Hello, friends! Has the current political climate got you down? Then come celebrate Pride with LB with a FREE showing of the Japanese musical theater show, Baddy: The Bad Lot Come From The Moon!
When: 6 PM Saturday, July 5th Where:NESFA clubhouse, 504 Medford Street, Somerville, MA 02145
Plot summary (from TakaWiki): The story is set in the capital of Earth, Takarazuka-City. The peaceful planet Earth — a united world where war, crime, and all evils have been overcome — receives a visit from Baddy, a vagabond rogue from the moon. Baddy is a super-cool, elegant, and a heavy smoker. But he soon finds that smoking is outlawed across the face of the Earth. Baddy, accepting no limits, leads his gang and engages in all sorts of wrongdoing to make the dull world more interesting. His final goal is to steal the planetary budget guarded in Takarazuka Big Theater Bank. But all-mighty female investigator Goody is gaining on him!
The Takarazuka Revue is an all-female cast, performing male and female roles both, and Baddy is a confection of silliness, lobster costumes, public queerness, and passport forgery. Be here, be queer!
(This event is open to the public. But ain't nothing saying we can't have a multi contingent here to enjoy it...)
1. I want to not have a headache. I need better health. 2. I want AO3 to not be down for maintenance right now. I need entertainment when I have pain and dysfunction. 3. I want to not have to worry about whether I’m communicating clearly enough to overcome other people’s bad—faith takes and will to misunderstand me. I need to not be judged by people whose brains don’t work like mine. 4. I want Mom to stop smoking. I need to worry less about her and it not reassuring at all that she has to be on blood thinners bc she won’t give up nicotine. 5. I want to have a fancy TENS unit that can give my body sensations to a doctor ( @or other third parties) for the purpose of getting them to believe me about medical bullshit. I need people who disregard how much I hurt or how tired I am to have to put up or shut up.
Let’s struuuuuuuuggle… I took a call on the Lovecast this week from a woman who slept with a former professor when she was 19 and he was 27. They were both consenting adults, she wasn’t his student anymore, she pursued him… and then he dumped her for someone else. Years later, she reached out to … Read More »
Once upon a time, I was friends with a guy named Jim. A very, very few of you might know him. Almost all of you won’t.
I walked away some years ago, blocked him on the socials over his support for the fascist, because I said that the fascist’s promises absolutely, positively, literally required American concentration camps, and that’s what he was supporting by supporting the fascist, and I could not abide that…
…and yet, he carried on, saying I was a fool, and that none of it would ever happen.
(I asked him then why did he support someone he insisted was lying to him. I do not remember getting an answer, before I quit.)
So now that we have American concentration camps…
…and now that people with direct access to the fascist are talking about sending literally every American citizen of Latino heritage there to die…
(it will require more concentration camps than that, of course, but that’s a detail which makes no difference)
I wonder…
…has he yet been moved to repentance?
Or is he still a good and solid member of that wretched cult?
It’s immaterial now, of course. We are long past the point where the pebbles’ opinions matter, and crimes already done cannot be undone.
But once in a while, I think of it.
And for a moment – a pointless, irrelevant moment – I still wonder.
So, yesterday was Pivot Day – the day in the middle of the year. From this point on 2025 is on the downhill run.
The Good: I finally managed to plug a hole in my guitar rig. I’ll be paying on it for a while, because my discretionary funds became reassigned to survival. It’ll take me a bit to clear the debt, but some opportunities are the kind of thing that passing one up involves a lot of self-kicking of one’s posterior, no others need to be involved.
And then there’s the not so wonderful. The novella I finished, “Riding the Tiger”, wound up having a love relationship component in it. I want to stop doing this to myself, but I write about people, and romantic Relationships are something people do sometimes. There’s also a quest for “The ONE”, and that’s a major interest to a lot of folks. This is a bigger deal when someone’s been in the hospital – hospitalization is a solitary experience, as I’ve been through myself, and it’s a powerful stabilizer to have a romantic partner backstopping someone who’s going through a tough medical patch or waking up from being kept under for a while.
Editing didn’t happen yesterday, so I’m wondering what’s going on. My editor isn’t loquacious by any measure, but this is atypical for her – I hope she’s alright.
I’m doing some work on Holly and The Wizards 3: The Lost Sister and Holly And the Wizards 4: Putting it all on the line, so maybe that’ll keep me focused for a bit. I’ve already got the start of the fifth one. My goal is to go through and clean out a lot of stuff in my Work in Progress folder so I can get a lot of stuff finished. My goal is to get as close to done with all of my writing as I can manage to do. I also know that having a lot of ideas sitting around is common for writers. The issue is that I also have a lot of stuff sitting around in my Ideas folder and the other folders of my musical projects, along with a desire to get my guitar and violin callouses back up to playing trim. I know stuck for me doesn’t mean the same thing as it does for others, pretty much like all conditions are subjective experiences, but I’m feeling sort of that way right now. I know a big part of it is all the work I’ve done on the Déjà vu trilogy and the novellas in that world, and finishing something like that is sort of a huge deal that leaves an empty spot in its wake.
