We should be so lucky.

Among the brilliancies in this essay is the concept of the “bureaucratic double bind”: an organization cannot function without its members exercising independent judgment, but it cannot acknowledge the judgment without undermining itself & being seen as “political.” open.substack.com/pub/artifici...

Strong recommendation to teaching faculty to just say no to this stuff, even if you are AI curious/enthusiastic. This is meant to reduce faculty autonomy and capture human labor with automation. You're selling out your future self and the profession as a whole. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

Fun fact: the TX Railroad Commissioner is the state official in charge of monitoring oil and gas emissions (flaring) across the state. Something tells me this fellow, should he get elected, will not be the most zealous enforcer of extant environmental regulation.

US buyers can purchase GAME STUDIES: A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION TO THE FIELD through Blackwells right now. Books ship free (and free of tariffs) and usually arrive within two calendar weeks. blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/pro...

Knights, Samurai, and the Myth of Japanese Feudalism, with Stephen Morillo - an episode of 'tis but a scratch: fact and fiction about the Middle Ages youtu.be/QG8b02B8s5c?... #Samurai

Teaching a dream course next fall.

Our (@mahliann.bsky.social, @marcuscarter.com, and I) book GAME STUDIES: A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION TO THE FIELD is officially OUT everywhere in the world except the US for some reason. So here is an actual thread about why we wrote it and what we were trying to achieve with it.

Adam Curtis has pointed out through his work how we're in a fundamentally different time from the early 20th century -- how that was an era of mass movements, and we now live in an era of mass atomization. The Kirk thing was an attempt at mass movement politics, and those fall flat now

Anyway, AI is a managerial technology that came out of fields where researchers act more like managers than researchers and this is not a coincidence. It’s fundamentally related to why certain people jumped at the chance to try to build certain kinds of systems that devalued (other people’s) work.

Increasingly feels like they’ve managed to engineer a disaster that we have absolutely how is going to go.

I want to make clear for a second with this comment, it’s not just the green dipshit in this particular thread, it’s the entirety of 21st century fucking politics doing this now. Republicans want manufacturing job where hungover man swings hammer, because of aesthetic.

I’ve been resistant to calling Americans/developed world more broadly politicans/voters “decadent”, but like if you keep knocking loadbearing pillars out of your economy for aesthetic reasons because you don’t care about the consequences - then there really isn’t any other word to use for it

The reason no American president was ever stupid enough to start a war with Iran is because there’s a big pile of natural gas in the Middle East and they’re turning it into fertilizer. But the administration of aesthetics decided that it can only good happen. And now, that pillar is getting bombed

And personally, as an economist, I can handle being sneered at while - as one of the They toiling on spreadsheets - we try to keep the world going, shelves stocked, etc but congrats, y’all finally got what you want, you broke the machine! And we’re all trapped in it together as it bleeds to death.

A politician who seems excited to know things and excited to talk about things and thinks it’s cool that you know things is such a tremendous breath of fresh air

Nice to see colleagues in college writing recognizing that gen AI in the classroom is neither inevitable nor necessarily beneficial--as the research increasingly shows, quite the reverse! www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

There is such a direct line from gamergate to all the evils we’re currently experiencing. We can’t let it all get pushed down the memory hole.

Nature published another pile of trash i am trying to catch up on some of my reading but this one is getting under my skin so here’s a thread highlighting why this piece is either ill-informed or intentionally ignorant of a wealth of knowledge from embodied cog sci and related fields 1/

I'm one of many professors quoted in this report from Alice Speri. I really appreciate The Guardian taking an angle which has basically eluded every other major outlet.

local techbro discovers CK3 not a manual

🚨NEW ARTICLE OUT🚨 My most recent paper on historical agency & games is available in open access! It deals with environmental studies, posthumanism, fantasy, the 'ontological turn' in the philosophy of history & my upcoming video-game, Galar. Quick thread on the contents 🧵1/6 #gamestudies #gtp

Understanding marginalization and toleration as a spectrum shaped by contingency and context, not as a binary, is extremely important. Many of the sources that depict the most horrific violence bear witness to some degree of toleration that existed prior to persecution. 1/

happy international women’s day

And they say strategic bombing doesn’t work

Hey friends, it's been so long & I'm sort of flitting about intellectually post book. Anyone want to do me a solid & ask me anything about historical games? The usual - outside of ed or in ed, design or play, historical approach? You know I'll do my best for a thoughtful answer. Whaddya say?

