are now more federal agencies “investigating” and penalizing the state then there are transgender school athletes in the state. (That number being: two.) I woke up this morning to the disheartening news that my alma mater, the University of Maine, has lost millions in federal funding over this issue, which mirrors New York’s Columbia University getting similarly hit last week. These aren’t just attacks on the two states; they harm the whole nation, and even humanity as a whole, threatening to slow the advancement of science for years to come. The Trump administration doesn’t care, of course: it’s a price they’re enthusiastically willing to pay if they think it will make a perceived mouthy subordinate cry uncle.

I have hope that both governors—and most of their constituents—realize that giving into the president’s demands would not alleviate these pains, but merely embolden the bully into making ever-greater demands. There’s no avoiding the pain of the years ahead, but we can choose to hold fast to our virtues and principles, at every level, individual and state. The villains that have taken over the federal apparatus can and will continue to hurt us, but we can stand strong to limit the damage they can wreak. My governors give me strength in the example that they set.

The first part of this post contains no puzzle or story spoilers for “Type Help”, but does discuss the story’s genres and mood. I include a warning before mentioning deeper spoilers.

I spent Friday afternoon and evening playing Type Help by William Rous. It’s very good, perhaps great. It’s the first game that I’ve played in eight years that gripped me in the same sort of way that Universal Paperclips did, and it seems likely that this game will join that one in my personal all-timer list.

Type Help names its deduction-game inspirations, including Her Story and Return of the Obra Dinn, on its web page, and these connections become clear as soon as you begin play. The game also reminds me a bit of the TV series Severance in that its frame story posits the existence of a science-fictional technology whose realism is both questionable and unimportant, and furthermore relies on in-world coincidences so profound that the story repeatedly lampshades their unlikelihood. But, also like Severance, the space that this sets up is so much fun to explore that all these rough edges are easy to wave away.

I do have to agree with Zarf, in his own non-spoiler review of Type Help, that for such a strongly written work, the title is so terribly weak. Combined with the cover art, the packaging unfairly makes the game look like either an office farce or a 90s-tech nostalgia trip, and not a period mystery with a horror infusion.

But that horror element is sublime. Zarf writes about how the puzzle-solving experience of this game gradually picks up speed as you play, until you’re positively racing to the meet up with the final scene. To this I would add that the discovery of the horror—whose nature is never explicitly spelled out—moves at the pace of an oily liquid you didn’t realize you’ve been soaking in for hours until you discover it seeping through your notes, pulling its terrible stain inexorably upwards and across your spreadsheet cells as you realize the truth of the narrative layered behind the puzzles. I found the implications of the story far more disturbing than a certain related game’s openly gruesome scenes of sea monsters gobbling up unfortunate sailors, and I loved it.

This carries a key similarity to Universal Paperclips, as well. In both games, you might begin play by thinking “Oh, one of these, I love these!” And you would not be mistaken: just like Paperclips is, in fact, a very good “idle-clicker” game and remains one until the end, Type Help is a solid “Dinnlike” all the way through. But fidelity to the source genre does not stop either game from getting weird, carrying you into truly surprising, even upsetting territory far beyond their respective genres’ expectations—while never needing to stray far from their minimal hypertext user interfaces. And this, more than anything, makes them great.

Before I talk about one or two spoilery things, I must also say with all due humility that I did completely solve this one with no hints, including the elusive “last lousy point” that Zarf wrote about. Putting an LLP into your game is an old tradition in IF, and I did enjoy seeing the ornery old bastard show up again here. (That said, there is at least one easter egg beyond the LLP I needed to be told about, and there may be others still…)

Spoilers from this point on!

Honestly, I just want to gush about how the pocketwatch was a phenomenal prop. It manages to be an homage, a total red herring, and a key plot device all at the same time.

Most obviously, the watch is a direct reference to Return of the Obra Dinn. (Another game that I enjoyed very much.) I was waiting for a character to mention how they heard that it’s an old family heirloom that once belonged to a maritime insurance adjustor.

