The reason this is relevant is because he has spent the better part of a year complaining about “illegal immigrants” who are “invading” the country. But an old video from 2013 resurfaced on Saturday that appears to show the billionaire admitting he was at one point building his small business in the country illegally, describing it as a “gray area.”

*Edit: typo

It will bring recession, possibly collapse, as a result of retaliation, and lost allies.

The guy at the register where we paid was wearing a Superman T-shirt.

$35 to dress like a person who's a really big fan of Spirit Halloween, but does not work there.

And yes, I'm also shocked and saddened that there is a Caillou fandom site.

Let’s discuss tasks, contestants and the show in general.

Spoilers ahead.

The best part is that fully half of these are addressed to my mom…

This is my cat's cousin. (My brothers cat) Lol

The announcement of this rule change with examples are at the bottom of the article. To summarize:

In the current rules, if you attack with a creature and it gets multi-blocked, once your opponent locks in their blocks, you choose the order of blockers immediately. During the combat damage step, you must assign enough (big asterisk on "enough") damage on the first creature before you can assign damage on the next.

Starting with Foundations, you don't choose an order for the blockers. During the combat damage step, you will just distribute damage however you want.

This weakens multi-blocking as a defensive option.

We will one day speak of blocker order like we do damage on the stack.

Michelle Goldberg Oct. 25, 2024

i haven't played magic the gathering in ages but i still follow it for some reason. if you're not checked in with the game, here's what's been going on in recent years: it's been enshittifying. i'm fascinated by when gacha games (which this essentially is) start putting the screws to players. here are some of the ways it's gone down

• the game used to have rigorous processes for managing balance, processes which sometimes failed spectacularly, but held up most of the time. empirically, that's pretty much gone. almost all of the cards that have been banned in the standard format have come from the last several years, and they printed a mechanic so broken that they errata'd it to cost more. to be clear, this is a game that is played with physical cards that the text can't be changed on. the situation was so dire that they just said "ok everyone should know, ignore the text on the cards, they are too broken the way we made them."
• they thought a bit about how the majority of their playerbase wasn't playing the somewhat competitive 1 vs 1 style the game was originally designed for. instead, most people play several person free for all formats, in particular these days a format called commander. so they've been absolutely shredding these people's wallets and ruining their games by designing rare cards specifically to end up being powerful in commander. recently they printed a commander card so busted in various formats that the former friend of mine who designed it ended up falling on his sword, writing an extremely apologetic essay about how he personally fucked up by letting it slip through.
• there's a whole much larger drama around the commander format that i haven't got the energy to go into here. the most tolerable summary is that they printed a card so ridiculous that the format dissolved and was remade under a wave of death threats when it was banned. i know that doesn't make sense, just trust me, or write your own summary of it.
• they found out that the more cards they come out with, the more cards they sell, so they've just been cranking out designs at greater and greater volume. at any given time there is a massive chunk of cards that are about to hit the shelves, and which they're 'teasing' and fomoing players about. the game is about 30 years old and they've been hitting a pace of printing something like 10% to 15% of all cards ever, every year.
• every once in a while they release joke sets, with weird or silly mechanics like having to yell things or tearing up cards. generally, these cards are not allowed in semi competitive play. well, they thought the most recent one would sell better if that wasn't the case, so they marked as many of these cards as they could as being tournament legal (but to keep the outcry tamped down, not in their standard format). one of these cards in particular, a goblin that makes you put stickers on things, was so miserable to have in tournament play that they ended up backtracking and banning all the joke cards.
• they found out they could make a big chunk of money by ditching their own setting and making cards for licensed IPs. they've been printing ever increasing numbers of cards themed around everything from the walking dead to fortnite to marvel to street fighter to spongebob, which sell like hotcakes. people who are invested in the style and theme of magic the gathering aren't super pleased. again, to placate the haters, these cards are not allowed in the standard competitive format, giving people who want to do wizard shit a refuge.

the last bullet point brings us to today: just kidding, frog boiled, you will now have captain america and kefka fighting each other at your table whether you like it or not. reactions are not entirely positive:

https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/1gc3w97/universes_beyond_will_enter_through_standard/

something that's quite interesting to me is how few people i've seen bootlick for wizards of the coast in recent years. i've looked at reactions to other games enshittifying and always saw lots of defenders of the company in charge, with four lines of attack being most common:

• they have to put bread on the table
• whew i know this seems bad but i would be ok with it if they just gave us 2% more crumbs. it's sooooo close to the right level of abuse
• stop being poor
• bro, just vote with your dollar bro

i've been seeing very little of that in regards to mtg. some people have denied the pot was getting warmer, but mostly, people have just turned into haters. not sure why; perhaps it has to do with the small scale social aspect of magic. if you're playing marvel snap and having the blood drained out of your neck, you don't really have a group of specific people you're experiencing that in concert with; with mtg you do. it could be the strength of small scale personal ties that both keeps people invested in this game, and makes people angry at how that investment is being treated

unfortunately i don't see any reason that this anger is likely to put a stop to things. after all, arch-enshittifier facebook is still making ultrabucks, despite having destroyed its reputation on every possible level and despite constantly enraging its users. you can do horrible things to people and just coast! it works!

EDIT: this is election relevant btw https://awful.systems/comment/5086076

A shady new super PAC named for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg just spent nearly $20 million on efforts to help Donald Trump appear more moderate on abortion, but the group won’t reveal where its money comes from until after the election.

