I’m autistic. Not because of Tylenol. Not because of vaccines. Not because of some headline. I’m autistic because that’s how my brain works. Stop treating us like a problem. Start listening to us.

One more thing out of science fiction that has arrived in our lifetimes (or started to, at least). I mostly don't pay for power because of the solar panels on my house but it's even cooler to see at a utility level!

By the 00's I was never the only woman at a convention, but was regularly the only woman at a public game night with 20+ people. I will never forget someone being asked what it's like to get beaten by a girl. (I chose to hear it as admiration so I could keep devouring all the games)

I might play this as my alarm every morning for the next month

There's a chill in the air so we broke out Creature Comforts by @robertataylor.bsky.social . My porcupine family is ready to ice skate and toboggan, followed by a cozy meal of bead and soup. This game is so freakin' charming!

So many people have recommended this documentary to me that I'm going to pass on the recommendation to you before I've even gotten a chance to see it.

I try to avoid getting political on this account, but this post reminds me of something my dad said the other day. My grandpa (dad's dad) was a decorated flight engineer in the Army Air Corps in WWII. Per dad: "They had Antifa back then, too, but back then, it was just called 'the Army.'"

Antifa is not an organization, it's an ideology. Banning an ideology is textbook fascism. We should be anti-fascism. Pic: my anti-fascist grandfather, sometime around WWII.

People want everything to be a binary between dooming and “we’re so back” but I’ll just say this is both a really troubling attack on press freedom and an open admission that your regime is fragile enough to feel threatened by Jimmy fucking Kimmel

Game Design Lessons from the Emmy Awards! gametek.substack.com/p/game-desig... 🎲✂️

I can't believe it's only been 8 months. I am losing my faith that we will get through this.

I am transferring files to a new computer and just came upon a gem of a "next 2 years at some point" to-do list from 2018 Still to-do (out of 75ish items): * Send valentines * Make ginger ale * Make plans to go to Hawaii

Hey #fungi peeps -- @mawdc.bsky.social has $ available for students who need research support in mycology. Priority given to projects relevant to mid-Atlantic US. Deadline Oct 31. Please spread the word!

I can’t believe I caught this 🦋 Just before noon, I figured I better check again… the hangar bay was opening! Little out of focus for a few seconds, but I got the focus back- apologies- I was so excited & shooting w/ the sun on my viewer.

The world has been especially dark this week and the new baby tapir at the Calgary Zoo has been cheering me up.

The headline makes this sound like a one-off but this is just normal fall migration! (It IS awe-inspiring, so maybe the headline is not so far off.) Of interest: an explanation of HOW they pick bird shapes out of radar data. Thanks for bird nerding with us, @matthewcappucci.bsky.social !

The MSNBC commentator saying that most political violence has historically come from the left just once again showed how we suffer from failing to learn history. Lynching, pogroms, race riots, the political violence that ended Reconstruction, and against the Civil Rights Movement. Come on.

Thoughtful convo:

I spent today at the Takoma Park Folk Festival and this Pink Pony Club parody in honor of the guy who threw a sandwich at CBP (while wearing a pink polo shirt) was by far the highlight of the day. 🤣💗🥪 We're gonna get real loud All across DC You know it's time to hurl Salami, bread and cheese

People from all over are showing up for DC. This is not a moment. It’s a movement. We are united in our demands. We are all DC! #FreeDC

I'm in there somewhere...

Just a reminder to check for your name in this list of books that OpenAI trained from. If your name is there, they probably owe you several thousand dollars. OpenAI cried that if everyone eligible author files, the company will go bankrupt, so I'm alerting every author I have ever spoken to.

We're hitting the streets tomorrow and marching to the White House to make it clear once and for all: federal forces OUT of DC NOW!!! #FreeDC Make sure to RSVP: freedcproject.org/event-list/w...

JUST IN: Anthropic has agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by a group of book authors alleging copyright infringement. That’s at least $3,000 for each copyrighted work that it pirated—well below what Anthropic may have had to pay if it had lost the case at trial.

