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January 13, 2026

The plan was never to become an ICE agent.

The plan, when I went to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Career Expo in Texas last August, was to learn what it was like to apply to be an ICE agent. Who wouldn’t be curious? The event promised on-the-spot hiring for would-be deportation officers: Walk in unemployed, walk out with a sweet $50k signing bonus, a retirement account, and a license to brutalize the country’s most vulnerable residents without consequence—all while wrapped in the warm glow of patriotism.

At first glance, my résumé has enough to tantalize a recruiter for America’s Gestapo-in-waiting: I enlisted in the Army straight out of high school and deployed to Afghanistan twice with the 82nd Airborne Division. After I got out, I spent a few years doing civilian analyst work. With a carefully arranged, skills-based résumé—one which omitted my current occupation—I figured I could maybe get through an initial interview.

The catch, however, is that there’s only one “Laura Jedeed” with an internet presence, and it takes about five seconds of Googling to figure out how I feel about ICE, the Trump administration, and the country’s general right-wing project. My social media pops up immediately, usually with a preview of my latest posts condemning Trump’s unconstitutional, authoritarian power grab. Scroll down and you’ll find articles with titles like “What I Saw in LA Wasn’t an Insurrection; It Was a Police Riot” and “Inside Mike Johnson’s Ties to a Far-Right Movement to Gut the Constitution.” Keep going for long enough and you might even find my dossier on AntifaWatch, a right-wing website that lists alleged members of the supposed domestic terror organization. I am, to put it mildly, a less-than-ideal recruit.

A comic about Cannot Goodenough

The Washington Post published a story so horrifying this weekend that it would stop your breath: “The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.”

What went wrong? The Post continues: “Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far.” The shameful, horrifying errors were uncovered in a massive, three-year review by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the Innocence Project. Following revelations published in recent years, the two groups are helping the government with the country’s largest ever post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.

Chillingly, as the Post continues, “the cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death.” Of these defendants, 14 have already been executed or died in prison.

The massive review raises questions about the veracity of not just expert hair testimony, but also the bite-mark and other forensic testimony offered as objective, scientific evidence to jurors who, not unreasonably, believed that scientists in white coats knew what they were talking about. As Peter Neufeld, co-founder of the Innocence Project, put it, “The FBI’s three-decade use of microscopic hair analysis to incriminate defendants was a complete disaster.”

This study was launched after the Post reported that flawed forensic hair matches might have led to possibly hundreds of wrongful convictions for rape, murder, and other violent crimes, dating back at least to the 1970s. In 90 percent of the cases reviewed so far, forensic examiners evidently made statements beyond the bounds of proper science. There were no scientifically accepted standards for forensic testing, yet FBI experts routinely and almost unvaryingly testified, according to the Post, “to the near-certainty of ‘matches’ of crime-scene hairs to defendants, backing their claims by citing incomplete or misleading statistics drawn from their case work.”

NACDL executive director Norman Reimer said in an interview with Associations Now that the flaws in the system had been known for years now. “What we were finding was that the examiners … wouldn’t just simply say that there was a microscopic similarity [between the two hairs], but they would go beyond that and say it was a 100 percent match, essentially misleading the jury into concluding that the evidence had a certain value that it didn’t actually have,” Reimer said.

tubi has the movie where the grinch fucks for you

i still dont understand why the grinches (maybe they're a species in this??? we only got through like 20 minutes) have glowing red eyes

yuup

This is the only movie I have on this mysterious planet.

-Olimar

It was only raw lust at her nun fit in the start because I am superficial and a walking ulterior motive, but I have to say The Masses' Travels absolutely sold me on Archetto/Hildegard.