Spoiler: I think the answer is yes! #MedievalSky #skystorians #IrishHistory #DigitalHumanities

Everything's coming at once. I thoroughly enjoyed talking with @partialhistorians.bsky.social Dr. G and Dr. Rad last July about my book Swords and Cinema and the way that Roman Warfare is portrayed in movies up to the 20 oughts. The podcast has now dropped.

Huge NYT article on the back story of those two weeks in March/April 2025 when DOGE illegally terminated hundreds of NEH grants. Gift link!! www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/a...

Obviously, NEH grants never should have been clawed back in the first place, DOGE is a lot of crap, and all grants should be reinstated, but if you want to feel PARTICULAR rage about how half-assed and cruel the whole process is, read the AI rationale for terminating the TEAMS METS grant

On Monday, at 1 PM, we welcome Casey Schmitt to our Ships & Seafaring Talk, where she will present her book "The Predatory Sea", a full-length study of the entangled history of captivity and colonialism using Spanish, French and English archives. Sign up here: www.eventbrite.com/e/ships-seaf...

Happy to report that @alexvandewalle.bsky.social's and my article will be published in the forthcoming inaugural issue of the American Journal of Classical Reception. Hopefully it serves as an entryway piece for anyone interested in the intersection of games, epigraphy, and digital humanities.

With Fire Red and Leaf Green on Switch now, there’s probably people playing Pokémon who have never played a classic 2D Pokémon game before, so just some advice: remember that holding down and B when throwing a Pokéball will help increase the odds of catching the Pokémon

A busy weekend pushed us out a day or two, but as of yesterday your podcatcher should have received the latest episode of GAME STUDIES STUDY BUDDIES, in which we journey into the deep past with the debut issue of GAME STUDIES from the alien world of July of 2001 rangedtouch.com/2026/03/02/9...

📚 ☀️ The Summer School is a 5-day course, designed to foster critical AI literacies and to empower participants to develop ways of resisting or reclaiming AI in their own practices and social context. 1/🧵

prepping to try to explain to my AI & Society class what has happened since our last class early last week

I suddenly have the urge to read Star Wars again

The man wrote a whole book about this:

This by @adapalmer.bsky.social is instantly one of my favorite pieces of writing about SFF (and especially its contrast with literary fiction) ever. strangehorizons.com/wordpress/no...

Come to campus and check out these two amazing book talks at #UCLA next week! Karen Hao’s Empire of AI: datax.ucla.edu/news-events/... More, Everything, Forever Book Talk with Adam Becker: datax.ucla.edu/news-events/...

In honor of Black History Month, here's a thread with one book recommendation a day.

We're announcing our new theme: Analogue. It's an open call, and full details are available on the HGN blog here: www.historicalgames.net/call-for-con...

the guy who wrote the literal book on this stuff is dunking on the admin:

"Anthropic is guilty not only of wildly exaggerating the capabilities of AI, and promoting dystopian fantasies of ‘AI doom’, but also quietly advocating the deeply misanthropic philosophy on which it was founded. www.spiked-online.com/2026/02/22/t...

i’m tired of every paper (even critical ones) on societal impact of AI starting by both-siding the “benefits” and risks/harms of AI in academia, i would like us to arrive at a collective reckoning that we don’t need to play both sides. it's totally legit to clearly state just the harms. period

This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t

30 years ago, Pokémon entered the world. Years earlier, the project nearly died. Here's the bonkers behind-the-scenes story of the creation of a tiny GameBoy game that would become a rival to Mickey Mouse.

WE AGREE

“One possible criterion with which to evaluate the success of a close reading is how well it understands itself as being part of & beholden to a community, even as it tries to challenge that community's terms of engagement. Or, as Dan & Johanna phrase it, as a product of & an offering to community.”