Convicted felon and liable for sexual assault, Donald Trump and his merry band of cronies didn't refuse to negotiate with Democrats over an insistence on providing undocumented people emergency health services; they did it to advance their plan to remake the United States of America into a place that sucks. — Read the rest
Announcing the September 2025 Inner Hive Drive: Join Tom the Dancing Bug's Inner Hive, and you'll not only get weekly emails with pre-publication access to each week's comic and other content, but the first year's fee (details at link) will be donated to Immigration Law & Justice New York to help fight Trump's illegal and horrific war on immigrants. — Read the rest
[ID: headline reading: “Pregnant Mother in Tennessee Denied Care for Being Unmarried. The 2025 Medical Ethics Defense Act allows physicians to deny care to patients whose lifestyles they disagree with.” End ID]
“Last Thursday, at a town hall in Jonesborough, Tennessee, a 35-year-old woman shared her story: she was denied prenatal care by her physician because they objected to the fact that she wasn’t married, nor did she plan to be. She’d been with her partner for 15 years and they have a 13-year-old child.
While going through her medical history, the physician told her that because she was unwed, they didn’t feel comfortable treating her, because it went against their values and she should seek care elsewhere. At the time of the appointment, the woman believed she was about four weeks into her pregnancy.
Now, she’s traveling out of state to Virginia to receive prenatal care.
This is the first reported case of a woman being denied prenatal care for being unmarried in the state of Tennessee.
On April 24th, Tennessee’s 2025 Medical Ethics Defense Act went into effect. It gives physicians, hospital systems and insurers, among others, the legal right to deny healthcare to patients based on religious, moral or ethical beliefs. There are no protections for people in rural areas with limited options. There’s no requirement to refer patients elsewhere. And there’s no legal recourse. The woman at the town hall explained that her representatives are not responsive to her questions, even as she repeatedly calls Sen. Marsha Blackburn. When she reached staff at Sen. Bill Hagerty’s office, they told her, “he’s not obligated to listen to his constituents.””
The mentality of “Because I don’t fuck with your personal lifestyle choices, I will not give you necessary care and fulfill my duties as a healthcare provider” is how people die of a lack of care.
The UK-based Telegraph has a long piece that describes former Marine Thomas Jacob Sanford, the man shot and killed by police after attacking a church, as a known Trump supporter. The US media doesn't seem to want to tell that part of the story. — Read the rest
At Sony's State of Play today, Eidos-Montréal and developer Aspyr announced that a remaster of classic immersive sim Deus Ex is coming to PlayStation 5 next year.
There's no mention of Xbox or PC versions in the trailer, but we've confirmed separately that Deus Ex Remastered will also come to both platforms. On PC, it'll be available on Steam, and there's a store page up now.
As beloved as Deus Ex is on PC, I wonder if this will be bigger news for the console crowd. Deus Ex is a PC classic through and through, and as such, fans have kept the original fresh themselves with mods. GOG will supply you with fan overhaul Deus Ex: Revision, for instance.
The official remaster will feature "new lighting, dynamic shadows, particle systems, and upscaled textures," according to a post from Aspyr on the PlayStation Blog. They've also rebuilt the character models, added lip-syncing to the dialogue, and thrown ragdolls into the mix. (I'll basically never say no to ragdolls, so sure, why not?)
In a press release, Aspyr and Eidos-Montréal also noted a few quality of life additions: Deus Ex Remastered will include "autosaves, faster loading, achievement tracking, and cloud saves on supported platforms," as well as ultrawide and multi-monitor support.
I also wonder if a full remake wouldn't make the most sense here: You can get the original Deus Ex for 97 cents on Steam at the moment, so this remaster might be a tough sell at $30.
Granted, it can be easier to recommend a game to friends when it comes optimized for modern PCs with the quality of life features they expect. Deus Ex Remastered is scheduled release early next year: February 5, 2026.
The Pokémon Company says the US government did not have permission to use Pikachu and other Pokémon content promotional videos for the Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection agencies posted to X—but what it's going to do about it, if anything, remains to be seen.