It's that damn scene, man, it's that damn scene where she pours her entire heart out about her joyful memories, the good, the bad, the easy, the hard, the sweet, the bitter, about Laterano, about busting her ass off and breaking her back for Landon Monastery, and generally, for Laterano, her life's work dedicated to bettering the monastery, and those it aids, reminiscing about all the good times with the sisters, with the abbot, the little games and pranks, the outings, the efforts, the sacrifices, the successes, all of it, not just the monastery, but of Laterano itself, the best places to eat, the best sights to see, and the wonderful people she's met and loved, be they Sankta, Liberi, or anything else.

Hildegard then asks if that all is invalidated just because she has no halo, simply because she has no halo. She asks if she is not a real Lateran despite all of that, pouring her whole bleeding and beating heart out, simply because this is a binary of halo or no halo? Is she not a real Lateran?

And the Nurturer simply answers, with all the grace of a crude shiv between the ribs, no, you aren't. You aren't a real Lateran. You simply aren't and you will never be unless you are given a halo.

I cannot tell you the raw anger that evoked in me as a reader and human being in a catholic country where I have seen the very same scene play out far too many times for comfort. I am privileged with a halo, let's say. I've seen far too many people be written off, othered, because they weren't born with one. It made me want to cry, my eyes were legitimately burning reading that. It unbottled all that anger I thought I had already resolved and come to terms with. No, it turns out, this still burns a bit too bright, that hypocrisy makes me want to burn at least one of the numerous gilded churches you can find every three streets around here.

Beyond that, holy shit, kudos, because Archetto was a character that was an absolute nobody in my radar until this event and now I've done a 540, she's got shooters and I am as many of them as she needs me to be.

Genuinely the last time I felt such a strong emotional response to an Arknights story was back in Stultifera Navis with Laurentina's climatic scene with Amaia, where she fully embodies the narrative theme of letting the rose-tinted past go: In a monumental warship meant to represent the glory of Iberia, filled with passengers stuck in the past and who refuse to move on, with a captain who has embraced a forever hunt in its massive, empty halls, crawling with beasts who can only ever move forward by referencing the past and are conceptually unable to otherwise self-actualize, besieged by hunters who each individually is stuck in the past in their own way, one singular woman, who is three, yet one, stands. This warship is now sinking while a sea chanty that assures, promises that the golden age will one day return again, and midst this maelstrom of regret and aching for a better yesterday, Laurentina finds herself in an ordinary shattered mirror: She is Shark, she is Specter, she is Laurentina, she is all of them, all of them, even if individuals, are ultimately her, parts that she loves, even the Specter that 'stole' her body.

She is ill. She has a high chance of dying far before her Abyssal Hunter peers. She is weaker than them now, due to her illness. She will never again be as fast, as strong, as terrifying as she used to be. She will never be the same Laurentina she was before. But, without the events that led to this happening, she would've never discovered Specter, or Kal'tsit, or Doctor, or Irene, or sides of Skadi and Gladiia and Ulpianus and others that she has come to love and treasure. And she can't stay stagnant. Her ship won't sink while she reassures herself that the golden age will return again. She has better things to do, and so do her loved ones. Laurentina, by her own strength, shatters the status quo of stagnancy in the Stultifera, and rallies everyone to get their shit together because when the one that has had it objectively the worse by far can pull herself up like that, then maybe the rose tinted past isn't all that compared to a future you can still build with your own hands. Wild and unpredictable as she is, Laurentina is ultimately codified by her completely unstoppable willpower: She does Not fall in battle, she does Not give up in her personal life, and it doesn't matter how many times she has to get up, she always does it with a smile and a quip.

Because that is simply who she is.

What I'm trying to say is that the Hildegard scene hit me around this hard.

Some ya’ll who are younger need to google Frank Serpico and read about his time in the NYPD and what the cops did to him and attempted to do to him up until the late 90′s. He literally had to go into hiding in Italy and Switzerland and multiple times people tried to kill him. He only came back to America after the mafia (who hated the NYPD a lot, obviously) said “you’re under our protection.”

Damn, NYPD is so bad, Mafia started protecting good cops

👆Really really good article by the way. Feels like a good piece to show to folks you know who are still on the fence about things like police or prison abolition. Plus the pseudonym the author uses is hysterical, and he's really quite a good writer.

extremely good article, please read it. at the very least read the "how to be a bastard" section, it outlines a lot of the ways cops will try to trick you

The Predecessors in Arknights being presented as the dangerous ancient gods of Terra while literally just being the original regular humans is cool because their identities as both forgotten legends and Just Regular Scientist blur in a way that can hit very hard when you finally touch the person underneath.

Friston as the ancient god sealed under the earth who ultimately was just a very lonely dude drowning in despair. The sleeping gods in the sarcophagi having no hope to awaken, just the powerless remnants of a civilization that tried whatever it could to see the next day. Oracle, the creator, ultimately just a quirky little nerd who wanted to help others. And Priestess, the evil goddess bringing about the doom of humanity, warping creation beyond recognition and trying to make the creator fall to her side, who's also just their manipulative toxic ex.

Another part I want to contribute to this, is that one of the few people that actually recognize and understand predecessors as who and what they are (the only others being like, Theresis and Martus), Kirsten Wright, doesn't even try to explain what she found and what the source of her knowledge was when she encountered Friston. She found God, capital G God. Because it's simpler than trying to explain that this unfathomably powerful and otherworldly entity, is just a guy in a computer. (CW-5 After:)

She will explain it to Saria, but even then, to a peer who she respects, she doesn't even try to put into words what a predecessor is, mostly just what they represent. (CW-10 Before:)

I genuinely believe Federico is like 90% of the reason why the central themes of emotion, humanity vs seaborn, and human connection actually work, because it would be so easy to completely ruin the message by making it a vehicle for typical "love is what makes us humans" "if you don't feel love and emotion exactly like everyone else does you're not an ACTUAL human with a SOUL!" nonsense, like to the point I'm also anxious I might end up sounding like that every time I try analyzing the seaborn conflict in any way, but thanks to Fede being written the way he is while having such a central role in Zwillingsturme and being so close with and important to Arturia we know that when she says "it has to include everyone" and when the game falls on praising human qualities and the power of human connection they don't mean "everyone who can feel normal human emotion :)" "everyone but they're gonna need to become human" but simply everyone, no one left behind, no one erased. The focus on destroying the barriers between people exists as an answer to oppression and discrimination, to bring humanity together so they can work as a whole to face adversity, not because not feeling empathy the same way Arturia does is "wrong". Even during the piano scene when Fede is shown as unable to understand why music, why art move people the way it does, despite it being a focal point of everything about Arturia and everything about the humans who stand against the Seaborn, it's never presented as a failing on his part, never presented as him being fundamentally incompatible with humanity - in fact that scene is where he learns how to approach emotion from his own angle in his own way as a form of data and it's when he grows as a person and becomes able to use it to better get Arturia despite his difficulty in conveying and "feeling" emotion. He doesn't get Sankta empathy, he values logical understanding over emotional connection, he's joked about from other characters as being more like a robot than a human, he's deliberately written as being an opposite to Arturia's unrestrained empathy, and yet he is the protagonist to Arturia's antagonist role, he is the one who understood her the most and who could support her in the finale, he's the one outsider who cared the most about fixing things in the Monastery while the "proper" Sankta were all busy dealing with their own problems or actively worsening things (hi Oren). His character arc doesn't have anything to do with him starting to "get" emotions like "real people" do but just about starting to ask questions, to find a way forward when his strict adherence to logical reasoning fails him, to interpret why he does what he does and feel the way he does, to understand why things happens and why people act certain ways, and in quite a few scenes that's precisely why he could reach a conclusion others couldn't.

His biggest scene in Hortus involves him refusing to accept Clement's position that just because the only flower left from his garden he had a deep emotional attachment to was a bit damaged and not perfect the way he grew all the others to be, the way he wanted it to be, then its survival is meaningless.

Just because Clement couldn't see the worth in the flower's existence it doesn't mean there was none for anyone.

