In a surprising move, the staff of Bethesda Game Studios - creators of the first person based Fallout games, Starfield, and The Elder Scrolls - have moved to collectively unionize under the Communication Workers of America (CWA). (SLIGN)

This is a full "wall-to-wall" unionization of the studio covering not just developers but also artists, designers, and other technical staff, and comes after successful drives at Bethesda Montreal and the ZeniMax (Bethesda's direct corporate parent) QA staff. Microsoft has chosen to accept the card check after 241 Bethesda staff signed one.

Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, famous for his climate change denial speech where he brought a snowball on the floor of the Senate, has died at 89.

Given his profile, Erik Loomis of Lawyers, Guns, and Money had an obituary prepared for the deeply incurious, deeply homophobic Republican:

If Inhofe is remembered for anything by the general public, it was his "herpty derpty it's snowing here in DC so climate change is a lib conspiracy" speech, replete with the snowball brought onto the Senate floor. He thought climate change was just hilarious, thus the snowball. He stated, "With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people? It sure sounds like it." OK Jim, sure. For this, among other things, I once called Inhofe "arguably the dumbest person to sit in the Senate for a long, long time." Amusingly, this quote is the lead for Inhofe entry at RationalWiki. Now, I stand by the statement mostly. Inhofe was a stupid, stupid man. However, that comment doesn't really hold up to the test of time because the Republican Party really came to value stupidity as its central ideological point. People like Marsha Blackburn or Ron Johnson, not to mention Kirsten Sinema, genuinely very dumb human beings, managed to surpass Inhofe. And then there's Tommy Tuberville. Good Lord, now that is a dumb person. It's a sad nation where Inhofe isn't the stupidest person in your governing bodies. In any case, Inhofe's own granddaughter challenged Grandpa Dumbass directly the next time she saw her, saying that climate change was real and asking why he would not listen to science and help save the world. Inhofe's response to his own granddaughter was to say that teaching science in schools was brainwashing.