And while nobody goes that far, characters do talk about it, quite a bit. They fob it back and forth, hide it, steal it, hide it again, die while holding it, and subsequently loot it. Some characters start overtly fearing it as supernatural, which naturally leads the player to start suspecting it too, and to pay close attention to its movements. In my spreadsheet that tracked the characters’ locations during each time code, I added a little “⏱️” emoji to every cell corresponding to the watch’s shifting location and possessor.

And none of that matters, because the disaster that powers the story has nothing to do with the watch. And yet! Paying close attention to how the characters react to the watch, especially their increasingly confused reactions to it as time ticks rightward and the thunderclaps come faster and faster, can play a key role in helping the player to understand the true nature of the horror. While the first big, unmistakable reveal about the curse’s true nature happens during Helen’s confrontation with Eddie and subsequent demise, the watch provides an important “checksum” for understanding various other, finer details of it over the next few hours of play. In the end, I welcomed the watch’s utility to help solve the mystery, even though it absolutely tricked me and led me all a-ticktock down the wrong path first.

So, so good.

Anyway, the game should have been titled I’d Climb The Highest Mountain, right? Or some derivative of that. Let ‘em wonder until the end. Or even The Hangman, get a little Agatha Christie up in there! Seriously.

“Piano Rolls” by Kaptain Kobold is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 .

The band of semi-anonymous young software engineers doing Elon Musk’s bidding in Washington are soldiers recruited into a murderous stike team that is directly and violently assaulting the federal government of the United States. They must be stopped, immediately.

I do not speak in metaphor. These men could not be doing more damage to the country even if they were soldiers of the traditional variety, kicking office doors down and shooting anyone they find, Three Days of the Condor-style. They conduct their shock violence with software rather than bullets, which might be less bloody in the short term—but which promises to be truly catastrophic for not just national security but national identity.

Their code changes, deployed directly to production before the eyes of horrified civil servants, are even now ripping through the guts of the digital infrastructure of the United States, for extralegal purposes that we can only guess at—and with ultimate consequences that we can scarcely imagine.

Even in the very best case, which assumes that these young men are such superheroic engineers that they are injecting completely ironclad-secure and bug-free code into a stupefyingly complicated legacy system in one try and with no testing, they are modifying software that distributes trillions of dollars towards ends known only to themselves and Elon Musk.

Because that level of engineering perfection does not exist outside of the movies, the real situation is almost certainly much, much worse than that. We can surely expect sloppy security holes that subsequent malefactors can take advantage of. Or, perhaps, the whole system might simply break, resulting in the national cash-flow going in directions nobody intended, perhaps following the president’s lead with reservoir management and dumping itself straight into the ground.

I call upon American lawmakers and law enforcers to stop these men immediately, applying the same level of urgency they would to any other band of violent insurgents hewing their way through the national capital.

“Bombed buildings” by Hugo Sundström is licensed under CC BY 4.0 .

I stand and step forward in defense of my friends, family, and neighbors who are women, immigrants, civil servants, scientists, black, brown, queer, disabled, transgender, pregnant, childless, or have any other identity or condition or role now under direct threat by the United States government.

As an individual private citizen, I don’t always know what I can do to help, at any given moment. But I will never step aside and knowingly let harm befall my fellow Americans by the agents of a corrupted government who wants to harm them. That’s the bare minimum, and I state it here.

And I hold fast to my own identity as American, even though it confirms my citizenship of the nation that exercised its sacred democratic power to re-elect a frightened and angry old man who has allowed opportunistic oligarchs to run amok in his name. He can claim he does it it my name as well, but he’s wrong.

