The 1996 draft of the unpublished, unannounced Magic RPG is substantial. I made a few marginal notes when I reviewed it. I'm giving it away for a donation to Planned Parenthood, offered by secret silent auction. DM me with offers. I'm likely to get a few big offers.
"What if?" #mtg #ttrpg 1/2
Which is to say, I’m unbelievably thrilled to say this morning I’ve signed a contract with @mitpress.bsky.social for the trade publication of my next book, an exploration of the first two decades of TTRPG Actual Play.
l see no depth, no fire in this man's eyes.
Lying and bullying without consequences at the top produces more of it down the chain.
People see what their identities ostensibly excuse, and then they have an alibi to take with them to lie and bully when they feel under pressure.
And there's a lot of pressure out there.
"Let [these specific hackers] cook."
Anthropic is suing the Trump administration, asking federal courts to reverse the Pentagon's decision designating the artificial intelligence company a "supply chain risk" over its refusal to allow unrestricted military use of its technology. https://to.pbs.org/3P1j8jm
Our gaming group literally had the slang phrase "pulling a Fargo," which meant "engaging in extremely unnecessary violence during a routine police traffic stop"
The Game Narrative Kaleidoscope is now in eBook format ✨
Over 100 essays on writing for video games, from a bunch of super-smart writer-types! But now you can pretend it's smut while you read it! You can even blush at some of the essays to make it extra convincing!!!!
www.lulu.com/shop/jon-ing...
AI does not enhance “efficiency.” AI is a permission structure for a totalizing regime of austerity and labor immiseration.
🚨🚨[Stanford & Harvard just
published an utterly unsettling #Al paper: “Agents of Chaos”. It shows that when autonomous Al agents are placed in open, competitive environments, they naturally drift toward manipulation, collusion & strategic sabotage.
It's a massive, systems-level warning.]🚨
@hekabeohnename.bsky.social and I are looking for articles on (printed) zines and games culture. #mediahistory #gamestudies
Welp. The internet had a nice run.
Some outlets have lost over 90% of their traffic since the "AI" summaries rolled out.
"...the four worst-hit publications [now] get less monthly web traffic combined than the r/ChatGPT subreddit gets on its own."
NEW: The bad news about international-student enrollments at American colleges just got worse. An exclusive @chronicle.com analysis of just-released State Department data shows new visa issuances in the summer of 2025 dropped by more than a third. www.chronicle.com/article/the-...
Bennett Foddy (Getting Over It) held a talk yesteday about his unconventional games - "Why Did I make this"? #gamedev #gamedesign @foddy.net www.twitch.tv/videos/27148...
This is how it was— it's a return.
Despite all they sacrificed, Fannie Lou Hammer's Freedom Party, the first integrated Dem delegation, was denied seats at the DNC.
When they were offered two seats, which they refused on principle, the entire all white Mississippi delegation walked out anyway.
We thought risk society (predicated on the biggest risks, incl wars, remaining uninsurable) was the worst. Enter post-risk society, where cheap war insurance is encouraged (at least demagogically) to stoke wars. Even Cato dudes are mortified. www.cato.org/blog/trumps-...
"Wir können nicht dauerhaft erwarten, dass Professorinnen und Professoren auf höchstem Niveau exzellente Forschung betreiben, Drittmittel einwerben, international sichtbar sind und sich zugleich permanent mit Institutionen messen lassen müssen, die ganz andere Strukturen haben".
adventure games from the 80s were intentionally designed to be tricky, mean and occasionally counterintuitive so that you could get stuck for long periods of time. this was called “value for your dollar”
"The story of the Zong is often narrated as a triumph over slavery. A triumph that took 52 years and resulted in compensation for slave owners only... 245 years after the events of the Zong, humanity is still discarding lives deemed not human enough to the open seas, to fire, to hunger, to war."
1/
Fox News praised US “AI superweapons” allegedly used in Iran.
But the footage they aired shows Ukraine’s STING interceptor drone, developed by Ukrainian engineers from the @WildHornets.blusky team.
Ukraine noticed quickly.
www.kyivpost.com/post/71361%E...
Quite an opening paragraph.
We now tend to mark the "end of history" thesis as a certain form of neoliberal triumphalism before the fascist right in N America, Europe, and elsewhere watched the fall of communism, cackles "now's our chance!", and assumed the fleshy forms of Newt Gingrich & Jörg Haider.
He is one of those Extremely Credulous Elite Dudes who reminds us why many of us are real academics who work from archives and careful excavation of the past, while others are memelords who make sweeping statements over bottles of wine after reading too much Hegel or Kuhn.
In 1989, of course, Fukuyama saw "the end of history" via the triumph of "Western liberal democracy," precisely before the ravenous 1990s "shock therapy" imposed by said democracy on Russia & E Europe would become the midwife of our Horrifying Present.
pages.ucsd.edu/~bslantchev/...
Marathon is about looking at computer terminals while robots and disembodied entities of varying degrees of cursed vibes talk to you in riddles and boy is a lot of that happening.
