chuck schumer quoting bill maher saying "palestinians should just accept that they lost the war, the way the serbs accepted that they lost kosovo" is a sentence custom-designed to turn me into the joker

The news from Oklahoma and Nebraska is so depressing. The US public university system is one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century, created to democratize liberal arts education, and it's being destroyed by greedy people who think only the rich are deserving of such learning.

True enough - but when they're both gone we'll only miss one of them. Tony Judt was right.

We got Weird Al out here singing Killing In The Name, the time for moderation is over

A lot of Trump admin communication isn’t strategic. A bunch of the staffers are just like this, except now they can force many others to see it. And they get extremely weird with women they’re attracted to who they know don’t like them. See also: AOC. A government of, by, and for the online right.

This is incredibly wishful thinking. The core problem facing the games industry right now is that the price point consumers want to pay for games is far too low to cover the development costs of games. The industry's choice to keep the $60 ceiling for close to 2 decades had a disastrous effect.

It’s that time of year: what was the piece of writing about AI that stuck with you the most this year, pop press or academic? A few of mine in the thread. ⬇️

I've found that men's spaces communicate pretty strongly that the only acceptable way to be a man is to be career focused in a male-coded (e.g. non-caregiving) field, excel others in that field to attract a partner (treated like a trophy object) and flaunt success. It is not a healthy script.

i have a similar rule for friends and colleagues: engage in human trafficking up to sixteen times, that's all well and good. seventeen? you done crossed a line, son.

WHAT THE FUCK IS UP, DENNY'S?!

I spent 20 years hyperfixated on a very specific kind of video game, then I decided to spend seven more years *professionally* hyperfixated on that same kind of video game.

After "film trilogy that dropped a critical plot point exclusively via timed Fortnite event" and "video game series whose story only makes sense if you're aware of the events of a canon pachinko machine", I feel like there are whole frontiers of user-hostile narrative design waiting to be explored.

Your stare was holdin' Ripped jeans, skin was showin' Hot night, wind was blowin' Where you think you're goin', baby?

This is someone who gets it.

I once knew a Federal bank examiner, and one time someone asked him why we had to KEEP inspecting banks over and over. He basically said every new batch of business school grads invents bank fraud from first principles.

This (youtu.be/2AvfOhtmCZY?...) is an older @acollierastro.bsky.social video I must have missed, but it is brilliant in explaining the intensity of the bullshit of the adjunct system, for students and instructors.

Screw it, I’m installing Linux

AI porn generator and ERP chatbot Secret Desires left millions of images and videos exposed in unsecured cloud storage. I took a look and found folders called "faceswap," where people had uploaded tons of stolen content and random photos of women www.404media.co/ai-porn-secr...

An immoveable Parliament is more obnoxious than an immoveable King. It's not great that I'd be down for an American Cromwell right about now.

The webpage for our upcoming book has the cover on it now which is enough of a milestone for me to write another post about the book we have coming out soon. www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?b...

Look guys I’ve spent the last day playing this over and over again. Don’t read the comments first and stick it through to the second verse. It is in fact one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard.

Even a cursory skim through regional histories often reveal just how staggeringly destructive plague and famine have been for millennia. Today we've (nearly) slain two horses of the goddamn apocalypse; this retvrn nostalgia is not just profoundly ahistorical but also staggeringly ungrateful.

Clausewitz was deeply emotionally affected by witnessing famine in the Rhineland, describing skeletal figures scrounging for underripe potatoes that were no doubt already ruined by the blight. It is a crowning achievement of our society to have solved this problem that plagued countless generations.

They terrorized the fucking Girl Scouts

been doing some light reading about the aftermath of the korean dictatorship and I think it's really important that we repeat this to ourselves, to our friends, to our neighbors, to our politicians

It is, & it’s too moderate. For example: only 24 top Nazis were tried at Nuremberg. Everyone involved in horrendous abuses such as those reported in the thread below should be tried, down to the lowliest prison guard. The “Nuremberg defence” – “I was only obeying orders” – must be disallowed.

All these trend pieces are super interesting - another one today #medievalsky www.nytimes.com/2025/11/09/s...

This is amazing

TFR, a terminally online mod for Hoi4,has a path for China where an ai takes over and runs the state that is represented by a cute anime girl.

Nope. Read this, it’s perfect. “But I am a hater, and I will not be polite. The machine is disgusting and we should break it. The people who build it are vapid shit-eating cannibals glorifying ignorance. I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.” anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/h...

Yeah :D

A project that started with a DiGRA23 workshop is finally, nearly out in the world! Coming May 2026 from Bloomsbury’s Writing History series, Writing Games Histories is a collection of essays on historical game studies methods&approaches. Find the ToC here: www.bloomsbury.com/uk/writing-g...

My favorite comment on the FT story

we’re about to find out if loving SimCity makes you a better mayor Mamdani was asked in 2002 by NY Mag what he wanted for Christmas and said SimCity 3000

Young men everywhere joined Liu Bei because they heard of his talent and virtue. And he welcomed them all as equals. ☯️🌈

opening it up now is to open a portal into a nazi simulacrum where expressing views consistent with those of ronald reagan brings six pedophile shut ins posting your daughters SSN at you. it's a poisonous madness rune. it's like that recording from the event horizon in the warp

Years of therapy lessons summed up in a single thread full of wisdom.

"On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?'... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." Charles Babbage, inventor of the mechanical computer, 1864

Wanna hear a scary story? The first American vampire was Black. Seriously. 78 years before Dracula appeared in American literature, there was "The Black Vampyre" by Uriah D'Arcy. It was written in 1819 as an antislavery critique and the effect the Haitian Revolution had on the States

"The framing of LLMs as preserving the lives of those we have lost distracts from the lost livelihoods, and worsened material conditions, of a generation of writers on whose work the technology of LLM feeds—and the loss of innumerable voices and the stories they won’t be able to tell" bit.ly/48Vv1iT

It's always nice when a physical book copy hits your hands, especially when your work is alongside so many great scholars' contributions. www.routledge.com/Contemporary... (Given the date, I was tempted to wear my vampire teeth, but that, uh, seemed like a mixed message)

A Nature poll found that 75% of U.S. researchers are considering leaving the country. Guyz, even the *historians* are leaving or contemplating / likely to go. Including, at least 3 historians that I know of in my subfield. 😢

Here it is. The absolute strategy beast that is Europa Universalis 5. My review: www.pcgamer.com/games/strate...

Take time to read this interview in full. @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social interviews historian Elizabeth Hinton about lessons from the Civil Rights Movement for this current moment. hammerandhope.org/article/nati...

So, today I'm announcing a new book project... and doing a call for papers: crpgbook.wordpress.com/2025/10/31/t... It's an anthology of video game history outside the usual US perspective - an accessible & exciting panorama of different realities - and I'll pay 300 USD per article. Please share :)

Hey, I can talk about EU5 now. It's good! It is very complex, it is complex by the standards of a Paradox game. But it also embraces a historical vision that sees a wider range of actors than just states - both people within states and people outside of them. acoup.blog/2025/10/31/m...

Has anyone gone and done the work to trace exactly which edgelord gamergaters from 10 years ago are now working as professional posters for Homeland Security? There's gotta be a direct pipeline there of specific people, not just of ideology.

Your daily reminder that language is a technology. Chopsticks are technology. Technology literally means “the practical application of knowledge.” We occlude a lot of cool things by limiting the idea of technology Silicon Valley.