And I have nothing but the lowest contempt for the actions of a nation which, in its profound illness, has declared war on its closest allies for no reason beyond the would-be sovereign’s personal grudges, a war no less literal for being fought with economies rather than munitions, one that began with betrayals no less real than a treaty-breaking sneak attack. I don’t think there’s much I can do about this right now rather than stand up and shout no, for whatever good that does, so I do. No! No, no. No.

In the end I choose to express my Americanness the only way I know how, standing stubbornly true to myself even when everyone around me wants to pull me down and push my face into the mire of hopeless cynicism, even when I feel sick by it all, so sick that it feels like I can barely get to my feet, sometimes. I’ll do it anyway. See if I don’t.

Ten years ago this week I launched this blog, though it would take a bit longer to earn its title. I posted to it more or less weekly for the next seven years, until I became a full-time writer for Google and had to slow down. Three years after that, and five months after I left Google, I find that my taste for regular and frequent Fogknife posts hasn’t fully returned. I don’t see this as a problem.

I have resumed writing for myself more than ever, but most of it goes into private journal entries now. For the past couple of years I have been using Nota to create and organize my notes to myself, both personal and professional. Nota replaced dear VoodooPad, which I used daily from 2004 through 2022. VoodooPad was a revolutionary application for its time, but its design remains fixed in the pre-mobile era, with its own file format that makes cross-device syncing unwieldy. Nota instead uses plain old textfiles as its data store, making your work much more portable—and letting me apply the same Markdown-based formatting techniques that I first got familiar with for Fogknife’s sake.

Nota also includes several lovely journaling features that have nudged me into creating, updating, and interlinking near-daily textfiles about my life, and my projects, and the ups and downs of the many interpersonal relationships I’m so fortunate to have. Sometime last year I started to treat these journal entries as daily newsletters to myself, complete with titled sections and top-of-page summaries. This suits me very well; I enjoy building labeled threads of thought like this, day-by-day, and being able to easily retrace my thought-steps around a single topic, flipbooking back and forth in time.

The idea for Venthuffer developed rapidly in these daily notes, for one thing, as did the structures of all of its episodes. I’ve also used these notes as a base camp to explore new directions in both professional and art-project writing—which I look forward to announcing in this public blog, when they’re ready to share.

All of which is to say that I’ve been writing, just not necessarily here in Fogknife. This is fine! The ongoing Venthuffer project is enormously important to me, and so the other writing projects, even the ones that are work-for-hire. I’m happy with the best writing I did Google—there’s a reason it headlines my portfolio—but the truth is that I didn’t get to write nearly as much as I wanted to while I was there. This ten-year mark sees me taking control of my writing career in new ways, and my energy is focused on making something personally meaningful and satisfying from it. Something more to my taste, even when someone’s paying me for it.

So: more to come. Happy New Year!

I have always taken it as a definitional point of pride for Generation X that our childhood of the 1970s and 80s was the final one sentenced to live every day in fear of nuclear annihilation, which on some days seemed like a near certainty. We rejoiced as the Soviet Union fell just as we emerged into adulthood, like a graduation gift felt around the world: Congratulations, you made it. You have all outlived the thing trying to kill you and everyone you love. Fear no more! And since then, it has been the solemn burden of we Gen Xers to tell the generations after ours how lucky they have it, growing up without this terror.

But a thing I learned from Annie Jacobsen’s crushingly grim 2024 book Nuclear War is that my cohort can set this burden down. In the early 90s, the chances of nuclear conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union dropped to zero, sure, by dint of one of those nations ceasing to exist. But the thousands of nuclear weapons possessed by the Soviets did not vanish into fairy dust, and nor did the people who knew how they worked, nor the knowledge to produce more weapons like them. And so three decades later, to hear some experts tell it—the experts that Jacobsen interviews—we are closer to nuclear holocaust than ever before.

It seems plausible that our culture, kids included, simply cares less about nuclear war now. I don’t have any kids, so I’m not sure whether it is a common playground topic the way it was for my classmates. But with culture so fragmented into innumerable online shards, instead of bound together by a handful of shared television networks, I rather assume that young people today aren’t as obsessed with the topic as all of my friends and I were. So many other crises pull at modern kids’ attention all day long, and give them plenty of other reasons for nightmares.