Just like Federico was the one chosen by the Law amidst countless "perfect" Sankta well accustomed to their supernatural Empathy.

Everyone means everyone.

I’m really glad Arknights didn’t just say “Oh Executor has emotions now” and leave it at that, because Federico has ALWAYS had emotions. He just expresses them in a different way than other people, and that’s okay.

Despite not “getting” Sankta empathy, Federico has always been shown to have empathy, even in his story debut in Operational Intelligence. From helping Vermeil to get her revenge to telling Clement that he doesn’t deserve to die, Federico has always been able to express that empathy, even if it might be in a different way than the “perfect” Sankta of Laterano, and I think that’s something very important.

The Laterano-related events have always had things like questioning oneself, understanding others, and broadening one’s own perspective as central themes, and Federico’s character development proves exactly why he was chosen to be their protagonist.

unrestrained summer fun

1: She is clearly physically restrained 2: I don’t think this is taking place in summer considering all the ice and snow and fell winds and such 3: I do not believe she is having fun

imprisoned winter agony

Revisiting having completed the Polyvision Museum: since the games themselves are in fact the game of arknights itself, where each map represents an actual battlefield, suggests worrying things.

Firstly, the gamers; Closure, Kirara and Mizuki, by having high scores, could represent their proficiency in commanding a battlefield. Which means all three could be excellent tactical commanders. And if you check Kirara's physical exam:

This further means two things: - Rhodes Island may or may not use videogames to determine an operator's tactical acumen - Operators who do have excellent (or better) tactical acumen are likely people who reside high on Rhodes Island's leaderboard

Some of the funnier options as to operators who, following this thought process, would be good at videogames: O for outstanding and E for excellent - Catherine - E - Civilight Eterna - O - Degenbrecher - E - Executor - E - Harold - E - Ho'olheyak - E - Horn - E - Muelsyse - E - Saria - E - Texas - E - Thorns - E - Tin Man - E - Ulpianus - E - Underflow - E - Valarqvin - E - W - O - Warfarin - E

Even just some of these operators in the same room, as part of a gaming tournament, in a finale, would be incredibly funny. Ho'olheyak has to face Tin Man. Underflow smashes Ulpianus. Saria and Executor, both stone faced and silent as they control their characters. And then W schools them all at the end.

Imagine the teams that could form. Catherine and Harold work together and school all the kids. Exusiai and Texas. Most of Rhine Lab.

Lastly:

Kal'tsit, who I can only assume was also banned from Rhodes Island's leaderboard, same as the Doctor.

I want to see Doctor and Arturia share screentime together someday, if only because I want to know why Arturia’s so down bad for them.

I mean, aside from Doctor just being a magnet for morally dubious women, that is.

If I had to shoot to my shot, I’d say it’s a fascination born from observation, that is, Arturia can see that there is something clearly different about Doc compared to everyone else, in a way only she can perceive thanks to her particular insight in life, combined with the respect and even closeness she feels with Amiya, from one ‘black crowned freak’ to another. Despite the abhorrent things she’s done, Arturia’s dream is ultimately entirely benevolent and not very different from Amiya’s. How come, then, that with a similar ability and a similar dream, Amiya is surrounded by loved ones, meanwhile Arturia is a terrorist with a hefty bounty on her head? Rather, how come they ended in such different places in life?

Arturia is incredibly analytical, as we’ve seen, another aspect that adds to her chaotic disposition: Someone so very analytical that wants only a world ruled by unpunished emotion, where we can all do what we truly want — sounds familiar, doesn’t it? To a certain Rhine Lab Direct or? — without fear. Given this analytical nature of hers, she likely started breaking down what made Amiya, Amiya, and it’s no rocket science that Amiya isn’t Amiya without Doctor and Doctor isn’t Doctor without Amiya. Was Doctor’s influence the deciding factor? Their love and support for Amiya? Perhaps what Amiya would do for Doctor?