The first video, a montage of ICE agents and police blowing up doors and arresting people mashed up with music and video clips from the Pokémon TV show, was posted on the evening of September 22. It also features the words "Department of Homeland Security" spelled out in the Pokémon font. It's the sort of thing I would not have believed could possibly be real if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, but there it is.
DHS followed with a series of Pokémon-style "cards" bearing images of people convicted of crimes in the US.
But that wasn't the end of it: A couple hours later, Customs and Border Protection got in on the act with an animated image of Pikachu, calling him "Border Patrol's newest recruit."
Support for the display in replies was widespread—it's X, after all—but there was pushback too, and calls from some for The Pokémon Company, or Nintendo, to take action against what was presumed to be unauthorized use of the property.
In a statement provided to PC Gamer, The Pokémon Company International confirmed that the US government did not have permission to use the content, but left the question of what comes next unanswered.
"We are aware of a recent video posted by the Department of Homeland Security that includes imagery and language associated with our brand," it said. "Our company was not involved in the creation or distribution of this content, and permission was not granted for the use of our intellectual property."
Nintendo, one of the owners of The Pokémon Company, is notoriously litigious when it comes to dropping the hammer on people who can't effectively fight back. But former Pokémon Company chief legal officer Don McGowan thinks this is likely a fight it doesn't want: The Pokémon Company International is "INSANELY publicity-shy," he said, and perhaps more compelling in light of the US government's recent treatment of South Korean workers at a Hyundai plant in Georgia, "many of their execs in the USA are on green cards."
"Even if I was still at the company I wouldn't touch this, and I'm the most trigger-happy CLO [Chief Legal Officer] I've ever met," said McGowan, who became well-known for his aggressive pursuit of Destiny 2 abusers and cheaters during his post-Pokémon years at Bungie. "This will blow over in a couple of days and they'll be happy to let it."
For its part, Homeland Security doesn't seem inclined to change tack. In response to my inquiry about the unauthorized use of Pokémon intellectual property, a DHS spokesperson invoked lyrics from the Pokémon theme song, saying, "To arrest them is our real test. To deport them is our cause."
Yesterday, we shared images of a statue placed on the National Mall that had been approved and granted a permit to remain in place until Sunday, the 28th. I was just informed by the artists, The Secret Handshake Project, that the artwork was destroyed in the middle of the night, with no notice, by US Park police. — Read the rest
Announcing the September 2025 Inner Hive Drive: Join Tom the Dancing Bug's Inner Hive, and you'll not only get weekly emails with pre-publication access to each week's comic and other content, but the first year's fee (details at link) will be donated to Immigration Law & Justice New York to help fight Trump's illegal and horrific war on immigrants. — Read the rest
Trump's lapdog Attorney General, Pam Bondi, has vowed to go after people who employ "hate speech," where hate speech is any speech Donald Trump hates. Trump is already threatening journalists who ask about this clearly illegal move.
Trump is directly threatening a journalist, and it's a bad sign. — Read the rest
I mean, I'm not an expert on Nazis, but I think one of the big things they were about was killing people who didn't conform.
Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade shared his opinion that homeless people who refuse help should face "involuntary lethal injection." He made the comment during a discussion about the murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, where Kilmeade and co-hosts Ainsley Earhardt and Lawrence Jones were debating solutions to homelessness and mental illness. — Read the rest
The last 10 days have brought a string of patent wins for Nintendo. Yesterday, the company was granted US patent 12,409,387, a patent covering riding and flying systems similar to those Nintendo has been criticized for claiming in its Palworld lawsuit (via Gamesfray). Last week, however, Nintendo received a more troubling weapon in its legal arsenal: US patent 12,403,397, a patent on summoning and battling characters that the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted with alarmingly little resistance.
According to videogame patent lawyer Kirk Sigmon, the USPTO granting Nintendo these latest patents isn't just a moment of questionable legal theory. It's an indictment of American patent law.
"Broadly, I don't disagree with the many online complaints about these Nintendo patents," said Sigmon, whose opinions do not represent those of his firm and clients. "They have been an embarrassing failure of the US patent system."