Into this setting drops Nuclear War, and it wants to refresh the cultural focus around its title topic.

Jacobsen’s book carries the subtitle A Scenario, and it makes clear that it speculates one way that things could go down, if worse comes to worst. But the scenario is presented not as precognition but as framework to shock the reader into horror and hatred for nuclear weapons. I can envision its scenario presenting a terrible novelty for a younger reader, who had no idea that instantaneous, irrevocable, and extremely literal destruction of the world is one bad decision away, at every moment. And in the case of older readers like me, the book rattles us into dropping the misconceptions of safety that we’ve held all of our lives.

The most profound shock, delivered again and again through elapsed-time readouts in the title of each short chapter, is how fast everything happens. The total running time of the war in Jacobsen’s scenario, from North Korea firing a single ICBM at Washington to the US and Russia emptying out their full nuclear arsenals at one another, is barely over an hour. If you started a movie and set your phone to Do Not Disturb a minute before that first ICBM fired, human civilization would end before credits rolled. Which they wouldn’t, because an EMP burst probably wrecked your TV, especially if you were sitting literally anywhere in the continental United States. Also you’d probably be blind or dying of rapid-onset radiation sickness if you hadn’t already turned to ash, been impaled by glass, or crushed under rubble from any of the thousands of nuclear fireballs and pressure waves ravaging the entire northern hemisphere all at once. Or swept away by a flood from a dam that malfunctioned because of that same EMP burst. And so on.

It’s the speed that kills you, in nuclear war. Nobody has time to think about anything. Reagan famously lamented out loud how an American president would have only six minutes to decide how to respond to an incoming nuclear weapon, and that fact hasn’t changed today. Jacobsen’s scenario shows how, under this impossible timeline, the kinds of miscommunication found in any stressful situation can easily muddle even the most heroic attempts to avert a worst-case scenario. Once one person launches so much as a single weapon at a nuclear superpower for any reason at all—especially a nation with a hair-trigger “launch on warn” nuclear policy, such as the United States—every road leads to global annihilation, in the theory that this book adheres to.

Jacobsen uses the phrase “zeroed out” several times to summarize the effect of a general nuclear war, with ten thousand years of human progress reset in just a few minutes. The aftermath would not be a sexy Fallout land of high adventure where plucky survivors comb through the crumbling ruins of modern buildings seeking high-tech treasures. There’s nothing left. Every piece of standing human achievement from Stonehenge onwards is obliterated.

In the concluding chapter, Jabobsen spends time with contemporary archaeologists studying an intriguing site, an ancient earthwork containing manufactured objects and structures in a part of the world where nobody expected to find such things. But the objects are all shattered, their purposes frustratingly obscure. We can only guess as to the intentions of the people who made them. Jacobsen suggests that, 25,000 years after the last nuclear submarine launches its final MIRV and the earth has healed enough to support agriculture again, the distant descendants of modern humans—if there are any—would be lucky to find even this much trace of our own cultures.

I took a bunch of other notes about details I’ve had wrong my whole life: how ballistic missiles work in the first place, for instance, and why they’re essentially impossible to stop, once launched. (You can still try, in the same why that you can try to stop a bullet in flight by shooting it with another bullet. It has about the same chance of success.) But that’s not what the book’s about. I learned about Nuclear War from a Warren Ellis blog post, where he mentions that Denis Villeneuve has optioned the book for a film adaptation. “The book is a relentless horror and nobody will thank him for bringing that to cinematic life,” Ellis muses, and I don’t suppose I would either, but I’d watch it anyway.

This book hurt me, it shook me and slapped me across the face, and I needed the wake-up. So did my inner ten-year-old, with his memories, and his nightmares.