The pro-Trump RBG PAC (a massive insult to the late justice, who hated Trump) is attempting to use the liberal justice’s legacy to try and boost Trump ahead of the election. Its website even features photos of Ginsberg and the former president, captioned “Great Minds Think Alike.”

Archive/mirror: https://archive.ph/SaBu4

One of the oldest global aspects of our hobby, other than actually using the radio, is the QSL bureau. It uses a postcard-like system to confirm that two stations made contact, sent via the postal service as a so-called QSL card. Of course, that only works if you have each other's address which after World War II was somewhat difficult. As a result the QSL bureau was born.

Intended as a single point of contact for a country, a local QSL bureau consists of one or more volunteers, paid staff or contractors, who act as the distribution point for incoming and outgoing QSL cards. If you and I agreed to confirm our contact via the bureau, my QSL card to you would be sent to the VK outgoing QSL bureau, which would hold my card until there were sufficient outgoing cards from all over Australia to your country to package them all up and send them to the incoming QSL bureau in your country.

Your QSL bureau would then wait until there were enough QSL cards for your region to send it on, where it would eventually get into your hands in a variety of ways, via the postal service, through your local club, or at a local hamfest where the QSL bureau might have a stall. Your QSL card to me would make a similar, reverse, journey.

This process could take weeks or sometimes years.

Although not fast, this worked for many decades, but once electronic communications and computers started appearing, combined with increased costs associated with privatised international postal services, the wheels started coming off.

Getting access to historic documents has proven challenging. I can tell you that over the years the IARU, the International Amateur Radio Union, has coordinated and controlled how the QSL bureaus should work. For example, a resolution adopted in 1985 and updated in 2009 "strongly encouraged" its member societies to accept incoming QSL cards for all amateurs in their country, regardless of affiliation. It also instructed QSL bureaus to only send cards to the official QSL bureau if there was more than one.

Several years ago, the IARU administrative council recognised several trends, among them the environmental impact of unwanted cards generated in bulk by computer logging software, lower levels of adoption and ultimately the closing of some smaller QSL bureaus after being overwhelmed by undeliverable cards from increasingly popular holiday DXpeditions.

In September 2018, the IARU adopted resolution 18-1 that stated that it "resolves that member societies are encouraged to continue to offer QSL bureau service in their countries, exchanging cards with the bureaus of other member-societies, for as long as doing so is economically justifiable, and further resolves that amateurs are encouraged to adopt confirmation practices, including but not limited to using electronic confirmation systems, that reduce the volume of unwanted and undeliverable QSL cards being introduced into the bureau system."

This resolution took effect on New Year's Day, 2019. I'll also note that the IARU has its own year 2000 issue, having been in existence for nearly a century, its resolutions are named after the last two digits of the year followed by a sequential number, so resolution 25-1 could refer to 1925 or 2025, but I digress.

The internet has introduced several confirmation processes. The most vocal of these is "Logbook of The World", or LoTW. I'm not a fan and haven't been for some time. I'll get into why in a moment. Other contenders are eQSL.cc, qsl.net, qrz.com, clublog.org and others that have yet to steal the limelight. If I've forgotten the one you run, let me know.

Saying that I'm not a fan of LoTW is understating it. Recent ARRL ransomware payments aside, why do I need to legally prove beyond a reasonable doubt that I made contact with some random amateur? Why does this need to be authenticated, signed with a time-limited certificate and verified with 100 points of identity and why do we continue to roll out new and interesting procedures for what is essentially a postcard saying that on this day, time and frequency we made contact using this mode for the purposes of .. wait for it .. our hobby?

The eQSL website has an interesting statement: "One of the problems with an e-mail based system is that there is no security inherent in that mechanism. Anyone can purport to be P5ABC, and you'll have a difficult time verifying it."

So what .. and what made you think that the postcard ending up in your letterbox was guaranteed to be from P5ABC?

If you're going to the effort of pretending to be P5ABC, what harm does that do in the scheme of things? For that matter, how do you know that the station you talked to on-air was actually P5ABC? I ask because I've spoken to an amateur who recently did some HF direction finding during several popular DXpedition pile-ups. They discovered that there were several stations purporting to be the DXpedition that were not.

So. Right now we're in a situation where many if not all amateurs are connected to the internet. Most will have an email address. You already know mine, [email protected]. If we made contact on-air, send me an email. If what you wrote matches my logs, I'll send you a reply to confirm it.

How do you get the address? One possible approach is to create an online email database where you could submit the email address associated with your callsign and you could look-up a station to contact them.

Another is for member societies to offer email addresses, the ARRL and the WIA already offer this service to current members.

I'll also point out that one of the reasons that the QSL bureau was instigated in the first place was because some addresses for amateurs were not available. If you make contact today and you want to send them an email confirmation the question to ask is simple: "Hey, what's your email address?"

Will that cover everyone?

Nope. Neither does the current system. What it achieves is that my personal private identifying information isn't stored at the ARRL if I'm not a member. Besides, in my opinion a list of email addresses combined with callsigns is hardly something worth getting excited about, unless of course it's used by manufacturers to send out product announcements and discount codes. We should be so lucky.

If you have a better idea, you know how to get in touch. What I can say is that this is the ultimate decentralised QSL system, not unlike the contact you made on HF.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB