io9

The Trump Administration Doesn’t Understand Memes

During a press conference Friday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany decried the supposed canceling of Nickelodeon’s popular kids show PAW Patrol and, in doing so, proved why outrage over so-called cancel culture is usually nothing more than deflective bullshit. She also proved that the Trump administration is clueless when it comes to internet culture, … Continued

Tech NewsNews

CNN Blurs Faces of U.S. Secret Police in Viral Video

CNN aired a viral video on Sunday of U.S. secret police kidnapping people in Portland, Oregon—a tactic that White House officials say could be coming to several other cities in the coming weeks. CNN made an odd journalistic choice to blur the faces of the police in the video, but CNN’s Jake Tapper took to … Continued

Tech NewsNews

Did the NYPD Try to Scrub References to Police Brutality From Its Wikipedia Page?

While we legally cannot, with 100% certainty, claim “New York’s finest” tried to lazily edit their own entry on Wikipedia to be infinitely more flattering—signs point strongly toward them doing precisely that! The substantial change was caught Wednesday morning by @NYPDedits, a Twitter bot that automatically posts when anonymous changes are made on Wikipedia by … Continued

Earther

The Movement for Black Lives and Environmentalists Are Finding Common Ground

The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) and the environmental movement have not always walked side by side. However, that tide is slowly shifting. This much-needed unity has never been more clear than in the M4BL’s release of the BREATHE Act, a suite of policy proposals, on Tuesday. While the document includes expected demands, such as … Continued

io9

The Simpsons and Family Guy Will Also Recast Their Black Characters With Black Actors

The animation industry is currently going through a small reckoning as it finally, finally, really, finally seems to realize that its characters of color could be voiced by actors of color just as easily as white ones. According to Entertainment Weekly, The Simpsons is the latest animated show to make the change. Earlier this year, … Continued

Tech NewsNews

This Group Got Tech Twitter Hyped on an App That Doesn’t Exist to Raise Money for BLM Charities

Leveraging FOMO to get people to donate to meaningful causes is the best thing to come out of 2020 yet. On Thursday, a diverse group of young techies began mobilizing the culture of exclusivity and manufactured excitement in the industry to build hype for a mysterious new project cryptically named “It Is What It Is.” … Continued

Tech NewsFacebook

The “Stop Hate For Profit” Movement Isn’t Going to Stop Anything

Yesterday, Verizon became the latest company to join a corporate chorus boycotting Facebook advertisements in July as part of a rallying cry to get Facebook’s corporate board to take action on the rampant racism and hate speech that many of us have come to associate with the platform. The “Stop Hate for Profit” campaign, as … Continued

io9Games

Padmé Joins Star Wars: Legion, Roll20 Makes Its Own RPG, and More in Gaming News

Welcome back to Gaming Shelf, io9’s column all about board games and tabletop roleplaying games. itch.io recently finished its groundbreaking bundle campaign for Black Lives Matter, and we’ve got information on more bundles and deals to benefit BLM causes. Plus, word on a Star Wars escape room game and how Terraforming Mars has terraformed its … Continued

Tech NewsGoogle

1,600+ Googlers Call on Company to Kick Cops Off Gmail, End All Other Police Contracts

In its enviable tradition of employee dissent, Googlers have used this moment of civil unrest to reassess their company’s relationship to police. The verdict, according to over 1,600 of them, is that there shouldn’t be one. Accordingly, a petition began circulating last Wednesday asking CEO Sundar Pichai to end all sales of its products to … Continued

Tech NewsNews

Police Tried to Take a Protester’s Prosthetic Legs After Macing Him, Witnesses Say

After a directive from Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther to “immediately stop the use of tear gas and pepper spray” on peaceful protesters, a rally in Ohio’s capital appears to have included not only the use of such chemical agents, but also, according to eyewitnesses, involved uniformed officers removing and attempting to confiscate the prosthetic limbs … Continued

io9Games

Rap Godz Co-Creator Shares Why He Made One of the Industry’s Only Hip Hop Board Games

