You cannot separate the technology from the ways in which it has been deployed to, in seemingly every facet of life, make society measurably worse. It's killing us. One does not admire the sharpness of a murderer's knife as it stabs us. One does not critique the stitching on the executioner's hood.

I am reminded of Katz's famous article "The Ethic of Expediency," wherein he examined technical memos from Nazi Germany about trains used for facilitating the Holocaust.

Excellent read. I've definitely noticed an uptick in this sort of writing style of late, and this is great advice for copy editors on how to approach it. Plus, we get this gem: "No point in picking fights one is almost certainly going to lose. One is not, after all, Jake Paul or Andrew Tate."

This is 100% correct. Source: I have a PhD in writing studies.

Corax: I'm suing you for giving me an F on my rhetoric term paper! Tisias: You didn't meet the assignment criteria. If your lawsuit shows an understanding of rhetoric, I'll change your grade. Administrator: I've changed the grade. Tisias, you're fired.

The Center for Digital Play at the IT University of Copenhagen is organizing a new conference: Playing Futures. The conference will take place from May 20th to 22nd at the IT University of Copenhagen. You can read more about it here: playingfutures.today

I reject the AI booster insistence that you must understand any and everything about the tech to make even the tiniest critique, if they can be vibe coders I can be a vibe hater

Cagle is the truth and does great work yall should read

Prepping to discuss Benjamin in Game and Media Studies tomorrow. Get to talk about aura, rizz, genAI, NFTs, vidyja games, and VFX. Now I just hope students show up to their last class before break! 😅

Since my tweet about Jeff Bezos, I've been getting a lot of replies such as these. "Where do these dress rules come from?" "When do they change?" These are very good questions, so let me answer them. 🧵

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...

As a reminder, proposals for the 2026 ACM Special Interest Group on Design of Communication are due in two months! We are looking forward to welcoming you to SIGDOC 2026 at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, MN. The Call for Proposals is live: sigdoc.acm.org/conference/2.... 1/2

Your favorite RPG freelancers and many indie devs are, in America at last, allowed to have this job because of the ACA. Your games will get worse if it's killed. The brain drain will be immense.

I got this useful bon mot from a middle school teacher recently. In response to, “I DONT UNDERSTAND,” he calmly said, “okay what steps have you taken to understand?” And that’s when I realized that a lot of folks have no steps.

I understand why people think grinding Mandalia Plains in Final Fantasy Tactics is a bad idea that sucks the life out of the game, but I simply disagree. aftermath.site/final-fantasy-...

Tell all your friends. It's coming in June 2026.

More evidence that we have already been cyberpunk for some time.

Man I loved the pivot from “virtual school during the pandemic was amazingly destructive and caused so much learning loss we should have let COVID rip through the schools instead of closing them” to “the wave of the future is your kids’ education being 90% chatbots- sign up or be left behind!”

reading slaughterhouse 5 for the first time and i was absolutely knocked senseless by this passage, which is so true and relevant that it feels like it was pulled from a history book

To be clear: LA County has declared a state of emergency BECAUSE OF the federal government. The Feds, LA County is (correctly) saying, have CAUSED the emergency. This is a striking political moment of internal collapse. Local govts feeling compelled to protect their ppl from … their own govt.

My latest: "Numerous studies show that majors in the humanities—typically, in departments of English, history, philosophy, religious studies, classics and languages—lead students to employment and life satisfaction outcomes as positive as those for majors traditionally championed as 'practical.'”

“We could hear them laughing” 😧 Aaron Trammel argued in “Repairing Play” that playfulness can be a tool of subjugation. Has anyone tried applying ludological frameworks to how ICE is behaving? It seems like there might be a “there” there.

This is the next iteration of “participants were 138 undergrads looking for extra credit it psych 102”

If a government tells you that you can’t call it authoritarian, it’s authoritarian.

I hope you're proud of this poetic line, @mattcolville.bsky.social "Victories are glass,” the bright faerie spake. Her brother nodded. “While tragedies are fingerprints.” It will live in my heart forever.