And by the way, be well all of y’all. I don’t say it enough, I value what effort y’all put into reading what I write here.
Current Mood:blah
Current Location:Home
Current Music:Natalie Cole and Diana Krall - "Better Than Anything"
Making dinner was so hard I couldn't eat dinner. I just laid on my bed and couldn't talk or think properly at all.
It was scary because it meant that the problem wasn't contained in the immediate aftermath of counseling or whatever (not that I really expected it to be, given that I'd actually spent most of the session talking about how I was surprised not to be triggered by something that very reasonably could have been expected to leave me feeling really bad). And it was miserable.
I ended up sleeping for three or four hours and woke up because I needed to pee and D came to bed about that time. He thought I was asleep because I didn't move or talk. Until I had to get up for the bathroom and then after I came back to bed I was sobbing and we talked a little.
The conversation was good and useful. We came up with some plans. I know D has been struggling with poor sleep and I wouldn't have done this after midnight if I'd had much choice about it. But I did feel much better afterwards.
Today has started normally. But then so did yesterday (I was relieved when I could open the curtains and do chores while feeling okay), so who kmows.
Mori: our headspace has started having weather and seasons, but it’s not as marked in changes as out here. It gets cold enough to snow sometimes but rarely sticks, it gets up to maybe eighty, warm but not HOT, and while it rains more often than it snows, it’s pretty much never windy. Rawlin has slept outdoors here her entire life (a woman her size finds human-size dwellings claustrophobic) and is fine; between her fur coat, a poncho, and her winter den above the hot springs, she’s always been able to make herself comfortable.
But this summer has been hot, and she’s been fronting way more, leading us to learn that she overheats pretty quickly. Makes sense, since she barely sweats.
What’s more, she SHEDS. Still not as bad as our roomy cat, though.
I can’t get the pictures to load on Imgur, but I do have pics of Bat’s 10’x25’ storage unit, packed chin-high with decaying cardboard boxes and trash bags full of a mish-mash of possessions packed, at the last minute, in no logical order. How did Bat come to be in possession of a full storage unit of DOOM? Some of that is AuDHD executive dysfunction, and some of it is life circumstances being hard for someone with those disabilities to navigate. You may have seen the ADHD aphorism “DOOM” ie. “Don’t Organize, Only Move”? Well, you’ll be seeing it a lot in this post.
I will tell the sad tale behind a ( Read more... ) Wow, long post is long.
Just finished: Alien Clay by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Yeah, I think this is my Hugo best novel pick. It was really good, really timely, fucking gross, and gave me nightmares. It's very much a confluence all of Tchaikovsky's quirks—rather darkly funny narrator, alien minds, and the particular type of resolution he goes for. All of those things happen to work for me quite a bit. This one reminded me quite a bit of Jeff Vandermeer but less nihilistic and I liked the characters more.
Currently reading: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett. This was the only novel on the Hugo list where I'd never heard of the author or the book. I'm loving it so far though. It's a murder mystery set in a city where only engineered seawalls stop the things from Attack on Titan from demolishing the place every wet season. A noble is murdered in a mansion (not his mansion) via a tree growing through his body. The person charged with investigating the murder is an old autistic woman who doesn't leave her house so she gets a young man to be her eyes and ears. The murder mystery structure makes it rather different from not just this batch of nominees but the other award lists in general, which is also intriguing.
Today has been a day of cramps, grocery shopping, more cramps, talking to people on the phone, learning to debone a chicken, and having figured out when to do class work to get ahead of schedule without getting a headache from the overhead fan throwing flickering shadows over everything when the sunshine is coming in the clerestory window.
Just a reminder that Hey.Cafe exists. It's Canadian-based and Canadian-owned. It's an alternative to Twitter and the rest - however well-behaved they are - just in case.
I could barely do the morning chores I usually feel neutral-to-positive about this morning -- I open the curtains, unload the dishwasher, make a pot of tea, get breakfast for myself... Things that are always the same and always different. It can be very grounding.
Today I wasn't especially tired and I wasn't in pain or anything, I just didn't want to. I couldn't imagine doing the first tiniest step.
This is a sign of burnout. I need a break. I was telling my counselor this evening that a break for me has to be somewhere away from my house, because my house is full of reminders of chores I need to do, things that get on my nerves, etc. I am not good at relaxing, but when I can do it it doesn't tend to happen at home.
I did an okay amount of work today but near the end of the day I was in this focus group about "inclusion" in our workplace. These things can be kinda therapeutic but by the end I was thinking that we keep having surveys and stuff like this, where we tell some nice external person all our woes and we're assured that the feedback is anonymized into themes that cannot identify us, but all that means is our specific nuanced articulations all get flattened in to "we all have good colleagues who care about their work but the executive team keep letting us down," and we're going to get the same kind of response from said executive team about how impressed they are at everyone's honesty and how committed they are to addressing these themes, and then we'll do this all over again in a year or two.