Which is to say, I think Arturia considers Doctor THE key factor that differentiates herself and Amiya, and so covets a future where she too can enjoy this. Not to mention, Doc and Federico also have a very positive relationship, and despite everything, she does truly cherish her little ‘brother’, so that only adds to it I think.

i keep thinking about how hard the devs were cooking with libra, equilibrious beast. the consistency of the theming is so good, on all levels.

making them a goat, much like baphomet. to tie this with Frenzy and Order, the two fingers pointed up, three fingers pointed down, "as above, so below." for Order to exist, there needs to be the existence of Frenzy, and vice versa.

on libras theme song, its made up of highs and lows, the consistent chimes/bells(?) around a storm of noise, calming moments with loud aggressive moments

libra asks you to make a choice and gives you a buff with a debuff, they have two main phases, if you can break the runes in time they do physical attacks, if you fail the break them they use spells. they use madness but theyre also weak to madness, but even on top of that, if you use madness against them, you risk triggering madness for your own character too, its all fucking balanceeeeeeee

Read a post about how FGO was able to capitalize on its nature as a gacha back in the days by making a dead character impossible to summon in a way that, by ensuring the player knows he's never getting into the gacha (idea the game didn't betray even as of now 9 years later), adds to the sense of loss for that character in a way unique to this medium, and I was thinking about this in the context of how Arknights goes about it.

Obviously its equivalent dead character everyone has been crying about for years is Frostnova, the story went all in on the tragedy that while she joined Rhodes Island on her last moments we're never actually going to get her as an Operator and she's never going to walk in the landship with everyone else (see also the ep 14 dream scene), but going a bit deeper, I believe Theresa is an even more interesting case. As a character, she's defined by her fate: even when we do meet her in the present story she's already been dead for years, she's a reanimated corpse, and while we do see her move, breath, talk, interact with the world, she carries with her this aura of death that made it very hard to imagine she could be saved and join us at the end of it all - she was doomed to the point it made the players almost expect her to just crumble and vanish like dust once everything is over, and in fact when CE was first leaked and people thought it was Theresa getting into the gacha some opposed it because it could very possibly break the story. Her becoming playable felt so much like an impossibility it added to that feeling of her as a distant, ethereal figure, especially because the finale of part 2 happened right after we got the story about how she died in the first place and everyone was still crying over that tragedy.

But it didn't stop there - after the game unveiled everything about her, completely closed her story, and let her die in a way it's going to be impossible to get back from again (similarly to that case from FGO), it went one step further and added Civilight Eterna, someone that's obviously an excuse to give us a playable Theresa without clashing with the narrative but also further reinforces that sense of loss because she's not Theresa, no matter how much she looks and sounds like Theresa, she's a ghost masquerading as her, a program left behind by her lingering desire of somehow escaping that unavoidable doom, and every time you as the player go to her profile or put her in your home screen to listen to her lines or read her module and everything you're not getting more of your beloved character but just someone who keeps reinforcing again and again that she's not her, she can never be her, and by using the characteristics of being a gacha game this way Arknights manages to make you feel the same way as the other characters who were close to Theresa in the story: just like Kal'tsit can't even bear to look Civilight Eterna in the eyes because while resembling her loved one she's living proof the real Theresa is gone forever, as a player it's now impossible to wish for her return despite everything unlike what many people still do for that character from FGO, because CE's very existence, already having a playable "Theresa" in the game ensures the real one can't ever be added no matter what. With FGO, the player can at least hope, and has kept hoping for almost a decade. With Theresa, Arknights made it so that you can't even hope.

I once posted about how now in Rhodes Island there are a Theresa with all her memories who's not Theresa, and a Doctor with no memories who's still the Doctor, and it's incredible how much they mirror each other because in a similar way by reading Babel, when you finally find out the truth about our POV character that's been hinted about ever since the start of the game, you almost end up wishing they don't get their memories back and their amnesia is never cured. They went from "player stand-in with no real identity" to "fully fledged character" so hard it made the player recoil from the actions of the character and hope they never find out the truth despite that having been the previous objective for their character arc.