Great thread (in response to the thread I posted yesterday) with research on unconscious bias in creative fields

Update to this chart that I share a lot. Not breaking news: Game design teams are still OVERWHELMINGLY all men. About 7% of the top 500 games have a woman or non-binary person credited as a designer. A 🧵of related charts: (1/6) 🎲✂️

Sometimes I just go out in my backyard and soften my focus and appreciate the hundreds of critters out there, just going about their day

Start small. Give yourself SMALL goals you can complete quickly, while inspiration and courage hold out. There ARE people whose first writing work is a series of epic novels. But they are rare. When you are starting, make a goal of a page, a paragraph, even a sentence. Completion is triumph.

Americans Astronomers watching watching US politics Betelgeuse 🤝 “It could happen at any time”

The last passenger pigeon died 111 years ago today and not a day goes by that I don't think about how their flocks numbered in the *billions*, that their roosts covered 100+ square miles, that they collapsed trees with their nests. America is incomplete without them

Driest mushroom camp weekend we've had in years -- not good for mushrooms -- but we still found over 180 species. Even more, my heart is full from being immersed in the childlike delight of my fellow nature geeks @mawdc.bsky.social ♥️

If you’ve ever compared unvaccinated kids to vaccinated kids, you’ve seen the former are more likely to die.

Just make it exist first. I saw this trend going around - especially in the pixelart circles - but i figured I'd bring it over cuz it applies to almost every artistic field. Heck to almost anything really. Make it exist, make it happen. And THEN polish, work-it, improve it. #artprocess #donkeykong

I proposed to Alyssa today and she said yes! Shout out to @itshugosnook.bsky.social for designing this fantastic Wingspan parody! It’s her favorite board game, and I MAY have lied and told her I was expecting a review copy for a new expansion in the mail. She doesn’t seem too mad about it.

It's mushroom camp baybeeeee! With @mawdc.bsky.social

I am begging board game designers/publishers to PLEASE stop putting background images behind text on cards, in rulebooks, & on player aids. There are SO MANY neurodivergent people & people with vision issues whose brains have great difficulty trying to process this type of visual content.

Friendly neighborhood stress physiology enthusiast here to remind you to be gentle with yourself and members of your community! To some degree everyday is unprecedented for your body (that’s how time works) but these times have some especially unprecedented stressors. We need care! Tips: 1/14

Wow I guess WaPo has zero paywall-free articles per month now? I'm told this one mentions Wingspan

heyyyyyyyyyyyyyy can we stop with using "your wife" as short had for "non-gamer" in reviews?? like "so easy even your wife can play it!"

I try to keep my feed mostly positive, but this is worth a read. My plea to you is to get involved locally, not just in yelling into the void but in building community. Human connection is (hopefully) one way through. We are so much better than all of this.

I have regularly used DC parks and walked alone in DC at night for the last 30 years. The real explanation is that they are testing the waters for how to impose martial law, and no one will convince me otherwise.

I really had never appreciated the value of the hard parts of creative work fully before genAI showed up with its genie-like offer of shortcuts, or understood what a trap those shortcuts truly are. Even though humanity has been telling cautionary stories about genies and fae bargains for millennia!

Some much-needed joy: DC Square Dance Collective in Rock Creek Park. Square dance is definitely playful, and I'm pretty sure designing a dance would feel a lot like game design. I remember hearing Tom Lehmann is a caller.

My game Sanibel (coming out in January) was in Wirecutter's top 5 games that they previewed at GenCon!

I love that this has become, in part, a thread of beautiful waterfall pictures

💔. This is spot on. For one more bit of context, remember DC is an "industry" town whose main industry is government. So: everyone knows someone who's lost a job to DOGE, and we're also reeling at a more fundamental level from watching the dismantling of the democracy that we came here to help.

"5 Lessons Learned from 15 Years of Ascension" is an excellent read for game designers. 🎲✂️ boardgamegeek.com/blog/1/blogp...

Timeline cleanse. There is still so much beauty in the world. (Virginia Falls, Glacier National Park)

the Hutu rules of Rwanda called on their supporters to “exterminate the cockroaches” so they killed 800,000 Tutsis

I just had an 8 year old explain to me how "stunning and stupid" tariffs are because they have made his toys more expensive