(Image credit: Nintendo, USPTO)
Sigmon, who we spoke with last year about the claims and potential consequences of Nintendo's Palworld lawsuit, said both this week's '387 patent and last week's '397 represent procedural irregularities in the decisionmaking of US patent officials. And thanks to those irregularities, Nintendo has yet more tools to bully its competitors.
The '387 patent granted this week, Sigmon told PC Gamer, "got a bit of push-back, but barely." After its initial application was deemed invalid due to similarities to existing Tencent and Xbox-related patents, Nintendo amended its claims based on interviews with the USPTO, which then determined that the claims were allowable "for substantially the same reasons as parent application(s)."
"That parent case," Sigmon said, "had an even weirder and much less useful prosecution history."
(Image credit: Nintendo, USPTO)
Most of the claims made in the '387 patent's single parent case, US Pat. No. 12,246,255, were immediately allowed by the USPTO, which Sigmon said is "a very unusual result: most claims are rejected at least once." When the claims were ultimately allowed, the only reasoning the USPTO offered was a block quote of text from the claims themselves.
"This seems like a situation where the USPTO essentially gave up and just allowed the case, assuming that the claims were narrow or specific enough to be new without evaluating them too closely," Sigmon said. "I strongly disagree with this result: In my view, these claims were in no way allowable."
To Sigmon, an IP attorney with extensive experience in prosecuting and teaching patent law, the '387 patent and its parent case rely on concepts and decisions that would have been obvious to a "Person of Ordinary Skill in the Art"—a legal construct that holds if a patent's claims would reasonably occur to a practitioner in the relevant field based on prior art, those claims aren't patentable.
(Image credit: Nintendo, USPTO)
The '397 patent granted last week is even more striking. It's a patent on summoning and battling with "sub-characters," using specific language suggesting it's based on the Let's Go! mechanics in the Pokémon Scarlet and Violet games. Despite its relevance to a conceit in countless games—calling characters to battle enemies for you—it was allowed without any pushback whatsoever from the USPTO, which Sigmon said is essentially unheard of.
"Like the above case, the reasons for allowance don't give us even a hint of why it was allowed: the Examiner just paraphrases the claims (after block quoting them) without explaining why the claims are allowed over the prior art," Sigmon said. "This is extremely unusual and raises a large number of red flags."
According to Sigmon, USPTO records show that the allowance of the '397 patent was based on a review of a relatively miniscule number of documents: 16 US patents, seven Japanese patents, and—apparently—one article from Pokemon.com.
(Image credit: Nintendo, USPTO)
"I have no earthly idea how the Examiner could, in good faith, allow this application so quickly," Sigmon said.
Admittedly, the '397 case was originally filed as a Japanese patent application, which would allow the Examiner to use the existing progress in the Japanese case as a starting point for their review. But, Sigmon said, "even that doesn't excuse this quick allowance."
"This allowance should not have happened, full stop," he said.
On paper, the patent might not seem like a threat to Nintendo's competitors: The claims as constructed in the '397 outline a very specific sequence of events and inputs, and patent claims must be met word-for-word to be infringed.
"Pragmatically speaking, though, it's not impossible to be sued for patent infringement even when a claim infringement argument is weak, and bad patents like this cast a massive shadow on the industry," Sigmon said.
For a company at Nintendo's scale, the claims of the '397 patent don't need to make for a strong argument that would hold up in court. The threat of a lawsuit can stifle competition well enough on its own when it would cost millions of dollars to defend against.
(Image credit: Nintendo, USPTO)
"In my opinion, none of the three patents I've discussed here should have been allowed. It's shocking and offensive that they were," Sigmon said. "The USPTO dropped the ball big time, and it's going to externalize a lot of uncertainty (and, potentially, litigation cost) onto developers and companies that do not deserve it."
Sigmon, who says he's helped inventors protect their inventions from IP theft perpetrated by major companies, insists that the patent system still has merit. "That's the kind of thing that patents are meant to do," he said. "They were not made to allow a big player to game the system, get an overly broad patent that they should have never received in the first place, and then go around bullying would-be competition with the threat of a legally questionable lawsuit."