I felt really tired by the end of it, which wasn't great because it was almost time for my first counseling session in almost a month. A real "let me explain, no there is too much let me sum up" kind of situation.
My counseling happens on the phone and usually in my bedroom; I normally come right back downstairs in search of dinner, but this time I just lay on my bed for something ridiculous like an hour. I kept trying to get up and go back downstairs but again: so many steps. And it was relatively peaceful just lying there.
Since I had to come downstairs and try to eat dinner I'm feeling more depersonalization, so maybe all of this has been more stressful or triggery than I realized. I hate feeling like this; is probably the most uncomfortable symptom of my anxiety/depression.
Listen to me read this post here (not an AI-generated voice!), subscribe to the feed in your podcast app, or download the recording for later.
It feels like every week I write something along the lines of “Trump’s crypto conflicts surge to new heights”, but Trump’s crypto conflicts have again surged to new heights as the Emirati investment fund Aqua 1 pours $100 million into his World Liberty Financial crypto project, leaving former corruption frontrunner Justin Sun in the dust.
Elsewhere, FHFA Director Bill Pulte tries regulating by tweet, directing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to consider crypto as mortgage reserve assets — because nothing says economic stability like tying your ability to afford a home to an asset known for its dramatic boom and bust cycles. And crypto PACs are throwing cash into a Virginia special election to try to install a crypto booster in the seat that previously belonged to crypto skeptic Gerry Connolly, while New York’s mayoral primary sent crypto (and other) billionaires into full panic mode.
Welcome to the circus.
This publication is entirely reader-supported. If you value Citation Needed, a pay-what-you-want subscription helps me keep reporting, researching, and writing.
In the White House
Trump business interests
Aqua 1 Foundation, a United Arab Emirates-based crypto fund, has spent $100 million to acquire WLFI tokens (tokens issued by the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial Project) and cultivate a close relationship with the Trumps. They have just surpassed shady crypto billionaire Justin Sun and his $75 million investment to become the single largest holder of WLFI tokens.1 World Liberty also profited massively last month from a deal in which Emirati investment firm MGX used the company’s USD1 stablecoin to perform a $2 billion investment into Binance [I83]. In a press release, Aqua 1 claimed that they and World Liberty would work closely to “jointly identify and nurture high-potential blockchain projects”, and said that World Liberty “plans to support the launch of Aqua 1’s Aqua Fund — a UAE-domiciled investment fund ... dedicated to accelerating the Middle East’s digital economy transformation”.2 For all Trump likes to talk about “America First” crypto projects, his businesses are looking very UAE-first.
World Liberty also just announced a partnership with London-based Re7 Capital, a decentralized hedge fund backed by the Hong Kong multi-family office VMS Group. The partnership aims to increase USD1 uptake on BNB Chain, the blockchain run by Binance.3 Connections between Binance and Trump have already been controversial, with Democratic Senators Warren, Durbin, and Blumenthal writing a May letter requesting information on Trump’s connections to Binance and its former executives, and opining that “The convergence of [former Binance CEO] Mr. Zhao’s pardon application and Binance’s financial entanglements with the President’s family presents urgent concerns regarding the integrity of our justice system.”4
There have been rumblings that Trump has sold some of his stake in World Liberty as Democrats in Congress have tried to hold up crypto legislation over his substantial conflicts of interest. Most of this stems from an update to the fine print on World Liberty’s website which now says that the Trump family-owned DT Marks Defi LLC owns a 40% stake in World Liberty, down from the 60% it displayed previously.5 However, information on the World Liberty Financial site has regularly been wrong, and neither number matches the 75% ownership Trump declared in his most recent financial disclosures that were only just published on June 13, 2025.6
A journalist asked Trump if he was “open to the idea of pulling away from [his] personal crypto ventures, just for the next few years, if that helps get these crypto bills passed?” to which Trump just repeated “I’m president”, in case we were unaware. Technically his incoherent ramble was a bit longer than that, but it didn’t contain much more information.
Well it’s a very funny thing, crypto, so. I became a fan of crypto, and to me it’s an industry— I view it as an industry. And I’m president. And if we didn’t have it, China would, or somebody else would, but most likely China, China would love to. And we’ve dominated that industry. It’s a big industry, by the way. In fact, when the stock market went down recently, crypto and bitcoin and all of that went down much less than anybody else as a group. Uh, and we’ve created a very powerful industry, and that’s much more important than anything that we invest in. We— we invest in it, but really that was an industry that wasn’t doing particularly well. I got involved with it a couple of years ago and, uh, before this whole— before the second term. I— I got involved before I decided to run. I only decided to run because I saw what was happening and Biden was incompetent and the administration was crooked and incompetent, and I was in bitcoin then. Not— not knowing if I was going to do it a third time. So uh, it’s become amazing. I mean it’s— the jobs that it produces, and I notice more and more you pay in bitcoin, I mean people are say— it takes a lot of, uh, pressure off the dollar and it’s a great thing for our country, so I— I don’t care, I don’t care about investing. You know, I have my— my— I have kids, and they invest in different things, they do believe in it, but I’m president. And what I did do there is build an industry that’s very important. And you know, if we didn’t have it, China would.
