From the Florida Gainesville Sun:
Gainesville city officials and residents gathered at City Hall Plaza on May 8 to celebrate the ribbon-cutting of the newly renovated space.
The redesigned plaza, city officials said, will provide a more functional community hub and can accommodate more than 2,000 people. The space also incorporates the rainbow bricks salvaged from the downtown crosswalks removed last year.
Their removal came after state officials ordered communities across Florida to take down or paint over rainbow crosswalks, including the crossing in Orlando that memorialized the 49 victims of the 2016 Pulse Nightclub massacre.
Gainesville officials pulled roughly 1,900 bricks from three downtown crosswalks after the Florida Department of Transportation threatened to cut the city’s transportation funding in August 2025. In a memo, the department warned that non-standard markings “can lead to distractions or misunderstandings can jeopardize safety.”
Instead of discarding the bricks, the city commission chose to honor the LGBTQ community by incorporating them into the plaza.
“It was deeply hurtful to many people in this community and to me when the state and federal government told us, ‘You can have money for your roads or you can keep your rainbow crosswalks’,” Mayor Ward said during the ceremony. “If you are here, we’re glad you’re here. We strive to be an equitable community.”
I’ll merely add that I’m happy to be living here in Philadelphia where the rainbow crosswalks are still to be found at 13th and Locust or Barbara Gittings Way as it has been named. Currently the Pennsylvania House and the Governorship are in Democratic hands, so we don’t have to worry about Republican hate for the time being.
Meanwhile, here’s a little schadenfreude for you.
Medical students, of course, do not make much money, and often struggle to make ends meet. Sam, coming from a very impoverished background, was no exception. But medical school takes a lot of time and energy, and does not leave much of either commodity left over for working a part-time job at, say, McDonald’s. So, Sam tried to find time-efficient side hustles. He sold copies of his course notes to other students, and he also tried to make some money as a YouTube influencer, but those did not make much of a dent.
Sam’s next venture was to try to sell salacious pictures created with the help of AI. Salacious enough to be of interest to potential customers, but non-salacious enough to be post-able to Instagram. His early efforts went nowhere, until he decided to create “Emily Hart.” Ms. Hart looks like Jennifer Lawrence, is a registered nurse, and liked to post sexy pictures to Instagram. Her pictures were invariably accompanied by MAGA rhetoric, like: “If you want a reason to unfollow: Christ is king, abortion is murder, and all illegals must be deported.”
Sam didn’t actually expect the scheme to work out, since he thought it was “too obvious.” But, in something of a demonstration of Poe’s Law, MAGA Men ate it up. The Instagram account was eventually shut down for fraudulent activity, but by then “Emily” had a Facebook page, an OnlyFans account and a lineup of t-shirts and other merch. Eventually, Sam was making thousands of dollars a month. This is all MAGA money, going to a brown-skinned immigrant who believes in vaccines.
Sam is not above targeting men on the other side of the political aisle, but his liberal counterpart to “Emily” went absolutely nowhere. Sam’s explanation for that is that Democrats recognize AI slop when they see it, but that “The MAGA crowd is made up of dumb people—like, super dumb people.”
Read the whole thing: This Week in Schadenfreude: It’s Hard out Here for an Incel