Unfortunately, Nintendo has gained these patents at a moment when the USPTO has made challenging bad patents more difficult. Currently, US patent officials under USPTO Acting Director Coke Morgan Stewart have been refusing to hear a huge number of Inter Partes Review cases—special proceedings in which parties can argue that a patent should never have been granted—for "discretionary" reasons.
"Realistically, this means that patent validity issues are being relegated to lawsuits: not a good situation, as that often entails millions of dollars in costs and a lot of risk," Sigmon said. "In practice, this means that bad patents get to fester on the market for longer and provide a bigger threat for the industry as a whole."
Americans have lost their constitutionally protected right to videotape law enforcement in public. From Prospect:
DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin told the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) that "videotaping ICE law enforcement and posting photos and videos of them online is doxing our agents," and added: "We will prosecute those who illegally harass ICE agents to the fullest extent of the law."
Two days ago, a new Banksy work appeared on London's Royal Courts of Justice. Though the mysterious street artist's work is customarily tolerated by authorities, not least for its high value at auction, this one was immediately hidden from view: it depicted a judge brutalizing a bloodied protestor with a gavel. — Read the rest
Elon Musk thinks Deus Ex is "one of the best games ever". It's not exactly a hot take. But his taste in games also displays an impressive lack of self-awareness. Musk sees himself as an outsider and heroic figure taking on the status quo, despite being the world's richest man, the owner of X, and a sometimes-ally of Donald Trump.
When Musk rails against 'the establishment', it's only when it threatens his vast fortune, his ability to indulge in hate speech, or when he's promoting conspiracies. Indeed, he posted multiple tweets during the Covid-19 lockdowns where he drew connections between essential measures to protect the vulnerable and the plot of Deux Ex, where a man-made pandemic is deployed by the world's richest man to advance a political power play.
Unsurprisingly, Austin Grossman, who wrote Deus Ex alongside Sheldon Pacotti and Chris Todd, is not a fan of Musk's take on the classic cyberpunk immersive sim.
Deus Ex—and Dishonored, which Grossman also wrote—is a game very much interested in the powerful, and the tools they use to control people. It's also an exploration of the ethics of transhumanism—an industry that Musk himself is extremely invested in.
"That kind of political weight and social satire is a real common thread between Deus Ex and Dishonored," Grossman tells us. "It is the thing that Elon Musk likes, creepily. It is creepily in Elon Musk's worldview. So that may be its longest, worst legacy."
Like most of us, Musk easily recognises who the villains of Deus Ex are—the problem is that he genuinely seems to believe that he is opposed to them, rather than being a more annoying, less capable, real-life version of AI-obsessed billionaire antagonist Bob Page.
"It's bizarre that Elon Musk would not recognise where he actually sits in the Deus Ex universe," says Grossman, "because it is not in the JC Denton role."
Criticising Musk always comes with some risk. Alongside a baffling Sardaukar of vocal fanboys on X, "The Everything App", Musk himself will happily target his detractors with a level of glee and pettiness that is particularly strange when it comes from a man in his 50s who is in charge of several high-profile companies—something Grossman is prepared to weather should his online harassment ticket get punched.
"I did an interview with The Independent in which I probably went a little over the top in my rant about Elon Musk," Grossman says. "Honestly, I hope Elon Musk never Googles me, because I'll then be murdered."
In said interview, Grossman told the site that "Musk plainly imagines he's the JC Denton of this world—a plainspoken everyman, standing up to the elite. As is obvious to everyone, Musk is the one with power and he's just pathologically incapable of honest introspection."
And even more scathing: "I would say Musk is like a Deus Ex villain, except that the franchise doesn't have any villains as whiny and self-servingly delusional as he's shown himself to be."
The context: soaring "terrorism" prosecutions of mostly-older Britons attending protests against Israel's war in Gaza (specifically those holding signs or otherwise mentioning Palestine Action, a group recently banned after spray-painting graffiti on a Royal Air Force plane) and British support for the war. — Read the rest
A man walking down a Washington D.C. street got stopped for carrying three ounces of marijuana — one ounce over the legal limit. Surrounding him weren't just local cops, but agents from five separate federal agencies, including the FBI and Secret Service, all for what amounts to a misdemeanor fine. — Read the rest