Well, that clears things right up.
In government
Ten days after The Lever published leaked messages between Democratic operatives and members of the crypto industry suggesting that pro-crypto Democrats could get air cover for supporting Trump-supported crypto bills by introducing “symbolic anti-corruption amendments to the final bill prohibiting President Donald Trump and elected officials from profiting from cryptocurrencies knowing the effort would be ‘doa,’ or dead on arrival” [I86], Adam Schiff has triumphantly announced his Curbing Officials’ Income and Nondisclosure (COIN) Act to “put a stop to [Trump’s] corruption in plain sight”.8 He announced the bill, which will not pass, less than a week after voting in support of the GENIUS Act. Schiff benefitted substantially from the crypto industry’s $10 million opposition to his fellow Democratic opponent in the primary, Katie Porter, and he received direct support from various executives at companies including Ripple, Coinbase, and Andreessen Horowitz.
Crypto mortgages
On June 25, Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pultea published a memo directing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to “prepare a proposal for consideration of cryptocurrency as an asset for reserves in their respective single-family mortgage loan risk assessments.” The memo, Pulte said, came after he did some “significant studying”, and was aimed at satisfying Trump’s “vision to make the United States the crypto capital of the world.”9 Despite the official letterhead and Pulte ending his tweet with the Trumpian pseudo-judicial all-caps sign-off of “SO ORDERED”, as of five days after the post, Pulte’s directive does not actually appear on the FHFA’s list of official orders and may have solely been issued via Twitter.10
As the directive currently only orders the two companies to prepare a proposal, details on what this would ultimately look like are somewhat scarce. However, Pulte noted that any proposal should not require the cryptoassets to first be converted to dollars, and that only assets “that can be evidenced and stored on a U.S.-regulated centralized exchange subject to all applicable laws” should be considered. The latter is a somewhat controversial caveat for the “not your keys, not your coins” segment of the crypto populace, who view storing crypto on a centralized exchange as an unacceptable dereliction of control to the types of intermediaries crypto was supposed to make obsolete.
Though any move in this direction is still in its early stages, the tweet is another attempt by the Trump administration to integrate crypto into one of the most central parts of the American economy, and one where instability has particular potential to inflict massive consequences on everyday people. Many interpret Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention of bitcoin as a direct response to the 2008 financial crisis, and his inscription of the headline “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on the brink of second bailout for banks” into the bitcoin blockchain’s genesis block as a signal of his anger at government intervention and the failures of big banks.
Now, bitcoin and other cryptoassets are increasingly threatening to themselves introduce new instability. Some other companies have also gone beyond just considering crypto holdings as reserve assets when determining mortgage suitability, as is indicated by this memo, with Coinbase recommending people use their crypto borrowing program to borrow money to pay their mortgages,11 and other crypto companies such as Milo offering high-interest mortgages with crypto collateral. Milo has also expressed interest in securitizing their crypto loans in the future, because when have securities backed by high-risk mortgages ever gone wrong in the past?12
House Republicans are working to push forward crypto legislation, possibly by advancing both the Senate’s GENIUS Act and the CLARITY Act market structure bill in a combined vote.13 The GENIUS Act has already passed the Senate, and Trump has urged the House to push it through “LIGHTNING FAST” [I86].
Texas is the third state to enact legislation authorizing the creation of a state bitcoin reserve, following New Hampshire and Arizona [I83, 84].14
In regulators
The Supreme Court has denied a request to take up a case challenging the IRS’ demands for information from companies such as Coinbase. The plaintiff, James Harper, first argued in 2020 that his Fourth Amendment rights had been violated when the IRS “obtained a vast quantity of Coinbase records by means of a dragnet subpoena devoid of individualized suspicion”. The district court dismissed his claims, and the First Circuit upheld the ruling on appeal. Harper’s Supreme Court petition earned support from Coinbase; Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter); the DeFi Education Fund advocacy group; the states of West Virginia, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Ohio; and several others—but was ultimately denied.15
SEC
Federal Judge Analisa Torres rejected the joint request by Ripple and the SEC to lift the August 2024 permanent injunction ordering Ripple to obey securities laws and reduce the $125 million penalty to only $50 million [I63]. This outcome is no huge surprise given Torres’ previous skepticism towards a malformed request to do the same thing [I84]. Torres elaborated:16
Not that long ago, the SEC made a compelling case that the public interest weighed heavily in favor of a permanent injunction and a substantial civil penalty. ... First, a penalty was necessary because Ripple had violated the law. ... Second, the SEC pressed for a permanent injunction because Ripple’s misconduct was reckless and likely to continue. ... None of this has changed—and the parties hardly pretend that it has. Nevertheless, they now claim that it is in the public interest to cut the Civil Penalty by sixty percent and vacate the permanent injunction entered less than a year ago.
Torres essentially left Ripple with two options: accept the earlier penalties and walk away, or continue fighting to have the judgment overturned on appeal. Ripple chose the former the following day, dropping its cross appeal against the SEC. Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse also wrote that they still expected the SEC to drop their appeal as well, which was filed before Trump took office and which sought penalties closer to the nearly $2 billion originally requested by the agency.17
In elections and political influence
Crypto super PACs have just spent $1 million to back Democrat James Walkinshaw in the Virginia special election to replace Representative Gerry Connolly, the former Ranking Member of the House Oversight Committee who died in May.18 Walkinshaw, a longtime chief of staff for Connolly, won the “firehouse primary” with about 60% of the vote.19 Connolly had been a staunch opponent of crypto, recently opposing Trump’s efforts to establish a strategic crypto reserve and blasting Trump’s memecoin as “open corruption”.2021 Walkinshaw, on the other hand, writes on his website that “we must embrace the next generation of technology”, including blockchain.22
Zohran Mamdani’s win in the New York mayoral primary is already making crypto billionaires sweat, and it’s making me wonder if the crypto lobby will pile some of their cash into the city’s general election later this year. Trump “Crypto & AI Czar” David Sacks reposted a clip of Mamdani expressing his opinion that “I don’t think we should have billionaires”, tweeting: “Wake up, Silicon Valley. This is the future of the Democrat Party. Communism has defeated liberalism. Even Bill Clinton has bent the knee. You basically have two choices now: Get on board with MAGA or prepare to be on Mamdani’s dinner menu.”23
While Mamdani has not expressed an opinion on crypto, his upcoming opponents sure have. Incumbent mayor Eric Adams, elected as a Democrat but running for re-election as an Independent, recently appeared at the Bitcoin Conference to reinforce his self-anointed title of “bitcoin mayor” and suggest that New York City issue bitcoin-backed municipal bonds (an idea that was quickly swatted down by NYC Comptroller Brad Lander, who was also a candidate in the Democratic primary, coming in third place after cross-endorsing Mamdani) [I85]. Mamdani’s closest opponent in the primary who will now also be running as an Independent candidate in the general election, former New York governor and alleged sex pest Andrew Cuomo, advised crypto exchange OKX after resigning as governor in 2021, when the company faced criminal charges that would ultimately land them more than $500 million in penalties.2425 And the Republican contender, perennial candidate Curtis Sliwa, tweeted during his 2021 campaign that he would “make NYC the most cryptocurrency-friendly city in the nation” by allowing property taxes to be paid in crypto, installing more crypto ATMs, and encouraging businesses to accept crypto.26 (That said, he also later criticized Adams for spending too much time with “crypto profiteers”, “crypto currency pirates”, and “crypto monsters”.2728)
Tyler Winklevoss, one of the twin billionaires behind the Gemini crypto exchange who contributed millions of dollars to political campaigns in 2024, seems to be at least considering bankrolling an opponent, writing that he is “torn and undecided” on the idea before launching into a long screed dismissing the young New Yorkers who turned out in record numbers this election as spoiled and ignorant private school kids living in apartments paid for by their Wall Street parents.29
In the courts
John Woeltz and William Duplessie, charged with kidnapping an Italian cryptocurrency millionaire and torturing him for weeks in a New York City apartment, have pleaded not guilty. They’re currently being held without bail, and are previewing their defense somewhat as they argue that the Italian man wasn’t kidnapped at all. According to the defense, he was in fact “having the time of his life” as he partied with his alleged captors, freely coming and going from the townhouse. Prosecutors have claimed that the alleged captors set up the photos suggesting that the victim wasn’t being held against his will.30
A Pennsylvania man has been sentenced to eight years in prison for his role in a $40 million crypto Ponzi scheme involving scam companies called EmpowerCoin, ECoinPlus, and Jet-Coin.31
Prosecutors in Massachusetts and Georgia have been trying to tackle North Korea’s tactic of having malicious contractors apply for jobs with cryptocurrency firms and then use their access to steal funds. In simultaneous announcements, Massachusetts declared they had charged nine individuals and Georgia charged four.3233
Spanish police have arrested five people on charges connected to their alleged laundering of $540 million in stolen cryptocurrency obtained from investment frauds targeting more than 5,000 victims. The arrests were the result of an international operation supported by Europol.34
Elsewhere in crypto
Polymarket
Crypto betting platform Polymarket is facing renewed allegations of outcome manipulation, again involving Ukraine. When the outcomes of a bet on the Polymarket platform are challenged, the dispute is resolved through a platform called the UMA Protocol, where holders of the UMA token are expected to act as “impartial arbiter[s] of the outcomes of relevant markets”. However, in the past, large holders of the UMA token have swung the outcome of votes, such as in March when one UMA whale manipulated the outcome of a betting market over whether Ukraine would agree to Trump’s mineral deal. At the time, Polymarket stated “This market resolved against the expectations of our users and our clarification ... This is an unprecedented situation, and we have been in war rooms all day internally and with the UMA team to make sure this won’t happen again. This is not a part of the future we want to build.” [I80]