Three years ago, Omari Akil and his brother Hamu Dennis were sitting down for a night of board games. A few hours later, they were making their own. They’re the team behind Rap Godz, a tabletop game about becoming an industry-changing hip hop artist. And just like the characters in their game, the founders of … Continued

EartherEnvironmental Justice

Big Oil Is Scared Shitless

Big Oil has spent decades perfecting the art of lying and pursuing a strategy to divide the public so it can continue its polluting ways. It’s been a successful model that has run into a brick wall that is the new climate movement. An increasingly diverse, young, and angry coalition is done with the bullshit. … Continued

io9

The UK Foreign Secretary Thinks Anti-Racism Protesters Got ‘Taking a Knee’ From Game of Thrones

Ah, yes. We all remember when the famously pacifist Game of Thrones popularized the act of non-violent protest! The ongoing protests against police brutality and racism sparked by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis by police officer Derek Chauvin have spread across the world, and the UK has not escaped having to reconcile with … Continued

Tech NewsAmazon

U.S. Lawmaker Calls Out Amazon’s ‘Performative’ Support of Black Lives Matter

Last week, Amazon made a terse announcement that it would institute a “one-year moratorium on police use of Amazon’s facial recognition technology,” known as Rekognition, in response to the wave of global protests against police brutality spurred by the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. At least one lawmaker is unsatisfied by the company’s … Continued

Tech NewsNews

Github to Remove ‘Master’ and ‘Slave’ Coding Terms Widely Seen as Racially Insensitive

Github is preparing to overhaul coding terminology that has long been criticized for being racially insensitive, the company’s chief executive said. Github, the Microsoft-owned developer platform, is working on implementing language that moves away from long-used “master” and “slave” terms, the programming language that refers to the dominant relationship between processes. Google Chrome developer Una … Continued

Earther

Mining Company Not Sorry for Destroying 46,000-Year-Old Aboriginal Site: Report

Executives at Rio Tinto are not sorry for destroying a 46,000-year-old Aboriginal heritage site in the state of Western Australia, according to a secret recording obtained by the Australian Financial Review. The mining company had previously expressed regret for the distress caused to some people, but didn’t actually apologize for the destruction of the ancient … Continued

Tech NewsBest of the Week

Japanese Flip Phones, a Hidden Ancient Roman City, and Overrated Pastries: Best Gizmodo Stories of the Week

I hope everyone had a good week, except for my coworker Catie Keck who recently committed slander by calling macarons and oatmeal raisin cookies overrated. Fact: Those are fire and anyone who says otherwise is a cop. This week, the folks at Gizmodo covered some truly amazing stories. Like how a team of researchers used … Continued

Tech NewsNews

How Deadpool Found His Way Into a ‘Black Lives Matter’ Mural

Even as statues commemorating the worst atrocities of the last thousand years continue to fall amid ongoing protests sparking by the police killing of George Floyd, several major cities have erected their own works of art (if only temporarily) to celebrate the movement for black lives sweeping the U.S. and several European countries. Last week, … Continued

io9Books & Comics

The Punisher’s Logo Can’t Be Turned Into a Symbol for Black Lives Matter or Real World Justice

For years now, American police officers and members of various branches of the American military have used Marvel Comics’ Punisher skull logo as a symbol to represent their own personal ideologies about what it means to be a person wielding a weapon. Those ideologies, interpreted through the lens of the logo, are simple: it is our … Continued

ScienceHealth

U.S. Hits 2 Million Coronavirus Cases As Trump Ignores Pandemic to Threaten ‘Ugly Anarchists’

The U.S. has officially identified over 2 million coronavirus cases, the highest number in the world, according to the latest figures from the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus tracker. The country has at least 112,924 deaths, also the highest in the world, and things are expected to get even worse in the coming months as health … Continued