There’s a part where Jacobsen really twists the knife, having us watch as the animal residents of the Smithsonian Zoo—among the most innocent of all American immigrants—perish in confusion, pain, and flame in the first minutes of the conflict. If there is a movie made of this book, then I hope that scene is preserved, lingeringly. Let that be the image I carry with me from this experience. I don’t know yet how this book has changed the course of my life, and I can’t know if any of it ultimately matters. But let me press the image of those burning animals to my heart. Give me the scar.

I’ve either shown up on or straight-ahead launched a number of podcasts in and around the video-gamey space over the past year. Here is what they are!

Venthuffer

I have launched Venthuffer, a weekly audio zine:

Venthuffer is a series of monologues about the Steam Deck video game console. I realized in 2024 that I have become as much of a fan of this machine as I have for any piece of digital hardware since my years of deep identification with the Apple Macintosh, when I was much younger. This discovery surprised me a little, and I wanted a space to explore the reasons for it, out loud. Here it is.

As the rest of its About page states, I’m shooting for ten short, scripted episodes. I’ll make more if I find that there’s still plenty of gas in the tank after that, but I’m not banking on it; Jmac’s Arcade felt complete after only six episodes, after all. But this is a new topic, and a new (which is to say older) me, so who can say.

Listen to the first episode of Venthuffer here.

The launch of Venthuffer got a very kind writeup by Jay Springett, too.

Topic Lords

Back at the top of the year, I had a fantastic time guesting on Topic Lords, a long-running weekly chat show hosted by Jim Stormdancer. The episode I’m on is 224: Following A Garden Hose Around In The Dark, also featuring Nathan Fouts of Mommy’s Best Games.

Our hour-and-ten conversation was so much fun—and, honestly, so well edited—that I have relistened to the episode a couple of times, just to make myself happy. Topics include jukebox griefing, experiments with nail painting, the science behind color displays, and crackpot theories around a pen-doodle Bach once made.

I should also note that Bumpy Grumpy, the “lost arcade classic” which Nathan mentions on the episode as his then-current project, has since launched on Steam, and it’s fantastic. Charming, delightfully simple to learn, and quite satisfying to get good at. I achieved the Best Ending with it only last month, after pumping countless pretend quarters into it over several months. (And, yes, it plays great on Steam Deck.)

Third Strongest Podcast

In the Third Strongest Podcast, Ryan Veeder, Sarah Willson, and Zach play through EarthBound, a most peculiar and still-celebrated JRPG released on Nintendo consoles circa 1995. The podcast is 25 episodes long, and somehow I appear on six of them—granted, two are “extrasodes” outside of the main series. You can pick them out by control-effing for my name on the show’s webpage, but honestly you should just listen to the whole series, whether or not you’ve played EarthBound.

In fact, I only started playing EarthBound after listening to the first episode of Third Strongest. (The game is readily available on Switch, through that console’s first-party online emulator.) I emailed the hosts about this fact, and they all got so excited about this bizarre turn that they kept inviting me on to talk about my experiences as a new EarthBound player, versus someone who has played through this game over and over since childhood. I feel like I might have ended up talking about comic books a little too much but I’m still pleased wth my performance.

When preparing to record the first episodes of Venthuffer, I happened across the introduction that I had recorded for the final episode of Third Strongest. I am grateful for the trio’s very kind invitation for me to do this, and I realize now that the pleasure I rediscovered from scripting, recording, and editing a very short monologue about a video game helped inspire Venthuffer, even if it took a while longer to find its hook. So there’s that!

Third Strongest is only one example of a tightly scoped, limited-length podcast series that these hosts have produced. I am compelled to point also to The Complete Guide to Koholint, a show with exactly 256 episodes where each one finds Ryan and Zach deeply discussing a single tile of the 16-by-16 playfield from the original Game Boy edition of The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. And the episode selector on its webpage is exactly what it ought to be.