Despite those promises, it sure seems to be happening again, this time in a $14 million betting market over — yes, really — whether Ukrainian President Zelenskyy would wear a suit. When the president, known for almost exclusively wearing military fatigues, appeared at a NATO summit in Germany wearing a jacket and pants that looked at least suit-like, media outlets including the BBC and even one of Polymarket’s own Twitter accounts noted that he’d finally donned a suit. However, the resolution of the market to “yes” was challenged, punting the decision to UMA, where whales have been pushing for a “no” outcome. And despite the flood of reporting on the suit from various news agencies collated by some Polymarket users,35 Polymarket issued a clarification on July 1 that “a consensus of credible reporting has not confirmed that Zelenskyy has worn a suit”.36
zelenskyy wears a suit while visiting germany. this is, technically, a suit, as a suit is just a garment where the jacket and pants have been cut from the same cloth pic.twitter.com/CjLXTzMMaA
Crypto market maker Wintermute (yes, they’re really called that; no, these guys never actually read the sci-fi they name their companies after) has just secured a bitcoin-backed line of credit from Cantor Fitzgerald, the company once headed by Trump Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (who followed the Trump strategy of “divestment” by just putting his sons in charge). CoinDesk says:37
The lending and borrowing of crypto was taking place on an industrial scale several years back, but many of the firms involved either incurred heavy losses or were forced into bankruptcy as contagion spread through the industry. But Cantor’s debut perhaps signals a new and more institution-friendly phase.
Arrested Development’s Tobias and Lindsay Fünke say:
Did it work for those people?
[laughing] No, it never does. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might, but... but it might work for us.
The Solana DEX Jupiter was supposedly a decentralized project because it was governed by a DAO, where community members exercised control over the future of the project by voting on various proposals. That is... until a member of the Jupiter team announced that the company would be suspending DAO voting due to a “breakdown in trust” — ironically, stemming from concerns by DAO members that project team members were exercising too much control over DAO votes by using their massive token allocations to swing vote outcomes. I guess “decentralization” only worked for Jupiter as long as the community voted how the company wanted it to.3839
The Web3 is Going Just Great recap
There were four entries between June 19 and July 1, averaging 0.3 entries per day. $63.85 million was added to the grift counter.
Resupply stablecoin lender exploited for $9.3 million [link]
Self Chain fires founder after $50 million scam allegations [link]
New York scammer "daytwo" steals $4 million from Coinbase users, blows most of it gambling [link]
Hacken token crashes after private key leak [link]
Worth a read
We’re beginning to see people using technology to fight back against authoritarianism in the US in creative ways. 404 Mediawrote about FuckLAPD.com, a tool aiming to help people identify police officers who obscure their faces and cover their badge numbers. Time and CNN have covered Iceblock, an app that’s sort of like Waze except for identifying nearby ICE agents.
These have triggered sharp rebukes from the likes of “Border Czar” Tom Homan and Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, who both described CNN’s coverage of Iceblock as “disgusting” and suggested the DOJ should get involved. Attorney General Pam Bondi in turn threatened Iceblock creator Joshua Aaron, stating “We’re looking at him and he better watch out.” Homan falsely claimed that the app “puts law enforcement lives at risk” by noting where ICE operations are taking place (which, I should note, is a perfectly legal thing to do). Iceblock told The Daily Beast, “We will not be intimidated ... As long as ICE agents have quotas, and this administration ignores Constitutional rights, we will continue fighting back. No human is illegal.”
If you enjoyed the piece I recently shared by 404 Media, highlighting testimony from teachers about how AI has impacted their teaching, I suspect you’ll also really like a new series from Brian Merchant of Blood in the Machine titled “AI Killed My Job”. In the first installment, he highlights stories from tech workers whose jobs have been disrupted or have even disappeared as managers use AI to justify making workers’ lives even worse, or firing them outright. Future issues will feature workers from other fields, and there will be a video edition, too.
That's all for now, folks. Until next time,
– Molly White
Have information? Send tips (no PR) to molly0xfff.07 on Signal or molly@mollywhite.net (PGP).
I have disclosures for my work and writing pertaining to cryptocurrencies.
If the name rings a bell, it’s probably either because he is the grandson of the founder of housing construction giant PulteGroup, or because he became something of a memestock influencer during the early 2020s memestock craze, encouraging novice traders to gamble (and, generally, lose money) on stocks like Bed Bath & Beyond.40↩
HowlCon attendee registration is now open! Time sure flies - the con is only two and a half months away! So attendee registration is now open for HowlCon!