Déjà vu: Trump, far-right. Totalitarianism, neo-fascists, neo-Nazis ...

As someone who worked at a Nexstar station, this would be a 5 alarm all hands on deck fire for even one account

Political violence disproportionately hurts people with less power, not people with more power. Political violence will disproportionately hurt people of color and women and LGBTQ people. It’s not fair, but that’s the way it works. Celebrating political violence means at best indifference to that.

How do we convince publishers to stop doing this? Bibliographies and footnotes matter. They should be printed. Websites decay faster all the time. Especially in an era of huge mergers like the one that created Penguin Random House, where calls for efficiency see pages culled at every chance.

Even by Rascal's high standards, this was a great article

I quite enjoyed this anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/h...

What more evidence do people need before they realize what serious danger we are in?

For my money still the best single paragraph on AI/LLMs I've read

It’s wild, absolutely wild, how for EVERY. SINGLE. CITY. Trump wants to militarize I can post data showing how crime is plummeting in all of them without any federal invasion… … and the press KEEPS stenographing the naked bad-faith claims about “fighting crime!” in the headlines. Infuriating.

Congrats, Emma, Alisha Karabinus, @sparklebliss.bsky.social, and @cmejeur.bsky.social! Fantastic collection with a TOC that makes me salivate to keep reading. What I've already read is wonderful. It's going to do heavy lifting in the intro course for my new Game & Media Studies program!

This question feels like the heart of the survey. Another company scrambling to fuck over creators for a quick cash injection. I'm sure they'd be paying us cents on the dollar for that data.

ok so I know I've been fundraising for a local family but I also need to tell y'all about this other fundraiser @jamescsanchez.bsky.social, a mutual and colleague and friend, has been working on the documentary In Loco Parentis about cover-up and sexual abuse at elite boarding schools for 6 years

Draw Steel's art description guide isn't just a new approach to alt-text. It synthesizes museum-tested accessibility with an eye towards poetry and metaphor. Lin spoke with @dreamwisp.bsky.social about MCDM's mission-in-progress and creating "more visceral and tactile" descriptions.

Y'all, I'm asking for your help with a GoFundMe I'm sponsoring. Along with other members of my local community, I'm fundraising to support a pregnant asylum-seeking Mom and her family here in central Kentucky. Every dollar helps, as does every share. Thank you thank you! gofund.me/afcd1f1a

ATTN: Academics! If FOIA comes for you, do not cower! You've done nothing wrong! @noupside.bsky.social knows what to do. Read her thread!

My article "The Separation of Analog and Digital Game Studies" has now been published as part of this mammoth 781-page edited volume Historiographies of Game Studies. Congrats to the editors and fellow authors for getting this into the world! punctumbooks.com/titles/histo...

That was my point, yep. They just described a literature course, a library science course, a liberal arts program — all things that exist and that AI hollows out. Parasitic.

I would be ashamed not to stand up for trans folks, not just because there are trans folks I like and love, but because everyone should get to live with the same personal freedom and dignity I get simply for existing. Who are we if we do not wish for others every right and privilege we have.

after you get a Passport sub, don't forget to grab a(n officially licensed and a portion of proceeds goes to the PBS Foundation) PBS IS PUNK tee or sticker to wear while binging every ANTIQUES ROADSHOW or NOVA and so I know you're cool 😎 twocrowcollective.com/en-ca/produc...

In Loco Parentis = incredible project investigating the cover-up of sexual abuse at two elite boarding schools in 70s + 80s. I had the honor of pre-screening. Please consider donating + sharing w/those who care about survivor stories. seedandspark.com/fund/in-loco... #InLocoParentis #TeamRhetoric

Sometimes I think I should post more. Then I look at the replies. No, thanks. I'm good.

Interactive Fantasy, the journal of interactive storytelling that I published in the mid-1990s, is no longer available from DriveThruRPG. However it is now available from itch.io instead: jameswallis.itch.io/interactive-... for the same low price of pay-what-you-want.

tobias funke but it might work for us dot gif

When Teddy Roosevelt was called disloyal for criticizing Wilson’s conduct of WWI, he said “to announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”