The time has come for my quadrennial spell, the one I accidentally cast in 2016 and then cast again with purpose in 2020. And thus do I create a blog post before November with the correct title, and so the ritual is already executed to the letter. For the sake of propriety, I shall remain at the lectern for the length of a few more paragraphs.

On Sunday I stood in a neighborhood early-voting line and then cast my ballot for Harris and Walz, and proceeded to fill in all the Democratic circles down-ticket. I wish I had more of a choice in this matter, but I don’t. As in 2020, there is still only one viable political party in the United States with any interest in governance at the state or federal level. Four years ago I was hoping it’d be different by now, but it isn’t.

The other party has vanished completely into an authoritarian personality cult around one man who offers his supporters the chance to melt their personal identities into his own, so that they can enjoy the vicarious thill as he tries to use the full powers of the executive branch to wreck the pillars of national order and punish both individual political opponents and whole populations whom he finds distasteful.

My fellow citizens have every right to feel fearful, hateful, or just bored enough to want that future for themselves, and they are free to vote for its realization. I sincerely hope that their lives improve, somehow and someday, and allow their strangled and suffering hearts to let more air and sunshine in. But until then, I would encourage American readers of this blog to join me in outvoting them. Everything I wrote to my friends not voting for Biden in 2020 holds true today. We don’t vote for candidates whose policies we agree with 100 percent. We vote for the ones who, among those who have a reasonable chance of winning, promise to steer the state in the direction we find most agreeable—which, yes, you can also read as least-disagreeable. And today that means Harris, Walz, and all the Democrats and only the Democrats, up and down the ballot.

This year, when I say “be prepared for a Harris victory”, I mean it in the sense of “Nobody knows what’s going to happen”. Now, or ever. I have lost patience with social-media trends that insist that if Event X happens, then they can tell you exactly the chain of events that will follow. Nobody knows this, in any circumstance, when it comes to something as naturally chaotic as national-scale politics or larger. I saw this come to a crescendo when Biden dropped out and I saw immediate wailing from many otherwise rational people that the election was therefore handed to the Magas. They were proven wrong within days, of course: Biden’s action put the Democrats back into play again. This was the event that made me sure of only one thing in high-level politcs: nobody knows what’s going to happen.

I want to encourage you to take a page from the Stoics, here. While you can and should participate in this election, you can’t know or control its outcome, no more than you can know or control the election’s repercussions after it happens. What you can do is prepare by working on yourself. I know the stance I will hold if Harris wins, and the one I’ll hold if she doesn’t. I have the benefit of practice and experience here–and so do you. You can imagine yourself inhabiting these two futures, murky as they are, and think about the wellsprings of hope in your life that you can draw strength from, allowing you to stand in resolute self-definition for yourself, for your family, your community, your world.

Whatever happens, you’ll need that. I need you to do that. We all need to stand together here and be the best people we can be, as the world swirls and storms around us. That’s all we can do.

Look, they’ve chosen a four-letter abbreviation for themselves, just like another authoritarian movement from a century ago, so why not use it instead of recycling that old one with all of its deniable baggage?

Use it as a noun. Call them “magas”. Each individual member is a “maga”.

Magas aren’t generic History Channel villains. They’re a uniquely American threat, one that deserves to be met with specificity. Practice saying its name with a fleck of acid from the back of your throat. #uspol

https://masto.nyc/@jmac/113385813973250608

I posted the above a day or two after I saw someone else adapt the old saw that goes something like “History has a word for people who helped Nazis even though they didn’t call themselves Nazis, and that word is ‘Nazis’.” They swapped out “Nazi” with “Republican MAGA supporters”, and that seemed to make the pattern lose all its punch. So why not just “Magas”?

News about the rally in Madison Square Garden on Sunday night made me tap out this acerbic bit over breakfast today. I finally did a “My posts do not necessarily represent the opinions of […]” disclaimer to my Mastodon bio, and now’s as good a time as any to start exercising it.