What is HowlCon? HowlCon is a virtual camping-themed convention for alterhumans and nonhumans being hosted September 19-21, 2025! We are often so scattered across the web, we hope to serve as a gathering place for folks to meet others like themselves, make friends and generally have a good time. Our goal is to bring our community together for a weekend of fun and learning.
The form will close a week before the con - September 12, 2025.
Also!
Panelist and artist applications have been extended to August 20
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Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer's personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today's post is with Rhine, who volunteers as a volunteer manager in the Translation Committee.
How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?
As a Translation volunteer manager I mostly deal with admin work that surrounds the work our translators do – be it talking to other committees about things that are to be translated, preparing English texts for translation, making sure our version of the text is up to date, or getting texts published once they are translated – along with more general personnel stuff like recruiting new translators, keeping a clear record of who is supposed to be working on what and who is on break, checking in with translators and how they feel about their work, that kind of thing. Having been in this role for some time now, I also help with mentoring newer volunteer managers in how to do what we do, at the scale we do it.
What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?
There isn't one singular stereotypical week in this role, but some different modes with different focuses that are more or less typical for me:
Going on-call for a week: Translation volunteer managers work from a shared inbox that serves as a first point of contact for all inquiries related to the Translation Committee. Each week, one or two volunteer managers go on-call as the ones primarily responsible for making sure everything gets actioned and squared away as needed. This usually means spending a couple hours each day working through everything in the shared inbox, including but not limited to assigning tasks to translators, checking on translators who were on hiatus, triaging translation requests from other committees, and responding to any questions translators may have in the course of their work.
Working on a bigger project, like a series of high-visibility posts (e.g. membership drive, OTW Board elections), opening recruitment, or internal surveys: When Translation does a committee-wide thing, it'll by necessity involve most or even all of our forty-some language teams, each with 1–8 members. Coordinating all that takes some organisational overhead (and some love for checklists and spreadsheets, along with automations where feasible), which typically means sitting down for a few hours on three or four days of the week and chipping away at various related tasks to keep things moving, including but not limited to asking other people to double-check my work before moving on to the next step.
Working on smaller tasks: When I want to have a more relaxed week while still being active, I'll sit down on one or two afternoons/evenings, and take care of a task that is fairly straightforward, like scheduling and leading chats to check in with translators or train people on our tools, creating a template document with English text for translation, drafting and updating our internal documentation, asking others to look over and give feedback on my drafts, and giving feedback on others' tasks, drafts, and projects.
Weekly chair training/catch-up chats: We have a regular weekly meeting slot to sit down and talk about the few chair-exclusive things in the Translation Committee, as part of chair training.
What made you decide to volunteer?
I actually started volunteering at the OTW as an AO3 tag wrangler back in 2020, when lockdowns were on the horizon and I felt like I could pick up some extra stuff to do. Growing up bilingual and with some extra languages under my belt, I ended up hanging out in some of the spaces with lots of OTW translators. Then I found out that I could internally apply as a Translation volunteer manager, and the rest is pretty much history. At that point I was missing the feeling of doing some volunteer management and admin work anyway!
What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?
On a high level, I'd say it's striking a balance between the expectations and the reality of the work the Translation Committee does, including the sheer scale. On a more concrete level, it's like this: Being a translator in the Translation Committee is, by default, a relatively low commitment, with a number of optional tasks and rosters that we encourage people to take on, if they have the time and attention to spare. Part of how we ensure that is by dealing with as much of the overhead in advance as we can, as Translation volunteer managers.
This means that for instance, when the English version of a text is updated – which may take about two minutes in the original text – we go through each language team's copy of the text, make the changes as needed in the English copy, highlight what was changed, and reset the status in our internal task tracker so that it can be reassigned to a translator. This way the changed part is clearly visible to the translator, so they can quickly pinpoint what they need to do and make the corresponding changes in the translated text.
For both the author of the original English text and the translator, this is a very quick task. On the admin side, on the other hand, it's the same two-minute process of updating our documents repeated over and over, about 15 times on the low end for frequent news post series that we only assign to teams that consistently have some buffer to absorb the extra workload, and almost 50 times on the high end for some of our staple static pages that (almost) all teams have worked on, meaning it's something that takes somewhere between 30 minutes to almost two hours even when it's a tiny change and you're familiar with the workflow.
(And that's before getting to very last-minute changes and emergency news post translations with less than two days' turnaround time, where we manually track everything across around thirty teams, usually. Each time that has happened, everyone's dedication has blown me away. Thank you so much to everyone who answers those calls, you know who you are!)
What fannish things do you like to do?
I like to read, especially if it's something that plays around with worldbuilding or other things that were left unsaid in canon. I wish there were more hours in the day so that I can pick up some of my creative projects again. I suppose some of my coding projects like my AO3 userscripts and my AO3 Saved Filters bookmarklet also count as fannish?