Like. Do you get me.

Two ghosts interacting while carrying the weight of the people they were but can never be again.

It's so good.

I swear to fucking god. I would claw out OneDrive from my computer if I could. I would burn down their servers if I could. I would run down their stocks to the ground if I could. I hope every single one of their workers gets a better offer from a competitor in the next 24 hours. I hope every single one of their light bulbs explodes at the same time. I hope every single carton of milk in their fridge will always be expired.

Stop backing up my fucking files.

Stop asking me to back up my fucking files.

Stop taking my fucking files off my fucking computer.

I don't want a fucking reminder in three fucking days. Let me fucking say no.

Fuckers.

Friend, I have news you're gonna love. Here's a text tutorial to get rid of that shit on Windows 10.

Here's a text tutorial to get rid of that shit on Windows 11.

Here's a video tutorial to get rid of that shit on Windows 10.

Here's a video tutorial to get rid of that shit on Windows 11.

Go forth. Be free.

Hey kid, look at me.

I want you to T-pose. Turn your right thumb up and your left thumb doen and look at your right thumb. Move your arms up and down a bit until you feel a nerve running from your armpit to your palm. Now turn your right thumb down and your left thumb up, and look at your left thumb. Keep your chest facing forward and your shoulders back. Move your arms again until you feel that nerve again. Keep alternating between these two for a minute, or look at each thumb thirty times each.

Now sit down. Put your left hand firmly under your left buttock, palm down. Keep your shoulders back and put your right hand over the crown of your head, very gently pulling it to the right. Do this for thirty seconds, then do it again but with your right hand under your right buttock.

These are stretches for the nerves in your arms, and are very good for people who sit behind a computer a lot, or fibre artists, or you name it. Do them daily. They will hurt in the beginning, but keep doing them, even after the pain has gone, or it will return and you'll have to start all over.

Hey, I know another type of stretch for this!

I had to go to occupational therapy a while back due to pain in my ulnar nerve (same nerve that acts as your 'funny bone'). It was getting compressed from jamming my elbow against hard plastic armrests that were in a too-tall fixed position on my cheap old office chair. I was having burning and tingling pain and numbness radiating from my elbow into my ring and pinky fingers. It sucked. Honestly, I found it worse than carpal tunnel, because a rigid elbow brace makes life way harder than a rigid wrist brace.

Anyways, the main exercise that my occupational therapist had me do was called a nerve glide. The stretches OP describes help improve flexibility, but the nerve gliding exercise helps move the nerve out of the pinched spot so it can move more freely.

Here's the best diagram I can find of it:

It's a little confusing, so have some extra description on the weird parts:

Ulnar nerve compression (aka cubital tunnel) is apparently super common, but I had never heard of it before I started having issues. If you lean forwards on your desk or armrests a lot, I'd suggest giving these a try. It feels kind of weird because you can feel the nerve, but it shouldn't hurt at all.

I want to make fun of Arknights youtubers but 1) I don’t want to watch any ever again to not risk poisoning my algorithm irreparably like that one time and 2) it’d be the same as making fun of Gamepress probably.

“What’s up, everybody, it’s Tony Paizuri back at you with some steaming hot Arknights content, let’s check the new Operator, Crownslayer,”

*3:20 minutes of just reading the Skills and Talents descriptions verbatim*

“Well, she doesn’t do as much damage as Yato or Texas, so she’s probably the worse 6* ever released, just like how I told you all that Ines was barely a better Cantabile and not worth the pulls. At least Crownslayer is free, haha.”

becoming an arknights youtuber and just going "well she's hot so I'm gonna immediately e2 her, get all her masteries, and unlock that module. don't worry, I'll never deploy her"

I don’t know what point that’s meant to illustrate, because that’s based.

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