Now that our volunteer's said five things about what they do, it's your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you'd like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
Every month or so the OTW will be doing a Q&A with one of its volunteers about their experiences in the organization. The posts express each volunteer’s personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the OTW or constitute OTW policy. Today’s post is with Rhine, who volunteers as a volunteer manager in the Translation Committee.
How does what you do as a volunteer fit into what the OTW does?
As a Translation volunteer manager I mostly deal with admin work that surrounds the work our translators do – be it talking to other committees about things that are to be translated, preparing English texts for translation, making sure our version of the text is up to date, or getting texts published once they are translated – along with more general personnel stuff like recruiting new translators, keeping a clear record of who is supposed to be working on what and who is on break, checking in with translators and how they feel about their work, that kind of thing. Having been in this role for some time now, I also help with mentoring newer volunteer managers in how to do what we do, at the scale we do it.
What is a typical week like for you as a volunteer?
There isn’t one singular stereotypical week in this role, but some different modes with different focuses that are more or less typical for me:
Going on-call for a week: Translation volunteer managers work from a shared inbox that serves as a first point of contact for all inquiries related to the Translation Committee. Each week, one or two volunteer managers go on-call as the ones primarily responsible for making sure everything gets actioned and squared away as needed. This usually means spending a couple hours each day working through everything in the shared inbox, including but not limited to assigning tasks to translators, checking on translators who were on hiatus, triaging translation requests from other committees, and responding to any questions translators may have in the course of their work.
Working on a bigger project, like a series of high-visibility posts (e.g. membership drive, OTW Board elections), opening recruitment, or internal surveys: When Translation does a committee-wide thing, it’ll by necessity involve most or even all of our forty-some language teams, each with 1–8 members. Coordinating all that takes some organisational overhead (and some love for checklists and spreadsheets, along with automations where feasible), which typically means sitting down for a few hours on three or four days of the week and chipping away at various related tasks to keep things moving, including but not limited to asking other people to double-check my work before moving on to the next step.
Working on smaller tasks: When I want to have a more relaxed week while still being active, I’ll sit down on one or two afternoons/evenings, and take care of a task that is fairly straightforward, like scheduling and leading chats to check in with translators or train people on our tools, creating a template document with English text for translation, drafting and updating our internal documentation, asking others to look over and give feedback on my drafts, and giving feedback on others’ tasks, drafts, and projects.
Weekly chair training/catch-up chats: We have a regular weekly meeting slot to sit down and talk about the few chair-exclusive things in the Translation Committee, as part of chair training.
What made you decide to volunteer?
I actually started volunteering at the OTW as an AO3 tag wrangler back in 2020, when lockdowns were on the horizon and I felt like I could pick up some extra stuff to do. Growing up bilingual and with some extra languages under my belt, I ended up hanging out in some of the spaces with lots of OTW translators. Then I found out that I could internally apply as a Translation volunteer manager, and the rest is pretty much history. At that point I was missing the feeling of doing some volunteer management and admin work anyway!
What has been your biggest challenge doing work for the OTW?
On a high level, I’d say it’s striking a balance between the expectations and the reality of the work the Translation Committee does, including the sheer scale. On a more concrete level, it’s like this: Being a translator in the Translation Committee is, by default, a relatively low commitment, with a number of optional tasks and rosters that we encourage people to take on, if they have the time and attention to spare. Part of how we ensure that is by dealing with as much of the overhead in advance as we can, as Translation volunteer managers.
This means that for instance, when the English version of a text is updated – which may take about two minutes in the original text – we go through each language team’s copy of the text, make the changes as needed in the English copy, highlight what was changed, and reset the status in our internal task tracker so that it can be reassigned to a translator. This way the changed part is clearly visible to the translator, so they can quickly pinpoint what they need to do and make the corresponding changes in the translated text.
For both the author of the original English text and the translator, this is a very quick task. On the admin side, on the other hand, it’s the same two-minute process of updating our documents repeated over and over, about 15 times on the low end for frequent news post series that we only assign to teams that consistently have some buffer to absorb the extra workload, and almost 50 times on the high end for some of our staple static pages that (almost) all teams have worked on, meaning it’s something that takes somewhere between 30 minutes to almost two hours even when it’s a tiny change and you’re familiar with the workflow.
(And that’s before getting to very last-minute changes and emergency news post translations with less than two days’ turnaround time, where we manually track everything across around thirty teams, usually. Each time that has happened, everyone’s dedication has blown me away. Thank you so much to everyone who answers those calls, you know who you are!)
What fannish things do you like to do?
I like to read, especially if it’s something that plays around with worldbuilding or other things that were left unsaid in canon. I wish there were more hours in the day so that I can pick up some of my creative projects again. I suppose some of my coding projects like my AO3 userscripts and my AO3 Saved Filters bookmarklet also count as fannish?
Now that our volunteer’s said five things about what they do, it’s your turn to ask one more thing! Feel free to ask about their work in the comments. Or if you’d like, you can check out earlier Five Things posts.
The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.
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